A lot of unhappy customers...

[cleanxhost]

Is it me or what...
Lately, everytime I come to this forum I see loads of posts about unhappy customers and their problems, usually the same ones...either my sites are down, my mail doesnt work, can't login to billing, cant get an answer from support,etc,etc,etc,.....
It's beginning to worry me, even though all these problems are not affecting me AT ALL!!!

What's happening???


P.S. All these problems seem to be all from either new customers or customers that haven't visited the forum since they signed up with Hostgator yonks ago? Strange???

[Quarterbore]

Well, rememeber the complaints are always from the people that have a problem those that never have issues are sure to not be in here very often and they post even less.

I have had very few problems since I switched my 100+ sites to HostGator...

[TeeJa]

It's called growing pains for HG.

Looking at some of the complaints, newbies trying to be resellers, and have no clue how a server, email, etc works and get frustrated thinking HG has all the answers.

Also, HG has been upgrading the servers, and this will cause a lot of problems, and taking a lot more man power away from the everyday normal support tickets.

I don't know how it is in the Houston area now for techs, but 25 years ago when I was hiring for electronics techs, one out of twenty could fix a TV or VCR. But back then it was a melting pot of transplants from around the country.. Hopefully HG has better luck in finding quality people. ??

[kmaw]

Seems a lot of it has been responses to tickets and the majority in the last month have been related to the launch of the new ticket system...

Hostgator Is growing everyday and like Teeja says its growing pains. But when a customer does post on the forum about his/her problem, majority of the time we are able to get the issue resolved for him/her.

[regentronique]

Originally Posted by TeeJa

It's called growing pains for HG.

Looking at some of the complaints, newbies trying to be resellers, and have no clue how a server, email, etc works and get frustrated thinking HG has all the answers.

Also, HG has been upgrading the servers, and this will cause a lot of problems, and taking a lot more man power away from the everyday normal support tickets.

I don't know how it is in the Houston area now for techs, but 25 years ago when I was hiring for electronics techs, one out of twenty could fix a TV or VCR. But back then it was a melting pot of transplants from around the country.. Hopefully HG has better luck in finding quality people. ??

The odds to get competent and dedicated employees these days are worst than ever. Even if technology advanced very fast, the quality of teaching and the good will of the students have decreased dramaticly. Twenty years ago i was fighting with my school administration and syndicate to force the teachers to provide the needed knowledge for the programs they were teaching as expected, but keeping everyone happy was more important than the students needs at this time. A diploma is no longer a proof of knowledge these days, it is barely a proof of having sit in classrooms long enough and being able to pass a lot of too easy exams. (Dont ask the students about the easinest of the exams, because everything is very difficult for them now...)

Actually, there is half the manpower available 25 years ago and they are not half dedicated. From those, 1 over 62 will be barely suitable for job needing more than an average level of knowledge. This is one reason why some companies a closing, it is really too difficult to find COMPETENT employees and even more DEDICATED ones for a reasonable salary. For the main reason that most of them wrongly believe they have a lot to offer and ask really too much for the little they can give.

Now when a very special person emerge from the lot, many companies fight together to get that person, giving the impression to all others that they can have the same treatment. And because many companies are so desperate to get their staff, they hire them because they cannot do better...

Foreign countries have working forces far more knowledgeable (this was largely documented) and the temptations are really great for companies to use those forces now...

Is this ringing a bell about some recent problems?

Originally Posted by GatorJean

Hostgator Is growing everyday and like Teeja says its growing pains. But when a customer does post on the forum about his/her problem, majority of the time we are able to get the issue resolved for him/her.

When people are at a point to publicly post their problems on a forum after trying before with tickets and other means, it is because the company have really failed before to solve their problem. If you wait that the problems are posted here to solve them, this is not giving much credibility to the proper mecanism of tech support and staff...

[TeeJa]

Originally Posted by regentronique

From those, 1 over 62 will be barely suitable for job needing more than an average level of knowledge. This is one reason why some companies a closing, it is really too difficult to find COMPETENT employees and even more DEDICATED ones for a reasonable salary. For the main reason that most of them wrongly believe they have a lot to offer and ask really too much for the little they can give.

Now when a very special person emerge from the lot, many companies fight together to get that person, giving the impression to all others that they can have the same treatment. And because many companies are so desperate to get their staff, they hire them because they cannot do better...

Foreign countries have working forces far more knowledgeable (this was largely documented) and the temptations are really great for companies to use those forces now...

Is this ringing a bell about some recent problems?


When people are at a point to publicly post their problems on a forum after trying before with tickets and other means, it is because the company have really failed before to solve their problem. If you wait that the problems are posted here to solve them, this is not giving much credibility to the proper mecanism of tech support and staff...

I was always a firm supporter of classes on "Common Sense" along with whatever subject(s) you take. I seen so called techs with a fist full of degrees, and could not fix there toaster, and some one with only the basics of electronics, a few years experience, and could diagnose a problem with common sense...

Customer relations is a big part of any service industry, with out it you will fail.
The best techs I had never talked to a customer, they where good at what they did on the bench, but don't have them talk to a client......

[gwyneth]

Everybody's made some really interesting points.

We should bear in mind that we have no idea about the statistics of the situation--i.e., if the cross-section of those who post here represents .10 of all support requests or new customers, then the reality is quite different than if it represents .01 or .001 or .0001.

Originally Posted by TeeJa

Looking at some of the complaints, newbies trying to be resellers, and have no clue how a server, email, etc works and get frustrated thinking HG has all the answers.

This is at least partially a byproduct of long term price/functionality trends. When the price of something drops dramatically over time, concurrent with sharp growth of its capacity/capability it's inevitable that the number of unskilled users grows--and not just as a constant percentage of a growing total, but the percentage itself increases.

A good example is video cameras. In the early '80s, when they cost more than a thousand bucks, a very low percentage of buyers were, for lack of a better term, clueless. Small percentage of small population. As the price dropped, the population of buyers grew. This alone would raise the number of the clueless buyers, if the percentage remained constant. But it doesn't--it grows, because as the price drops, the composition of the buyer population changes.

This principle is aggravated in the case of internet hosting because as the visible front end gets more elaborate it also appears more seamless.

When connecting to a dialup involved two applications (anyone remember Trumpet?) before even starting a browser or email client, hosting didn't just seem more complex: by the time somebody considered it s/he had been forced to learn a fair amount already. And since the simplest kind of hosting account (aside from ISP's "home page" accounts) cost at least $40 or $50 a month, and buying a domain name cost more than $100 a year, the price was also a deterrent.

Flash forward in time. Now add in the entrepreneurial (or less tactful adjective) motive. It's probable that the less a new user knows, the higher (and more unrealistic) his/her expectations and the lower his/her frustration threshold.

Of course, none of this mitigates HG's responsibility to offer reasonable service. However, it certainly affects the new user's expectations and resulting perceptions of the hosting experience, and thus, his/her definition of what, exactly, is reasonable service.

[hcacree]

Posting to forums to get problems solved seems to have caught on. Its going to be hard for HostGator to undo it at this point.

It doesn't help that Hostgator doesn't seem to have an escalation policy stated anywhere.

[Goddess Dix]

disgruntled customers are always the most vocal. the bigger a company grows, the higher the number of disgruntled customers. growing pains = longer wait times for fixes = louder complaints. it all seems like part of the cycle to me.

[TeeJa]

I guess most of the complainers never had to call:
Dell support
There cell phone support.
Any big company support??????

Then after getting a hold of a live person (sometimes), that person cannot speak your language, reads from a script to diagnose your problem, and rarely ever gets it right..... then transfers you to higher level, and wait another 2 hours???

One of our local telephone companies sold to a big outfit, before you could almost call a tech directly to help you, now they go to another country. Talk about a shock to the locals that never had to deal with this???
There Internet (DSL) and dialup IP business was lost to Roadrunner cable.

My 2 year old Sears refrigerator broke a couple months ago, full of food. Called sears, told me 3 weeks to get someone out??
Had a new one from Lowes delivered that afternoon.

Don't ya just love it???

[lowlux]

email tech support at GODADDY... 60+ emails later.. 3 months and it never was fixed... that was about a year ago.

this tech support is better then most.... all..... you are going to get angry nubs (newbies) no matter how good your tech support is.