{"id":307,"date":"2010-05-21T20:56:15","date_gmt":"2010-05-22T01:56:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ericgharrison.wordpress.com\/2010\/05\/21\/dear-the-planet"},"modified":"2010-05-21T20:56:15","modified_gmt":"2010-05-22T01:56:15","slug":"dear-the-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ericgharrison.com\/?p=307","title":{"rendered":"Dear The Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Dear \u201cThe Planet<\/a>\u201d – You Suck<\/p>\n

The Planet does IT hosting. In my case, a friend and I share a server that we\u2019ve had there for three years.\u00a0 Unfortunately, I missed several emails from them telling me that my credit card had been rejected due to an expiration date passing.<\/p>\n

Normally in a case like this, from a company providing a critical service, I would expect a phone call to clear things up and prevent a service interruption.\u00a0 No phone call attempt was made.<\/p>\n

So yesterday I get a call from my friend and he asks about our server not responding.\u00a0 I assume the server is locked up and I tell him I\u2019ll jump into the account and request a forced reboot \u2013 something that\u2019s been necessary once before (not bad \u2013 once in 3 years!).\u00a0 When I attempted to log in, I was told that my account had been disabled!<\/p>\n

At that point, I tried to chat with a support person.\u00a0 After 20 minutes of huge long delays in trying to get responses (send message, wait 5 minutes, get a \u201chang on, I\u2019m working on multiple chats\u201d, etc) I have to give up and focus on the meeting that I\u2019m in.\u00a0 Later that day, I try the chat again.\u00a0 I\u2019m told that my account was disabled due to non-payment of the bill.\u00a0 More on that in a minute.\u00a0 At this point I ask her to help me out with getting it reactivated and she says I have to *call* to speak to someone to give them the cc info as they don\u2019t ask for it via chat.\u00a0 <sigh><\/p>\n

That evening, I\u2019m finally at home, where I can make the call.\u00a0 I call and I\u2019m told\u2026 \u201cI can\u2019t process it, you need to log into your account to fix it\u201d!\u00a0 After some back and forth, she activates my login so that I can go in and fix the billing info.\u00a0 I try.\u00a0 FIVE TIMES.\u00a0 Each time it blows up with an error.\u00a0 She\u2019s still on the phone with me and rather than just taking the cc info, she says I need to submit a trouble ticket about not being able to update by cc info!\u00a0 I submit the ticket and go to bed.<\/p>\n

In the morning I check and I have a response that says in essence \u201cplease call, we can\u2019t fix this without having you on the phone\u201d.\u00a0 I then go ahead and try to update the information and it works! Happy days!\u00a0 At that point, I update the ticket and ask them to reprocess the charge and get our damn server online.\u00a0 An hour later, ta-da, we have our server back.<\/p>\n

Great, about 18 hours of downtime for a $69 credit card charge.\u00a0 Yeah, I messed up by not watching my hotmail account like a hawk, so I take the blame for that, no problem.\u00a0 But I have to ask this \u2013 what in the world are they thinking that when the bill isn\u2019t paid THEY CUT OFF ACCESS TO THE BILL PAYMENT SYSTEM SO YOU CANNOT FIX THE PROBLEM?!?!?!\u00a0 What should have been a 5 minute problem turned into a marathon of frustration.<\/p>\n

Think about this just a bit \u2013 their solution is to prevent you from logging into the system to fix the problem.\u00a0 Perhaps your first thought is \u201cwell, maybe their systems suck and they can\u2019t just disable the server while allowing you to log into your account?\u201d.\u00a0 Ah, if only it were so \u2013 note that she very quickly and easily gave me access back to the account after I was forced to call them (and only to be told that I had to go into the account online to update it!).<\/p>\n

One final insult –\u00a0 after all this, they charge me a $50 reconnection fee.\u00a0 Dicks.\u00a0 I should charge them for my wasted time.<\/p>\n

In summary Dear Reader, please consider if you want to do business with a company that treats you like this.\u00a0 If you have a server you need to be up, and you want to host it somewhere, I cannot recommend The Planet.\u00a0 Go elsewhere and put these jerks out of business.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear \u201cThe Planet\u201d – You Suck The Planet does IT hosting. In my case, a friend and I share a server that we\u2019ve had there for three years.\u00a0 Unfortunately, I missed several emails from them telling me that my credit card had been rejected due to an expiration date passing. Normally in a case like…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericgharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericgharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericgharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericgharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericgharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericgharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ericgharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericgharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ericgharrison.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}