Some of you may have tried to access this site the past few days but found it was off-line or some other error messages. I apologise but it was out of my control. The thing i was most frustrated and upset about was why it took Site5.com (my web host) 3 days to get the server back to normal operation? Sure these things happen but 3 days to restore a server, one might think the server admins are incompetent, maybe?
But for me the real issue was losing time and patience from my loyal site visitors. Losing my site visitors and SEO position was enough damaged to say the least. But no, Site5 only offered a prorated refund which was 100% refund on a site being down for over 1.5 days but based on a month of that period (works out to be about $20), not even worth the hassle.
What they should be doing was to give free hosting for 3 months at least, if they value their customers since damage have already been done. To add to the insult, each time you raise this issue by sending a support email using the Backstage system, it took them 8-12 hours to respond. Even when they have replied, the replies are often vague about what is happening. They do offer priority support but you had to pay $1 and even this wasn't taken seriously by Site5 according to some other Site5 customers who still had to wait about 6 - 12 hours.
The worst part was having other clients sites hosted and trying to explain to them what was going on when you only had so little update from Site5 about the problem. I certainly hope this is the last time it will be down for that long as now my relationship with Site5 is very shaky indeed. I was closed to moving away from them. Maybe this is all down to bad management but whatever the reasons, it's not good enough that their customers should suffer for it.
At this point, it is very difficult for me to recommend Site5 to anyone.
I just hope they'll pull together and start offering quality service to all their customers. Only time can tell, so i'll update this post in a couple of months and see if Site5 have improved or not, let's hope so.
