Merchant of Doom wrote:I would like Mike to write a review we can post on Trustpilot AFTER our account terminates...
Well, minus most of my initial profanity and sheer frustration with their piss-poor support, this is it:
In my nigh-on 30 year career as an IT professional, I can honestly say - and with some stiff competition involved - I have never had to deal with a consistently worse supplier. The measure of which is not how they provide a basic platform, or address simple know-nothing queries - any idiot can ride the easy stuff, and pull a five-star rating by doing so. No, the real test is how well they can respond when things do go wrong, and in that respect eukhost are woefully lacking.
It doesn't help that the only folks who speak better than pidgin English are the sales and damage limitation - sorry, 'customer response' - teams. The actual technical support people struggle to put a coherent sentence together, which is hardly ideal when you need an exact explanation of why your site has been down for days on end. But perhaps that's appropriate, given it's essentially analogous to their comprehension of IT troubleshooting and addressing of issues.
Now, I'm in the business and - without any false modesty - I'm damn good at it: I've put in my hours sweating over inexplicably failed services, I understand that even the most mission-critical of systems occasionally wind up inaccessible and need fixing, and I have sympathy for fellow techies put on the spot when it all goes west. And, despite that, eukhost have succeeded in completely eroding all sense of goodwill and understanding I have for the more difficult aspects of their job. We're not by any means mission-critical: a small and basic media site built around some dynamically-generated php/MySQL content, a forum and a Flash radio - but, by the same token, there is nothing difficult about hosting or supporting it. Yet we've been migrated from pillar to post this year - every time a site outage has been inflicted on us (none, I might add, through our own actions - they've all arisen as a result of eukhost's own incompetence), their recommendation has been a move to a different host server - and each time it has taken several days to fix the same recurring issues: lost data, putting us on an incompatible version of php, breaking extended character support, having our databases unexpectedly crash, leaving tons of unexplained files lying around. Amusingly, any complaints about the appalling lack of attention to detail, the sketchy semi-literate communications, or the support staff's failure to clean up after themselves, were met by apologies that this was not usual practice - while our experiences showed it to be absolutely par for the course, every single time.
The last straw? They moved us yet again, and asked us to check the site, because (sic) "your domain is working fine from the new server, refer the attached screenshot". The screenshot, in fact, quite clearly demonstrated that they'd reverted us to backups over six weeks old, broken extended character support yet again, and once more put us on to a php version incompatible with some of our legacy code. I mean, really? Who looks for that kind of utter lack of awareness of customer requirements in their IT providers? Sure, I could tell them how to fix it (yet again) - or I could live in hope that they'd miraculously up their game and figure out the issues for themselves - but, honestly, life's too short to spend it wading around in that morass of spending my free time on repeating my day job.
So, faced with that staggering degree of incompetence and inability, we did the only sensible thing and moved the site to a new hosting company. And thanked all the Gods that we're not actually an online business, trying to keep our own orders and customers satisfied, because we'd have been losing those hand over fist through no fault of our own.
Whatever eukhost used to deliver in the past, it's quite clear their stack-em-high-sell-em-cheap approach has long since outstripped their ability to manage and maintain it. The service we have received over the last year or so bears all the classic hallmarks of cramming every host to the absolute maximum capacity and beyond, and then having to try to deal with all the knock-on effects to other clients when resources become stressed. I'm not saying every prospective or existing customer is going to face those issues. Clearly, there are a number who are quite satisfied with the service they've received. Maybe you'll be one of the lucky ones - we were, for several years. Just be prepared for considerable misery if and when that runs out and you actually need some serious issues fixed. So, if you enjoy the excitement of gambling your time, reputation and business in that sort of lottery, go right ahead and sign up; if, like those of us who do know what we're doing, you'd welcome seeing your systems in a state of constant, boringly predictable and reliable uptime...well, best avoid this amateurish three-ring circus altogether.
I do expect somebody like 'Jade' to pop by any minute and offer some mealy-mouthed and patently false platitudes about the embarrassingly poor service we've received. Well, whatever form that may take, apology not accepted. There is nothing to discuss on the matter: your support has been terrible, and I'd have a load more respect for a simple admission of that than any kind of attempted excuse or deflection. Approach at your own risk, if you think you may ever need anything other than a scripted first-line response drawn up by a bunch of sales-oriented shysters.
