Chocolate Teapots!

[BillyBobBongo]

Yup...that about sums up the quality of service I'm getting over the web hosting uk 'Live Chat'. I think it's about time that you stop outsourcing your support staff to India and moved it back to a country where they can cope with English! Yes the names of the people we're talking to are English...but you're not fooling anyone!

Like everyone else my site went down over the weekend. I got it back late on Saturday afternoon, but it was (and still is) drastically out of date. My latest emails are showing 15th May and the latest posts on the my forum are around the 20th May. I decide to contact the support staff through 'Live Chat' as I understand that there should be a more up to date backup available.

Hayden (clearly the support staff have been watching American TV lately) and Kathy (meh...try harder next time) both seemed unable to grasp the concept that as much as they say that the backup on my site was from the 3rd June that this cannot be the case as all my email from May 15th onwards is gone and that files on my site are not older than 20th May. I pointed this out to them and they simply said that I was wrong and that the backup was from 3rd June. I told them to check.....they said they'd check...and simply replied

"Restored we last 3rd June Backup" <- OMG I've got Yoda on the line now!

I'm positive that this is a scripted response that they are given (hopefully not with the terrible grammar) and told to give to each customer. It doesn't take a genius to be able to see that this cannot be if all the data is around 2-3 weeks older than quoted date.....but you need to actually look at the site rather than read off a script to see this! My site, in it's present state, is not functional. It's been 'broken' in one way shape or form since Friday and you can imagine that by now my patience has gone.

I've opened a ticket with the Support Staff now pointing out that my data is around 3 weeks old and that I'm not impressed with the standard of support service that is provided through 'Live Chat' ("Useless" was the word I used) and I'm hoping that they can resolve this in the next few hours.

For what it's worth the domain name is http://www.tequilatown.co.uk

Please can you poke your support staff in the ribs and get the going on this!? Normally I'd let this go, but I'd installed the newest version of phpBB and spent a lot of time fiddling with it to get it working...and I'd prefer not to have to do it all again!

Cheers

[Cassie]

I once asked live chat (when it was working for me a few weeks ago) before I decided to host here - are you chatting from the UK. They said yes. I also rang their support and asked the same questions. Despite the fact there was a very strong Indian accent and lots of clicks and whistles on the line (very like you get with my banks Indian support line) he assured me he was in the UK. Something not right here - I don't mind Indian based support if it works but I really don't like being fibbed to. Unfortunately the bad English does give it away a bit.

Luckily my site doesn't appear to be affected but if it was I would have been on here straight away shouting as loud as possible.

I hope you all get sorted asap and I now am backing up locally - daily !!

[londonmate]

You're not the only one fuming BillyBob.

I had my sites restored late on Saturday afternoon after kicking up a stink on the forum. I had my sites restored urgently (probably to shut me up on here). Fair enough, within the hour the sites were back up and running, although they too were 4 weeks out of date (everything dating back to 20th May). I spent the afternoon clearing up the mess, deleting old emails, updating pages to their current versions and restoring everything as it should be.

After a few hours cleaning up I decided to take a manual back up of everything through the cpanel (just in case). I backed up one site and then went to do my second site...

BUT IT HAD DISAPPEARED AGAIN???

I couldn't access the second site, it had gone. So I raised a ticket to find out what was happening. Then my first site disappeared. 20 mins later, I had a reply back from support saying that they were in the middle of restoring my sites (even though they had already done it as a priority hours before). I quickly emailed support back to say "STOP! I DON'T WANT YOU TO RESTORE MY SITES AS I HAD JUST SPENT HOURS GETTING THEM UP TO DATE AGAIN". I sat helplessly waiting to see what would happen. Then my sites reappeared. Both had been restored with the 4 weeks out of date backup again. I received an email later from support saying they had successfully restored my site. I was so p****d off. So I have to go through it all again and tidy up my sites and get them how they should be.

After this weekends fiasco, I will definitely be looking for a new host as these guys can't be trusted. One support email from "Adam Smith" even added "Have a nice time!" on his email reply. Now that's really taking the p****.