If you happened to visit bit-101.com today, you may have been greeted with a holding page advertising lots of horse-related products. What was up with that???
Well, my hosting expired today. Apparently there isn’t much leeway in this kind of thing. They could have at least waited til midnight. Not sure who is in control of that stuff, but my site went down like (yeah, you know what I want to say, Mr. Grden) a lead balloon. As soon as I was alerted to this, I went and renewed it for another five years, but it took most of the day for it to actually come back on line.
Stop reading here if you don’t want to hear a rant.
My big beef is with LiquidWeb hosting, who is the domain registrar for bit-101.com. Actually, bit-101 was hosted with LiquidWeb from its inception up until earlier this year.
The incident that caused me to leave in search of better hosting was when my disk use went over quota and they simply took my site off line. No “you are almost out of space” warning, or even, “YO! you are over the limit, fix it in 24 hours or we’re pulling your plug.” NOT EVEN a “oh, by the way, your site is off line now, and here is why…”
It was just gone. No explanation. It took a support requests and several back and forth emails to even ascertain what the problem was. Cleaned up a bunch of big old archived files and that was fine. But that level of customer “care” left such a bad taste in my mouth, that I switched to Media Temple the same day.
But the hosting was still with LiquidWeb. And here again, the same thing happened. The domain expired and bang, horse products for sale. What about a quick, automated form letter in the email, “your domain will expire in x days… might want to renew.” Or again, even a “… oh by the way, your domain is dead” email. And then, even after I paid, several hours went by with no action. It took an actual support request and a few more hours of waiting for the domain to get fixed.
I know it’s my responsibility to take care of things like hard disk space and domain expiration, but this is what this is what service is all about. This kind of thing makes the difference between a company you love and a company that pisses you off.
Very true…especially if you are dealing with a gazillion things on your head. I recently had a domain name expire and was receiving warning letters about two months prior and about twice as often the last couple weeks before it expired. I tend not to remember when domains expire…now I’ll keep an eye on it. Anyway… very poor customer service if they didn’t warn you. They either do not care enough about their customers or their notification services are not working as they should…though their automated services to take sites down seem to work a little bit too well…either way, they should treat their customers better.
Just my 2 cents.
This domain expiring … how does this happen?? I also went to Media Temple some weeks back and as far as I can tell I pay for the webspace and domain yearly. So if I pay that how could the domain ever expire?
I’ve been slowly moving all my domain names to media temple. It costs a bit more ($15/yr) but it’s year to year (e.g., no 5 yr fee up front for $9.99) – and it’s more convenient having hosting and domain name registration at the same place. Plus – they automatically renew.
Thanks.
I’ll be ready in five years time. I have already registered Saddlebags-101.com, and will prey upon all mislead traffic!
The future is bright!