Sunday, May 01, 2005

www.textdrive.com loosing its gloss?

When it kicked off textdrive had a glowing reputation, alot of heavyweights were using it and recommending it. So I jumped on the bandwagon for my site www.rfidnewsupdate.com

As is usually the case when something appears very good, eventually things happen that lessen your opinion of the same.

Firstly, I run a basic homebrew CMS for rfidnewsupdate, which is a news site for RFID, one of the industries using RFID is the casino industry. Guess what happens when I try and submit an article containing the word 'casino'. Yeh, server error. It seems a while back textdrive were having problems with a spammer, trying to sell something casino related, and their solution was to blanket ban form submission containing the text 'casino'. Not very professional.

Secondly, recently they migrated to some new hardware, it was supposed to be a 'no brainer' for customers, just wait a day or so and its all magically done. No technical reason why a professional shop couldn't do that. Textdrive couldn't. My site displayed 'server error', after some investigation on my part it turned out my script was depending on some perl libraries which were not intalled on the new system!!! How can a hosting company not understand the concept of 'standard build'? Not very professional.

To rub it in here's what the CTO on support duty put in my ticket

I say "New bidwell isn't the same"

He says "Thanks for asking so nicely."

Lovely, so here I am as a paying customer, getting lip from the company I pay for a service, who have provided the service in a less than professional manner. Don't these guys know anything about the 'business' part of running a business?

Perhap something like, "Sorry for our error which caused your downtime" would be more appropriate?


Update: Much nicer and very helpful response to my followup query, nice to see!

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