33 replies to this topic

[NyteOwl]

With all respect to ASO's support team, and with full understanding of their arguements; customers were e-mailed before when the PHP and MySQL services were updated on servers in 2008. No reason it couldn't have been done again.

[JamesNZ]

I'd like to throw my two cents in here as well as I'm another customer who's getting so frustrated at the way I'm being treated. I'm a dedicated server customer, and got an email about needing to move to a new server in a data centre at one of the SoftLayer locations on 1st August. On the back of this, I've been with ASO since 2004 when Tim moved me across.

It's 20th August now, nearly 3 weeks later, and I'm still struggling to get responses from ASO staff surrounding this move that I really need to make on 26th August. I've gone through responses and queues from seriously no less than 8 ASO staff including the CEO himself. And now it's the weekend US time, I suppose I'm going to have to wait another two days and I notice my ticket has again magically found its way into another queue. Still no result for me!

ASO's Support Team are still the best of the best, and this is the first time I've had to deal with ASO staff outside of the general support guys since Tim left, and boy its a horrible experience.

[jenbooks]

Twitter?  Seriously??  The signal to noise ratio on that is ridiculous.

[IBBoard]

You're picking the wrong people to follow, then! The signal-to-noise ratio on the ASO account is quite good. Yeah, they do the odd contest as well as just announcements, but it's not that many.

[Joel]

I posted this in another thread, but it deserves repeating in this more active thread.


Let me try to explain this in the context of our existing relationship as vendor and client;

Each billing period, I pay you, the vendor, to provide a service, which I receive (and until this point, I have received for years without any major trouble). You, as the vendor, expect payment for services rendered that I, as the client, owe to you. AFAIK, over the years this arrangement has also been without issue. In that time, whenever a major change was coming, we received an email telling us what was coming and how to deal with it. If there was a billing issue, we also received an email detailing the problem and how to resolve it.

Imagine that I made a random post in this forum, or Tweeted, that I couldn't pay my bill this period. Would a lack of response on the part of ASO to my post or Tweet be a tacit approval of my statement of non-payment? I think not. As I would never expect ASO to post vital, relevant and personal information to a social media area of the web, you would not expect to learn of a breach of contract on my part the same way.

It has always been written here that the forum is not the OFFICIAL arm of ASO's customer service and technical departments. This is one of those times when a personalised notice was, in my mind, absolutely necessary.

[war59312]

You guys really ought to update the TOS @ http://www.asmallorange.com/terms.php

And have a section that states how you will notify users of problems.

[Michael Wexler]

In this day and age, it's really irresponsible to have not sent out an email alert.  You know which accounts are on which servers.  I get mails from a zillion services I don't care about; I'd much rather get them from you guys.  Emails really are a universal lowest common denominator in these days of smartphones and free email accounts; other approaches (SMS, RSS) are all extras compared to just sending out email announcements.

Expecting us to come to the forum or to watch specific forum areas is really asking a lot of your paying customers.   Twitter? I have a zillion posts in my feeds; I'd miss any important announcements from ASO.  An email goes to me, and I can set a rule to highlight it. Again, lowest common denominator in the modern world.

BTW, Cindy was migrated but it's not mentioned in any of your forum announcements.  So, even if I was watching all these posts like a hawk, I still would have been taken by surprise.

Very disappointing given the high bar of quality ASO has set in the past.

Edited by Michael Wexler, 07 September 2011 - 01:00 PM.

[NyteOwl]

Interesting to see from another thread that VPS users are notified when their servers are migrated. Why do I suddenly feel like a second class citizen?

[SitesEye]

I'm in that small group ( is it 1% ? )of customers that got no notice of the migrations and were using external DNS services. Thus my first notification was when a monitoring service watching an affected domain signaled me that the site was down. I had to hustle, especially tricky when I had to investigate to find the new IP address.

I've reviewed the explanations by ASO staff that they had long discussions in order to satisfy themselves that it was OK to not send out notification emails. Most worthwhile customers were monitoring ASO communications via the proper and supported methods that ASO had determined but never instructed same to their clients.

A month has gone by and I see no indication that ASO would do anything different next time.
I don't want to call myself a "one-percenter" since that sounds elitist. I'm going with "coaster" since I am coasting along with ASO until the end of my paid-up period, have the replacement host chosen, and am ready for the move away.

[project37]

I'm another incredibly frustrated customer that had my server switched on me twice (!) and no notification as to what the heck was going on. I don't do Twitter or Facebook and don't check this forum and don't understand why I couldn't get a simple courtesy e-mail saying, "hey we're moving you, here's what you need to know." This is 2011, why do I even have to ask for basic customer service?

    

Edited by project37, 09 October 2011 - 09:49 AM.