It’s been a year since I first paid for quality web hosting. I’d have never known it if not for a post I made earlier.
My final year in college didn’t seem all that boring or pointless. It basically didn’t feel like engineering.
In other news, I got my visa yesterday so thats one less thing to think about. It doesn’t really feel like it’s been a year since I wrote my GRE.
It’d be great to say I’ve come a long way since last year but unfortunately that isn’t true. Oh well, at least I get two more tries.
Airtel has usually got my net problems sorted out pretty fast. The fact that I even bothered to write about it a few times, is saying a lot. You can imagine my shock when it took them over 20 days to get my net connection shifted from my previous apartment to the new one I shifted to.
Its not so much the lack of service than the pure lies and deceit. Customer care first asked us to send them an email. While paying the monthly bill, the Airtel guys (those that are supposedly opp. the HDFC ATM - one heck of a landmark that is) asked us to give them a written letter. First they say they’ll come over to pick up the modem and cables and install the same in the new place. Then they ask us to take the modem with us and they’ll come later and install the cables. Thereafter, over the course of a lot calls, one customer care rep says there’s no record of a request to move the net connection, another says that Kotturpuram isn’t covered, yet another says it’ll take time to lay cables and thats the reason of the delay and another says the guy is due that evening.
It takes about a week to get a complaint number. I got one sms mentioning my complaint number and a promise to get the job done by that evening. It wasn’t till another week that I got my net connection back. They duly sent me another sms a week later saying my complaint was closed. Absolutely brilliant.
What I find completely weird was that they refuse to reduce my bill amount for the time I didn’t use my net connection or refund me for the calls I made (They keep insisting that I use the Airtel phone. Sick sense of humour). Even more weird is when you’re in the middle of explaining your complaint, the customer care rep decides to completely ignore you, recites his/her well rehearsed closing statement, “Is there anything else I can help you with? This is -somename-. Thank you for calling Airtel.” and hangs up.
The whole episode reeked of gross incompetence. I just don’t get it. How can they mess this up so badly? They handled every other complaint of mine so well. I’m not sure what I really feel now, annoyance, disappointment, or both.
Looks like this isn’t a one-off occurrence. George had a similar experience: Airtel - Service Extraordinaire
I thought I’d add in a forum thats integrated in to wordpress but that would be too easy, functional and effective. After due consideration I’ve decided to add in two forms to contact me, one when I’m offline and the other when I’m online, which can be accessed on the contact me page. It is to be noted that both are routed to my online dustbin.
To provide effective support to my hosting service I’ve decided that the most comprehensive method would be to install a shoutbox. That should be somewhere on the right. I hope you appreciate my concern for your problems.
So after a few years of using free hosts I decided I’d give paid hosting a shot. One of the reasons was that I know a couple of fellows that, while using free hosting, have created blogs with decent content thats worth more than a free host. There are some pretty good free hosts out there like IGB but since this was the first time I had the means and inclination to do so I thought why not, lets get us some paid hosting. I went ahead and bought the cheapest hosting plan I could find. Its been rather bothersome to setup all the stuff and submit support tickets but now thats done I hope there’s some smooth sailing ahead.
The funny thing is at one point of time I was emailing more than 8 people about their packages and if they’re willing to give out a low bandwidth package for cheaper and I got a negative answer on almost all of them. For some reason within the last month I’ve managed to buy two hosting packages that seem like killer deals. Now to verify if they’re killer deals.
