After my post on Thursday about Interland (which was 24 hours after first contacting Interland support and more than 48 hours after Interland switched my mail server without warning and broke my e-mail), I received a message from Interland (web.com)’s SVP for corporate communications! So, supposedly, contacting web.com’s customer support gets you response times of a week, but posting on your blog that web.com sucks gets you a response from senior management within 24 hours. Wow, the power of the internet.
Here is what he said:
I noticed your blog post this morning and wanted to pass along my apologies for your troubles. I have spoken with customer service and looked into your account. It seems like there were a few email configuration changes that were updated and needed to be executed on your end as well. In any case, I am having our best rep call you to walk you through the process.
Again, I want to apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced. Please feel free to contact me any time if you have any questions or comments. We treat these cases very seriously and I want to assure you I’m here to make things right again.
This is corporate marketing at it’s best, right? This is also what a loyal customer would want to hear, right?
There was a slight problem, and I had logged it in the original support item as well. Here was my response to his message:
Peter, I have been a customer of interland and now web.com for 6+ years. I remained a customer even though I am paying substantially more for your hosting than other hosting providers charge for significantly more capabilities. On SEVERAL occaisons over the years, you have made modifications or broken my site without prior warning. Each time I have complained and each time I have been promised that it would not happen again.
This most recent change is absolutely horrific. I have set up about 300 mail rules over the years to weed out spam on my main account. When you switched systems, you broke all of these rules so that the ones filtering mail INTO my box now essentially DELETE it. I have gone from getting around 50-75 valid e-mails a day to getting 6-10 (actually, it turned out to be around 2-3). I would go through and rewrite all my 300 rules, but your new ajax-ish web mail interface won’t let me bulk edit and it is so impossibly slow that it would take me HOURS TO FIX YOUR SCREWUPS. (I wasn’t exaggerating, I had tried. It was taking me over a minute to delete a single mail rule on a broadband connection on a fast machine. I had to delete 300)
All this and you recently raised my rates $10/month.
I switched to your service because I thought that it would be reliable and bulletproof. I am sorely dissapointed.
So, meanwhile, I never got that call that web.com promised from their “best rep”. This morning, I checked my support ticket and saw that it was closed. The tech who closed it noted that I had to change the addresses for my pop and smtp. Of course, if I hadn’t logged into their support system and checked that myself I wouldn’t have known. After following their instructions , they are still deleting 99% of my mail, and downloading my mail still doesn’t work.
So, I’m switching all my domains to dreamhost. I had planned on keeping my main unitcircle.com domain on interland, but this utter stupidity and lack of respect for one of their long-term customers is the last straw. I’ll have to figure out how to switch the catalog from asp to php, but that will be fun and I’d been meaning to get off windows hosting anyhow.
You cannot trust interland or web.com with anything remotely important, and they are more expensive than their competition if you are doing anything not-critical. Seriously, .Mac is cheaper than those losers.
And interland, if you want to respond to me again, I’d love to hear from you, but don’t try to send me an e-mail for a couple of days, because if it ends up on your servers, I’ll probably never see it.
Web.com sucks!!!!! Thanks you for your words. I just got off the phone with a supposed supervisor from Web.com. I was an Interland customer for six years until it was acquired by Web.com in Sept ’07. At that time, my account was increased 10/month to $65.95. I recently checked their hosting packages and I’m paying $65.95 for the same product they charge $19.95 for. After submitting a cancellation notice on 1/22, I received 4 calls – two from a third World country and two from the U.S. trying to get me to stay and change to the lower plan. On 1/26, I agreed to change, however, I received an email later that day which said my account was closed. I would’ve been fine except I had no backup of my files and my site wasn’t viewable in a browser. On 1/30, I contacted customer service who tells me I have to submit a request to “extend the migration” of my account in order to retrieve my files, afterwhich I can submit another cancellation ticket. They reactivated my site on 1/31 and I submitted another cancellation ticket on 2/1. In the meantime, they charged me another $65.95. For the last two weeks, I’ve been going back and forth trying to get the $65.95 reversed. After dealing with robot responses rejecting my plea, they finally had a rep call me today. She called with an attitude like I had just robbed them and was asking them to borrow money. This was probably the worst customer expereience I’ve had in about ten years. Their reasoning is that “you requested to migrate your account so you were billed accordingly.” I was also told that they don’t prorate. So I’m being charged $65.95 for only one day on an account which was closed after I agreed on the phone to keep open, an account which wasn’t working properly for the two weeks prior, an account in which I was told by them that I had to request to “extend migration” in order to retrieve my files (and no one told me I’d be charged), an account in which I was paying THREE times as much as their comparable plan…….. I just got an email that my Ticket was closed and they rejected my request again. However, the idiot that responded said the reason was because I didn’t submit another cancellation request until 2/14. I just reopened the ticket and referenced the ticket from 2/1 which was me actually requesting the account be closed. Yes people, Web.com SUCKS!
Web.com sucks! Death to Interland! …… I signed up with them last year to secure a number of domain names because the price was good — and I liked the name ‘Interland’ (reminds me of William Burroughs “Interzone”). I had received one notice from them already that the renew date was April 1, and this was confirmed on their website and a second notice that said March 2 — only to find out today that the domain names actually expired MARCH 1. Not only did they refuse to correct their error or give me an extension, when I went to recover the domain names so I could switch them to another ISP, the price suddenly jumped 3-fold! So sudddenly I too am looking at a $60 bill just to keep the account active long enough to transfer it away from the greedy lying shits. “Web.com sucks” indeed! Warn your neighbors! Save the children!
Thanks for the tip. Yeah, Interland has gone down hill. I used to call an speak with people in atlanta all the time, now I am getting Bejing and Bangkok (or was that bang-cock). Every time I talk of leaving them (after 7 years) they give me price breaks. But the fact is their service is reliable but at times still leaves much to be desired.
Then again, I have no one else to compare them to except the price gouging monstrosity formerly known as Bell Atlantic from the late 90s). AND DEAR GOD, WEB.COM’S CUSTOMER SUPPORT!!! I GET TIRED OF DEALING WITH PEOPLE WHO CANNOT SPEAK ENGLISH OR EVEN SPANISH. I have to spell every single word as though I were teaching challenged first graders.
FYI, today I signed up for a new site and was specific about having FRONTPAGE EXTENSIONS. SO THEY PUT ME ON A PLAN THAT DOES NOT HAVE FRONTPAGE EXTENSIONS. NOW I HAVE TO CALL CUSTOMER RETENTION TOMORROW.
On 7/13/07 Interland (web.com) changed mail servers and since that day I have been getting intermittent 553 errors sending email. Again and again I completed tickets, updated tickets called supported and they would say I’m the only one having this problem and we have tested your Pop and were able to send 1 message without a problem. Hello, I keep telling them it is intermittent and they keep trying 1 email and saying all is good.
I finally spoke with Tim at the executive response team and he researched and said their new email server had a memory leak during SMTP Authentication and that was the cause of the intermittent 553 Errors and they are working on it.
Then a day later my email is almost unusable as I’m now getting 553 errors and errors just trying to connect to their email server where it has a timeout or other failure.
Today they tell me in an email they are well aware of the problem and that I might not be able send, receive, etc. until they resolve the issue.
Then later in the day I get a ticket update telling in about 200 words that the problem is either my ISP or my Email Client and that I should try using my ISP’s SMTP server.
This is so frustrating dealing with them as they don’t listen and you get 3 different answers depending on to whom you speak with no resolution to the problem.
I’ve been an Interland customer for about 9 years now and I’ve had it with them this time as not being able to send and/or intermittently receive email is not acceptable when you are trying to run a business.
Stay away from Web.com!!
Interland / Web.com has been a thorn in my side for over a year! They SUCK! I requested to cancel service and that they release my domain so that I could move it to another registrar. It took them over 6 months! Then they still had not cancelled the service despite repeated attempts. Finally, after them not correcting this issue, I had to have the credit card cancelled! So you know what they did? The money grubbing scum suckers actually sent the account to collections! When I told them I wasn’t paying, they told me that they… and yes, this is completely true… “Can’t talk to me about the status of this account, or close it until it is out of Collections Status”!!!! Then they even asked for a new credit card number to get it “up to date so they can cancel it”. Not only do I warn people about the companies products, but they are outright thieves!
web.com sucks! I have been dealing with them for about 5 years. i will be posting another more detailed email but lets just say the reprehensible conduct of this company cannot be over stated. I have been afraid to transfer my account because of the delay tactics i have heard but am now going to do it anyway despite the damage it will do to my business because of the absolutely horrendous customer service. not to mention fee increases and email and website downtime. but really its the service that is the worst. How is this company in business. I actually thought about buying web.comsucks and guess what they already bought it… anyway Today i’m having problems not being able to receive emails and this is at least the 4oth time i’ve had to call because of email or the website being down. This place will fuck you be forewarned the you really dont know what bad service is until you have dealt with web.com.