Ever since January 2003, I have used the services of Pickaweb Internet Services to host my website, but a few days ago experienced such poor service that I immediately cancelled my account with them. The behaviour of their technical and sales support would be comical if it wasn’t for the fact that it was me that was on the receiving end and I wasn’t actually giving them my money.
The only way to contact Pickaweb’s technical and customer support is via online chat or messaging, and the replies I received from them this way over this recent issue were short, ungrammatical and extremely unhelpful to the point of insulting. I believe that English was not the first language of the support team I communicated with, which is bad enough, even without their seemingly dismissive attitude to the fact that I was a paying customer of theirs with a legitimate problem.
The short version of the story is that Pickaweb terminated the SSH account that I had used for over 4 years to manage my website without telling me, and then denied that they ever offered such a service. Then they tried to palm me off with things that were plainly untrue, contradictory, or just made no sense. It seems obvious now that because I wasn’t a business customer, they couldn’t be bothered to give me any sort of service at all, and put up no objections when I cancelled my web hosting with them, even though I had been a loyal customer of theirs for over 4 years.
My website, www.edwardboyle.com, was offline for several days whilst I transferred it to a new web hosting company, Your Name Here Internet Services, who seem to offer a good service with a support phoneline that connects you to a real person in the UK.
I saved the history of the messages that were sent back and forth between myself and Pickaweb’s technical support, which you can see here.
pickaweb user
I am a disgruntled Pickaweb user. I have to agree, they are completely crap at their jobs and, at times, freightenly so. This week their servers were down for about three hours on Friday morning and about then late in the afternoon. I lost touch with key clients, that were trying to email me…my website was down…it looked bad to my newer clients and it lost me time and money. Pickaweb are totally remorseless and do not seem to understand my ‘beef’ with them. I too will be taking my business elsewhere!
Eddie
Update July 2008; I’ve been using YNH now for over a year and I can wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone looking for website hosting services.