Can you afford to have your servers down for five days?

By way of honesty, I have been an Internet hosting reseller of AITCOM.net services for several years. Depite its claims ("AIT is customer-centric and committed to providing excellent, ongoing service to help your business grow, improve and profit. We exist to deliver value and performance to our customers - everything else is secondary.)," I have always found its customer service lacking, but its generally good reseller business model--and my lack of time to search for competitive products--kept me on board. But this is to relate to you, factually, and without emotion, a customer service nightmare so egregious that I must take stock of my loyalty to AITCOM.net.

I was out of town when, according to an AITCOM.net "customer service representitive," (as of this time that term is a very generous description of the service I have received) my dedicated server in the AITCOM facility "was affected by one of our outages." Despite its claims of "heroic customer service" (http://www.ait.com/welcometoait.php) and "multiple reduancy," my servers have, at this writing been down for nearly four-and-one-half days, and more than thirty hours since I reported (yes, my bad, I was delinquent--but I trusted AITCOM. Shame on me!) the problem by calling "customer service" and also opening a trouble ticket online at about 4:00 pm (EST) on Friday.

Please understand that this means that mine and all of my customers' web sites have been down for almost five days and we have not been receiving e-mail messages to our domain e-mail accounts for that same amount of time! Can you afford to be without your business web site and e-mail for five days?

But, oh, yes, it gets worse. When I first called the "customer service" line, after opening the online ticket, the CSR promised prompt attention to my problem. Six hours later, after having heard nothing from AITCOM, and I called again and was again promised prompt attention, but in neither case could the CSR tell me what was the problem or when it would be resolved. A third call, this time with someone who purported to be the "floor manager," told me that tech rep had "gone to the data center to work on my server,"and again promised prompt attention, this time promising a call back to me by midnight (EDT). Well, that call did not come so I called again at 9:00 am (EDT) and that CSR promised to look into it and call me back by 10:00 am.

Oh, yes, each time I called I stated that my site was down, that all of my customers sites were down, and that none of us were receiving e-mail messages. A reasonable business person might assume that would spur the CSRs to solve the problem, to give them a sense of urgency, but . . . , well, please continue . . . ,

Well, the 10:00 hour came and went without a call, but, at 4:00 pm AITCOM did call--with a solution? No? To ask if my problem had been resolved. It had not. I called again at 5:00 pm and received another "run-around" response and another promise of a call back--this time the CSR alleged that the problem had been elevated to "tier four" for resolution and someone would call me. Once again, no call, and so I called, yet, again, at 7:00 pm, only to receive another promise of prompt attention and a callback.

After having dinner, I checked the ticket status to find a message from AITCOM stating that my server was functioning--but, alas, it was NOT! AITCOM "customer service" had lied again! So I called again (Why, oh, why, did I bother--I don't know, just angry by now, I suppose, and determined!), this time to be timed out of the tech support que (Oh, yes, I did forget to note the other five or six "timed out" calls--each time after suffering fifteen to twenty minutes on hold, having to listen to sappingly annoying music and repetitious advertisements--I made over the course of this saga, leaving messages each time that also went unreturned.)

As of this writing, it is 10:30 pm on Saturday, the second day of this epic of customer service delinquency, thirty-two hours, after my opening of the trouble ticket and nearly four-and-one-half days after my server (yes, the one with "multiple redundancy") went down. I have not received the call back from any of the calls I made this afternoon and evening and my customers are still wondering why their web sites don't work and why they can't receive messages. SO AM I! But AITCOM doesn't seem to care!!!!!!!

Can you afford to have your web site down for nearly five days? Can you afford not to receive your e-mail for nealy five days? Well, if so, then perhaps AITCOM is the ISP for you! If not, well, . . . ?