Iomega's Mysteriously Bad Technical Support - Update

I forgot to mention that yesterday I was also unable to submit a question to the company from the "My Account" function after signing in there. The "Question" function/icon was there, but clicking on it did not generate activity - I attempted it several times. What a waste of time.

I went to the Iomega site and found an opportunity to submit general "Feedback" to the company. I informed it of this blog and received a response with an apology and an offer an hour of technical support with the fee waived. It was too late. The offending hard drive had been disassemble for parts (not much of any value) and the remains were in the trash. But, more than anything, I just am not interested in doing business with a company whose products don't last and whose technical support is that horrible.

Iomega's Mysteriously Bad Technical Support

Last weekend my 1TB Desktop USB Hard Drive ceasing functioning. It was my primary backup drive and was less than two years old. Suddenly my computer could no longer see the drive and the drive letter disappeared from my "My Computer."

Proceeding to www.iomega.com/support, I found myself unable to communicate with the company. It is true that my drive is no longer in warranty and that I did not purchase an add-on warranty, but two things occur to me: (1) A drive of that nature should be manufactured to last more than one year; (2) if it was manufactured to quality specifications, it would have lasted longer than that.

Well, upon arriving at www.iomega.com, creating an account, and drilling through the various pages of anti-support obfuscation and obstacles, I discovered that I was entirely unable to communicate with the company. Despite the fact that the site claimed to offer e-mail, live chat, and telephonic support (for a fee), I could not find any way to communicate with Iomega.

I did find an instruction sheet that addressed my problem, but it was less that useless -- following the instructions was very time-consuming and, in the end, fruitless.

I attempted to pay for telephonic support, but, after entering my contact data and credit card information, the "[lack of] support" site would not proceed to process my card -- it just stuck there (eight times) without reporting any error message or providing additional instructions.

After clicking on the live chat icon several times and being routed through a labyrinthine series of pages, only to be returned, repeatedly, to the original "[lack of] support" page, I moved on to the forums. As it turns out, being logged in to my customer account did not allow me full access to the forums and I learned that I would be required to create yet another account for that purpose. I was able to view, though not submit, a forum that turned out to be the relevant one. There I found that several others had the same problem. The moderator responded to one of the posts with an inanely erroneous and unhelpful response and then ignored the remainder of the posts.

One of the posters noted that he no longer needed Iomega's "[lack of] support" because he had thrown the offending drive, a brand new, never-used one, out the window and had purchased a replacement -- presumably NOT an Iomega product.

My Iomega 1TB Desktop USB drive has gone in the trash and I will never purchase another Iomega product in my life. (Interestingly, the two 500MB hard drives that comprised the 1TB drive were manufactured by Seagate, not Iomega, so I may not purchase any of their products, either.)

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

5:00 PM EDT on 29 September 2008. As Well, AITCOM finally got the servers up, after six days. I've received calls from the CIO and director of "Customer Support," but no offers of compensation or apology, yet.

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

9:18 EDT on 29 September 2008: Well, I have not heard from AITCOM. No calls, despited the notation in the trouble ticket to contact me. Ms. Hall left her shift yesterday afternoon without calling me as she promised she would. My customers web sites seem to be functioning at their two-month-old backup state, but I won't know that for a certainty until each of them has had an opportunity to check them and restore their latest files.

Since I have not heard from AITCOM, I don't have an explanation for my customers as to why the server went down, why it took so long to restore it, or why the only backup they could find was two months old. I cannot imagine that there is a reasonable explanation for such incompetence as AITCOM has exhibited during this problem and I will be very embarrassed to attempt to explain it to my customers. What should I tell them when they ask what is the guarantee that they won't be down, again, sometime for five days. If I were my customers, I would move to another hosting company. I'll keep you posted.

But, back to my problem. My control panel still does not function and the trouble ticket has not been closed by AITCOM. With the control panel lacking functionality, I cannot restore the domains and e-mail addresses that are missing from the backup restoration, missing because they were installed subsequent to the backup file creation two months ago.

I requested a callback in this new ticket and it will be most interesting to see if AITCOM actually complies with its own policy--according to the ticket procedure. And even more interesting to see if one of its executives calls me with an explanation and apology for the egregisously incompent and cavalier "service" I have received during this problem.

Can you afford to have your servers down for five days? Can you afford not to receive your business e-mail for five days? If so, then perhaps AITCOM.net is the hosting company for you. If not, well . . . ?

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

6:52 EDT on 28 September 2008: Progress--finally!!!! My hosting site has been restored, BUT to its two-month-old-backup state. It is missing, of course, all of the updates I and my customers have made over the course of those two months, and those domain web sites that I added over that time.

It appears that we received all or most of the e-mail messages, for those addresses that existed prior to the two-month-old-backup (including those, that arrived during the outage), but it seems that all messages to those addresses created since the backup file was created two months ago are somewhere in the AITCOM ozone layer.

And, as of this time, my hosting control panel does not seem to be functioning. I have tried to reestablish the domains and e-mail addresses we've added over the last two months and have not been able to accomplish that.

Remember Ms. Tiffany Hall, the customer service supervisor? Well, she promised to call me before she left work today, at the end of her shift, and let me know how the repair was progressing. Would you be surprised to hear that she did not?

Well, as you can see, this saga has not ended. More to follow.

Can you afford to have your servers down for five days? Can you afford not to receive your business e-mail for five days? If so, then perhaps AITCOM.net is the hosting company for you. If not, well . . . ?

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

4:02 EDT on 28 September 2008: Frustration level just about pegged. I called again and was, after expressing great frustration about being ignored and kept in the dark, finally granted a telephonic audience with Tiffany Hall. She told me that I was one of four customers whose site was damaged last week, perhaps as the result of or during "system maintanance." Good news and bad news: Good News--AITCOM had located a backup; Bad News--The backup was TWO MONTHS OLD!!!!!!!

And why hasn't AITCOM been responsive to my support ticket and my requests for communications? Well, not her fault--not on her watch!! Of course! (But she was one of the people who wrote in the trouble ticket that the problem had been solved when it had not been.) She did promise "that someone higher than me" would contact me tomorrow (Monday). Yeah! Right. We'll see! I'll keep you informed.

She also promised that my site would be restored--from the two-month-old backup--within twenty minutes.

Can you afford to have your servers down for five days? Can you afford not to receive your business e-mail for five days? If so, then perhaps AITCOM.net is the hosting company for you. If not, well . . . ?

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

3:38 EDT on 28 September 2008: Having not received a callback from AITCOM.net, I checked the ticket status and found the following update from AITCOM.net:

"Reply Sent on : 9/28/2008 12:46:56 PM
By : Tiffany Hall
Hello,Our system administrators have corrected the problem and verified that your site tarichards.com is resolving internally and externally. If you have any further questions or require any further assistance please feel free to contact us. Please be sure to rate this ticket. Doing so is strictly rating my performance as a Technician in communicating with you and resolving any issues within my reasonable control.If you would like to give feedback on AIT as a company or for your services, please fill out our Customer Service Survey, located here: https://www.AIT.com/customerservicesurvey.phpThank you for rating this ticket and thank you for hosting with AIT!Tiffany Hall Customer Service TechnicianAIT, Inc.www.AIT.com"

BUT, my site is not resolving: I cannot connect to any of my customers' sites, to my own site, to my hosting control panel, or to my mail servers, nor can I connect to my server via FTP. Another incompetent attempt to resolve the problem and another lie from AITCOM.net.

Can you afford to have your servers down for five days? Can you afford not to receive your business e-mail for five days? If so, then perhaps AITCOM.net is the hosting company for you. If not, well . . . ?

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

2:09 EDT--And it continues: Now, five days after the servers failed, forty-six hours after reporting this problem, and two hours after yet again--unsuccessfully--requesting a callback and not receiving one--I called again. "Will" answered and said that my ticket had been closed and the server is "resolving." Sure enough, the ticket had been closed, BUT THE SERVER STILL DOES NOT WORK!!! What are they thinking? Did they read the ticket addendum I submitted nearly three hours ago? DID THEY DO ANYTHING ABOUT THE INFORMATION IN THAT ADDENDUM? And, why didn't they call me before closing the ticket????????

Oh, and by the way, after all of this, "Ms. Hall," who, according to "Will," is the "customer service" supervisor on duty at this moment, is could not make herself available to speak to me.

Can you afford to have your servers down for five days? Can you afford not to receive your business e-mail for five days? If so, then perhaps AITCOM.net is the hosting company for you. If not, well . . . ?

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

The saga continues:

The morning of the fifth day (third day since reporting the problem!): The servers are still down and, so, having NOT received a call from AITCOM, I called it. This being Sunday morning, a CSR answered fairly quickly. After looking up my my ticket number, Matt asked if everything was working. I said no, it isn't. He seemed puzzled and responded that it was working on his end. I said it isn't working on my end and told him that I could not even get to my control panel (Hint: if the control panel doesn't work, the web sites for that reseller will almost assuredly not be accessible).

(NOTE: After being timed out of the customer service que last night, I left a message, in accordance with AITCOM's recorded message, which included a promise that a representative would respond as soon a he/she became available so I would "not lose [my] place in the que." I stated in my message that I would like to hear from AITCOM at any time during the night. NO ONE CALLED!!!!)

Matt asked me to perform a "trace route," which I have done--all thirty "hops" timed out--and have pasted that data into an addendum to the trouble ticket, along with the results of failed attempts to FTP to my servers and to connect to one of my customer's web sites.

Now, as we approach the five day mark of my servers being down, and forty-eight hour mark of my opening of my trouble ticket, I am still completely in the dark as to what happened to my servers and what AITCOM, has attempted to do to repair them, and what it is doing, now.

I have just been timed out of the que, again, and have left another message to be called "without losing your place in the que." I'll let you know what happens.

Can you afford to have your servers down for five days? Can you afford not to receive your business e-mail for five days? If so, then perhaps hosting with AITCOM.net is for you. But, if not, well, . . . .

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, . . . ?