Warning Never Use 3sHost.com Crappy Service

Recently I witnessed such a horrendous display of poor customer service from a friend of mine that I had to post something about it. Based on his experience I will never use and emplore you to not use 3shost.com for any of your hosting needs. Although their pricing is cheap their service is horrendous.

History: This is for a small church website that my friend developed as a favor. The barrage of bad customer service started with a simple inquiry to downgrade his service, renew for another year, and when his current contract ran out. I am going to post the full transaction below but have a few excerpts that I would like to highlight showing the gall that these folks have:

From 3sHost.com:
"if you are not going to renew it is your decision but please do not blame
us later"

"Now we are asking please backup your files & please do not renew your account because such customers like you are really waste of time & money"

Now I have seen a lot of customer support disasters in my time but this one takes the cake.
Needless to say my friend will be finding another hosting provider.

The initial email that started this chain of events:
"Dear customer,
To renew your hosting account, please Copy & paste the FULL link below
Link hidden for obvious reasons
Kind Regards,
3SHost.com Sales Team
Sales@3SHost.com"

Friend Wrote:
"I would actually like to renew at the "Medium" Windows hosting level,
since I don't use any features beyond what it offers. Will you please send me
a bill for that? Also, will you please verify when my current contract
runs out, what date this renewal will expire?

Thanks"


Needless to say they went back and forth. My friend always simply asking about the renewal. He has since switched host.

Full transaction to come I didn’t realize how much work it was to annonymize something…

A Good Friday

Today was a great Friday. This morning I went to work and had Panera Bagels waiting for me. I love the way Cinnamon Raisin bagels smell, there is always something special about that smell that reminds me of my grandmother. Anyway after that I did some work and before lunch our shipping guy came in and told me that I was not supposed to bring pets into work and that I needed to go pick up my snapping turtle from outside I thought he was just being silly but decided to go and check it out, boy am I glad I did…

Link To Photo Gallery
Check out the tail on that thing it looks like a dragon tail. Anyway I snapped a picture with my iPhone and sent an email out to the whole building to tell them to be careful not to disturb the turtle and to watch out for him as they drove past in the afternoon. Well that got everybody out of their seats and made them come down to see it for themselves. So many people came that facilities thought it best to put him back near the pond. It was a fun break away from work and got everybody talking about it.

Anyway then we headed of to La-Hacienda and had some great Mexican food. I always love to go “Suck Cheese” with my amigos from work. So anyway some more work and then off to the house. I bought Daniel two new Koi fish to put in his tank as his last fish had bit the dust over a week ago. He was super-excited to see me home and even more excited when I told him that today was the start of the weekend. He currently only associates the word weekend with Daddy being home for two days. So I setup the fish and then went outside to grill up some tenderloin as Maw-Maw, Paw-paw, and the girls were coming down to spend the weekend. About half way through the Grilling I notice that we had run out of propane for the grill (go figure). So I packed up Daniel and the propane tank and headed to our local gas station to get it exchanged. Daniel was super grubby from playing in the gravel in my carport but I didn’t think anything about it as we where just heading out for a minute.

On the way to the gas station I got in-behind the very nice looking older car and noticed it was going to the gas station as well. I knew the driver as he lives up the street and thought nothing more of it until I got to town…

As you can see we where very surprised that there was a car show going on… there is always something happening in Madison during the summer. So me and Daniel took a little detour and looked at all the cars. All of the owners were super nice and one even let Daniel drive their car. Take a look at all the great cars they had. If you’d like to see them in person you’ll have to wait until the second Friday of next month.

Link to Photo Gallery

After the show we went back home grilled up the tenderloin and enjoyed the evening with the family.
One more thing I’d like add is that finally the old truck is gone! I sold that thing about 3-4 months ago and the new owner had never picked it up… What a perfect ending to the day.

Thanks for reading
David Bates

Server Move, Vegas, New Baby, Work

Sorry I havn’t posted anything for a couple of weeks. I have both been busy at work and home. It almost seems like I have no time anymore. Let me catch you up real quick and hopefully I will be able to catch up on post so that you can read all the exciting news in depth.

I had a guest blogger as you can see from the previous post. This is a new area for me as I orginally intended this blog as a personal outlet. I now see that in the technology arena I am in sometimes it doesn’t hurt to bring in other folks and hear their ideas. The last post was a test of that. Since this site is getting a lot of hits from others besides my family I thought it wouldn’t hurt. Let me know if you liked his post or not and I will evaluate bringing in other talent again.

I went to Devconnections 2010 in Las Vegas last week… yeah I said VEGAS!! it was great I got to meet a lot of people in my industry which is rare and had time left over to take in Vegas and all of it’s wonderful sites. I had never been to Vegas as an adult so it was very exciting for me. I hope to go back again soon. DevConnections allowed me to learn a lot about web development, web services, and silverlight 4. You will be seeing my site switch from php/wordpress based to asp.net/silverlight based in the near future. I have secured serverspace with rackspace.com and am currently working the final stages of my own asp powered CMS. I will be selling this CMS as a value add to the customers that I already host to allow them a more robust system under their current hosting contracts. So those of you who host with me know an email is coming

Our new baby is coming soon as well 7 weeks and counting. My wife had me put up a be back banner on her page southernmama.com as well as create an e-invite platform for her babyshower coming May 8th. We have decided on the new baby’s name but I will not ruin the suprise here yet. Daniel keeps asking when “Baby ____ is going to come out and play” we can only laugh and reply soon.

Work is going well we are hiring new people and others are leaving. I will have my hands full soon, if I didn’t already, with training and managing. I am hoping that I will be able to do more managing and actual coding instead of data entry type stuff with the addition of new staff. We will see. I have been delving hard into sharepoint and want to switch our external site over to it but given our current constraints I don’t see that happening anytime soon. I have however been able to build a full youtube clone as well as a twitter-ish clone within sharepoint and I am working with SP webservices more. I just can’t get enough of this stuff even now I should be asleep but just can’t help myself researching and playing in tech. It is great to have your hobby also be your job

Well that’s all for now hopefully you are fast asleep or doing whatever is usual at this time in your timezone as for me I am going to search about CDN’s and silverlight smooth-streaming.

Thanks for reading
David Bates

IPhone OS 3.0 First Look

Well, I took the plunge and downloaded OS 3.0 for my IPhone and I have to say that I am impressed… Sideways email, Search in Email, and push notifications are awesome. I do find however, that a large number of programs simply crash with 3.0 and I have updated all of them from the app store. I was also disappointed to find that voice recognition was a feature of the 3GS and not the software

I give it a thumbs up but also hope that the hackers crack it soon so I can get cycorder back

Thanks for reading
David Bates