Wednesday, March 10, 2010

WebHost4Life domain registration fiasco

Readers of this blog will know that I recently registered www.rate-my-biz.com in order to give customers a voice. How ironic that my own hosting provider has dropped the ball with this web site.
On 4th February I asked WebHost4Life.com to register a second domain name, and paid the required US$30. Five weeks later the domain still has not been registered. After a month they asked me to resubmit the domain registration information, and pay another US$30, even though they have failed to refund the first one, or register the domain.
My support log ticket is very repetitive:
Dear customer,
We apologize for the inconvenience. I have sent an urgent message to our senior staff check the actually issue. Please wait our reply.
Thanks.
How long am I expected to wait? Considering the .com domain name took a few days to register, I can't see why it would take 5 weeks to register another one with the same contact details.
Update 9pm: Here's the latest gem:
Dear customer,
According to the notes of the domain registration department, it seems that there is issue of this order. I will forward to the domain registration department again. We apologize for the inconvenience. Thanks.
Wonderful. They think there might be some kind of problem. Looks pretty much like all the other replies. Unbelievable.
Now there is talk on Twitter of a Class Action Lawsuit because of their hosting migration problems. Some sites have been down for 6 days. Ouch!
Update 12.30pm (i.e early Thursday morning): It would appear that the registration of the domain name http://rate-my.biz was completed on Tue Mar 09 03:59:11 GMT 2010 but this didn't show up when I did a domain name search, nor did it work when I tried to go to the URL. Now it is working, so there is just the matter of a refund to sort out. I wonder how long that will take?
Update Friday: After 2 days of zero activity, I contacted the help chat line and they have now promised to request a refund. It seems that their "support" system has broken down completely.
Update Saturday: It took the intervention of Ernie Lopez to wake them up and actually tell me that a refund was on the way. I guess any communication from the responsible department is clearly out of the question. A simple message when the problem first arose would have prevented all of this. I guess they just don't see the need to talk to their customers.

1 comment:

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