Brinkster Customer Service Fail

A few months ago, I blogged about how "great" my web hosting company, Brinkster, is. Apparently they thought this faint praise was sincere, because they're back at it. I went to listen to some briTunes this afternoon and was met with a very generic parser error screen. Real lovely. Turns out this was true of all of the pages. I just visited the site last night and hadn't made any changes since, so I knew the error wasn't on my end.

I checked my email to see if I was notified of any outages, which was a waste of 40 seconds because that's not how Brinkster rolls. They view service issues as a way to increase site traffic (who cares if it's pissed off site traffic, right?) so they make you log in, chat with customer support and let them tell you condescendingly that the site is down for maintenance via this link. Sorry, guys, didn't realize that one of the requirements of being your customer was to check the Brinkster news page every hour to see if my site might be down. Ever hear of email?

Additionally, if my site is going to be down for 24 hours (which it was last time...we're approaching 12 this time), it should, at the very least, be set up to redirect to a nice, clean, plain-English page explaining that the site is currently down because of Brinkster's lousy servers and not because of me, the customer (even better if it provides a link to the news post). It's bad enough that the site is down, to throw some nondescript parser error message at you is inexcusable.

Unfortunately, explaining these ideas to customer support feels like explaining capitalism to a squirrel. They can nod* and pretend they understand that you want something in return for what you gave them, but really they don't care because they already have your nuts.

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* the computer senses this nodding and outputs "I have noted that for you" as a result

Brinkster

My webhost is Brinkster. I have highly recommended Brinkster to the few clients that I have as a web developer. They have a great referral program.




So go get yourself a Brinkster website. Seriously, they're great.


However... like every good thing, there are side effects, and Brinkster is no exception. So, here is my disclaimer: Brinkster may cause headaches.

For example, your website might all of a sudden go down without you doing a thing. You won't know about it until a user tries to go to your website and sees nothing but the domain name listed there. So you will go to chat with Brinkster support and ask what's up and they will tell you the following:

"Windows updates were run on the computer and this caused the operating system to crash. We rolled back the updates that were run on the server this morning. This corrected most of the errors, but left the computer unable to communicate with the rest of the network or go online. We have built a new server to replace the one you were on and are moving the website files from the backups made a few hours before the crash. Once the files are restored, the website will be online. We truly apologize for the down time you have experienced today."

If you have an ounce of common sense, you will proceed to inquire whether they sent an email out explaining this because even though you didn't see one, you give them the benefit of the doubt and figure that you just didn't see it. Brinkster will respond:

"No we did not. Unless users were coming into chat earlier in the day.

We do not have an email system in place to do this."

Then you will proceed to bang your head against the desk, thus creating the aforementioned headache. That their server crashes and leaves your site down for hours is bad enough, but for them to knowingly not bother to have a basic system that at least informs their paying customers of the situation is simply inexcusable.

There are other things that may induce the side effects as well, but I won't bother to write them down because someone already did.

But by all means, if you need a website, go with Brinkster (using one of my reference links, of course). Just be wary of the potential side effects.