Surf Speedy Refuses Customers Money
June 17th, 2007
For the past year now, I’ve been trying to move to a new web host. Since more than 50% of hosting firms go out of business each year, I’ve spent countless hours reviewing one that would best fit my needs.
Without going into detail why I like SurfSpeedy, just take it at face value that there’s aspects of their service and package plans and pricing that really attracts me, and I want to build out my future web business with them.
Last thing to confirm is that they have a real help desk. I called their customer support and posed to be a customer in need of help. They actually… I’m not making this up… they actually ANSWER the phone and were ready to help me.
I thought it was a fluke, so several days later, I called at some other odd time of the day and posed as a customer in need of help right away. Again, they answered and the guy was ready to help me.
I thought it was unbelievable, I thought.. well, maybe it’s a sales guy posing as a techie, so I said, you know, my MySQL server is redlining and I can’t figure out why, I’ve rebooted my server several times, but after a few hours, it starts maxing out again, can you help me with this?
He says.. ”sure, lets go through a checklist of items here…”. And I said, ”wait, you mean, you aren’t going to pass me over to someone else, you aren’t going to just log it and say you’ll get back to me? you are going to put me on hold until I get frustrated and hang up?” Yes, jaded I am.
He says no, I’m the tech support person, I’m able to help you. I was stunned, I told him… look, I wasn’t a customer when I called, but I am now. I’m going to spend $300 a month with you guys, you just sold me. Thanks. And I took his name and told him I’d enter a footnote that it was his excellent service that sold me.
That’s when the party ended.
I’ve tried a dozen different times over a 6 month period to sign up and pay them $300 a month for a dedicated server. They don’t want my money.
They use some hyper secure credit card processing technology that must match my IP address & my credit card address and conclude I’m a fake. They also requied me to enter a phone number, where an automated machine would call back and verify the phone number was real, and that excluded international calling numbers.
The first couple times I got rejected, I said.. I can’t believe I’m this desperate that I’m going to call them and try to get them to accept my money. I did. I talked to one person after another and was told at all levels that they couldn’t accept my credit card over the phone, they couldn’t accept another system of payment than their strict online form.
I explained my story, how I was having trouble with using their online form to make payment, that it wouldn’t accept it, and I have to hand it to them… they helped me, they walked me through all the steps on the phone, they saw my initial tries and erased them so I could start over from scratch, and they didn’t even know why it wouldn’t process.
I made sure there were no problems with the credit card, made other online purchases with it, etc.. nothing worked, and they didn’t know how to solve that problem.
Bottom line, they don’t want my money. Jeff… owned by SurfSpeedy.
In a turn of events on this issue, my current host, www.challengehost.com made some incredible improvements in their customer service department. I am now REALLY happy with them. I’ll stick with them when ramping up my web hosting needs. And they have no problem accepting my money.
UPDATE: Challengehost Sucks.
