So on Monday Register365 announce that they are withdrawing their free phone support from those on shared hosting in 7 days. We’re told we can still call - just at a euro per minute rate. We of course have other options like free live chat with someone in Krakow or we can enter the email ticketing system. Neither of which will provide very meaningful immediate feedback. Hosting/Register365 say it is to increase the efficiency of support but I am left wondering who this new efficiency really benefits.

Having had a plethora of support issues, some of which remain ongoing with little sign of resoluiton, I took exception to this move and decided to start a petition at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/h365 in order to try and get Register/Hosting365 to reverse this.

Not wishing to be underhand in any way I posted a comment to their blog informing them of same with a link to the petition. Amazing as it may seem, they actually removed the petition link from the comment without informing me despite the fact that Aidan McCarron finally engaged on one of the ongoing issues I am having exchanging several emails with me throughout the course of the day.

The issue in question was one I had brought to the attention of Stephen McCarron back last June just after the big outage having gotten no resolution from normal support channels. At that time he undertook to follow up the issue - he never did.

If the management can’t follow up on issues how are we to believe that those they manage will?

What is the value of providing a comments section on a blog if you censor the comments to your liking and then reply to them without actually engaging with the poster?

There is a very interesting discussion on this going on on Enterprise Ireland’s e-Business mailing list at the moment. I would recommend anyone interested in this area to have a read.

It seems to me that in the last year there has been a move in Hosting365 to shove all the shared hosting cutomers over to Register365 with no free phone support while keeping the more valuable co-located and dedicated hosting customers with Hosting365.

When I brought my clients to Hosting365 (and yes, it was ‘Hosting365′ I brought them to despite the fact most are on shared hosting plans) there was no such distinction. Now those shared hosting clients are learning a valuable lesson about their hosting company’s valuation of them and their support needs.

That’s just pure arrogance. If you expect customers to be on the same technical level as you then they won’t be customers, they’ll be competitors or hosting themselves. The solution of “contact support to do this” isn’t very helpful either.