Hi. Me again. Going into the third day(fourth if you count the fact that as of Tuesday afternoon the hosting payment had cleared into their PayPal account) of a suspended account that should not be suspended. Thanks for dropping the ball E-Starr!
As of today, I have sent:
- 6 e-mails, with the last three going to billing@e-starr.com and support@e-starr.com
- 3 helpdesk tickets, all clearly spelling out the issue in the subject and description, and having a high priority
- 3 contact form submissions, with the last batch going under the subject of billing, information and technical
- 3 voicemails
- 1 comment left at E-Starr’s owner’s personal blogs (two) and MySpace account
What makes me so angry about this is the fact that Jay from E-Starr was in touch with me, both on Monday morning, and again on Tuesday morning. So it’s not as if E-Starr up and disappeared off of the face of the Earth. Jay e-mailed to check on changing the domain my reseller account is on (since I wisely moved jenn.nu and Lavish to VoNetwork after the server upgrade/file transfer debacle in February), and to offer to do a password change. Not only did he not email back after Tuesday morning’s email (sent at 8:24am, I replied at 10:31am), but in both of his emails to me he never once touched base on the thing I did mention in my emails to him: the suspended hosting account.
Why did Jay up and disappear? I have no freaking clue. Why didn’t he unsuspend the account? I don’t know. Considering that he knows how to change domains on the server and modify passwords, I’m sure he has a grasp on how to login, view the suspended accounts, and click that spiffy little “unsuspend” button next to them. If not, he should be asking E-Starr’s owner. Or Googling it. Or at the very least, emailing me back to let me know what’s going on, and to give me an idea as to when I can expect to access my reseller account and use the services I paid for.
And you know, when you own a hosting company, you have a responsibility to run it. Hosting issues, account suspensions and technical support doesn’t just magically disappear because it’s Easter, or because you have a headache, or have other things pop up. I’m still here, my domains are still here, as are the domains of everyone else on E-Starr’s servers.
Believe me, I understand all about being busy with family and kids and work and life in general. Why do you think I threw in the towel at doing my own hosting gig? I knew I didn’t have the time to devote to it. I was smart and decided to leave the hosting business to those that have the time to handle it. Like, you know… E-Starr (thanks for proving me wrong!).
If you expect to run a successful business, you can’t just up and run away from it. I don’t know what’s going on with E-Starr and its owner. And quite frankly, I really don’t care. What I do care about is my brother-in-law’s domain, and the fact that he is now losing potential clients, and unable to correspond with current clients. I do care about Caitlin’s domain, and the fact that she risks losing part of her income. I do care about Debbie’s domain, and the fact that she is probably dealing with rejected posts and payments. I do care about my mother’s domain, and the fact that she can’t keep in touch with our pastor, and receive updates on different things via e-mail. I do care about each and every domain on that reseller account, all of which are inaccessible right now.
At this point, I am through with E-Starr. They can keep the $30 payment, so long as I get access to the reseller account so I can get on there, make copies of everyone’s stuff, and then move everyone to my VoNetwork reseller so fast my head will be spinning.
Very, very unprofessional.
Word of mouth works both ways and if they keep this up, they might as well just throw in the towel now.
So sorry you’re having to deal with this.
I agree with Teresa, it is VERY unprofessional. If your having a family problem or a family emergency, at least let their customers know by sending a friendly email just letting them know. I would never go with them, I was thinking about getting another domain do to another project with and I was thinking about going with them, but NOT after this. Tsk Tsk. Maybe you can report then to the BBB?
remember you posting the review of e-starr and singing it’s praises? :tonguer:
you also have to be fair and talk about the fact that your payment was late. both sides can be in the wrong here, but amy will appear. she’s just busy working… at khol’s not at e-starr
I had this exact same thing happen with my previous own domain. Long story short, they’re still trying to charge me for service that was never delivered (my website was down for 3,5/4 of paid time, and the remaining 0,5, worked when they felt like removing me from blacklisted users – apparently, accessing your cpanel is considered a DoS attack…)
But returning to the matter at hand, like Teresa and Danielle said, this is just ridiculous behavior and extremely unprofessional. Even if there’s some kind of trouble, you’re the end user, you’re supposed to be kept informed, not kept in the dark. It’s NOT too much to ask for for E-Starr to at least write a short e-mail explaining the situation, if there *is* a situation. Just disappearing when the feedback isn’t positive is a sign of a business that’s not gonna exist for a very long time.
E-Starr can’t just leave their customers hanging like this, and yes, in the matter of small businesses, word of mouth either makes or breaks the company, and if this keeps up, I’d say E-Starr is facing the latter.
*virtuaHug* I’m sorry you have to go through this.
That is complete bullshit, I don’t know anything about E-starr or whoever it is that’s responsible but it’s not like you haven’t suffered for making a late payment, which happens to everyone all the time. My account has been suspended for late payment once with HostGator, and as soon as I realized this and made my payment things were back up and running within the hour. If working at Kohl’s is more important than running a business where clients are paying for a service they’re not receiving, something should obviously be done.
The longer they let this go the worse it will get, if you google e-starr hosting this entry shows up as the 7th result. That’s great for business
A couple of things comes to mind.
The first one would be when I purchased a domain through your previous company. Which I had to email you after three days because it was yet not registered but gladly accepted my money. Which I again lost the next year because you sent me no renewal invoice nor attempted to contact me when you decided to not having a hosting business any more. To my surprise some mongrel emailed me a few months later to ask me to “stop linking to -his- domain”. Imagine how happy that made me.
Second would be when I was hosted by Netrillium while you answered support there and I needed someone to bother responding to my ticket which was URGENT. When I posted at Lavish complaining in general about the lack of reply you flat out told me I was being hysterical and impatient and how I shouldn’t nag because they’d “eventually get to me”. And I had sent *one* ticket.
I work webhosting support myself, and I know that by leaving this many messages you’re not going to get a reply any faster. You’ve made your point, they’ll get back to you as soon as they can. It’s not like your files are deleted forever, they’re just temporarily unavailable, as frustrating as it may be to not get a reply.
Thirdly, there might be *reason* why they’re not responding. For all we know the reason why Jay stopped replying was because he might have to return to whatever crisis that might have emerged. Perhaps he had to return to a hospital, or perhaps there’s been a death or any other likely crisis which occurred. We don’t know.
Yes, maintaining your business is important. But if someone stops replying this suddenly, then there is most likely a very good acceptable reason for it.
Your life will not end because of it.
So what she was late, everyone makes mistakes. So does that mean for E-Starr not to contact her back? You think shes going to back and use them after all this? When it comes to hosting, you need a reliable company, not one doesn’t write back. Everyone that comes to Jenn’s site, which is probably a lot, do you think there going to use E-Starr after this? Bad customer service, no contact, I don’t think so. Word of mouth is the best advertisement. They better make it up to Jenn some how. This just shows Jenn how unreliable they really are.
youknow,
I sang praises for E-Starr and recommended them because, at that time, and up until this happened, E-Starr has been fantastic.
And I mentioned the fact that the payment was late in the last two entries.
Maja,
I appreciate your comment. What you pointed out about my hosting company only shows that I did the right thing in backing away from offering hosting to others. I didn’t have the time nor the organizational skills to keep on top of things. I am very sorry that you lost a domain name; at the time I never thought about sending out renewal reminders, as it’s something I myself am not used to receiving from other hosting companies. I have always had to keep on top of my domain names. Although currently I only have to remember the expiration dates of some of them, because GoDaddy *does* send expiration/renewal notices out.
In regards to Lavish, I honestly do not remember the situation you’re referring to. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, just that I don’t remember. However, I would like to point out that my position as a technical support provider with Netrillium ended in the winter of 2004, and Lavish itself wasn’t created until May of 2005. So I’m not sure if you were referring to Seduced, or if this happened later, after my stint with Netrillium had long since ended.
Back to the matter at hand: I am hoping there is a reason for this delay and lack of response. I’ve never had anything like this happen before with E-Starr, which is why this is puzzling and frustrating. And doubly so when Jay didn’t unsuspend the account when he emailed me back on Tuesday morning (the day the payment cleared), or afterwards.
And no, my life obviously will not end because the domains are unavailable, and the accounts are still intact. But I have a huge burden of responsibility on my shoulders, namely because most of the domains affected aren’t even *mine*. They belong to people who are losing *money* because of their domains being unavailable.
Perhaps in the future E-Starr should have a backup person on hand who can be notified in case of an emergency, and they would then step in to handle crucial matters, including domain renewals, suspensions and downed servers.
Considering it’s been quite some time ago, I think it was on old Seduced…
My point was: Shit happens. We don’t always have to like it, but considering not every one here is all that innocent in past experiences running a business it might be an idea to not throw stones in glass houses.. I believe the phrase goes…
Karma that affects me is one thing. But when it is affecting others, then I start to throw a fit.
Oh well. Back to twiddling my thumbs.
I think you should consider having hosting with a larger more reliable company.
At first I thought it was no big deal, but now I am starting to see it from your point of view. Especially since more time is passing, and you still haven’t heard anything from them.
When I first signed up with Estarr, I had a problem from the very beginning. I could not download more than a few files at a time without getting locked out of FTP, then oddly my site would go down only for me. I exchanged several emails with Amy, and she could not figure it out. I was thinking that she isn’t very experienced. She was never able to fix it, but for some reason it stopped doing that months later. I have no clue what was happening. But I expect for something to get fixed when something is wrong. Also, like I told you on twitter… I was in one of my psycho moods one day and deleted all of my files. I emailed her and asked her for the backup. It took her a whole week to upload the backup files. And you know how you talked to Jay? I talked to her several times, and she kept asking me stupid, irrelevant questions when all I wanted was her to upload my files. He should have had your site back up the moment you talked to him.
I guess what is puzzling me about this entire thing is, why doesn’t anybody know what is going on? If I ran a business, I would certainly at least put a small little update on the company website to announce that I had a family emergency or something of the sorts… it’s better for their business to keep everyone informed rather than just disappearing.
I think what is just really getting me about this whole situation is that people keep making excuses. Hello? If you own a business do you not get held to the same standards if you are working out of your home in your pj’s? I mean cause 90% of the time I call customer service for anything I’m getting someone sitting at home in their pj’s and not once has one of them said to me……..Hold on indefinitely because my kid just has whatever crisis. I’ll be back when I can be, there is no back up, your heat/water/electric/phone/whatever else is turned off for the amount of time it takes me to get said crisis in check. Deal with it.
I don’t care if she’s a person who owns a hosting company and her part time job at Kohl’s is more important. If I were Jenn I’d have called her home by now. I can assure you one thing, after this she needs to ask them to up her hours because her hosting company is pretty much shot.
The people that own the IP that e-starr is hosted on seem to be Global Net Access: http://www.gnax.com/
Though it is unlikely they will unsuspend an account on a server they sell to somebody else.
I’m sorry about your issues with E-starr, but I have to say that I have never once had any problems with either their hosting or their customer service/support. I’ve dealt with Amy numerous times in the almost five or so years of being hosted with Estarr, and she’s always been timely in her replies and professional.
One isolated incident with one customer doesn’t make a company unprofessional. Contact with one or two of a company’s employees also doesn’t make them unprofessional or uncaring. I know it’s frustraing to deal with something like this, but SHIT HAPPENS. I can’t think of one company, any company that hasn’t had at least one or two or even twenty unsatisfied customers at some point during the company’s history. I don’t believe that alone makes them unprofessional. I just don’t think you can please everyone all of the time.
And now I shall step down from my soapbox.
Jenn?
One phone call wouldnt hurt no one.
I’d call Amy. I’m sure she’d much prefer a phone call then to have her rep trashed. If I remember correctly she used to have a toll free number that called her house anyways. But if you have the number – I’d call. If you get voicemail though – leave a message and leave it at that. No stalking
I completely agree with Irene. If things like this were the “norm” then I don’t think they would have been in business for 5 or 6 years. I suppose the situation does suck, but every company “drops the ball” sometime. Every company. If word of mouth advertising is so important then you should think about that before trashing the repuatation of a business that supports a family.