Edit: I’ve removed the name of the Help Desk person that I’ve been dealing with. I still stand by my claim that it should not take 2 months to transfer a domain, and that the Help Desk needs to be held accountable if they aren’t answering tickets or giving out information. But, apparently he’s just a 20 year old kid and he asked me to remove his name. I felt bad.
I’ve had a couple of blog posts about the incompetence of my (former) web hosting company (Gnxonline… tell all your friends, they suck!).
At first they were just like any other hosting company, but they quickly went downhill at a pace that would make an olympic skier jealous. They had downtimes of epic proportions. They would upgrade server hardware in the middle of the day without telling me. They got themselves hacked and then told me to deal with it (apparently the “backups” got hacked as well).
Their latest transgression was migrating my site to another server without telling me about it… I went to log into my control panel and got 404ed. I logged into their livechat to ask about this, and the stupid monkey running it would not shut up about how seamless the migration went. It’s not bloody seamless if I can’t get into my fricking control panel, now is it?! I finally got fed up, decided to eat the cost of the rest of my prepaid year of hosting and signed up for an account with a company called A Small Orange.
The only hitch? These fuckers still own my domain . Yes, I was an idiot for buying my domain through them, but I’ve learned my lesson and I will never, ever, ever do it again. Please let this be a lesson to you as well. Domains and hosting should always be seperate. I begged gnxonline to give my domain back to me and they agreed… for a ten dollar “domain administration fee.” It wounded me to my very core to give them more money, but I kinda like my domain name, it’s a good name. It’s my name. I don’t want it to become a spam portal. So I paid them their blood money. And I paid godaddy their transfer fees. And I initiated a transfer. And then I waited. And then I waited. And then I waited some more.
They never even bothered to pretend that they were working on my transfer. I was simply ignored. I finally opened a BBB complaint about them and all of a sudden there was a response to my help desk ticket! Hallelujah, the FSM has deemed me worthy! I have been graced with His noodley benevolence and the heathens have been made to atone for their transgressions! Of course, seeing as how gnxonline excels at fucking up… they’ve managed to royally bork up my domain transfer.
They gave me the transfer codes, but they would not give me the domain authorization code. In fact, they don’t appear to even know what a domain authorization code is. I don’t really expect most people to know what a domain authorization code is. I would, however, expect the people at a web-hosting company to know. They’re only generated for each and every domain, every time you purchase one. Gnxonline appears to only have one help desk staffer. Every. single. time. I log into their live-chat system, [Help Desk Guy] is there. Every time I send an email, [Help Desk Guy] responds (if I am lucky enough to get a response). Every time I open a ticket, [Help Desk Guy] closes it without fixing anything. [Help Desk Guy] is my great white whale and I would gladly send a harpoon through its head.
I respond to their BBB response, letting the world know that it has been three weeks and that I am still trying to get my domain transferred. All of a sudden there is a new ticket! Sweet sassy molassy, am I finally going to get my domain back?!
The ticket is marked INTERNAL which makes me think that perhaps it was not intended for my beautiful, hazel eyes. Either that, or they are thinking of rounding out this whole sordid experience with a rectal exam. I open the ticket up and it says this:
“search through sales emails and make sure this domain transfer is given to the customer and allowed
also I hope you do go through the transfer requests”
Apparently the fact that I currently have four open tickets asking for the authorization code is a hint that the help desk is not spending all of their time responding to tickets. My guess? [Help Desk Guy] and its imaginary friends have been smoking medical marijuana and taking crazy pills. At this point I realize that the whole situation would be hilarious… if it wasn’t happening to me. And, deep down inside, I am kindof laughing a little. You have to laugh or you end up crying.
[Help Desk Guy] leaves the following “helpful” response which makes me wonder if it has somehow managed to exert some mind control properties over whoever its manager is. Because I sure as hell would fire the ass of someone who wrote this as a response to a ticket:
“Hello Unregistered,
the thing is all the transfers now seem to need auth code which yu should provide
and i had left the notes for you and emailed those tickets
Regards
[Help Desk Guy]”
Translation: “Hooked on Fonics didn’t wurk 4 meeeee.”
Words fail me. Words have apparently been failing [Help Desk Guy] for quite some time now. I pick my jaw up off of the floor and write my own response to the ticket:
“The authorization code is a code that was given to you when you originally set up my domain name. I cannot complete the transfer without it. You people are incompetent.”
Admittedly I was harsh. Admittedly I was unprofessional. But if gnxonline had to decide between me traveling up to their headquarters in Canada and running amok in their server room with a sledge-hammer or me writing some unkind (but very true) things in one of their tickets… Well, they’ve proven their incompetence time and time again, but I still think that they would take name-calling over the sticks and stones.
Last night I logged into the Help Desk system to see if there is an authorization code for me. What do they say about insanity? Something about repeating the same actions and expecting the results to be different? There isn’t an authorization code (big surprise there!), but I have apparently made ickle [Help Desk Guy] rather mad:
“Hello Unregistered,
Nope.. this department is meant to be Internal For staffs..
you read the message i sent to domain staff.
you shouldnt have open it here .please use support or sales
now i will ask our staff to look at it
Regards
[Help Desk Guy]”
Ouch. Nobody told me that I wasn’t supposed to read tickets in my own Help Desk queue. I wonder if [Help Desk Guy] leaves Hustler in its childrens’ room and then admonishes them for reading it. I seriously hope that [Help Desk Guy] has never spawned.
Perhaps if a ticket is not meant to be read by me, it should remain INTERNAL and not be added to my queue. I only clicked on it to see if there was an authorization code. Once I read the idiocy within, I felt that it was my solemn duty to say something.
All I know is, if I don’t get my @#$@#$%&^ domain back soon… I am going to need a good alibi, a bazooka and a ride to Canada. I also know that gnxonline is the worst hosting company ever, period. Their whole operation should be razed and then the earth should be salted to make sure that nothing can ever grow back again. I hope that none of the people associated with this horrible, incompetent mess of a hosting company ever have children. They should all have their computers taken away and replaced with slide-rules. They should then have said slide-rules taken away to beat them over the heads with.
So, share your own stories of incompetent people!
Last night a woman came through my check out lane at Babies R Us with her toddler in his stroller. Nothing unusual there. I’m starting to add up her merchandise when I look down to engage her child in some mindless babble and notice he has THROWN UP all OVER HIMSELF!!! I’m talking chunky yogurt throw up all down his shirt, jacket, pants, and even hit shoes. There was POOLS of it on his little stroller tray and he was looking at me in horror. I said “OH!!” and asked the woman if she wanted to use our restroom to clean up her child. She replied “I don’t know what to do.. my husband will be here soon”. WHAT??? She’s letting VOMIT stay on her child’s clothes, hands, face and breathe it in because she doesn’t know how to handle the situation?? Now I don’t have kids, but cleaning him up sounds good. So I spent 15 minutes helping her clean up vomit with paper towels and I’d also like to add I only make $8 an hour. I do NOT make enough.
Maybe they only have the one helpdesk staff and [Help Desk Guy] is just some poor guy they dragged from the street and that they keep chained to a desk and awake 24/7 on a diet of experimental sleep deprivation pills which would explain why he answers all the requests and why he is slightly irrational. The only thing that keeps him going is the fear that the growling beast that leaves in the stationary cupboard will come out and whip him… See you could almost feel sorry for him now if he wasn’t the ijjit that’s stopping you from migrating your domain. 🙂
This is that poor guy [Help Desk Guy] LOL,
look im a support staff , im paid to be online on the livechat .
This is not about servers . this is not about domain .. be a human
I can fix if you have any problem on the server which i have access to
I dont have any authority toward the domain section which is handled by other staffs
They didnt do their job and that is NOT my problem you see
im told to update the tickets so clients will get an answer till domain dept will do the stuff.
but how come you say me as jackass,etc for just answering you
may be try venting your anger on the company and not on an individual
i will try to call/email someone to do help you asap
but dont expect me to be kind toward you anymore.. and hope you dont post any more insults towards me .
Did he actually check your website to see what you were saying about him? Well good, because now I can leave a message for him. And I’ll try not to hurt anyone’s feelings.
Hey [Help Desk Guy]…only you can make this right. You don’t get it…YOU are the one that she has to talk with, and you’re not working within your company to help her. Does the company suck SO bad that they won’t even work with YOU to solve this problem for her? Get this girl the code she needs…geesh…pry it out of some server guy’s hands…DO SOMETHING! It’s not THAT difficult, I shake my head in disgust at what she’s had to go through to not get ANY support. If there is truly nothing you can do about it…I’d advise you get a BETTER JOB! What has happened to customer service?
And now you’ve made me type half my words in CAPS.
Wow. There really aren’t words. I really didn’t think people were that clueless… His comment made me laugh a little. Just…wow.
I have a message for [Help Desk Guy] too. [Help Desk Guy] — “They didnt do their job and that is NOT my problem you see” is not true when you are working at a Help Desk. When you work at a Help Desk, other people not doing their job IS your problem. Because you are the one talking to the customer. When you get tired of other people’s failures being your problem, you do one of a few things. You make sure that customer is handed to the person who can fix it, and that the customer knows to talk to that person now. You can ask for the ability to fix it yourself. But, until it goes to someone else, or is fixed, it’s your problem. I worked help desk for years, believe me, it’s your problem. If you can’t handle that, it’s time for another job.
I’ve had the same issues for as long as I can remember… Someone led me to them because of the low cost. Knowing what I know now I would have gladly paid 10 times as much to be somewhere else! I was able to move the hosting to another company but like the person at the top of the page, I cannot get my domain transferred either! I’ve used godaddy to intitate the transfer but they will not release the authorization code in the time frame needed to finalize the transfer… Our site is currently down becuase I do not have access to the dns records for the domain I OWN and I’ve submitted tickets for the past few days and have yet to receive a response! I’ve had a chat window open for two straight shifts (the past two days) and no one has even become available to chat. This is utterly ridiculous and if it were me, I would have left [Help Desk Guy’s] name in the thread. Who cares if his feelings are hurt. His/her job is to make sure the customer receives the help needed. If I had the time to go to Canada, I would. And it wouldn’t be to see the sights!
So I have recently had to rescue my domain name from GNXonline, who had become completely unresponsive in the last year or so to any of my requests, especially to have a domain transfer. I ended up calling enom.com, the company they register their domains through, and was given an excellent website that helped me to rescue my domain.
The website is: http://modernbill.com/products/moderndns/unresponsive/
After filling out the form I was contacted within 30 minutes by a very polite service representative who said that, even though I was not the registrant of the domain (surprise surprise, it was in gnxonline’s name) that they knew of the problems that customers were having with the company and would do their best to work with enom.com to fix it. Within less than 8 hours my domain was happily sitting in my very own domain account, free from all traces of GNX.
Hope this can help some other people who are trapped in a similar situation.
By the time I realized that these criminals did not renew my domain name, although I paid for it, it was too late. I lost my domain name. Now another bunch of criminals bought it, and I would have to bargain with them to get it back. F them all.