Update 12/6/2005: GREETINGS, “non-existent” Filepile users. Not very sporting to be discussing this article from a closed-registration site, right? (I have a bunch of visitors coming to this article from http://discuss.filepile.org/, which is viewable only by those with an elusive Filepile account)
Anyway. Original info below.
Well, my time with textdrive.com has come to an end. Turns out they don’t like upset customers. The President and COO, Jason Hoffman, outright called a customer a “dick” (me) and an “asshole” (me), then put a ticket into their system to have my account cancelled “this weekend”. All of this after I politely emailed them a long concerned letter weeks ago asking about the stability problems with their servers, then followed up in their forums on 11/24/2005 with a louder plea and complaint (which was met with a bunch of hand-waving dismissiveness and no answers).
I will have plenty of details about this after my move to new hosting, don’t worry. I have the forum threads (where the conversation happened) saved locally to disk.
PhD or not, Mr. Hoffman’s not quite as intelligent as he thinks he is if calling an angry customer a “dick” is acceptable to him.
Turns out, a large number of his existing customers watched the thread closely and have emailed me with their similar astonishment at this guy.
If you want a zip file containing the saved forum pages, it’s right here.
63 Comments
I read the thread. Man, what a good example on how NOT to handle customers. I’ve know you Jeff for several years now and have a very hard time believing that you did not try to work things out politely first. I mean, it is one thing to be frustrated and ask for help but to be called a “dick” by Jason AND (this is what gets me) have your account canceled?!?!? Jeesh, sad indeed.
I personally have had a similar experience but it was over a major contract at work (I think you may know what I mean). Effectively, the answer was the same. From that experience I found the it is the personallity of the “President” that gets in the way.
As a suggestion to anyone who owns a service company and insists on handling customer service, if you can’t communicate in a way that says “customer first” then find someone who can and channel everthing through them instead of busting up paying customers and making yourself look like a “dick”.
Hope the transition goes smoothly. Rock on.
Funny, they finally got around to erasing history by deleting the thread in the forums at textdrive.com. Good thing I saved copies. This is far from over.
Isn’t it painful to have this much hate?
Peter: Me?
yes, because I remember reading that thread, and you didn’t exactly come across as particular sympathetic yourself..
It’s like I said in the thread, Peter. I am very sympathetic when I am not treated like an idiot from the get-go.
I don’t hate people. I also do not take shit as a consumer.
It seems that everyone wants to selectively omit that this all started with a very polite email that took me an hour to draft.
Take a look at what happened.
Then stop and consider for a second how different it all would be if the following had been the response, either to the email, or to an initial angry customer post in a forum:
“Jeff, we’ve been having a hell of a time with bidwell.textdrive.com. For some reason it is crashing because of XYZ. This is in part apparently due to FreeBSD 5.4 that we are using. We thought it was stable for production use, but apparently it is not. As for the filesystem checks which add another hour to every crash - we are working on it as part of our future architecture plans. For now, however, this is what we have to work with, and know that we ARE trying to address these weekly problems.”
This is how you address a customer. Let’s not forget that: I was their customer. I did my part. I paid. I emailed first politely. We’re not “buddies” in a commune sharing hugs and flowers. I was a paying customer, and that was our relationship.
I say it again: If your paid service (broadband, telephone, postal mail, whatever) was not functioning for hours at a time about once a week and you got no improvement in service after politely contacting customer support, you would be okay with that?
The hostility in my posts (past the first one) is due to further being jerked around and defensive lack of problem acknowledgement.
The whole thread is a textbook lesson in poor customer interaction.
What you don’t seem to appreciate is the underlying hostility that lies in dismissing your customers like they’re idiots. In this case, they did it to someone who DOES what they do every day, and far better I’ll add. Someone who also doesn’t swallow dismissive “you’re a peon, go away” hand-waving.
Jason said in the thread that had I been a staff member of his, he’d have fired me. Problem is, if I was a staff member of his (more likely I’d be his boss, but I digress), I certainly wouldn’t be treating a customer like he did me, nor how I did him.
What’s ironic is that I’d have fired him THAT DAY for calling a customer a dick, regardless of the account cancellation.
So, frankly, if he’s still of the mindset to pull power trip moves and cancel customers’ accounts for being angry/hostile at their service, they he sure as hell does not belong as the Chief Operating Officer (let alone President) of anything.
Sympathetic? Me? I sure would have been if treated appropriately as a customer.
I have to add:
I can tell you without pause that more than 1 of of the employees at Textdrive were disgusted with Jason’s actions. “It doesn’t matter what you said. What he did was totally out of line.”
And I can bet you Jason Hoffman now wishes he had handled it differently and learned something from it, which was the ENTIRE underlying motivation for every forum post PAST my 1st one. The SECOND I saw where it was heading, and the egos involved, there was no holding me back from exposing that — “Let’s see where this goes. This ought to be interesting, since they clearly can’t hold themselves accountable for their server problems by simply acknowledging the problem and addressing my email, let alone comments. Way too much ego to do that.”
And if he doesn’t wish he’d handled it differently by now? Wow.
Yes, frankly, I enjoy dissecting and exposing arrogance and lack of humility the second I sniff it. It started with “I have a PhD”, but is riddled throughout. Good for you, Jason. I don’t, yet I do your job better than you do and apparently have more sense than you do when dealing with customers. What does that say?
If you think my tone and posts in the thread were arrogant, you just don’t get it. I’ve already expressed how I would have handled the situation if the roles were reversed.
Wow. What a goat rodeo. It sounds as if Dr. Do-Little really blew it.
Yeah, bidwell has really sucked ass hard lately.
I’m a textdrive customer that’s on the davie server. I’m not particularly happy with the uptime on that server either. By far, textdrive is the worst host I’ve been on in terms of downtime. If it weren’t for the fact that I got in on the VC2 and have an account for life, I would have cancelled a long time ago.
I can’t imagine the frustration of having a crappy server and being reminded monthly that you’re paying for it. I’m just happy that I don’t host anything critical on textdrive.
Somebody needs to kick Joyent’s ass. I have a feeling that this experience, and others like it, are going to be the end of them. Word of mouth is a powerful thing.
Goat rodeo! Nice, BB. -Jeff
That’s interesting, I had a run in with him once too. His responses to a thread/ticket of mine were rude, dismisive and arrogant. My problem was eventually remedied. I wrote it off to an asshole techy, and stayed my hand before sending my shit-o-gram, never really paying attention to who he was. Perhaps I should have sent it.
:)
Hey there -
I’m a TxD custoemr, and I watched what happened to you on the forum. I think you got totally shafted, that was a *terrible* example of customer service. I’ve been with TxD for a while now, they really do have a problem with customer relations. They’re cool in that they’re flexible, but I think they’ve believed too much of their own hype.
I have a VC account (paid for hosting-for-life) so I won’t be leaving any time soon, but I certainly won’t be recommending them to anyone else.
Hope your next hosting company treats you better.
Cheers,
Stewart Johnson
PS: I really think you should post your archive of that thread. I wish I’d kept an archive myself. It’s important that future customers get to a chance to see how rude they can be.
oh come one. If you DO this server shit for a living, then what the hell are you doing at textdrive? and if you’re so damn smart that “you’d probably be the boss of everyone” then how come it took so long to move elsewhere? Not to mention that you weren’t even smart enough to pick/start another thread, instead you hijacked an existing thread about another topic, and kept going on and on and on and on about how essential journaling was to server availability (whaaat? and you DID this for a living you said? riiight, good luck with that).
What where you doing at textdrive in the first place you said? and why the hell did it take someone who thinks he smart enough to be the boss of everyone so long to move? It seems like someone doesn’t “get it”, and he would rather sit in the corner crying about all the adults are mean to him. Instead of just moving the hell on and getting over it. It really is that simple, so quit the bickering, if you really think you can be the boss of someone you’d know that there’s a time when you just need to cut someone loose. It sounds to me like jason did exactly that; both of you where better off getting you fired as a customer. Granted, if you really where called an idiot, then that’s out of line, but for the actual “fireing” of you, then that’s perfectly fine, just accept that dammit.
That’s normal business practices, happens everyday in every business. get over it and move on.
Dude, as a VC200, I’m sorry to see you go. But, had I been on the receiving end of that exchange, I’d probably be heading for friendlier territory as well.
Good luck!
The thread still exists, it’s just been closed off from public view. So I went back and looked over it again, and here’s what I saw:
You began by telling the staff point-blank that you thought their choice of OS was “laughable” and proceeded from there to imply that they’re incompetent. You also asserted that for certain projects such as Rails to be associated with TextDrive was, in your mind, “embarrassing” for those projects. What you had to “put up with” from TextDrive was “crap”.
Your words, those were. “Laughable” and “embarrassing” and “crap”. And you were just getting warmed up. But let’s pause for a moment and look at what happened:
Jason replied, very politely, and indicated that TextDrive’s shared servers are, in the very near future, moving to a combination of Linux and Solaris.
Your next reply was not as vitriolic as your original post, but still managed to toss a general insult in the direction of everyone on the TextDrive staff.
To which Nate replied, again very politely, reinforcing that TextDrive is getting its shared servers off FreeBSD and asking not to have the thread turn into a holy war.
Your next reply was a bit calmer. Not bad. What seems to have set you off was Nate’s followup comment that sometimes servers crash, and sometimes that means a fsck. It was at this point that you went all frothy at the mouth.
I posted what I felt was a polite reply pointing out that, while you claimed to have extensive sysadmin experience, a shared hosting environment (and especially one which offers as much as TextDrive does) is a very different beast from most other sysadmin tasks, and that yes, indeed, sometimes things manage to go wrong for reasons which aren’t apparent at the time. The only thing to do in such a case is figure out what caused the problem and find a way to prevent it in the future, which is pretty much how TextDrive operates.
You called my reply “absurd” and indicated that it was mere hand-waving to “divert attention from the problems at hand” which, apparently, you were revealing for the very first time in a Moses-coming-down-from-Sinai fashion. Considering that the problems with some of the shared servers had been discussed pretty extensively in the forum several times before, and very definite information had been provided by the staff on the measures to be taken to alleviate those problems, your attitude did seem somewhat out of place.
Daniel replied with a rather pointed question: if you’d had this little bubble of rage building up for weeks on end, why didn’t you try following up with the staff? Instead, you waited until it boiled over and unleashed it in the forum. Not the best way to deal with a problem, and certainly not good for your blood pressure.
I posted another reply, again trying to be polite, pointing out that really TextDrive is caught transitioning between two phases: the “early days” when the users either had very simple needs, or were technically savvy enough to deal with their complex needs, and the current timeframe where the needs are complex but the users aren’t so savvy. Originally, there was no need for fsck-less journalling filesystems, and no need for hard resource limits. Now there is, and so now they’re being implemented. Why this fact apparently caused you to have an aneurysm I’m not certain.
Your next two replies were really nothing more than you venting your spleen on anyone and anything you could find. At this point Jason piped up with the “don’t be a dick” rule. I’m honestly surprised that it was possible for you to take it to another level after that, but you did, and through it all your posts were completely detached from the reality of the thread they were in.
At this point, Jason stepped up and started the cancellation process.
Now, I used to do customer service for a living, and so I got yelled at an awful lot. And we had a pretty similar rule: if you couldn’t keep the bile to a reasonable level, you got cut off. I remember transferring calls to my supervisor and hearing her tell people that “until you can calm down and act like a civilized person, we’re not going to help you”. People who continued to call in and abuse us were dropped — having a customer like that doesn’t do any good for the customer or the business.
Seems to me that much the same thing happened to you, and I honestly don’t know how you could have expected it to end differently.
ubernostrum: You have an interesting “take” on things. There’s no way in hell I am going to sit and spend more time on this - to address your interpretation/opinion of the step-by-step playback. People are forming their own opinions. You want to defend what ultimately happened? Go right ahead. It shows that you’re as clueless as Jason.
Nothing you can say will correct calling a customer a dick, then cancelling their account, for being angry about their service. You can nitpick the entire thread apart with your interpretation of it for weeks if you care to.
Wake up. You’re as bad as Jason.
Peter:
I don’t run a hosting company, that’s why.
I picked my thread very specifically. It was not an error.
What’s funny is that you guys both don’t realize you’re making the situation for Textdrive worse than it was a minute ago. Keep digging yourself in.
Plenty of people have read the forum thread .zip file and see it exactly how I do: “Nothing you said or did in that thread deserves a support person calling you a dick then cancelling your account.”
As for “crying”? You can go right on ahead living your life being pushed around by companies, Peter. If you think that’s the way to go, so be it. I choose to confront, politely, then not so politely, and make a point. It’s a matter of being an active and conscious consumer, and I’ve seen firsthand how productive it can be for ME, AND for the NEXT GUY IN LINE (that’s you, if you can’t figure it out). What you, and apparently 90% of Textdrive can’t appreciate, is the value of confrontation.
That said, if you think I’m going to continue bickering further with you, you’re mistaken.
I know what happened was wrong. So do a lot more people nowadays.
Notice how I didn’t call you a “dick” in response to your frothing attack at me? Notice how I approved your aggressive comment in the moderation queue instead of deleting it? It’s called dealing with people and personalities.
Another (current count: 48) reply from sending a random requester the .zip file containing the archived thread.
Maybe I should start posting all of these as they come in from here on out.
“well… I must agree that there is a certain lack of professionalism on his (actually their) part and his (their) words were poorly choosen
actually very poorly choosen
I hope you find a more mature and diplomatic host”
Cute, now you’re attacking me by trying to subscribe me to gay porn mailing lists? You guys are unbelievable.
FROM MY INBOX JUST NOW:
“Thank You for Subscribing to FreeGaySmutClub. To confirm your subscription to this mailing list, click here or click the confirm button below.”
This is exactly why customer service sucks in this world. They all want us to suck it up. They don’t give refunds. All they do is say “We are sorry you FEEL that way”. Look closer folks. This doesn’t even qualify as an apology. To top this all off, the reason customer service has got so bad is because WE DO NOT SPEAK UP! Customer service and products get better when people speak up and MOVE on. Hit em in their wallet! There biggest mistake is thinking we’re bottom feeders. Good job jeff. You did everything right. Now we just need more people to speak up and demand good products and services.
Seems to me that Jason calling you a dick is just another example of his excellent judge of character and good perception. I read that thread, and you were being a dick in a public forum. Yes, a dick. It was probably bad judgement on Jason’s part to call you out in a public forum, but its no more inappropriate that anything you had said prior.
Sure, TextDrive has its problems, but I have had nothing but great customer service.
It’s not just me. I’ve reached the end of my road with Textdrive. I joined in September. It’s November. There has not been a week when the server hasn’t been down at least once. Usually it’s down 2-3 times a week.
At first, they’re response was to blame me. So I pared down my blog, removing everything that could have made exsessive server demands,and even employed caching to help with that. It hasn’t helped downtime, but at least I know it’s not my fault
The final straw was when I posted a question to the forum yesterday about whether the server was down or not. I post to my blog anywhere from 2 to 6 times a a day, and I’m in and out of the backend almost all day long. So, I notice downtime immediately. The response to my post was essentially that if the service I’m paying for isn’t working reliably, as a customer I should basically shut up and wait for it to be fixed. Don’t ask questions.
So, I’m moving to Pair. I’m done.
I feel so bad for you, but I can see you were so impolite first, then you were so gungho with your posts. You are either liar or blind when saying the post was deleted. It’s still there. This fact alone can judge your character.
Terrance: It is all in your imagination, you “dick”. I am cancelling your account! They know how to run servers! Nothing is wrong except YOU!
khanh: Where is it? Even ubernostrom above points out it was moved out of the public eye. My character is fine. I don’t lie. The thread was there one day and gone the next. Let me guess… they’re going to revive it from the dead and edit it to paint a different picture now? I wouldn’t put it past them.
Terrance,
You are so incredible. I bit the hands which feed you.
khanh: The forum thread in question is NOT still around in the top-level forum it was in, nor is it findable via a search. I don’t know what thread you’re looking at
TextDrive really need to work on their flaws and I hope Joyent will be the ones to pull them up on this. The admins need to chill out, the way they respond creates far more problems then it solves. And the rabid zealot like fans only make things worse.
I wish they could see that kick ass server specs aren’t the only thing that makes a hosting company great. I’m sure they hate the downtime just as much as anyone (if not more!) but the way they talk down to and blame the customers is ridiculous.
They’re bound to get stick from the customers but they should never bring it down to the level where they are calling customers “dicks”. The future of this company, that they love so much, depends on things like them being able to respond in a polite and understanding way. What was that recent bit of research? “If you are treated well you’ll tell 3 people, if you are treated badly you’ll tell 9 people.” Posts like yours could ultimately decide their reputation and who hosts with them the future.
The vibes I get off the admins has put a firm stop to me recommending TextDrive and made me afraid to raise issues or complaints.
Well said.
If I was a fellow staff member, or for that matter anyone who cared about the well-being of Textdrive and its growth/improvement, I’d not only be paying attention to the word on the street, but also holding my coworkers accountable for their actions that directly affect my investment in the company (be it passion, financial, or other).
Sadly, it seems to me they’re a hive-mind crew with the same broken “our shit don’t stink” mentality as their president/COO.
If it were me working there alongside some of these people, I’d be requesting a one-on-one meeting with the CEO, Dean Allen.
I just got back from a long holiday weekend and found out, from a co-worker, that TextDrive had been acquired by Joyent. What kind of hosting company doesn’t send an email to customers letting them know about an acquisition — especially customers who are supposedly some sort of pseudo-investors?
Anyhow, I plonked down my money for a lifetime account, but everyone I’ve referred to TextDrive has wound up leaving because of all the downtime. The downtime is frustrating enough, but it’s the way they deal with it. And clearly they haven’t solved any of the underlying issues. It just keeps happening and happening over and over with no solutions and no explanations.
I don’t recommend people use TextDrive anymore and, given the recent acquisition, I’m not even sure what the status of my own account is.
I never saw the thread and so can’t comment, but here’s my thinking:
-TextDrive had awesome promise, which is why I was happy to plunk down cash with them. As far as I can tell, they’ve squandered that promise with excessive downtime. Bidwell has been horrid. I’ve had to move most of my stuff off of bidwell to other hosting companies just for reliability. These hours of downtime are not cool when you have users who expect your site to be up. On top of that, the server loads are insane lately.
-TextDrive has a good customer base, but there are an excessive number of people there who’ve ‘drunk the koolaid,’ and who, as a result, will tirelessly defend TxD. They get mad when others suggest that the downtime sucks, or that we’ve been patient long enough, or that the promises of stability have never materialized. This is absurd. My other hosts — many of whom have similar features — have much better uptime records. Come to think of it, another hosting company that I use has had exactly 1 hour of downtime in the last 8 months. Bidwell can’t even claim this for the last *24 hours*.
I expect growing pains, but this is insane. They should recognize that customers are going to get pissy when there’s so much downtime, particularly when they advertise themselves as ‘reliable.’
Repeated ignorance of customers is the perfect way to squander all of the happy community feel that TxD always prides itself on. And then what’ll be left? Certainly not the reliable hosting.
Looking great, guys! THREE bidwell.textdrive.com crashes and downtime for fsck to finish in the last 4 days.
http://status.textdrive.com/article/284/bidwell-crash
http://status.textdrive.com/article/287/bidwell-crash
http://status.textdrive.com/article/293/bidwell-down
“We have servers down cold.”
FOUR crashes of gilford.textdrive.com in the last 2 day.
You “defenders” are outright comical.
Simple question, here. You feel you’re due an apology for the way you were treated by TextDrive. Do you feel TextDrive is due an apology for the way you treated them?
I read the thread — I’ll agree that your post (and much of your response) was aggressive, Jeff. Had that been your first time complaining, I would have been offended if I was on the end of that.
Considering, however, that you requested support multiple times, requested clarification, and help… multiple times — only to receive, from what it seems, canned answers and comments; I don’t think you were out of line.
Some of us may not have chosen your wording — but that is beside the point. As a business owner myself, I would have read right into the fact that you were extremely frustrated with your experience. My job would then have been to figure out what went wrong and how to remedy any future illness there. If that didn’t work, and you persisted with your aggression, then there’s a problem.
But that’s standard in customer service — if your client is unhappy, the way to make them happy is to find out what is wrong. Fix the situation, or offer a path to when that situation will be fixed.
No where did I see TextDrive offer a fix to the situation (even discussions of moving servers), most of it seemed to be excuses rather than actions.
I certainly don’t think TextDrive’s responses where justified — no matter how angry. If this is the way they treat their clients, it’s time to remind them that this is Business. Business isn’t personal (short of an aggressive corporate takeover). You start taking it personal, then it’s time to find another business to delve into, or hand over the reins.
So, to say, I thought your attacks on them were aggressive Jeff, and some of the language could have been viewed as inappropriate… but absolutely TextDrive, Jason specifically, can be viewed the same. Regardless, the fact that this company did not offer you any real answer, decision, clarification, or means to help you is inappropriate in the least - and your heated display in understandable.
Even more than the whole thing — for them to zip up your files and call it a day is a shame at best! What company throws business out because of passing a few heated words? TextDrive keeps that practice up, they’re business won’t survive the web 2.0 burst.
I won’t be using TextDrive, nor my business associates, I’m not sorry to say.
I look forward to TextDrive posting up a professional response, apologetic for their quality of product, and understanding of their customers frustrations.
Things like this I always find amusing, though — how much bad publicity could they have stayed from, or good publicity could they have gained, but just saying I’m sorry? Two words would have made them look like champs (followed by a solutions, of course).
You’ll have to indicate to me, very clearly, what it is I am supposed to apologize for first. “You were pissy” doesn’t cut it. I *became* pissy as a direct result of my interaction with the textdrive staff and their egos.
You want me to apologize for that and trade pleasantries with Jason Hoffman out of the sides of our mouths?
My conscience is clear. If it was not, and I did not feel my words were appropriate to the situation that went down, I would absolutely have apologized by now. That is to say, if I were Jason Hoffman and SIX days had passed by now, I would have realized an apology was in order. I have zero hangup on apologizing when I have actually done wrong.
I certainly would not be offering a .ZIP file of the entire thread to everyone who emails me for it if I felt I was in the wrong.
Deep down, I couldn’t care less if Jason Hoffman or Textdrive apologizes to me. That’s for him/them to figure out. If his conscience is telling him I deserve an apology, then so be it. Given the 6 days now, I’m not holding my breath that Textdrive or Jason Hoffman will come to some GENUINE revelation all of a sudden about this.
Here’s what I am sorry for:
I’m sorry the reality of your situation/stability was thrown in your face and that it hurts your feelings to acknowledge it for what it is. Textdrive created this situation well before 11/24’s thread. It was a timebomb being passed around “hot potato style” with a lit fuse.
I’m sorry the Textdrive staff did not have the humility and customer service skills to handle this properly in the first place.
—
You know what I do when people are really unhappy with me? I ask myself if they’re right to be. If they are right to be, you most definitely won’t find me asking them for an apology for yelling at me. You’ll find me apologizing humbly. We had an incident 2 years ago at work that was causing embarassing repeated downtime for one of our storage units. You know how I addressed it? I sent email to all of the users explaining that we’d really screwed up, how it happened, gave immense apologies for the inconvenience, and let them know that we were doing everything possible to resolve the problem (enumerated a list of tasks).
There was an outpouring of sympathy, understanding, and even offers of help — even from the people still disappointed with what we’d let slip.
Humility. Look into it.
And as I write this LONG post, the following drops into my inbox just now: “ouch. I’ve been called rude things by jason too. If it wasn’t for him, I’d have more sympathy for the growing pains they’re going through. But his attitude is poor, to be civil. They marketed to the blogger community, and got a lot of goodwill from doing so. It is interesting to see how fast the bloggers are turning on them. Such a disappointment.”
I’ll end there.
Brady: I appreciate the thoughtful/objective reply.
Personally, I think this was an absolutely reasonable 1st forum post from me, and the situation should have been addressed in 1 or 2 posts following it:
—START-1st-post—
[- Prompted by bidwell being down AGAIN and tediously fscking forever while your customers wait -]
Maybe some of the proceeds could be used toward a reliable infrastructure instead of being put “back into tools” for 6 months. You’ve become, in my eyes, the beast you allude to in your own “About” page.
I emailed the staff privately 3 weeks ago or so in order to address the clear history of outages I’ve experienced. I mentioned, for one, the use of a journaling filesystem: something so fundamental to the notion of server availability that it was laughable to me in mentioning. I got zero information back (of worth) indicating the specifics of the problems you’re facing, what your plan is for addressing them as a hosting company, nor any reasoning about the journaling filesystem comment. I also mentioned the Urchin licensing debacle, which was explained to me briefly. I pointed out the current situation: Customers who paid for stats. Customers who lost their stats capability. Customers being told, “Go build AWStats. We’ll ALLOW YOU”
I composed the message as politely as possible and made it private out of courtesy for a first major contact about these issues.
Whether you care or not (I doubt you do based on the response I got to my letter), I am forced by your hand to seek hosting elsewhere when, somehow… I am able to even find the time to deal with it. A simple explanation of the problems, mistakes, and proposed solutions being worked on would have satiated me. Frankly, as a user of the tools you associate the company with, I’ve come to consider the service I’ve had over the last 3 months to be embarassing by association.
I’m not quite sure who you used as a hosting company before you started this one, but I’ve a nice handful of friends not experiencing this crap.
If you know me from the last few years (which none of you do), you know that for me to post something like this, I’ve really had it.
Do you have ANY RESPONSE? Any DEFENSE at ALL worth sharing that you opted out of via email?
—-END-1st-post—–
Jason shouldn’t be allowed to post on TXD public forums (except for “How do I” and “Troubleshooting”, maybe). And from a techie point of view, every other decision he made was a complete failure: The Planet, BSD, lack of serious control panel, lack of statistics. The only things he does right is posting witty comments on forums and picking up fights with customers.
And another thing: In the forums the TxD staff said they were going to donate a “substantial” part of one of the VC rounds to some disaster (Katrina or the tsunami, I can’t remember). I’ve often wondered how much they donated and why don’t they publish this information. Contrast this with DreamHost who donated more than $40,000 to the Red Cross Katrina fund (~$20,000 from customer donations, ~$20,000 DreamHost match). And why is TxD so secretive about how much they actually contribute to open-source projects. Is it maybe because the amount is so small?
I was really dismayed reading the original forum thread, because I’m a VCII and really want TextDrive to show the kind of responsiveness that A) a professional company and B) a company that quite literally built itself on the goodwill and enthusiasm of its customers, should show. The original post was both more reasonable and more articulate than many complaints that show up in the forum. I understand growing pains and I understand how things can escalate in a place filled with zealous non-staff defenders of TXD; but the escalation in that thread was really nasty and, I think, inexcusable. The end result of cancelling the account and calling you a dick was pretty much unthinkable.
I’m posting this anonymously because I have begun to get the impression that TXD, while occasionally offering a brilliant and supportive *community*, is, on the part of its staff, losing a perspective that allows for constructive criticism without backlash.
TextDrive is more than a business; to many its a community. And the unwritten rules are “don’t be an asshole”. You hijack a thread, spread some FUD about OS choices, decide to attack the CTO, leave some parting shots about journaling and Rails. That would qualify as being an ‘asshole’ and you got the boot. Now next time you expect the same courtesy from others, show them some as well.
So. You think they were out of line, but you don’t think you were out of line? Me, I don’t think anybody comes away from that thread clean (I’ve said before, and feel free to go hunt up my posts on it, that I think TXD needs a couple of dedicated customer service staff, because the current situation isn’t healthy for anyone involved — it’s too easy to get into situations like this where one over-the-top abusive customer sparks something nasty), but I’ll say again what I said in my first post:
Back when I did customer service for a living, if somebody couldn’t remain civil on the line, we cut them off. It’s just not productive for anyone to put up with that, because it just makes everybody angry and does absolutely nothing to solve the problem. When I look back at that thread I can see no possible constructive goal you might have had in mind for it, aside from sharing your apparent conviction that TextDrive is some sort of sham run by incompetent assholes.
You were replied to, politely, many, many times in that thread, but you were unable to keep yourself under control. Jason’s post about the “don’t be a dick” rule should have been a pretty clear sign to you that it was time to reign it in and be civil, but you kept up and posted several more inflammatory things after that. And that’s when they cut you off.
I run a business myself, and I have a pretty similar rule. If I have a client act the way you did, I realize that this cannot be a productive relationship for either of us, and that client quickly becomes an ex-client.
Cingla:
The loss of stats wasn’t something TXD had any control over. They tried, many times, to obtain new Urchin licenses, and were met with nothing from it. Hence they’re working on a replacement for it which can be rolled out site-wide and provide the same functionality or better. As for theplanet and BSD, well, plenty of other hosting companies use theplanet and plenty of other hosting companies use BSD. Perhaps those aren’t the black-and-white issues you’d like them to be.
(Disclaimer: I am not an employee of TextDrive, Inc., but I am a volunteer who’s helping to build the new stats app)
James, I’m sorry, but “we couldn’t help it!” is bullshit.
Point blank, TXD implemented a new server upgrade and went, “Oh shit. The Urchin licenses. Shit. Shit. Call them, quick.”
…and THEN found themselves in a problem due to their lack of planning.
Sunny: What a crock of crap. It’s amusing how you don’t see this yet as TXD’s loss. I couldn’t give a crap about the situation after the 3 hours it took me to migrate my stuff to new hosting. You, JUST LIKE THE TXD STAFF, have a real problem with ego — “We’re kewl and we kicked you out!”
Brilliant business plan.
Your community and its attitude will be the company’s undoing.
James: I honestly don’t see how you can start from my 1st post and work your way through the thread to the conclusion that this was handled well. How it is that you think I owe anybody an apology at the end of this, I can’t fathom. I was a paying customer. I watched my email + site bounce up and down for 2 months. I finally had had enough. I calmly composed a letter asking for an explanation. After 2 more weeks of it, I gave the situation one more chance and asked for SOMEONE, ANYONE, to please give an explanation.
At that point I was gang-raped by the TXD forum piranha and staff through 15 some-odd posts, trying to both defend myself and push my issue forward through the dismissive bullshit for progress the entire time.
In the end, I got the Bastard Operator From Hell treatment by a PhD who apparently has the maturity of a 13 year-old boy with too much time on his hands.
Give me a fucking break with this shit. I’ve said exactly what I am sorry for above.
Actually, you are not a loss. And nah man, I don’t think I am part of some “it” group. Its not about absolving TextDrive. Its about making you see what you did and why you got the boot. Pointing fingers at others without admitting your own faults would also qualify as juvenile behavior.
You’re right. When people get robbed, then yell at the caught criminal, they should apologize later.
My money was outright stolen from me for voicing displeasure.
Pure thuggery.
I cannot understand why everyone on earth has not switched to dreamhost.com yet. When dreamhost blows the competition out of the water, dreamhost doesn’t even get wet. The water gets dreamhosted.
What’s seriously comical at this point
- after all the posts here from people
- after the pile of email I have received from people blown away after reading the .zip file.
- after this thread being posted all over the place by people who saw it and were appalled at what transpired
… is this notion that it’s “just me” and a single incident, let alone that I am supposed to apologize for posting “aggressively” (eventually) as a customer being jerked around and at the end of his rope with the shitty service.
You guys really are too much. Nice distraction tactics.
dreamhost is good. Much
also, that post above got you booted? That’s weird, because it is pretty level-headed to me. Am I missing something?
No, that’s not the comment that got me booted. What got me booted was arguing with TXD staff trying, in vain, to get any sort of intelligent answer out of them whatsoever.
That post was my first post in the thread. It was dragged downhill from there by people who have no customer service skills whatsoever.
Feel free to email me and I will send you the 2-page thread as a .zip file.
IMHO the manly thing to do would be to close the comments on this post and stop defending yourself. It very quickly comes to the point of fish out of water floundering.
And, why hide the ZIP file? As far as I know, you aren’t supposed to distribute email without the authority of the sender. Put it out in the open or trash it and say goodbye.
There comes a time when you have to be the bigger man (as you’ve been insisting you are this entire thread, very vehemently). Move on!
Whoa, there cowboy. You’re apparently so hopped up on your own righteousness that you’re not even reading what’s posted here. Go back to my comment above and look again at that bit that says “I don’t think anybody comes away from that thread clean”.
You said above, and I quote, “At that point I was gang-raped by the TXD forum piranha and staff through 15 some-odd posts”. You made ten straight posts in the same abusive, inflammatory fashion before Jason brought out the “dont’ be a dick” rule. You made two more after that before your account got cancelled. Up to that point, you had received:
1 polite reply from Jason to some of your original points
1 polite reply from Daniel (a TXD staff member)
2 polite replies from Nate (a TXD staff member)
The non-staff replies were more of a mized bag; some people responded to you in the same abusive fashion you had used. Others didn’t.
How this constitutes you getting “gang raped” is beyond me, frankly.
And as for apologies? Nobody ever has the right to be personally abusive to anyone else, at any time, for any reason. I don’t care how wronged you felt you were, or how wronged you actually were. None of it gives you the right to be an unapologetic dick, and that’s exactly what Jason told you in that thread.
Urchin? TXD moved to a new datacenter, and right around that time Google stopped responding to license requests as they geared up to completely re-engineer Urchin. Obvoiusly this is TextDrive’s fault for not having an insider at Google to let them know in advance, right?
And the server problems? You seem to have this notion that you’re the first person who’s ever been frustrated with the downtime, or that there’s some sort of massive conspiratorial coverup to hide it and pretend nothing’s wrong. Personally, when I look around the forum and the IRC channel, I see people having civilized discussions about it, and staff talking about the new infrastructure being put into place to resolve the current problems. There are problems. They’re known. They’re admitted. They’re being worked on. This is reality, and it differs significantly from the picture you keep trying to paint. But that doesn’t seem to matter to you, if your posts are any indication.
Perhaps it’s time to sit up and look around, and see what’s actually going on, Jeff. It’d do you good.
James, it’s pretty clear that you have no experience doing customer support or running a business. Once you do, you will learn — maybe the hard way — that it is never a good idea to treat customers the way the TxD staff treated Jeff. That is the point that Jeff and others are trying to make. It’s not about Jeff, it’s about TxD’s abominable customer service skills.
I do agree that sometimes it is best to sever a relationshipe with a customer, but there are polite ways to do that.
DreamHost awesome awesome, they have a few flaws but downtime and customer service aren’t them. I really love DreamHost and i’m glad I moved myself and my clients there.
If I had the money though I would have moved to Segpub as they’re probably the best host on the net, according to friends of mine. If your site falls below 99.5% uptime during any one month, you get that month absolutely free! They run FreeBSD servers the right way. They also support Ruby On Rails, Subversion, Perl, Python, PHP5 etc. A there customer support is meant to be the best of any host out there.
James: I know many hosting companies offer BSD on theplanet, this is not the point. The point is that TXD started as “100% availability”, “amazed when things just work” and something like “we are among the best three shared services in the world (along with mysql hosting and Segpub)”-attitude that resulted in moving out from theplanet because it was crap (first mistake and no apologize from their part) endless downtime (second mistake and no apologize from their part), lack of basic features sold in first place (stats) for which I payed (third mistake and no apologize from their part).
I don’t know if you get the stats thing right, but I PAYED for stats when I signed up. I gave them money, real money, for the whole package, not for part of it.
I never had the chance to read a message from Jason saying “sorry guys, I made the wrong decisions, I shouldn’t have gone with theplanet, nor BSD on a shared enviroment, I’m probably darn good at servers, but lack the shared enviroment experience”. Nor I received a reimbursement when they cut off Urchin.
I’m stepping through old tabs in my browser and stumbled upon this
with 22 comments, last one Nov 30, 05:46 pm. Did a refresh and now there’s 19 comments, last one Dec 1, 01:09 am. Interesting, wonder what’s gone…
— gone —
7. Congrats, but not sure you have the server thing down cold. In five years at my old hosting company (he.net) my server was down about 5 minutes total. Here it’s down everyday! Still I’m here because of all the cool software you are setting up. Congrats again, and keep the servers up, man!
Rob
— Rob Nov 28, 11:10 pm
— gone —
8. I second what Rob just said about the uptime, but if this merger gives you guys the extra juice you need to kick ass at developing the next generation of web hosting and keep Gilford running for more than 48 hours at a time, then I think we’ve all got cause to be really excited about whatever’s coming next.
— David Demaree Nov 29, 02:42 am
— gone —
20. I’m really glad to hear that other TextDrive users have uptime issues – I thought it might have just been me! Yes, agreed that the uptime needs sorting – I had a $20 a year shitty host and they weren’t down once in the three years I used them. I too stay with TextDrive because of the support and the installed software.
— Polly Stark Nov 30, 01:12 pm
— gone —
21. As I was reading this press release, http://www.textdrive.com crashed. Kid you not.
Dean, your COO does not have “servers down cold”.
He also has a serious customer relations issue—called me a dick, and asshole, and cacelled my account for complaining in the forums about bidwell crashing every week and fscking its disk for an hour every time (braindead).
http://www.kickflop.net/blog/?p=107
Enjoy. You don’t seem to be as big an idiot as Jason Hoffman. Let’s see if he’ll delete this comment just like he did the forum thread.
— Jeff Blaine Nov 30, 03:22 pm #
—
The lesson here: Karma comes around pretty fast these days.
The URL in my above post (re the deleted comments) didn’t show, probably because I surrounded it with angle brackets. Here it is again:
http://weblog.textdrive.com/article/186/textdrive-%3Cdel%3Ejoyent%3C/del%3E-w00t
Noel Jackson: I’d say this has all run its course well enough by now.
I appreciate all of the support from the overwhelming majority of you who “get it”.
I will, instead of answering all of these email requests, post a link to the zip file in the original post above and turn off comments.
1000 unique visitors to this article and its comments in 2 days, with links coming in from around the net. That’s enough retribution from my end.
Since well enough can’t be left alone apparently.
http://www.kickflop.net/blog/?p=121
Comments here re-closed.
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