Recently, I posted about a company called HostPapa, that I use for our Cortijo Grande Community website. They are total rubbish, but they are cheap and as with most things in lfe, you get what you pay for…
However, even a budget price offering needs to at least try to provide some of the services it claims to have on offer, and curiously, technical support fails here on just about every level.
In typical minimal cost mode, it seems that the support team work solely from a flowchart of responses, with pre-scripted texts designed to take a dummy through a series of steps to identify where the issues might lie. Mostly they just refer you on to some link or other with way too much written or video nonsense and a total head-blast of all the other services you could pay to receive for no extra effort from them.
Having fired god knows how many support tickets at them re the ip blocking issue that was plaguing me, over many many hours and days, and having been given the run around, with no resolution in sight, I decided to get serious and see how a social media push might affect their service.
I fired up Twitter, put my Bastard hat on, the one I use when I need to appear very, very angry, and threw my last support ticket mailing up into the Twittersphere, addressed to @HostPapa and tagged #HostPapa, so it would show it’s ugly face if anyone was doing a HostPapa lookup.
It was deliberately incendiary, invoked our old pal Adolf, and it appeared on Twitter like this.
You’ll notice from the text, that having fully vented, I made a point of sincerely apologising, something at which I am quite expert, just to ensure that the lines of communication could remain open.
One of the things I love about Twitter, is that it is so everywhere. If you tag a post the right way, you can get right to the people in the Twittersphere that you want. The #HostPapa tag would be where people would look if they were checking the company out, possibly a potential new customer, so I was fairly clear that a foul-mouthed derogatory rant, made exceptionally public, would elicit some kind of response. I have to add though, that I did have my doubts, because HostPapa do snail’s pace with everything else. But no, we’re broadcasting to the world, and in no time at all, my tweet was answered by a smooth-tongued support person from HostPapa. How could they help?
One of the other things I like about Twitter, that I really like about Twitter, is the fact that you can run multiple accounts. I’m a bit of a disconnected individual and I like to play, so I have Twitter accounts that I use, depending on which particular character I want to play today. Each persona was setup so that I could tweet from the account character’s viewpoint, like actoring, if you’ll excuse the expression.
With the HostPapa tweeting, I’d chosen my Easy Meat persona. He’s an extreme left-wing verging on public disorder style of character, is well versed in offensive and is happy to call a cunt, a cunt. I don’t fly posts from him too often but the character was right for my needs, so I just donned the Bastard cap and I was away.
Matters did eventually resolve themselves and HostPapa are providing the raw basics needed to keep our site running. It’ll be fine until the next time they start trying to piss all over me. Cheap, which is what they are, is quite acceptable, but cheap with serious probability of being pissed on, well that I would rather do without.
Finally, an apology for posting the picture of Hitler above, but if Hitler had been Putin, there would have been a stack of ripped-midriff faux-macho pictures of him floating around. I’m not trying to glamourise the man. That isn’t my style. As Easy Meat would put it, he’s a cunt.
Cortijo Grande Musings 