…And Then There Was the Rackspace Saga…

So I mentioned the awful awful awful service we’ve received from SLHost.com. Fahim and I decided that, as soon as our server was back up, we were going to move it to another hosting company. We’d decided on moving it to Rackspace.

Fahim went to the Rackspace site and signed up for an account. He received an email saying that Rackspace would call him to verify the account. No phone call.

Then he got another email saying they, Rackspace, needed Fahim to call them – on our dime – to verify the account. So he did. Only to be told that the account could not be created for “legal reasons”. What legal reasons? They could not tell us.

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/FahimFarook/status/13772856798216192″]

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/FahimFarook/status/13773093382131712″]

And why did they need us to call them, spending our money on an international call, for them to tell us the account was denied when they could have emailed us that information? Was it to prevent anything from being in writing?

Bottom line: No account. No explanation why no account.No option to resolve the issue through the customer service person.

We got a response back:

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/kr8tr/status/13776506752868352″]

Meanwhile, I have questions. Like…

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/LMAshton/status/13776662982295552″]

All the information they had on Fahim at that point was his name (Muslim), his location (Sri Lanka), and his credit card details. Our credit card works fine, and if there was an issue of the credit card being declined, they would likely tell us. So what’s the reason for the account being denied?

The response?

[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/kr8tr/status/13777028486533120″]

Then what is the reason?

Meanwhile, Fahim emailed @kr8tr and, three hours later, is still awaiting a response other than “it could have been for fraud protection.”If it’s for fraud protection, again, the only information they have on us is Fahim’s name, our location, and his credit card details.

We still don’t have an account and we still have no answers.

Lessons that Rackspace could learn from this:

1. Don’t tell a potential customer to call Rackspace if the only thing the potential customer is going to be told is that they can’t have account.
2. If you’re going to have a verification process in place, why not make it actually useful instead of turning down potential legitimate clients who are not criminals or terrorists.
3. Don’t offer hollow assurances that the reason for the denial isn’t location or ethnicity when that’s the ONLY information you have on a potential client. It rings false.
4. Provide a potential client with a way to escalate the situation through normal customer service channels to a supervisor who can approve the account. If we have to call on the name of Scoble or use Twitter to resolve an issue, then you’ve already got a customer service problem.

The reason we wanted to go with Rackspace? Scoble raved on and on about their service, as have other people. We thought they would be better than this.

If they can clear this up and create an account for us, we’d still like to go with them based on their reputation. Meanwhile, we’re still awaiting resolution.’

UPDATE:

We now have a Rackspace account, approved and everything. Thank you, @kr8tr, for looking into this and seeing that it gets resolved. 🙂

UPDATE:

I was wrong. We don’t have a working Rackspace account. Fahim received a “welcome to Rackspace” letter. He followed the link to a “your account is suspended” page. I suspect that it’s not a welcome letter that he was intended to receive.

UPDATE PROBABLY THE LAST:

AND IT’S UP! We have a working account. Fahim’s created our server instance. And he’s happily mucking about in there. Yay! Happiness abounds!

MUCH thanks to Rob La Gesse aka @kr8tr for getting this resolved so quickly. 🙂

UPDATE REALLY THE LAST, I THINK:

We got our Rackspace account and Fahim has moved everything over. Meanwhile, I’ve been waiting to do the WordPress 3.0.3 update on my blogs because with SLHost, I’ve had to do it manually. I’d always get an out of memory error. On the new server at Rackspace, Fahim allocated 64 MB of RAM to PHP instead of the 32 MB of RAM for PHP he had allocated at SLHost. Okay, double the RAM, good. So I figured I’d try doing the automatic updrade on the blogs. The automatic upgrades that hadn’t worked in how long?

And, because I pretty much like pushing things to see what the limits are, I did four blogs at the same time. Because I wanted to see what would happen. You know what happened? The upgrades worked. All of them. With NO out of memory error messages. With NO error messages of any kind. And it was fast. Four. At a time. When I couldn’t do one at a time before.

Yeah. Moving to Rackspace? Good. Decision. Ditching SLHost? Another good decision. Yup. 🙂

UPDATE THE FOLLOWING MORNING (REALLY REALLY THE LAST UPDATE, I THINK):

You know how I mentioned I couldn’t move my email from the IMAP server to the local folders on my notebook? And you know how I said it could be because of our crappy Internet connection? Well, guess what?

This morning, the day after the move to the new server at Rackspace, I tried moving the email to my local folders on my notebook. And it worked. Flawlessly. On the same lousy Internet speeds. Yeah. Rackspace for the win. 🙂