I've been with Oz.net as my ISP since 1995. They used to be a small, well-run Seattle-area company that took care of its users. About 2000, oz.net got sold to a Tucson-based company, Theriver.com, and service took a fair hit for a while. The small, well-run feeling got lost for a couple years and the level of information that the users were able to get dropped substantially. But it still worked, they recovered, and I stuck with them.
This past summer, Theriver.com (and Oz.net) got sold to/merged with Nationwide.net and things went to hell. They dumped a working spam program for something with an interface from the late 80s that doesn't work very well. Email started showing up late or not at all. Hold times started getting longer... by a factor of 3-4x. They put a marketing director in charge of tech support. The parent company, MobilePro, started playing ads for their "Close Call" service, trying to peddle us long distance service and mobile phones with a promise of "great" customer service (while we sat 8, 10, 12 minutes on hold we hadn't ever before). And we're starting to see turnover in tech support. I keep thinking "And I'm paying for this, right?" Actually, we used to pay a premium for good service because we used to get it; never mind that there were cheaper alternatives. At this point, Theriver.com is a company with a great future behind it.
I've signed up with Godaddy.com to shift my domains and email to a new, reliable provider. It'll take a few weeks to get all this straightened out and I hope that I don't lose email in the switchover. And the new owners at Theriver.com can go do something to themselves that's biologically unlikely but exactly what they deserve.
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