Joe Lamantia.com

Technical Difficulties

In business terms, I'd call the last several months of technical difficulties with Unacom.net a bad vendor selection and management experience. From a more personal perspective, it was frustrating, and a disappointment, since I'd wanted to add fresh content to the site on a regular basis after some travelling and starting a new full-time position before the winter holidays.

Unacom charges little and delivers less; for $80 per year, customers can count on receiving badly configured hosting environments, poor support and responsiveness, and substandard reliability. I won't catalog their sins, but I will offer one example of the quality of their offering: several days ago their entire network went down - nameservers and all - for almost 24 hours, and a friend of mine who uses them to host his on-line ordering and fulfillment site had to do some amature detective work and call the owner's *mother* in order to find out what was happening.

I sincerely hope my new hosting service - APlus.net works out much better.

There are lots of lessons in this, but what struck me the most was the intangible costs. I started looking at Unacom on the recommendation of a friend who used them as a preferred host for clients for some time, and is now severely embarrassed whenever the issue comes up.

I certainly don't hold him responsbible for Unacom's incompetence, but I know that he feels bad about the time and opportunity wasted by the friends and clients who choose Unacom at least partially on the basis of his recommendation. As a consultant, your livelihood depends on the credibilty of your recommendations. And as a business, it depends on meeting the committments you make to customers - which Unacom doesn't seem capable of doing.

local tags: blogging, customer_relationships, site_hosting