If you try to get such a credit applied to your account I do wish you luck as even this email to the executives got responded to with essentially “We won’t price match, sorry.”  Good luck!

Hello,

I’ll start by saying that I’ve been an AT&T Wireless customer for quite a while as I started out originally as a Cingular customer.  I’m a fairly intelligent individual and an entrepreneur myself so I understand how important public relations, customer service, and company reputation are.  Some may feel that a large corporation such as AT&T doesn’t have to worry about an individual unhappy customer however that is exactly when a large corporation begins to damage it’s own reputation.  Big or small any company always needs to do their absolute best to make their customers happy and to provide consistent quality customer service.  I’m not naive to think that you can make every customer happy in every situation however the situation I’m about to share with you is one that I do believe your company could go a long way towards making a very solid positive reputation gain or loss.

On August 12th, 2010 I went into my local AT&T Wireless Corporate Store to upgrade a line from a BlackBerry Bold 9000 to the new BlackBerry Torch 9800 and overall the experience was pleasant.  The phone was actually for my wife who is an avid BlackBerry fan and is active on several BlackBerry related sites and forums such as CrackBerry.com and she’s been happy with the phone thus far and this is where our positive experiences have come to an end.

We paid $199 for the phone with a 2-year upgrade and a $18 upgrade fee that the representative said that they could not waive which seems fairly standard fare.  It has been five days since we made this purchase and we can already see that there are reputable vendors such as Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/BlackBerry-Torch-9800-Phone-AT/dp/B003Y8XBRY/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=wireless&qid=1282015012&sr=8-3) selling this phone for $99 and waiving the activation or upgrade fee.  Everywhere that I have seen goes as far as to say that the $99 price as well as the upgrade fee waiver is sponsored directly by AT&T so I thought that I’d call up AT&T Customer Service and discuss this with them.

I originally connected to Chrishnelle Nesanet who is a standard customer service representative and she informed me that under no circumstances will AT&T in any way, shape, or form do any sort of price matching which I can understand is probably a good policy.  I explained to her that AT&T could choose from two options:

1. Applying a credit of $118 to my account to save me the trouble of having to return the phone and then subsequently order the new phone again through Amazon or another vendor.
2. Refuse my request and force me to make an extra trip into the corporate store, return the phone, and then order the phone elsewhere.

Ultimately I’m going to do what I need to do in order to save myself some money and while I understand a firm policy against any sort of price matching I find it absurd that you’d make a long time customer of more than several years go through this sort of trouble.  I made my intentions and my opinions clear to my original customer support representative and asked to speak to a supervisor.  The representative said that she understood my views however she wasn’t authorized to do what I was asking and I waited on hold for approximately 15 minutes for the next level of representative.

The next representative to come onto the phone was Tanya [Redacted] who was an Escalation Specialist to which I explained the situation and my views to all over again.  She also made it clear that the policy was that they couldn’t do anything to help me in this situation and I asked again to be escalated to the next level supervisor.  Tanya told me that it would be approximately a minute and placed me on hold.

The third representative that I spoke with was Wanda [Redacted] and when I asked her for her official position she simply told me that it was “Supervisor.”  I explained the situation once again to this individual and at this time I had been on the phone for a grand total of 35 minutes.  She gave me the same exact lines and told me that the only way that I was going to be able to make this happen was to return the phone including paying a restocking fee and then to purchase the phone from one of the vendors that were selling it at this discounted price.

The culmination of this event is the fact that AT&T had the opportunity to make a valued customer happy by making a one-time exception for them.  I’ve been with AT&T, and Cingular, for years and I’ve never asked for any special treatment or any sort of credits or exceptions up until this point.  AT&T had the opportunity to make this right for me and to improve my views about the company and its customer service however it seems that the company reputation and overall public relations are not important or taken seriously.  AT&T had a great opportunity to improve my views of the company and as such, being a mobile phone enthusiast, likely the views of thousands of others.  In this particular case AT&T has failed horribly at providing excellent customer service and as such AT&T’s reputation in my mind has greatly decreased and I will be making sure to get that across to anybody and everybody I ever speak with about cellular providers or phones again in the future.

I do appreciate you taking the time out of your very busy day to read my email.  I’ll be honest that I don’t really expect any sort of direct response however you’re more than welcome to respond to this message or to contact me back at [redacted].  I’ll go so far as to be bluntly honest that my apartment is in a “moderate” cellular coverage area between two distant towers so if for any reason you can’t get through – do leave a voice mail and I will call you back as soon as my phone picks up signal again.

Thank you,
–

█ Michael Denney

Godspeed.

Update 1
Sitting in the waiting room.

Update 2
2.5 hours into surgery and they came out and told us she’s doing well but it’s going to be about another hour.

Do look over some of my posts here (there’s what? 22 of them as of this writing) and let me know what you think!  Do you think that a large portion of what I’ve written and posted is my opinion?  Oh, and I know I get a lot of traffic [lol] so I do expect at least a few thousand comments!

Yes, that's a peak of 81 and an average of 8.296 visitors per day...

Jonathan Burdon

I have written a pretty in-depth review of Jonathan Burdon and AlreadyHosting.com concerning their affiliate fraud campaigns here. I even discovered that Jonathan Burdon is directly using cookie stuffing to obtain fraudulent affiliate commissions.  You can watch a short video demonstrating the cookie stuffing for MDDHosting, BlueHost, HostMonster, and WebHostingPad in this video.  If you’re not very familiar with how affiliate systems work, the basic premise is that sites will use outbound links to the provider that place a cookie on the user’s computer to identify the referral so that the affiliate can be paid.

In an article about Jonathan Burdon [which is likely written by Jonathan] it is claimed that “There is one *unnamed* company on the web that refuses to pay Jonathan for his contract so they have launched a smear campaign against him, please ignore their comments,” and the article goes on to say “If users will take a few moments to visit Jonathan’s sites they will soon realize that his site is a great resource and that the individuals writing the slanderous posts about him are simply incorrect.” Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/branding-articles/jonathan-burdon-webmaster-2848333.html

It seems that Jonathan Burdon believes that I’m personally launching a smear campaign about him and goes so far as to claim my posts are slanderous.  What I find particularly interesting, is that I have only posted verifiable, factual information and even the email communications with Jonathan Burdon.  I’ve not posted or said anything that wasn’t simply true and verifiable.  To be entirely honest, I don’t care about Jonathan Burdon or his reputation but only that he doesn’t continue committing affiliate fraud and, as such, stealing money from other hosting providers.  I publicly challenge Jonathan Burdon to disprove any of the information I’ve posted about him or AlreadyHosting.com.

I’ll be straight and to the point as to why Jonathan Burdon (AlreadyHosting.com) has not been paid for their affiliate commissions – they’ve committed affiliate fraud and, as such, we terminated them as an affiliate.  In performing cookie stuffing, not only has Jonathan’s site immediately taken credit for everybody who visited his page whether the page was helpful or not in the provider obtaining said new customer but it has done so under the false pretenses of being a “Review” of which the page was most certainly not.  Any provider that relies upon word of mouth and quality reviews to obtain customers will have a large portion of their customers who simply search Google for reviews of their company.  As soon as one of our potential customers clicks on the AlreadyHosting.com link to read the review of MDDHosting they will already be giving AlreadyHosting.com credit for the purchase even if the visitor was only on the page for a tenth of a second and didn’t find any useful information.

Jonathan Burdon has submitted a DMCA Takedown Notice to us and our data center to have his email conversation removed from public view under the false pretense of his emails being “original works” that he claims are protected by U.S. Copyright Laws.  While I do very much appreciate Copyright laws and their protection of intellectual property; I do believe publishing of Jonathan Burdon’s emails qualify under “fair use” and, as such, as soon as the DMCA Takedown period has passed (10 to 14 days) said emails will be published here once again along with some more emails not yet published.

It is my own personal opinion that the only one being damaging to Jonathan Burdon’s reputation is Jonathan Burdon.

Here are some more sources of interesting information:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=963915

http://www.scottswezey.com/blog/2010/jonathan-burdon-wants-to-sue-you-if-you-link-to-someone-that-doesnt-like-him/

Update – 07/24/2010

Upon further research it does appear that Mr. Burdon is indeed correct about emails and copyright and as such the emails that were previously posted and removed due to his DMCA notification will not be reposted.

During a larger battle I find myself constantly scrolling around (even when it’s a battle in only one location) to see what is going on in all locations where as if I could zoom out a bit more, I wouldn’t have to do that.

I guess I just wanted to complain about something, so here it is.

At the hosting provider I own we originally started offering Virtual Private Servers late 2008 to address the needs of our clients who were outgrowing shared but didn’t yet want to move to a full-blown dedicated environment.  We did offer VPSs for about 6 months before the HyperVM scare at FsckVPS happened where dozens of VPS nodes were wiped clean and data lost.  We then decided to discontinue HyperVM and worked on migrating our existing VPS clients to other providers we worked with and trusted to be reliable.

The Good

Fast forward to late 2009 when we brought our first new SolusVM VPS server node online.  SolusVM has been an exceptional control panel with a good list of features and while it is missing some basic features such as bandwidth reports, cpu graphs, and memory graphs SolusVM has been working on improving their software over time.  We can handle a few missing “features” as long as we know that those features are in development and will be added.

The administration control panel and the user side of the control panel are very clean and concise while still being very powerful.  The only gripes we originally had with SolusVM was the inability to customize the client side templates and re-brand the solution however they did enable this ability and so far we love the control panel in this aspect.

SolusVM does offer a forum where you can post your questions and issues and receive support from others using the software as well and fairly regularly a SolusVM staff member will also stop by and help out as well.  There is also a support ticket system should you have an issue that is urgent or that does require some privacy.  Our general experiences with SolusVM support over both methods has been fairly good – I wouldn’t go so far as to say great but the support definitely has not been bad.

The Bad

As with any solution the support staff can only support their solution and they cannot support third party issues such as hardware issues with a server, networking issues outside of the VPS system itself, etc…  We understand this however we are facing an issue currently that is indeed a part of the SolusVM control panel ecosystem and yet we’re receiving no support on the matter.

The particular issue we are facing is that no matter what speed we set for individual VPSs in the control panel they are limited to a total limit of around 10 megabit/second transfer speed.  Before contacting SolusVM support we did do some testing to make sure that the server itself was configured correctly and able to transfer at rates up to 100 megabit/second:

[root@boreas ~]# wget http://speedtest.dal01.softlayer.com/downloads/test100.zip
–2010-04-22 17:02:27– http://speedtest.dal01.softlayer.com/downloads/test100.zip
Resolving speedtest.dal01.softlayer.com… 74.86.116.210
Connecting to speedtest.dal01.softlayer.com|74.86.116.210|:80… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 104874307 (100M) [application/zip]
Saving to: `test100.zip’

100%[========================>] 104,874,307 9.55M/s in 9.7s

2010-04-22 17:02:36 (10.3 MB/s) – `test100.zip’ saved [104874307/104874307]

91.4MB/sec transfer

Even with providing this information to SolusVM they responded that they were able to reproduce the issue on our servers but that the problem was not a SolusVM problem and that they could only provide support to the panel itself.  They stated that they could not and would not support issues with our server or network.

We’re quite a bit on the fence with SolusVM due to this lack of basic support.  It’s obvious that the server itself is fully capable of 100megabit speeds and that the networking is fully capable of these speeds as well and yet SolusVM support is telling us that it’s a server or networking issue and that they won’t help.  To be clear the only thing that has been done to this server is that we installed it with a basic CentOS5 installation and then performed the SolusVM installation.

I’ll be sure to update this post once SolusVM does get back to us either letting us know that they are going to help with the issue or that we’re on our own to find another better supported control panel.

Update

It seems that they’re unwilling to help in any way/shape/form which is really unfortunate.  Up until now we’ve had nothing but good things to say about SolusVM and their support but it looks like there isn’t much support available.

Jason from SolusVM support got back to me saying they tested the rate limiting on our servers and that it is working and suggested that we test the feature ourselves.  They also stated that they tested teh speed limiting on their test servers and that it was working fine.  They went even further and said that it was an OpenVZ issue and not an issue with their control panel.  The tech went far enough to say that they are not willing to spend hours of their time investigating the issue when all we really wanted was a bit of effort on their part.

Update Number 2

I let the support tech that I was dealing with, Jason, know about my suspicion of what was causing the issue and I let them know about this post.  My suspicion is that since we are using SoftLayer servers where ETH0 is Private Networking and ETH1 is public instead of ETH0 being public as it is on most servers at most providers that perhaps this was causing issues.

Jason got back to me stating that they will not be blackmailed by a bad review and that he is passing the ticket over to Phill as he is no longer going to respond to the ticket.  Phill did get back to me very quickly (within about 10 minutes)  and hopefully we’ll be able to identify the issue.

Update Number 3

Phill did get back to me letting me know that the traffic shaping is indeed hard-coded to ETH0 and suggested that we either change our public networking to ETH0 or that they perhaps that SolusVM should do public network detection.

From speaking with Phill it seems as though he thought that our issue was that the Traffic Shaping wasn’t properly applying to the VMs and come to find out it’s not but that isn’t our primary issue.  Ultimately there is still the issue that SolusVM hard-codes eth0 into it’s traffic shaping and we’ve uncovered this today.

As for the issues where the VPSs port speeds are dropping for no apparent reason, we’re still working on this for sure.  Hopefully SolusVM support will be willing to assist with this.

Update Number 4

So it seems that SolusVM wanted me to remove any excerpts used from emails/tickets with their support.  I’ve done so as requested.

Update Number 5

Ultimately after finally getting Phill at SolusVM to actually discuss the issue with me he suggested that I drop all traffic shaping rules on the host node.  We did so and amazingly all of the issues disappeared.  This was after hours upon hours of SolusVM saying it wasn’t an issue with their control panel – it turns out that it was actually an issue with the control panel having hard coded eth0 into their traffic shaping settings in their control panel.  Every SoftLayer server uses eth0 as private networking and eth1 as public networking which means that SolusVM’s way of performing traffic shaping simply didn’t work correctly in our environment.

While this does mean that we’re unable to perform any traffic shaping per VPS via SolusVM until they enable the feature to select your primary eth device and that we have to do so manually if we wish to do so – we’d rather have to do some manual work and have it work correctly than to rely on the control panel and have it flawed.  We’ve voiced our opinion in the ticket that SolusVM should give the option to choose an alternate public ethernet device and we’re doing so here as well.

As far as I’m concerned the issue is ultimately resolved but SolusVM does have a long way to go before it gets back to where we would feel comfortable recommending it to our partners and other providers we socially network with.

Edit: I did find that there is no way to selectively disable this feature which makes copying shell commands out of a blog post difficult as you have to edit each copy before pasting it into a shell session.  I’ve disabled Tynt until I find a way to disable it per-page but I am open to suggestions

I’ll admit that I didn’t do the appropriate research before choosing this TV and had I done so I likely would have avoided this model but at this point it’s too late to do anything about it. Almost daily the TV will begin having HDMI sound issues where the sound signal loses it’s continuity – it sounds almost as though somebody is muting and then unmuting the sound very quickly once every second or so which is at the least very annoying and it doesn’t stop there. About 5 minutes after the sound begins having issues it will start to cut out for extended periods of time of up to 15 or 20 seconds and then go back to cutting in and out quickly. Sometimes the sound simply drops out all together and doesn’t come back – the solution to all of these problems is to unplug the TV and to plug it back in. We’ve tried simply powering off the TV, switching HDMI ports, switching Xbox 360s, trying other HD input sources, trying different HDMI cables and the result is that the TV has issues.

I hope that this article will come up in a search and help anybody considering this model to choose another less problematic TV. I’m not trying to bash Sony here (they do make some good products) but they obviously didn’t test this TV thoroughly and once the issue was reported they did release a software update that hasn’t fixed the issue. When I called Sony about this they told me that I had the latest software on the TV (which I had already verified on my own) and that there was no solution to the issue.

I uploaded a clip of the TV acting up – it’s fairly long and I do discuss the issues with my wife a little in the background. I was holding an Xbox 360 controller as well as the TV remote during most of the video. I did hit Mute a couple of times during the video to demonstrate that we’re not just muting the sound (it would show up in the bottom left hand corner) and to illustrate that it’s an issue with the TV.

Update – 04/23/2010

So after doing a lot of research and reading I managed to get my hands on a “secret” copy of the firmware for this TV with a release date of 12/04/2009 which is 4 months newer than the latest version on the site and that was previously on the TV.  This came directly from a Sony engineer here in the US and due to the nature of the firmware it wipes out all existing settings on the TV (any customizations made to picture, etc) which is why it’s not posted on the site or so that is what I was told.

I’ve installed the new software, tweaked all of my settings back and so far so good.  We played about 5 hours of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 without any HDMI audio issues and personally I think the picture looks brighter/better than it did previously but that could just be me looking closer than I did before.  I’ll definitely update this post in a couple of weeks after I’ve had enough time to conclusively say that it’s resolved the HDMI sound issues and if that’s the case I’ll make a download of the firmware available.  If you have this TV and want to try the firmware drop me a comment and I’ll get it over to you via email.

The individual signed up using a first name and last initial only, their mailing address was a mail forwarding address, and many other red flags were sent up when this individual attempted to order services.

Here is a complete view of the email conversation with all personally identifying information redacted and by all means read it over and let me know what you think in the comments.

This individual came to us from WebHostingTalk.com so I’m curious how they are going to portray this email conversation.  I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what they have to say.

Anybody with enough experience in the industry knows that most “web hosting review” and “top 10 web hosts” type of sites are simply affiliate link farms where the goal is to pull in as many visitors to click on their affiliate links as possible.  Someone experienced in the industry who has “been there, done that” will often see through this and knows to conduct their own research and won’t fall for these tricks but someone new to the industry and turning to Google for advice won’t.  While there isn’t anything inherently wrong with that, what bothers me is when the site makes commission in a misleading way.  Some sites actually do write up a decent review of the provider and provide links to sign up which is entirely understandable but some are not so honest and straightforward in their dealings.

One such site that is operating in a misleading way is “AlreadyHosting.com” which is operated by Jonathan Burdon of Murray, Kentucky.  While going over our affiliate sales I noticed that one particular affiliate had an extraordinarily high conversion rate and to be honest I wanted to know what they were doing to achieve a conversion rate of 9%.

Their site “reviews” as of this writing 111 companies which is not a lot when you look at the hosting industry itself as having thousands of individual providers.  When you look at any one of their providers that they review you may be surprised at the utter lack of any content or reviews (I certainly was).  I have pictured the page that I found was sending the affiliate referrals to us and commented directly in the image as to how their methods are misleading. Not only does every host that they “review” offer links to “Promo pricing” and “Coupon Codes & Promotional Links”, but every one of these links goes directly to the provider dropping the affiliate code without giving any promotional codes or pricing.

I contacted Jonathan (read entire conversation here) and explained to him that we felt that he was misleading his visitors by offering links to coupon codes and promotional pricing when those links actually just dropped them on the affiliate URL where no such information can be found.  We let him know that we were doing so pro-actively and that while we could have let him continue sending us visitors and simply refused to pay him any money at a later date but that we simply were not that type of company.

AlreadyHosting.com uses it’s SERP power to be seen for “[Hosting Company Name] Review” which means that the customer isn’t simply browsing for a list of providers but is looking for specific information on a provider that they are already considering.  At the time of this writing I did a Google search for “GreenGeeks Review” and in 9th place is “GreenGeeks Review & Coupon Codes | AlreadyHosting.com”.  Upon visiting this URL you will see that there is no review but there are links promising promotional pricing and coupon codes which anybody that is already considering that provider is going to click on.  As soon as the visitor clicks on the link they are taken to the provider’s site and should that visitor continue researching the company before buying – AlreadyHosting will obtain commission on the sale due to the visitor having been interested in coupon codes and promotional pricing.

In my conversation with Jonathan I explained to him that we were more than happy to keep him on board with us as an affiliate as long as he was willing to modify the page to actually link to the content it claims to link to (i.e. promotional information or coupon codes) or to simply not claim to link to such content if it isn’t doing so and rather than editing the review page to modify or remove the misleading hyperlinks Jonathan decided to respond with a threat:

If you do not reconsider we will keep your
review active and will tell our readers how you treat affiliates and will
directly recommend that they sign up for another company. I will also
invest a lot in SEO for that page to ensure that it ranks high for all of
your keywords.

Upon visiting the “MDDHosting Review” on AlreadyHosting.com after this email exchange I found that he has updated the page with an “Important Note” stating that we had discontinued his affiliate account with us, which we have.  I have no particular problem with this but what I do find interesting is the site claims to be a site containing the “BEST WEB HOSTING REVIEWS” which would lead the average hosting consumer to believe that they either have tried and reviewed the services they “review” directly or they have input from third parties who have done so and as such list them based upon their quality of service and support which is obviously not the case.  Should any of these “best web hosting providers” find that AlreadyHosting.com is misleading their potential customers and committing affiliate fraud by using misleading hyperlinks AlreadyHosting.com may end up having to place this notice on more pages than just ours.

At the end of the day I don’t suggest trusting any of the “Web Hosting Review” or “Top 10 Web Hosts”  sort of sites as they are all affiliate driven and a vast majority of them are simply misleading.  If you do happen across a site offering coupon codes or promotional codes and it turns out there are none to be had make sure to clear your cookies so that you don’t pay these crooks for misleading you.  I highly suggest a resource that is not affiliate driven for researching hosting providers such as the WebHostingTalk.com Forums.