Over the past month, I’ve experienced truly wonderful customer service from Apple and the complete opposite from Easyspace / virtualservers.com.

I instructed 1and1 to transfer my codexsoftware.co.uk domain to Daily so that I could have cheaper renewals, and because that’s where I have most of my other domains. Unfortunately rather than just change the IPS tag and leave everything else as it was, 1and1 decided to also delete my web site and all my mail too… Well, ok then.

Rather than have to deal with another ‘user friendly’ web site to manage my net services, I decided to get a virtual private server and manage it myself. All good in theory, but I made the mistake of choosing virtualservers.com, without first realising they were actually an Easyspace company. It soon became apparent that they weren’t offering proper hypervisors and I tried to cancel my order literally within about 10 minutes of placing it.

Not only would they not cancel it, but apparently in some small print amongst the reams of legal wording in their terms and conditions, and despite the only price shown being the monthly price, I had actually signed up for a 3 month contract. They wouldn’t cancel it. I told them I wanted to cancel it under the UK Distance Selling Regulations, but apparently that wasn’t going to fly either as I’d clicked the ‘business’ box instead of the ‘retail customer’ box and therefore wasn’t eligible. And so there was the good ol’ Easyspace customer service.

Wankers.

With no confidence in their promise to cancel my account after 3 months, I decided to get the server banned instead to ensure that it happened.

#include <stdio.h>

void main()
{
	printf("I really wish you'd cancelled my order instead of being bitches...\n");
	while (1);
}

Apparently consuming 100% of the processing time I was paying for was abusing their system, which I guessed would be the case. Luckily for them I didn’t also decide to make full usage of their advertised ‘unlimited bandwidth’ with a nice spider saving all of its downloads to /dev/null (unlimited disk space wasn’t part of the deal).

After that I decided to try out Amazon Web Services and got a proper virtual server in the EC2 “cloud”, and made sure to make decent backups this time as well. The server has been very reliable and I’m very pleased with it. No hassle at all.

An Example of Good Customer Service

Early in December, my 2 year old  iMac’s 24″ screen started intermittently turning black for random periods of time.  The problem got worse and worse.  Luckily for me I had taken out an AppleCare agreement for it and was covered.  I dropped the iMac in at the store and they told me it would take about 5 days to replace the screen.  I really didn’t like the thought of being without it at all, but I have a Macbook Pro and a fast PC as well, so it wasn’t really a huge problem to do without it for a while.

After 10 days I was beginning to lose patience, so I chased them up to find out what was going on.  They informed me that they’d been waiting for parts but that they’d now arrived and I should expect a call soon.

The next day I woke up to my phone ringing and I answered it.  It was the Apple store.

“Hello Mr Stiles.  It’s Simon from the Apple store here at the Trafford Centre.  We’ve finished replacing the screen on your iMac,” said the voice on the telephone.

“Oh, right.  Good,” I replied, while rubbing my eyes and trying to get both of my mental pistons firing.

“Yes, but I’m afraid it still isn’t working,” he continued.  I groaned.  That was just my luck.  ”So, we’ve decided to give you a brand new one.”

“What?” I asked.  I thought I must still be dreaming.  I was still in bed afterall.  ”Really?” I asked in disbelief.

“Yes, a new one free of charge.  Your old one had a 24 inch screen and this new one has a 27 inch.  Your old processor was a dual core 3.06GHz and this new one is an Intel i3 3.2GHz dual core.  Your old one had 2GB of RAM**, this new one has 4GB and is upgradable to 16GB.  You also had 500GB of disk space and this one has 1TB.  Does that sound, ok?” he asked, sounding slightly resigned.

“Umm, yes…”

“Right.  I’ll process that now then.  Can you get over here this afternoon?”

“Damn right, I can.”

I got myself ready and rushed over there as quickly as I could, to find the nice, brand new iMac waiting for me in its unopened box.  Not only did they give me a whole new machine, but they completely refreshed my AppleCare for a further 3 years.  At this rate I’ll never been to buy a new one again!

Now that’s customer service! <3 Apple

* I can’t remember who called me but I’m going to call him Simon.  In fact these weren’t even fictional Simon’s actual words but you get the idea.
** Actually it had 4GB because I’d upgraded it, but I wasn’t going to argue with the nice man.