You may remember earlier this Fall when our Bluehost VPS was having issues. It ended up being a hardware issue that took more than two weeks for them to flush out. Fast forward to this past week. Our server started acting up with the exact same symptoms.
I quickly called their tech support and pleaded my case to have them check the memory (the problem last time). Instead, I was escalated to Tier 2 support, and was told to give them 24-72 hours to “look into it”. Meanwhile, I have to keep the masses at bay and hope they find the problem quickly.
I waited 24 hours and thought I would call in to see if they had found anything. They knew nothing and couldn’t tell if anything had been done. I was told again to wait the 24-72 hours. I was not happy, but kept quiet and took my medicine.
Finally, after lunch on Friday, as the magical 72nd hour was expiring, I picked up the phone and called in. By this point it had been three days, I had heard absolutely nothing from Bluehost, and both my customers and I had lost our patience. I felt advanced sorrow for the poor unsuspecting agent that would draw the unlucky number of me in their call queue. Steadfast, I maintained my professionalism. He first asked how long it had been, to which I happily answered the requisite 72 hours. I waited on hold for another fifteen minutes while he took his best crack at the case.
Defeated, he came back online and told me that he had escalated my case to Tier 3 support. “Great,” I replied. “How soon can I expect to hear something?” He replied, “You should hear something within 24 hours.” It was at that exact moment he heard me inhale deeply as I had expended every last bit of keep quiet I had left in my soul. I explained that I had already waited 72 hours, and was not going to wait for another 24 while they do nothing. Our server had already been unusable for three days, and this could not be drug out for two weeks like it was in August.
I demanded to speak with a superior. The agent put me on hold for a good five minutes, presumably to take some of the fight out of me. Supervisor, Brett, answers the phone, to whom I quickly provide the elevator summary of the situation. I asked Brett if he’s ever seen the movie Roadhouse, and in particular, the scene where Dalton tells his bouncers to “Be nice…until it’s time to not be nice.” I told Brett that I was past the phase of being nice, and it’s time to get some answers. Brett chuckled briefly and assured me he would get someone to look at it right away. I told him if they didn’t have this fixed by Monday that I would be leaving Bluehost and would never return.
Apparently my convo with Brett was not at a loss. Within thirty minutes Tier 3 support looked into the issue and escalated it to their Systems Operations team, who eventually escalated it to a Sr. Systems Architect. By Saturday night our server was humming along under normal operation again.
As a person who has been on the receiving end of this situation, I always hate having to strongly assert my point, and yes, interject a curse here and there to drive things home. As Dalton would say, “Nobody ever wins a fight,” but sometimes you’ve got to light a fire under the posterior of the right people to get things moving again.
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