Tom Raftery, social media consultant, speaker, blogger and podcaster
I moved this site onto a new server last night (since my former hosting company told me they no longer wanted my business).
I have to say, it seems to be far faster as a result (not really surprising - there are far fewer sites on this server). Let me know if you come across any problems.
The server is in the new CIX data centre in Cork. CIX is not finished yet but when it is, it will be Ireland’s first fully redundant data centre outside of Dublin
[Disclosure - I am a director or CIX Ltd.]
I have heard it back that the reason for my recent posts about Blacknight is nothing to do with my poor customer service experience but rather because I am trying to bully Blacknight into becoming a customer of CIX!!!
In case anyone else has heard this ridiculous rumour and has put any stock in it let me address it quickly.
First off, anyone who knows Michele (MD of Blacknight), knows that any attempt to bully him into doing anything is definitely not going to work!
Secondly, how does this work anyway? Bully someone into buying something? Surely if I was chasing Michele as a customer for CIX, I would have been singing Blacknight and Michele’s praises on the blog. Not picking up on the failings of Blacknight’s customer service.
Finally, as far as I recall, I only spoke to Michele once about hosting in CIX. This was when I called him to inform him of our intention to build an N+1 data centre in Cork way back in July or August of last year. At the time Michele didn’t express much interest and said he wouldn’t commit to anything but that he may take a rack in the data centre when it had been in operation a year or so and had proven itself. I asked him to forward on any requirements he’d have from a data centre. He never did.
Not exactly a hot prospect so I didn’t think about him much more in relation to CIX as we had far larger prospects to chase.
I haven’t written about Hosting365’s customer service before now as I have no direct experience of it. I don’t host with Hosting365. However their reputation for customer service has been far from stellar. Almost as bad as Irish Broadband’s, I’m told.
Recently appointed marketing director of Hosting365, Ed Byrne is determined to change that.
In a comment on a recent post on this site, Paul Walsh of Segala said
Hosting 365 probably have the worst customer services I’ve come across. Not only are they ignorant, they’re technically crap.
Now, instead of attacking Paul, or throwing him off their servers, Ed contacted Paul privately by email and said:
I read your comment on Tom Raftery’s blog about Hosting365’s service.
First of all I am very sorry you have that opinion of us. 2005 was a tough year for Hosting365 - we’ll be putting up a long blog post about that soon - we went from 16 to over 30 staff and built 2 new support teams. I hope that customers now start seeing positive results from this.
I’m not going to try and pretend we had a perfect customer experience in 2005 - we didn’t - and we’re working to build back customer trust and deliver BETTER support - as we see it as our core driver of growth…
I would like to extend an invitation for you to come in and have a quick chat - show you around the facility. For our business - any business - reputation is absolutely key, so I’d really like to show you the investment we’ve made and get feedback as a customer, on what we should be focussing on.
When I spoke to Ed after my falling out with Blacknight, Ed very generously offered to help move all my sites and host them until I got sorted with a more permanent host, free of charge.
I told Ed that I really appreciated his offer but that if I did ask for his help I would insist on paying.
Now that is customer service - keep it up Ed.
UPDATE: - Just to clarify, I have no intention of moving to Hosting365, I just thought Ed’s attitude to customer service should be highlighted.
Blacknight Solutions contacted me this afternoon and asked me to move all my sites off their servers. They no longer want my business. Why? Because I criticised their customer service after they lost all my podcasts, didn’t tell me about it until I discovered it a couple of weeks later, and when I did report it to them, they blamed me for asking for a temporary home for my podcasts (untrue).
In the comments of that post, Blacknight MD Michele Neylon admitted:
our handling of the “podcast situation� could have been better
I decided to do a quick search through all my posts relating to Blacknight on this blog. I found fifteen posts referencing Blacknight. Of those fifteen posts (below) ten were positive or at worst neutral about Blacknight (mentioning them as my hoster in passing). In many cases I linked to them using the word “host” or “hoster” which can only have been good for their SEO.
Recently I have noted a decline in the standards of their customer service and my most recent five posts were negative about them.
I will always highlight good service when I receive it and poor service too.
It appears that Blacknight are incapable of taking criticism. If you criticise them, they ask you to take your business elsewhere.
Way to build a customer base guys.
For anyone thinking of hosting with Blacknight, beware what you say about them or you may find yourself out on your ear too.
Here are all the posts I found on this blog referencing Blacknight:
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/authimage-error-call-to-undefined-function-imagettftext/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/comments-fixed-wordpress-122-breaks-authimage-addressing/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/site-offline-briefly-sorry/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/offline-there-briefly/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/kudos-to-michele/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/podleaders-in-syndication-deal/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/site-offline-temporarily-apologies/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/hosting-problems-solved-hopefully-site-moved/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/hosting365-loses-internet-connectivity/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/awstats-vs-webalizer-lies-damn-lies-and-statistics/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/blacknight-suspends-site-against-explicit-instructions/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/commenting-problems-on-this-site/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/email-sending-problems/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/blacknight-customer-service-gets-worse/
http://www.tomrafteryit.net/all-this-sites-comments-lost/
A picture is worth a thousand words or so the old saw goes and it is certainly true that an image can greatly help the look of a blog post.
Several people have asked me recently how to add images to blog posts so I thought I’d put up a blog post explaining how I do it in case it would be useful for others.
I store my images online on Flickr. When I want to use an image in a blog post I use the copy of the image which is stored on Flickr. This has the advantages that:
Being a simple soul, I like it when things are made easy for me.
How do I do it?
Well, click on the image you want to use in your Flickr account. If you don’t have a Flickr account, get one! A free account will allow you to upload 200 images and if you need more than that it costs around $25 p.a.
Once you have selected your image, click on the All Sizes button above the picture.
This brings you to the Available Sizes screen. Here you decide which image size you want in your blog post and select it. I generally go for images around 500 pixels wide (although the one selected below is 240 pixels wide).
When you select the size you want, the code required to place the image in your blog post is in the field under:
1. Copy and paste this HTML into your webpage:
Copy and paste that code into your blog post et voilà , you now have an image in your blog post.
Tom Raftery’s Social Media is Digg proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache!
Hosting problems solved (hopefully!) - site moved
Due to issues with the server this site was on, my hoster agreed to move it to another server this morning. That move happened at around 11am GMT today.
Just now I noticed a comment which was made yesterday on one of my posts and which I was not notified of by my blog software (presumably due to my mail being on the same troublesome server) - hopefully I didn’t miss too many other comments.
If anyone left a comment or emailed me in the last two days and I haven’t responded, you have my sincerest apologies and please contact me again. Hopefully this move to the new server will resolve the problems this site has been having.