Afrihost Business Uncapped Feedback

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savage said:
Well if we're going to be exchanging personal stories...

In June last year I was away on a long weekend away for my birthday. NextGenNews suffered a major outage that I was unaware off, and all my customers was left without service for something like 2 or 3 days. When I realised what was going on (a few days later), I managed to remotely restore the services with nothing more than a cell phone in my hand.

Afterwards, I just made a post on the forum thread discussing the matter acknowleding that there was a outage, that services was restored, and that I will address the issue in more detail when I return home from my holiday. Which I then promptly did.

*ALL* customers that was using the service prior to the outage, received massive free access to the server, as I had to protect the credibility and faith in the brand. Frankly, I ran a personal loss of close to R7K that month (take into account we where something like 2 or 3 months old at that point in time) - to save my business' reputation.

Might not have been a perfect way to deal with the outage, there was many faults as to why the outage occured, and there where many issues as to why the outage wasn't picked up sooner too. They where all adressed afterwards, but I put my customers first. So much so, that from the day that I restored services and publicly acknowledged (here on myBB) that it was a toss up on my side, untill today, not one single bad thing about the outage has been said. There has also been very few (if any) since then.

Perception and responsibility is very important in any business - especially when your customers are involved - even more so when your customers are PUBLICLY revolting about your services. There is OBVIOUSLY something very serious wrong here. The only perception I am seeing from Afrihost is "it's telkom" and other than that "we don't give a fsck". I've seen Afrihost taken ZERO responsibility thus far.

Maybe companies just have their standards too high, and everyone should lower their standards and operate like Afrihost yes. Demanding a service, demanding support, demanding refunds... We as South African's obviously don't know anything about putting customers first. We're even too scared to just stand up and walk out of a resturant when you receive bad service.
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How many refunds do you hand out?
 
AfriMan said:
I'm not sure I understand - so are you still using us as your ISP, or do you just check in now and again?
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I like AH's setup but don't like MTN's.

As I like to form my own conclusions, I do from time to time buy an uncapped account near month end to test the waters, then give the account away to someone who wants it as my current ISP performs better.

EDIT: I also use your capped wifi and mifi 3G.
 
savage said:
Well if we're going to be exchanging personal stories...

In June last year I was away on a long weekend away for my birthday. NextGenNews suffered a major outage that I was unaware off, and all my customers was left without service for something like 2 or 3 days. When I realised what was going on (a few days later), I managed to remotely restore the services with nothing more than a cell phone in my hand.

Afterwards, I just made a post on the forum thread discussing the matter acknowleding that there was a outage, that services was restored, and that I will address the issue in more detail when I return home from my holiday. Which I then promptly did.

*ALL* customers that was using the service prior to the outage, received massive free access to the server, as I had to protect the credibility and faith in the brand. Frankly, I ran a personal loss of close to R7K that month (take into account we where something like 2 or 3 months old at that point in time) - to save my business' reputation.

Might not have been a perfect way to deal with the outage, there was many faults as to why the outage occured, and there where many issues as to why the outage wasn't picked up sooner too. They where all adressed afterwards, but I put my customers first. So much so, that from the day that I restored services and publicly acknowledged (here on myBB) that it was a toss up on my side, untill today, not one single bad thing about the outage has been said. There has also been very few (if any) since then.

Perception and responsibility is very important in any business - especially when your customers are involved - even more so when your customers are PUBLICLY revolting about your services. There is OBVIOUSLY something very serious wrong here. The only perception I am seeing from Afrihost is "it's telkom" and other than that "we don't give a fsck". I've seen Afrihost taken ZERO responsibility thus far.

Maybe companies just have their standards too high, and everyone should lower their standards and operate like Afrihost yes. Demanding a service, demanding support, demanding refunds... We as South African's obviously don't know anything about putting customers first. We're even too scared to just stand up and walk out of a resturant when you receive bad service.
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I concede, it's much more of a mission for some people to just move along, thankfully, I'm not in this situation :)
 
Fudzy said:
How many refunds do you hand out?
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Approximately 70% to 80% of the entire client base (refunds ranged between 7 days free access and/or free per-paid GB allocations depending on what subscription model the customer was). Have obviously grown nicely since then, and continueing to grow nicely as I realise I depend squarely on my customer, and how my customer preceives my ("best effort" - as I don't control the interwebs) services to be.

Anyway - that's not what's important here right now.
 
Fudzy said:
You were the one wanting to compare businesses here. I could go on by I agree, it's completely irrelevant.
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Nope - wingnut was the one wanting to share personal stories :D

The same can be said about MWEB too. When they had a massive seacom outage a few years ago, they took their entire network and re-routed everything though TENET in order to ensure that their customers had connectivity. I can point out numerious instances where businesses went OUT OF THEIR WAY to put the customer first...
 
savage said:
Nope - wingnut was the one wanting to share personal stories :D

The same can be said about MWEB too. When they had a massive seacom outage a few years ago, they took their entire network and re-routed everything though TENET in order to ensure that their customers had connectivity. I can point out numerious instances where businesses went OUT OF THEIR WAY to put the customer first...
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I was still with MWEB then too. They also gave us all 30GBs of SAIX bandwidth to use.
 
Oh - and MWEB's "best effort" service was still "connected". Still had no issues with local bandwidth, their systems was functioning properly.. It's only the international bandwidth that was affected... So the service was still "up" in terms of "best effort"

The difference is that MWEB realised that there was FUNDAMENTAL CHANGES to the service that they where operating. Just like there is currently FUNDAMENTAL CHANGES to how business uncapped services are operating at Afrihost...

Best effort does not fly here - neither does pointing the finger at Telkom, and pulling up your shoulders saying "there's nothing we can do."
 
A new issue has been introduced - a "fundamental change" of the service

what fundamental change has been brought about?
business uncapped accounts are not shaped as a compulsory provision - although you can activate port priority
business uncapped accounts are not on the evidence subject to a contention ratio higher than the (mostly dead-in-the-water) ADSL regulations (20:1) at any point on the chain under the ISPs control - and I doubt at any point at all because congested exchanges seldom get beyond that point either
customer support is still being provided with escalation mechanisms etc ...

A degradation of service is quite different to a fundamental change or to acting directly in contrast to a clear representation designed to secure contractual business. The fight really seems to be emerging from people who are wanting to be refunded - that is paid in money - consequent upon their unhappiness with the service. Are there any instances where somebody has dropped an email in the vain: "Hi the standard of service is poor and I have to move my business to another provider. Please cancel my service with immediate effect. My account is fully paid until x and I believe a refund in due course is appropriate" and not received a response of having the service cancelled and the refund sent to management for proper consideration?
 
I just tried to change my home uncapped to business uncapped and keeps getting an error in clienzone.
 
Wackyza said:
Lol they snuck that one in all quietly :P To think all that arguing and cancelling of accounts over a network status that was implemented this quick :P
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In their defense, they have paid a lot more attention to the customers than MWeb did (for whatever reason) when we were left to work out the throttle limits on our own.
 
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