I am a renewed Afrihost customer having originally jumped ship when they sold out to MTN. Prior to the sell-out, they were by far and away the best ISP in SA, however, they rapidly became pretty much the worst in terms of both service and support. To cut a long story short, after many months of waiting for it to improve, I left.
Recently I was informed by a customer that Afrihost are one again good and that she has no problems with her account or service. So, as I was in the process of putting in a new network for them (DSL as no Fibre in the area yet) I thought I would give them another chance.
These are my experiences.
1. Support. It is appallingly poor.
a) They really, really need to remove the live chat advisory in their phone message when you call in - it may be many things but 'live' is certainly not one of them, except perhaps on very rare occassions.
b) On the subject of calling in, I think I could grow a pot plant from seed in the time it takes me to actually get through to a real person. Life is just too short to continually be told "you are number twenty whatever in the queue....".
c) Twice I have tried the SMS help me function. Still waiting on a response, despite what "Afrihost Man" [I think that's his name] says in other posts, it does not appear to work.
d) I haven't actually benchmarked it, but my gut feel is that emailing a support request takes at least 4 to 6 hours to get a reply and then it takes the same amount f times to get them to reply to your reply.
In short Afrihost, YOU NEED MORE PEOPLE!
2. The Clientzone. Overall, I think this is actually a decent resource. However, I have an issue with being told something doesn't work because it is "buggy and our developers are working on it". For one customer I have a total of 3 xDSL lines one 20Mbps VDSL in one location and 2 x 10Mbps ADSL in another.
Problem 1. For quite some time, one of the 10Mbps ADSL lines showed it was not allocated an IP Address. The support person told me it was just a bug in their clientzone software and that it was working correctly. It wasn't and it wasn't. A short time later the line failed and died, we reported it to Telkom and it was fixed. At that stage, the connected IP address was correctly displayed. Did Telkom fix their buggy code for them as well I wonder?
Problem 2, ongoing in my mind but not theirs. The 20Mbps VDSL line is managed by Afrihost. Up until recently, it showed it was syncing at 20Mbps. Looking at it after the internet started going slow, it showed the sync rate is now 10Mbps. I was sent a screenshot (I presume of a Telkom site they use to test) showing that it was syncing correctly. It has not been possible to prove one way or the other as I need access to the site when there are no other users on it in order to test it properly. For now I will give them the benefit of the doubt.
To be fair and balanced, the account queries I had were resolved quite effiently. I also took out an LTE-A package for myself and this has been no problem whatsoever.
Overall, the jury is out as to whether I will stay with Afrihost in the long term for the DSL service.
Because most providers offerings are much of a muchness nowadays and most of them are also stable, the big differentiator has to be support and ones experiences when dealing with them.
It will need to be far better than it is now, of that I am sure.
Recently I was informed by a customer that Afrihost are one again good and that she has no problems with her account or service. So, as I was in the process of putting in a new network for them (DSL as no Fibre in the area yet) I thought I would give them another chance.
These are my experiences.
1. Support. It is appallingly poor.
a) They really, really need to remove the live chat advisory in their phone message when you call in - it may be many things but 'live' is certainly not one of them, except perhaps on very rare occassions.
b) On the subject of calling in, I think I could grow a pot plant from seed in the time it takes me to actually get through to a real person. Life is just too short to continually be told "you are number twenty whatever in the queue....".
c) Twice I have tried the SMS help me function. Still waiting on a response, despite what "Afrihost Man" [I think that's his name] says in other posts, it does not appear to work.
d) I haven't actually benchmarked it, but my gut feel is that emailing a support request takes at least 4 to 6 hours to get a reply and then it takes the same amount f times to get them to reply to your reply.
In short Afrihost, YOU NEED MORE PEOPLE!
2. The Clientzone. Overall, I think this is actually a decent resource. However, I have an issue with being told something doesn't work because it is "buggy and our developers are working on it". For one customer I have a total of 3 xDSL lines one 20Mbps VDSL in one location and 2 x 10Mbps ADSL in another.
Problem 1. For quite some time, one of the 10Mbps ADSL lines showed it was not allocated an IP Address. The support person told me it was just a bug in their clientzone software and that it was working correctly. It wasn't and it wasn't. A short time later the line failed and died, we reported it to Telkom and it was fixed. At that stage, the connected IP address was correctly displayed. Did Telkom fix their buggy code for them as well I wonder?
Problem 2, ongoing in my mind but not theirs. The 20Mbps VDSL line is managed by Afrihost. Up until recently, it showed it was syncing at 20Mbps. Looking at it after the internet started going slow, it showed the sync rate is now 10Mbps. I was sent a screenshot (I presume of a Telkom site they use to test) showing that it was syncing correctly. It has not been possible to prove one way or the other as I need access to the site when there are no other users on it in order to test it properly. For now I will give them the benefit of the doubt.
To be fair and balanced, the account queries I had were resolved quite effiently. I also took out an LTE-A package for myself and this has been no problem whatsoever.
Overall, the jury is out as to whether I will stay with Afrihost in the long term for the DSL service.
Because most providers offerings are much of a muchness nowadays and most of them are also stable, the big differentiator has to be support and ones experiences when dealing with them.
It will need to be far better than it is now, of that I am sure.
