My apologies for this rather long and convoluted posting and I apologise in advance for any inconsistencies in this tale of woe. I recently needed to transfer a domain away from Westhost. I was trying to consolidate my domain registrations in one place to make them easier to manage; this is typically an easy process and takes a matter of hours. However, this was not to be the case with Westhost…
The first part went very smoothly. I was able to initiate the transfer from my other registrar, but they were unable to proceed as there was a registrar lock on the domain. This is normal practice to prevent your domain registration from being stolen. Unfortunately, the Westhost control panel does not provide any means for removing the lock. I therefore submitted the online form requesting them to remove the registrar lock so that I could complete the transfer and received a reply within minutes saying that they had passed the request on to the accounts department. Six hours later, Will Sam Fong (Accounts Manager) asked me to provide the login I used for domain registration logins for register.westhost.com. I replied to domainreg@contact.westhost.com and received the cryptic reply "Correspondence not recorded - Permission Denied" from rt@contact.westhost.com
When I replied to this email the next day (providing additional login information), I received the same potted reply as I had previously informing me that my request would be passed on to the accounts department.
A week later nothing had happened and my domain registration was getting ready to expire. I sent another email and again received the useless reply "Correspondence not recorded - Permission Denied" from rt@contact.westhost.com Undeterred, I asked again what was happening. For the third time I received the message from Will Sam Fong (Account Manager) asking for my login details - this despite the fact that they were contained in the email to which he had replied. My reply was courteous but firm. I provided all the information for the fourth time and also gave them my mobile number so that they could call me. I also copied this email to accounts@contact.westhost.com
Again there was no reply. It was now ten days since the original request and there had to be some way to remove this cursed lock. After some research, I found out that Westhost are just resellers for eNom, so I lodged a complaint with them and copied it to the contact address provided to them by Westhost, but this too bounced! I was fuming and posted a suitable flame to their forum in which I stated the facts and slated their poor support. Their response was to delete the thread, kill the ticket and to post me a private message, which I did not see until much later. It would have been civil of them to email me.
Your post has been removed from the WestHost forums. Please do not use the forums to slander any company or individuals for a perfectly honest mistake. I have sent you an e-mail in reply to your ticket apologizing for this and indicating the problem is now resolved.
Please allow me once again to apologize to you. We take great pride in our ticket correspondence and very rarely will the ball be dropped by us, as it was this time around. The individuals involved in this process, which included me, have all discussed the matter to make sure it was not get duplicated. Thank you for your understanding in this matter and I am deeply sorry to see you leave us on this note. Best of luck to you and your business going forward!
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Best Regards,Scott Hull Client Service Manager WestHost Inc.
However, eNom eventually elicited a response from Patricia Russell (Billing Department Manager) billing@contact.westhost.com who wanted to know what types of problems I had had as I sounded very displeased with their services. I reiterated the story to her and received this reply
Thank you for a very detailed explanation of your frustrations with our company. I’m very sorry that this wasn’t handled correctly. For your information anytime you get a permission denied message its not us telling you that we can’t answer your questions or do not want to help you as its the email program we use to process these emails. Let me explain what might have happened: The permission denied email comes when a ticket is responded to from a different email address other than where the ticket originated or if the email comes from a redirected email address. The email program can’t determine where to send the message and then you are given the permission denied message. I don’t believe either of the persons that helped you understood this process so I apologize for this added frustration. If at anytime you are not getting a response back from any department please call me directly and I would be glad to help expedite the request. We appreciate your business and we are !very sorry for this error on our part to help with your request in a timely manner.
Best Regards,
Patricia Russell Billing Department Manager WestHost Inc.
Phone: 1-800-222-2165 ext (209) FAX: 435-755-3449
I use one email address for all correspondence with them, but have recently started filtering this through GMail as I get in excess of 200 spam messages a day. At that time, there was no way to reconfigure gmail to use alternate IP addresses. It seems that Westhost insist on all replies coming from the original addressee despite the best advice practice on RT’s support page
== Public Support System== ** Important ** It’s a public queue and users often use different email addresses to reply to same ticket, so if you don’t grant [Everyone] with ReplyToTicket right then your users would have problems in such a case [as we have proven]
In March it was time to renew my hosting with them and so I opened a new account (with six months’ free hosting) and closed the original account. Westhost’s Client Services Manager (Scott Hull) leapt into action asking what he could do to make me change my mind.
I am very sorry to hear you that had a poor experience and are needing to now cancel your account. May I please ask you what happened so I may have the opportunity to address it with you? I am very discouraged that you are leaving us, dissatisfied. Please allow me to work with you, if possible? Thank you!
I emailed him a copy of all the correspondence, but this too was bounced with the same message. I contacted their live chat and asked for his email address and that of his boss - Brian Chambers. They eventually offered me one month’s free hosting provided that I did not cancel the original account. This was not a very good proposition as I had six months free hosting, improved bandwidth and extra disk space using the new account. They were not prepared to credit the extra month to my new account.
I tried to reply to Scott Hull, but he has exceeded his stored private messages quota and can not accept further messages until he clears some space.
There were five tickets created in trying to resolve my problem and the problem was 100% Westhost’s fault. If you care to check ticket 1282524, you will see that Westhost had the necessary information to process my request on October 5th when cchristensen passed the request to billing. On October 11th I reopened this request (after many futile emails and hours of my time due to your support ticket policy). You personally killed the request without actioning or following up the request on October 12th; people don’t generally swear without a reason. On October 13th, I was finally able to remove the registrar lock after submitting another ticket (1290422) as well as lodging a formal complaint with eNom. This was two weeks after initiating the domain transfer.
Westhost’s failure to action my request in due time caused me unnecessary stress and work. I still host with Westhost, but no longer wholeheartedly recommend them to associates. The more I become familiar with hosting, the more aware I am of the failings in your offering and your failure to address them. I have resisted airing my grievances elsewhere, but the lack of freedom of expression here is stifling.
Tickets: 1281085, 1282524, 1290422, 1290573, 1403419 and 1402110
