Tag ix call center india

So yesterday morning I received yet another TOS (terms of service) violation email from my good buddies at IX Web Hosting.  Evidently the participants from the Turkey Trot hitting the GCR web site was too much traffic for my “unlimited” shared hosting plan to handle.  As is always the case when this happens, IX simply turns your site off until you contact them.

So I decide to go through their Romanian online chat tech support instead of dealing with their India based phone help desk.  After waiting close to 30 minutes I finally get someone on the other side and after another 20 minutes my site is finally turned back on after I promised to follow the guidelines the support person sent me via email.

Well I have had years and years of problems with IX including their insecure servers which allowed my sites to be hacked repeatedly, poor reliability and performance, highlighted by the SIX DAY outage when they had a SAN crash, and their brilliant decision to outsource their US based call center to India.  The only way you get to speak to an American now is if you want to buy something from them.  If you have a problem you get to deal with an Indian on the other side of the globe who you will be lucky to understand every third word out of their mouth.

So anyway I finally took some action and although it isn’t a total IX divorce it gets me out from under the threat of TOS bullshit.  I migrated the WordPress sites I use for Dufisthenics and the running club to GoDaddy yesterday.  The plan I bought includes up to 5 WordPress installations so I figured I may as well take advantage of it. I am planning to move the blog you are currently reading there as well once I work out a couple bugs.

The GoDaddy hosting I bought is tailored and optimized for WordPress so I shouldn’t have to deal with the normal shared hosting bullshit I have consumed from IX for so long.  Another barrier to me moving hosts was the hassle in doing so.  GoDaddy can make this process stupidly easy.  You provide them access to your current site and they can duplicate it on their hosting in less than an hour.  It’s awesome.

I am actually using a hybrid approach to this since I already have stuff like domain names, DNS and email bought and paid for on IX which works fine.  I would have to pay extra if I wanted to duplicate that service on GoDaddy.  So I am just leaving that stuff as is and just moving the WordPress installations which will basically eliminate the vast majority of my problems with IX.  It feels good to move away from the source of so many of my cyber-headaches.

After work I bought a small palm sander, another kitchen corner inspired purchase.  Cindy used it last night to do all sorts of smoothing and rounding of edges on the table top.  When she was done the counter top had a distressed look that was sort of cool but the plan is for Cindy to hit it with one more layer of stain before finishing it off with a glaze coat.

I had my hole bit attached to my drill last night to drill two holes, one in the inside of the corner cabinet to access the electrical outlet and a second one on the counter top to route the cords through.

This morning I started my Thursday morning unconventionally with prolonged, laugh out loud inciting videos.  The first was LA Beast swallowing 15 hot dogs without chewing them.

The second video was a hilarious scientific explanation of how to find a wife using careful formulas that utilize a crazy versus hot graph.  It is amazingly funny.

So yesterday I developed an issue with one of my WordPress sites I host with IX webhosting.  When I would try to authenticate to the WordPress dashboard I would be presented with a 403 Forbidden error.  Sometimes a WordPress plug in can cause odd behavior like this so the first thing I did was rename the plug ins directory to eliminate that possibility.  It still threw a 403 error.  Oh well I guess I’ll have to call support.

Any long time blog reader of mine is aware of the many, many issues I have had with IX Webhosting over the years, there are too many to enumerate.  However one thing I actually did like was that their call center was located in Ohio and I could at least speak with somebody that has English as a primary language.  They also have an online chat but that is staffed by Romanians whose communication skills are less than stellar, so I prefer to call in when I have a problem.

So I call the number and am on hold for a very long time, at least 15 minutes.  The reward for my patience was the other line finally being picked up by somebody with a very strong Indian accent on a poor quality line.   Immediately I could feel my blood pressure elevate.  Don’t tell me that IX has outsourced their call center to India…

So as is almost always the case when dealing with an Indian phone representative, the conversation was peppered with lots of “What?”, “Say that again..”, and “Huh?”.  It was frustrating as hell.  The communication barrier and the guys obviously lower level of technical expertise resulted in my problem not being resolved.  I hung up in near disbelief.  After having a four day plus outage several months ago that cost their customers collectively hundreds of thousands of dollars in downtime, they decide to ship phone support to India, something that is is universally seen as a hated practice for customers.  Indian help desks suck, plain and simple.

The move just piled onto the multitude of reasons I should have abandoned IX webhosting years ago.  The ONLY reason I have not bolted is because of the massive amount of work and time that will be required for me to re-home the NINE web sites I house there.  It will be horrible.  It needs to get done however, I can’t continue to reward horrible customer service with my dollars.  I guess I need to start doing some homework.

Cindy has been having some issues with her phone connecting to my in home wifi network.  I found something online about some compatibility issues with my D-link router which is at least 5-6 years old at this point.  I used it as a good reason to refresh my in home wifi network.  I purchased an ASUS RT-AC66U dual band router after reading a number of surprisingly good reviews.  I never bought an ASUS router nor knew they even produced them.  This is the first time I have ever used anything beside a Linksys or D-Link router in my house.

After screen shotting all of the configuration on my old router I shut it down and put the ASUS in place.  Getting the ASUS online had some hurdles to clear and bugs to squash but I had most of it done before we ate dinner.  I like the UI for router, it is easy to navigate and as powerful as you need it to be.  The wireless performance boost was noticeable.  The 54 megabit top speed of my old router is now tripled, Cindy’s laptop was showing a 150 mb wifi connection, sweet.

Tomorrow Cindy and I fly out for PA for my sisters wedding.  It is going to be a very quick hitting visit with our flight back leaving early Monday morning.  I believe it is the first time I am stepping foot in the greater Reading area in at least three years, wow.  The major to do besides the wedding is to see my brother’s new house.  Other than that I will be giving Cindy a whirlwind tour of the area that I used to call home.

Tonight I have to run the dogs back to Ali’s place so they can be picked up by dogsitter number two.  Ali does not return until Saturday sometime.  I then will head home to do a whirlwind packing job followed by hopefully reasonable bedtime since the flight rolls out at a ridiculously early 6AM.