| Product: |
magic-moments.com |
| Date: |
10/08/01 (63 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: It works, It's pricing is OK
Disadvantages: Poor support quality, 24x7 support - NOT
I've been using Magic Moments for several years to host business web sites.
The pricing is reasonable.
The website performance is acceptable, though not amoung the leaders.
The range of facilities is OK, though ASP is only available at extra cost.
But these are hygeine factors - we EXPECT them to be working well.
In my view, the real test of a hosting company is in dealing with them for support.
With Magic Moments this has been painful.
Looking back at the correspondence history, I see a few persistent failure mechanisms, which are actually classic support mistakes:
1. Each contact is dealt with by a diffferent member of staff, so if I have to go back 5 times to clear an issue, I'll get 5 people to deal with. There' no continuity in the dealing of any issue, and so I get the same or contradictory advice on each crank of the handle.
2. In general, the level of attention paid by staff to any issue by email is too low. They glance at it, think they know what you want, and squirt out a formula answer.
3. If you ask two questions in one email, expect one to be ignored.
4. If you ask "impertinent" questions about poor service, expect those to be ignored too.
5. If you try to use their "24x7" telephone support, expect it to be staffed by operators in the evening and at weekends. That means there are aset of things they can't do (like moving scripts to your critical secure CGI area) and you can only get answers to the easier questions. In my view, this mis-represents the meaning of "24x7 support" and should be dis-continued.
6. If support is too busy, you're invited to leave a message - again a mis-representation of "24x7" support. Additionally, I have NEVER known anyone to call me back from leaving such a message.
Magic Moments have now been bought by HostEurope, and I have a site hosted by those
too. Same sh*t, different company.
MARCH 2002 UPDATE
Following a spate of extended website downtimes & email delays of up to 26 hours I complained to Adam Fussey - head of Cusomter Services, and I asked a whole slew of questions about their methods of monitoring server status, identifying problem root causes and taking corrective action. I got no good answers, but one gem which I thought I'd share with the world:
====Adam Fussey Direct Quote ===
I am sure you understand that your existing package shares it's resources with several hundred other sites and as such is always going to be vulnerable to other users dominating the resources.
====== END OF QUOTE =============
- He went on to try to upsell me to a dedicated server.
I pointed out to him that I bought their "Enterprise Business Package" - as the business package it was advertised to be. The shortcomings which he's sure I understand don't appear anywhere in his advertising literature.
By the way, the reason for extended outages over the weekend which prompted this exchange was apparently a blown fuse.
Another indication of the solid, well-designed infrastructure in place at Magic Moments, I guess.
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