What's with the one ticket per 24 hours rule?

Jasper · **What's with the one ticket per 24 hours rule? -** 06-09-2010, 04:15 PM

So, I had an account canceled because of slow queries. I submitted a ticket about this, so I could find out which queries were the problem and prevent the thing from happening again. Well, the ticket resulted in nothing useful at all.

So, I just wanted to get my website back online so I assumed it was all about the queries I had issued through phpMyAdmin when trying to get a backup script working. (Yes, it's strange that you would wait till half a day later to cancel my account, and it's strange that you wouldn't take the time to notice that the queries were issued from phpMyAdmin and thus were not recurring, but it's more logical than the alternatives.)

So I set up a new account and moved my website to there. And tried to park my domain (that was previously parked on the canceled website) on the new account, but was unable to do so successfully - instead it kept pointing to err.000webhost.com. Obviously, a mistake in the system. So I tried to submit a ticket about this. I tried to but failed, as I would have to wait a day before making a new ticket...

(Let me state this explicitly, I do not want a resolution to the problem here, I dragged it all up so you can understand the enormous frustration this rule can cause.)

So you see, the rule does not provide anything useful and happens to only piss off (non-paying) customers. Believe me, now the chance is rather small that I'll ever become a paying customer. This rule is nothing but a recipe for disaster...

lobrc · 06-09-2010, 05:01 PM

They have this rule because some people are not patient and re-submit the same ticket over and over again until they get a response which just is annoying for the admins and staff.

You could try and comment on the ticket you have already submitted.

Jasper · 06-09-2010, 05:24 PM

I actually did comment on the previous ticket more than once and my second issue was rudely ignored - I did get new replies but they pretended I had never mentioned a second problem...

Perhaps only allowing a single ticket per hour would be a better solution to that problem. It still keeps people from resubmitting constantly, and lowers the time you have to wait to merely be able to get support on your problem to an hour, which is much more reasonable (it's not much longer than it might take to get a response anyway). Those that still resubmit their problem every hour should just get a ban...

cp. · 06-10-2010, 10:55 AM

SPAM thats all the reason mabey if they get more volunteers they will happily lower the time as they have more vlunteers to answer the tickets

Jasper · 06-10-2010, 01:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cp.

SPAM thats all the reason mabey if they get more volunteers they will happily lower the time as they have more vlunteers to answer the tickets

Resolving spam issues should have to be no more than one click, as such 1 spam message per hour isn't quite going to make it that much more work...

cp. · 06-10-2010, 02:18 PM

i mean like 2 every 12 hours or something

Webineer · 06-16-2010, 01:54 AM

Think of it as your using the demo version...They want you to buy. I think they give you a lot for free. Since it is free, can you imagine the spam they must get about free services they offer and how many of those are user errors. IMHO

Jasper · 06-16-2010, 03:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Webineer

Think of it as your using the demo version...They want you to buy. I think they give you a lot for free. Since it is free, can you imagine the spam they must get about free services they offer and how many of those are user errors. IMHO

I think that pretty nonsensible. It's surprising you haven't pointed this out yourself, but on another part of this forum I figured out - with the help of some people - that the problem described above was itself no more than a mistake on my part (not something I did wrong, but incorrectly expecting that DNS propagation was not needed). So yes, a lot will be user errors, but not always obviously so.

Tickets simply can't be part of the demo system. They are the only way to get support with essential issues. Maybe that's the problem, maybe there should a a difference between the "I need help with this and that" and the "I think this is something only you are able to fix" (which would also include "I need information about something that happened recently) kind of questions.

However, if you state this is a ply to get more users to upgrade - I think it fails miserably. Instead of making me want to upgrade my account to get better support, I am afraid of what I am getting into with this service, so I am pretty sure I will not be choosing this host when I need a paid host. I don't know for sure, but I would imagine that more people have a response like that than the number of people wanting to upgrade because of this.

Webineer · 06-16-2010, 03:57 AM

You know what they say:
YMMV
I had a ticket once, between support and I recently. In 1 days time they replied about 8 times or so. I later tried a new ticket a found the 24 hour wait to open a new ticket to be annoying, I too reopened my other ticket and the staff responded fairly quickly. I have paid hosting elsewhere. I'm trying 000webhost for the first time and have been enjoying it for several months. 4.84 usd per month for what they offer is great. Just be aware you have to prepay so many months to get that price. it's like 7 bucks a month if you pay by the month. If your concerne is support related, the free sites are "as is" an probably run on older boxes with some crowding I'm sure. With paid hosting, you enter a contract as they (000webhost) say. I would expect support tickets would be handled faster and unrestricted.

Jasper · 06-16-2010, 10:38 AM

Yes, I do indeed expect the contact to be better. However, if they have rules like this which make no sense now, why wouldn't they have other rules that make no sense when you do pay?