Month: December 2010

Posted on

Bad GoDaddy Customer Service

Last night, I noticed a couple of my sites were down, both hosted on GoDaddy. After talking to support for about an hour and hearing that it was my fault. I did my own check up and restarted the application pool for ASP.net. That worked.

But this post is not about there servers randomly going down. It’s about another bad customer service experience I had with GoDaddy support. Every time I asked for the support expert (ha) to check to see if something had gone wrong on their end he said, “nothing has gone wrong, your site is scripted wrong.” Even after explaining that I had not touched my site in ages and the other was install by GoDaddy… he continued to disregard any my suggestion/queries has to what might have gone wrong.  In the end all I wanted was the sites up and not to point a finger.

I even started a post on their forums and without surprise other users have been experiencing the same problems for 30+ hours. Honestly they could have just checked and might have found/suggested something like “please try restarting your application pool?!?!”

http://community.godaddy.com/groups/web-hosting/forum/topic/sites-down-1/

It gets worst they edited any (if not) all the comments on the forums that made the server failures their fault. Again saying it’s our fault. Big time, NO NO!!!

After writing this I will still keep the sites mention with them because moving the sites will be such a hassle and their prices are one of the lowest for Windows hosting. But as for future sites and any potential customers they might have had going to them from me… the count is now ZERO.

So if you are considering GoDaddy web hosting. Be very very careful.

[rating:2/5]

-Thuan

Posted on

Ooma

I have been using Ooma now for about a year. Initially the free line was going to take over our land-line. I ended up keeping our land-line for emergency reasons.  You know… in case our internet and all our cellphones go bad, lol. No matter how you look at it the Ooma beats having to pay $30+ monthly for unlimited nationwide calling, 3-way calling, caller ID, call waiting, and more.

Admittedly, it has its ups and down. To use the line as a fax number, I had to tweak the system a little. If you are using any Voice over IP type of system, you should really give Ooma a try… it’ll save you hundreds of dollar a year! Whatever you do though, don’t buy their Telo headset. It’s a piece of junk that has little features, low volume, and poor clarity. (Update: If you get the Telo headset, you get the instant second line… free.)

Ooma support seems to be outsourced and utterly useless. They’ll just repeat what is on the Ooma website. If you have any problems with an Ooma go to their forums, you find your answer there. Oh, BTW, I have had to RMA my first one already because I stopped work after two weeks.

Long story short, Ooma is great when it is works. There is a small learning curve and once you have it set up right, everything will be great.

One more thing, there are two versions of Ooma, the Hub and Telo. The Telo is the later version and looks slicker, but comes with an annual tax of approximately $11.

[rating:4.5/5]

Posted on

DNN Forums Stored Procedures

If you anyone gets these errors from Dotnetnuke Forum Stored Procedures…

Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Procedure Forum_AA_StatisticsSiteUpdate, Line 64
Invalid column name ‘IsPrivate’.
Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Procedure Forum_AA_StatisticsSiteUpdate, Line 78
Invalid column name ‘IsPrivate’.
Msg 207, Level 16, State 1, Procedure Forum_ForumUserViewsUpdate, Line 0
Invalid column name ‘LastForumsView’.

This is because the table columns were changed without updating their relevant stored procedures. After looking at the stored procs and the table structures, it seems that:

IsPrivate is now PublicView &
LastForumsView is now LastActivity.

Changing the variables mentioned temporarily fixed my problems.

HTHs,
Thuan