Alright... let me first explain that I am not a drama king... I have done a lot of effort to get this settled outside the boards. In fact I even gave it some days full of extra thoughts if I would do this posting on GFY. However it looks very much like support people at ePassporte don't read my messages or - even worse - just ignore me (great way to give support, don't ya think?), so I see no other way. Here we go...
So what is this all about? In short, it's about a dispute on which I don't get an answer of approval or denial. And no I am not impatient according to me. More about that below. And no, it's not for a charge back for a couple of tenners. In fact, if that was the case I wouldn't even file the dispute, I would see it as a loss, knowing where NOT to do business anymore and go on with my life.
What happened before I filed the dispute? Long story, short version. I had ordered some dedicated servers and paid trough my ePass. However, port 80 wasn't working anymore on ALL machines from my 3rd day of usage. No, I didn't fuck up myself. In fact while it happened I was moving to another city and not even online and able to fuck things up. Anyway, we all know how important port 80 is, when you want to have your websites online, right? So I requested support from the hosting company, but they fucked up even more in the end and... port 80 still wasn't working. Not even after almost a month having the servers online. Why not? Because "this problem was out of reach for the support department" (amazing statement). Fine, so I asked for a refund. First response from them "We'll see what we can do for you". Then many days of silence and I mail them once again about the case. Suddenly they tell me "We don't want to supply a refund because we have done everything in our effort to solve the problem". Huh?? Leaving you customer helpless without working servers is their definition of "done everything in our effort to solve the problem"? Perect company to leave, I think. So I did. I felt screwed big time! (it's not only the server rent that got down the drain, but also a huge chunk of sponsor cash that I couldn't make of course)
Now since I still didn't agree to this whole shitty situation (who pays for servers that don't work properly for a whole month, right?), I felt right to file a dispute agains this hosting company.
I sent an internal mail to the dispute department within ePassporte how this case should be handled: no answer.
After some days, I sent a mail to Michael Olsen from ePassport:
yes, he responded and sent me a form that I had to fill in and fax back to ePassporte.
Fine, I filled it all in by hand and faxed the form on May 30 to them.
It remained silence from the side of ePassporte for the rest of the week. I thought "maybe my handwriting wasn't clear, let's make a 2nd version of the dispute with a more detailed story of what happend and just print it instead of making another handwritten version". This 2nd dispute version was sent out on June 6.
Again, it remained quiet. Now, I understand that I am surely not the only one to file a dispute, but taking weeks to solve this kind of issue... Anyway, I didn't have a good feeling about this case and I sent Michael Olsen once again a mail on June 11 if he could tell me if the dispute was received in good order and if he could tell me when it approximately would be processed. To be sure that we were talking about the same thing, I once again attached a copy of the dispute to the email. Since it was Sunday that I mailed, Michael responded that he only could check about this case on Monday (thumbs up for responding on Sunday, I wasn't expecting that) and that he would forward (once again) my dispute. Later that week, I still didn't have an answer from Michael regarding the waiting time for the dispute, so I sent him a reminder mail, to which I didn't get any reply anymore.
In my last effort - before going to GFY - this past Tuesday (6/20) I once again sent an internal mail to the dispute department of ePaspsporte with a kind request to inform me about the status of the dispute. Was it accepted? Denied? Or, if I still had to wait for an answer, how long is the approx waiting time to clear this case? Pretty normal questions according to me. You probably already guess what happend: no response.
Well... the hosting company already screwed me once. Now I get the very strong feeling that ePassporte is the second to screw me in this case!
Look... I don't mind to wait to get a dispute handled, but please explain clearly how the dispute process is handled. In fact, I could EVEN live with it if the case was denied for a valid legal reason, but PLEASE take a valued customer serious and RESPOND to a dispute or questions that I as a customer have about it. Giving the feeling of being ignored isn't a good way to keep your clients happy....
So there it is... May this posting lead to a good end of the story.
Thanks for reading.
