My Experience With Aplus.net Customer Support - It’s not good
December 18th, 2007Thinking of selecting Aplus.net as your hosting company? Please think again. As a website designer, I have to deal with many different hosting companies. Often, I have to contact them for support while working on a client’s website. If you’ve read my other posts, you know I only recommend DreamHost as a website hosting company. And I decided to start collecting my experiences with with other companies, like Aplus.net, so you can see how frustrating it can be. Here’s today’s installment: Jill, Aplus.net, and getting a spellchecker.
A client wanted a content management tool, so I installed WebYep. WebYep is pretty cool, and comes with a neat user interface (TinyMCE) that lets clients enter content just like they would in a word processor. But this client wanted a spell checker, which is reasonable. WebYep and it’s editor, TinyMCE supports spell checking, but your PHP configuration needs to have something called “pspell” configured. Now, I’m not a PHP configuration expert, and when I checked the client’s config on Aplus.net, it didn’t show this enabled. When I checked my own PHP config on DreamHost, it had “pspell” enabled. So I assumed that it would a simple matter to contact Aplus.net to get this enabled, so I could get my client the spellchecker he wanted.
I contacted Aplus.net support via chat. I’ve talked to Aplus.net support on the phone before, and they all have heavy accents, which sound Russian to me, but I’m not sure where they are located. I’ve pasted the chat transcript below so you can see for yourself how bad their English is and how hard it is to communicate with Aplus.net support. The Aplus.net support did not know what I was talking about, wouldn’t let me talk to someone else, and basically told me to find a programmer to do this for me. Even after I told Aplus.net that other hosting companies, like DreamHost do this for free, in their basic PHP installation, it didn’t matter. And in the end, I even got called “sir”…because you know all website designers are men. So I got annoyed and decided to vent again 
Here’s the transcript (the only change I made was to remove my client’s website URL).
2007-12-18 09:48:05: Visitor60143: Do you know what “pspell” is?
2007-12-18 09:48:09: evec: hi
2007-12-18 09:48:12: Visitor60143: hi
2007-12-18 09:48:21: Visitor60143: are you familiar with pspell?
2007-12-18 09:48:52: evec: is this relatied to dedicated server
2007-12-18 09:48:53: Visitor60143: it’s part of the PHP configuration
2007-12-18 09:48:56: Visitor60143: no
2007-12-18 09:49:11: Visitor60143: doesn’t need dedicated server, just configured in PHP
2007-12-18 09:49:38: evec: yes
2007-12-18 09:49:44: evec: what do you need about it
2007-12-18 09:49:53: Visitor60143: I need to have it set up on “removedforprivacy”
2007-12-18 09:50:07: Visitor60143: it’s a spell checker
2007-12-18 09:50:23: evec: ok, how may i help you
2007-12-18 09:51:07: Visitor60143: I need it set up on “removedforprivacy”
2007-12-18 09:51:18: Visitor60143: it’s something that hosting companies have control over
2007-12-18 09:51:23: Visitor60143: it’s part of the PHP configuration
2007-12-18 09:52:00: evec: you can configure your own php.ini and upload it in your ftp
2007-12-18 09:53:26: Visitor60143: can Aplus.net do this for me? With other hosting companies, it’s already set up.
2007-12-18 09:54:13: Visitor60143: http://us3.php.net/pspell
2007-12-18 09:54:50: evec: here is tech support, we have web developers who can create your web page on a certain price, or you can do it yourself
2007-12-18 09:55:30: Visitor60143: so, as a hosting company, you won’t do this for me?
2007-12-18 09:55:35: evec: Have you recieved email from our billing department
2007-12-18 09:55:41: evec: sorry
2007-12-18 09:55:44: evec: it was not for you
2007-12-18 09:55:51: Visitor60143: It’s a service that I can get from other hostinging companies with no charge.
2007-12-18 09:56:13: evec: if you want you can contact our web developers about it
2007-12-18 09:56:43: Visitor60143: I don’t want to pay someone to do this. This is something that other companies, like DreamHost, already have set up.
2007-12-18 09:56:53: Visitor60143: It’s part of the basic PHP config.
2007-12-18 09:57:10: evec: did you check in your php configuration tool
2007-12-18 09:57:50: Visitor60143: can you transfer me to someone at aplus.net who knows how to configure this?
2007-12-18 09:58:17: evec: here is tech support, not php programmers
2007-12-18 09:58:26: Visitor60143: this falls under tech support
2007-12-18 09:58:28: evec: you need to contact some programmer
2007-12-18 09:59:03: Visitor60143: So you’re fine with knowing that your competition offers something that you are telling me I have to find someone else to pay for?
2007-12-18 09:59:28: Visitor60143: and that, as a web designer, I won’t be able to recommend aplus.net to anyone because of this issue?
2007-12-18 10:02:57: Visitor60143: are you still there?
2007-12-18 10:03:03: evec: yes
2007-12-18 10:03:43: Visitor60143: is there no one else there I can ask this question to?
2007-12-18 10:04:10: Visitor60143: aplus.net is fine telling me that I need to pay a programmer to do something that other hosting companies offer me for free?
2007-12-18 10:05:19: Visitor60143: do you understand my question?
2007-12-18 10:06:49: evec: i understand your question
2007-12-18 10:06:58: evec: but we are hosting company
2007-12-18 10:07:08: Visitor60143: yes, DreamHost is a hosting company too.
2007-12-18 10:07:15: evec: ok, it is
2007-12-18 10:07:16: Visitor60143: And they have this set up for their clients, FREE.
2007-12-18 10:07:42: evec: you want i change the aplus policy?
2007-12-18 10:07:46: Visitor60143: Yes.
2007-12-18 10:07:54: evec: are you kidding
2007-12-18 10:07:58: Visitor60143: No, I’m not.
2007-12-18 10:08:11: Visitor60143: If you want to be recommended as a good hosting company, this needs to be changed.
2007-12-18 10:08:32: evec: sir, let explain you again
2007-12-18 10:08:44: Visitor60143: I’m not a “sir”. And you don’t need to explain it again.
2007-12-18 10:08:55: Visitor60143: Apparently, aplus.net is not as good a company as DreamHost.
2007-12-18 10:09:06: Visitor60143: And I’ll tell my clients to use them instead of you.
2007-12-18 10:09:16: evec: it is up to you
Now I would have thought, maybe naively, that upon hearing that a competitor was offering something for free would have triggered Aplus.net to want to alter their PHP configuration for all their clients, to enable this feature. But when I suggested this, the Aplus.net support person thought I was kidding. Because I guess that it’s ridiculous that a hosting company would want to improve itself, something that DreamHost does all the time. Maybe DreamHost has spoiled me.
Jill
Jill--------------
J. Olkoski
Aldebaran Web Design, Seattle
Jill Olkoski has a BS in Engineering, a BS in Computer Science and a MA in Clinical Psychology. She delights in using her advanced technical, psychological and interpersonal skills to help small business owners develop cost-effective and successful websites.
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December 20th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Don’t choose APlus for your hosting company. I thought the chats were slow, but talking to tech support on the phone was an equally frustrating experience. Every time I called them, I would ask a question and there would be a long delay before the person answered.It must have taken at least 15 hours to get my SSL setup (and over the time period of *2 weeks*, and I probably spent over 25 hours on the phone getting my whole website to work.
The store software they have available is not user friendly at all, so I am *so* glad I found Jill to setup my store. She picked some good software (eCommerce) and helped me get everything configured the way I wanted. Actually, none of Aplus’ web tools are very easy to use, and often when you ask about something, they direct you to badly written and incomplete reference guides.
Also, you would ask them a tech support question and they would tell you the only way to get it answered was to email tech support. Wait, am I not *speaking* to tech support? No, you have to email. So I would email and a couple hours later I would get an unhelpful response. It also didn’t help that when you replied to the email, a different tech support person would answer. They would know nothing about your previous emailed conversations and the whole thing would start all over. Via *email*. And of course, you couldn’t get phone support for this problem because it had to be conducted via email.
The only thing that kept me sane through this interchange was Jill’s help. She even did a 3-way call with me to APlus, and the questions she asked were so intelligent that we managed to get an actual email to the person we were talking to instead of the vague support email I had been using.
So while I don’t recommend using APlus for hosting, registration, or anything else, I do recommend working with Jill. It was amazing to me that I would send her an email and sometimes receive a reply in half a minute. And her answers were always good ones too. She had good advice about just about everything. Too bad I didn’t find her before I signed up with APlus.