Site5 Support Sucks

It's day 8 and my sites are still down. My domains are still missing from my control panel. What worries me the most is that I will lose the domains. The websites I can restore, but without the domains, I may as well start from scratch. All those inbound links I'd built up would be lost. All that traffic and all that revenue. My brand. Gone.

The baffling thing is that there seems to be no course of action I can take to rectify the problem, or even to put pressure on Site5 to rectify the problem. If my domains have been removed from my control panel, surely that's theft? It may well be, but I'm positive that starting a lawsuit in the UK against a big corporation in the US won't be the best use of my time. What choice have I got but to grin and bear it?

Site5 Live Chat Joy

I've had numerous Live Chats with Site5 "operators". I'm not sure what to call them, because they have no technical expertise. All they have done so far is reassure me repeatedly - disingenuously - that my problem will be fixed soon, and pass my problem to a different department. My ticket has visited support, priority support, billing, advanced billing, and is now in the hands of a senior tech. Or is it a senior billing tech? Whatever that means.

But the sum total of all actions taken so far to resolve my problem is zilch. Nothing has been done.

Oh, I tell a lie. In actual fact, a Chat Operator said yesterday that my account was terminated because of an unpaid invoice. I informed them that I had paid it back in July, thank you very much, and even gave them the transaction id. So, they passed my support ticket to a billing tech. Or was it the senior priority billing department tech? Complicated business.

Today when I had my daily joyful Live Chat, the operator brought up the alleged unpaid invoice again. After I, again, quoted the transaction id of the invoice I had paid, he disappeared for 20 minutes and came back to tell me that he had made active the hosting account that had been terminated in error - yeah! But... my sites are still down, and my domains are still missing. 8 days into my website catastrophe, the Chat Operator finally understands the reason that my account had been terminated and realises it had been terminated in error.

Why did it take them so long to figure out the issue was caused by them thinking I hadn't paid a bill? You would have thought they could tell me that on day one! "Oi! Your sites are down because you ain't paid no hosting bill, son!" And, now that my account has been re-activated, I find I am no better off. Still no sites, still no domains.

But the invoice they queried was for hosting, not domain registration fees. Why, then, are my domains missing? The two are separate services. I have checked the WHOIS data for my domains, and it appears that I still own them. I damn well don't control them, though.

Stay tuned for day 9.