How not to thank your customers for their patience when you’ve disrupted their service (my emphasis):
“We appreciate the patience that the vast majority of our clients have shown during the migration process.”
That’s from my (soon to be ex) web host who, after selling up to a slightly larger rival, recently migrated their customers to the new owner’s servers.
For me, the migration was less than smooth: it broke the DNS on my domains, it broke the email account I use for work, it broke this website.
Since the move, their support seems to be less polite and they’ve increased the fee for my account by 17.5% despite the fact the new owners offer a better specced package for 25% less.
I signed up for a Media Temple account - I’ve heard good and bad things - to transfer to. Since opening my account, the MySQL database has been out of action, which renders the service useless to me. Support is slow and, so far, not particularly helpful.
Web hosting is - even on a small scale - one of the most profitable businesses around. Surely someone must be doing it right.
After nearly four years, I’m switching away from Bloglines.
I am tired of the - usually - small but always annoying problems I encounter with each use of Bloglines. From timeouts, through their awful “we’ve got the plumber in” maintenance screen, to the increasingly frequent Apache error pages, it is now more hassle to use Bloglines than it is to find an alternative.
Of course, I don’t have to look far. Google provide my work and personal email, let me edit documents wherever I have a net connection and help me plan road journeys; oh, the search is pretty good too. The important thing, though, is that I don’t remember having felt particularly let down by any Google app. Downtime is very rare and errors are handled in such a way that I continue to have confidence in the service.
Google Reader looks good so far. A quick OPML download from Bloglines - glad to see they offer that - and an import into Google Reader mean that I have all my subscriptions. It also appears that the UI is much improved on its days as a Google Labs project.
John Redwood on why today’s addition of 2p per litre on fuel tax will make no difference to the environment because people will continue to use their cars, trucks and motorbikes (my emphasis):
“They have no choice. There aren’t enough trains to take the strain, and so often the only practical way of getting yourself and your goods to work and to market is to go by road. People do need to get the children to school, themselves to their employment, and do need to pick up the family shopping from the supermarket. They are not being wicked doing this by car - it is often the only way.”