September 2008 Archives

Whether you are dealing with technical support, customer service or a casual acquaintance, there are some ways to ask for help that are more effective than others.

Technical support and customer service people are paid to assist you. However they can only work with the information that they are given.

Unless you believe that everyone has wonderful ESP skills then you need to help yourself as well.

If you are having a problem take a moment to describe it.

Are you sure it's a problem? (This may seem like an odd question, but if you were to switch from a PC to a Mac you'd probably have lots of "issues" related to things working "differently", rather than actually being broken per se.)

The more information you can give someone the more likely the first answer is going to be helpful.

It's in our interest to help you solve your problem as quickly as possible.

Imagine if you were asking a friend for a recommendation for a restaurant.

If you asked the very open and vague question:

Can you recommend a restaurant?

You aren't giving your friend much to work with and any recommendation they give you is going to be really general.

How many people are going to be eating?
Is it a romantic dinner for two or a quick bite to eat with a friend?
Do you have budget limitations?
etc., etc.,

Now imagine the difference a more precise question would get:

Can you recommend a cosy restaurant for a romantic dinner? It's our anniversary and I want to do something really special.

With hosting companies' support it's pretty much the same.

The more information you can give our staff when you contact us the faster we'll be able to answer your query and hopefully resolve it.

Basic things you can include:

• the domain name
• describe the problem including any error messages that you get
• can you give us a link to a page where we can see the problem?

You should also check that the problem is related to a service we provide.

Seriously.

If you cannot view ANY sites on the internet from your home or office then we won't be able to help you.

We are not Google (or MSN or Yahoo!) and have no control over how Google indexes websites. We cannot and will not offer SEO services.


If you have a question we can only do our best to answer it. We cannot work miracles and while I think our customer service staff do a good job, they cannot read minds.

As you know, if you've been reading our ramblings for a while, we really like our coffee.

There's nothing quite nicer in the morning than a nice fresh coffee and croissant to start your day.

While you might be able to make your own coffee, gettting a drinkable capuccino requires skills and equipment that you simply won't find at home - and I honestly can't see many people preparing fresh croissants for breakfast every day.

So what do you do?

You grab a coffee and croissant in a cafe, bar, corner shop or garage.
Maybe you'll take the few precious minutes to enjoy sipping it and waiting for that first cafeine hit to work its magic on your nervous system, or maybe you'll end up grabbing breakfast "on the hoof".
Would you honestly question the value of your coffee and croissant in the morning?
Would you start a big debate with someone over it?
Would you rudely berate the staff in a cafe serving you coffee every day?

Probably not.

Based on some totally unscientific research earlier today we worked out that the average price paid for a coffee in Dublin was about 3 euro. This being an average price for "a coffee" (You'd normally pay slightly more for a capuccino). It turns out that our "research" was quite accurate.

So if you add a croissant to your order the price will easily rise by another euro.

So your daily coffee and croissant could easily cost you 4 euro.

Why do I care?

Are Blacknight getting into the cafe business? While I may have worked in food and beverage in the past I don't have any real interest in going back to it at the moment.

However our entry level hosting plan which I spoke about a few weeks ago is a mere 49.95 EUR ex-VAT for a year.

That's just over 4 Euro a month, which is the price of a coffee plus croissant.

Even if you include VAT (sales tax) the total cost of a Minimus hosting plan for 1 year is just over 60 euro.
Add a domain into the mix (let's say a .com at our normal rate), then you're looking at an annual bill of less than 70 euro all in.


So I'm more than a little confused by that claim of us being overpriced
Why?
I'll tell you why.

Have a look at what you can get with the Minimus hosting plan
If you have a minute or two to spare, why not read my post about the Minimus plan from a few weeks ago.

Now those posts and the page on our site talk about features. You get lots of one thing, oodles of another etc., etc., but is that why we stand over our prices?

Did we increase the cost of our entry level hosting plan?

Yes. But it shouldn't really matter when you look at what we've given you in return. I'd go so far as to say that we've actually slashed our prices.

Not convinced?

Let's put things into perspective for a moment.

If you ignore the huge disk space, the powerful control panel and all those wonderful features we keep talking about, what are you left with?

You're left with a reliable service to host your business email and website for a year.

If you wanted to run an advert in a small local paper which is read by your next door neighbour and a few of your friends, how much would you pay out?

What if you wanted to run an advert in a national newspaper or magazine?

Do you honestly think that you'd get very far with what we charge you for a full year's worth of online presence?

I somehow doubt it.

And what about technical support?

Yes. I'll be the first to admit that our new hosting platform is a hell of a lot more intuitive and easier to use than its predecessor, so maybe you won't need our technical support team's help as much as before.

Being able to manage everything from the one place is pretty cool, even if I do say so myself.

But what about those times when you run into a problem?

What about those odd issues or queries that crop up?

Our technical support team will always do their very best to assist our clients make the most of their hosting experience with us.

Don't believe me?

Why would you?

But what about what our other clients have been saying?

Take a minute or two to read some of their comments

My personal favourite has to be:

"The only bad thing about Blacknight is they make the experience of dealing with other companies' support comparatively worse" (admittedly the original version contained more colourful language, but you get the drift!)

So if you want cheap and nasty hosting, please feel free to visit our competitors, but if you want a cost effective home for your website, then you know where to find us.
 

The shortlist for the 1st Irish Web Awards was announced earlier today and I'm absolutely delighted to see that both our main site and Irish ISP Test have made the shortlist!

Our main site is shortlisted under the "Best e-commerce" category, while the ISP Test is listed under the "Most Useful" site category.

The full list of nominees is up on the Awards' site, so you can see what sites we're up against - and it's a truly impressive list. I recognise a lot of the site names, but some of them are new to me, so I hope to get round to exploring them over the next few days.

As I always say - it's nice to have made it this far

Best of luck to everyone!

Just because a cert is self-signed does not make it insecure!

Of course if the site you are connecting to is a public ecommerce site then maybe you should consider your options very carefully, but when it's something like a hosting control panel for Virtuozzo you need to be able to access it.

If you look at the bottom of the screen you'll see a little link: "Or you can add an exception"
If you click on that and then follow the steps you will be able to access the site / control panel without any issues.

With older versions of Firefox this wasn't as much of an issue, as the warning message was a nice big popup.

The new version of Firefox handles this situation very badly.