Dotster Support

I've been with dotster for several years for my personal website - both as a registrar and host. I upgraded my package about 6 months ago so I could have more domains and added a professional photography website and blog subdomain (using wordpress).

Overall I haven't been too unhappy. I did have a problem a few months ago where my photography site was really slow for everyone visiting. I sent in a support request at the time and never got a response. It seemed to correct itself after a couple of days but never got any kind of an e-mail or call regarding a resolution. No real problems since then.

So fast forward to this week. I was preparing to start re-vamping my blog so I went into the apps section and started a backup of the blog webspace. I've done it several times for all my webspaces. The site will report that it's undergoing maintenance during the backup and I didn't go back to my blog until the next morning - 24 hours later. The site was still down and the backup application said that it was still running. I contacted support and opened a ticket. They said it would be resolved within 24 hours. I was not happy with that but took it well. The ticket was opened 30 hours ago now so my site has been down for about 55 hours which to me seems ridiculous. I followed up with their support desk right at 24 hours asking what the deal was. They said it was escalated and it was being addressed. The guy I talked to said he wouldn't give me a timeframe since the previous timeframe already was passed and didn't want to give me false expectations (it was the same tech who opened the ticket).

Since that call this morning I've sent a couple of e-mails asking for updates and received no response at all.

I'm a very patient guy and have an IT background so I understand technical issues but for my site to be down hard for over 30 hours is so unacceptable, is that normal, am I being unreasonable? I'm starting to think I'm just getting what I pay for. I had been thinking it was a good deal and the service was good but this support is so bad it's got me thinking maybe I need to jump ship and find someone else. My dillema is overall I am happy with them and would be worried I'd be finding other problems if not the same problems with other hosting companies.