Why Google Can Offer So Many Apps

Ever wonder why Google can offer so many different new applications? Well aside from having superb engineers working for them, great ideas, and lots of money, there is also one other dirty secret. They don’t offer any support!

Seriously, have you ever tried access support for ANY of Google’s services? I have tried, repeatedly, on a number of different products (Sites, Toolbar, Custom Search Engine) only to be thrown into a neverending maze of Google groups and the shittiest documentation this side of Microsoft (which is saying something). I consider my information literacy skills to be pretty high, but I am just left baffled by Google’s attempts at support.

Don’t get me wrong – I love most things Google and will continue to use many of their offerings. They “get” the web at a deep level and continue to innovate in exciting ways. But a support company they are not. Dealing with the morass of discussion forums and shoddy documentation would almost have you believe it is intentional… – SWL

We interrupt this blog…with a message about a horrible ISP – Canada Web Hosting/Synergy Web Services

For those of you who have tried to access something on edtechpost over the last few days but have got error messages, my sincere apologies, but oh what a week I’ve had. All the more frustrating because of the number of posts I’ve wanted to write, which I will return to shortly, but before that, a brief digression…

Complaining about web hosts is dull, but for the record, I have left Canada web hosting (who also operate the site Synergy web services) because of the absolutely atrocious service I have suffered at their hands. The irony is that I had made the decision to leave about a month ago after suffering through yet another technology change on their part, one that not only degraded the services the offered, but in the process of the change over wiped out 2 weeks of blog entries. (For this I was told it was “my fault”.)

Unfortunately, I did not make the site live on the new host quickly enough, and last weekend the sys admins at Canada web hosting felt they were justified in taking down everything in my home directory because of one apparently mis-behaving PMwiki script. When I got back from being away, I promptly called them, apologized for any difficulty with that script and assured them that they could remove it from the server. 3 days passed (and over 6 hours of being on hold with their help desk) and they never did remove the scripts. And never returned any calls. The only solution they offered me was a backup of my database (which took 4 days to happen). The site still remains totally unavailable to web traffic, even for simple static HTML pages. No discussion, no attempt to problem solve. No refund (they basically are claiming as theirs the last 4 months of payments on my hosting contract). I never even got to talk to anyone who had a clue of why the service had been yanked or how to restore it – their 1st level call centre folks had neither technical ability nor access, and they refused to pass me through to the “senior systems administrators” who had mysteriously made this judgement.

Live and learn, I guess. I chose them because they were a B.C.-based company who offered what seemed to be at the time an inexpensive hosting solution for my blog and other web apps. And really, I should have jumped ship a long time ago. Having done it now, I realize it is not that hard to do and wouldn’t have put it off nearly this long. The other lesson – to not rely on any hosting companies backup solution for my sites, because they still own the backup. My site is my site, and even if you are going to kick me off your server, you have no right to keep it hostage for 5 days. End of rant. Sorry. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming… – SWL