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Web hosting story: Could you google your company's advertisement?


This is a story of web hosting on an Internet provider. It didn't work unfortunately in my case.

I use Alice since you can quite it in a few months time span instead of  a two years contract. I signed up ``comfort'' that has a better service even the hardware is the same with extra 15 Euro/month. I liked it since I never need to wait the service operator. The quality of the operator was good. That was around 2009. After that, O2 bought Alice.

This time, I could not manage the ftp connection. I can connect to the server, but the connection only kept a few seconds. It was unstable. I changed client software, I looked forum, I changed operating system, I changed other connection point... I spent around eight hours in three days.

I called the service, but it turned out, the operator didn't know what was ftp. Another operator showed up, he seems also no clue about what I was asking. He told me this night shift could not handle the request, we will call back in the morning before 10. There was no call back. So I called them again.

The operator seems no idea about ftp again. I asked the operator, ``Koennen Sie googlen ``O2 ftp homepage domain''? Dann Sie sehen Ihre Werbung. Das funktioniert nicht.'' (Could you please search in Google with ``O2 ftp homepage domain''? Then your companies advertisement about FTP shows up. That doesn't work.) Finally, the operator found the one who know about their FTP service. The answer is the system is temporarily down, please be patience and try it later. I asked when it will be up again, she answered maybe half an hour. By the way, this is the page about ftp in O2.

http://hilfe.o2online.de/t5/o2online-Login/o2-Mail-DSL-Festnetz-Homepage-und-Domain/ta-p/273952

The later of the day, I tried, but it is the same.  I felt stupid, I paid 15 Euro/month more to avoid this kind of problem. I gave up and bought the Strato's web hosting service. It was around 50 Euro/year, and it worked immediately as expected. Actually much better since I have ssh connection now. Paying this 50 Euro to Strato is saving money for me.

I found a cheaper service is actually expensive. Once I got a trouble, so much time is wasted, and the trouble happens again and again. Think about the time. 8 hours, I can read a book, watch a movie, do volunteer work. How much you can save is usually just 10 Euro/month. It's not saving money.

For example, if I bought a cheaper monitor. Maybe a good monitor is 200 Euro more expensive than the cheaper one. But, if I easily tired or my eyes loosing sight, 200 Euro is nothing. I bought a 150 Euro keyboard. If I got thecitis, 150 Euro is nothing. Maybe I became old, I started to pay quality.

In old Japanese saying about this is ``There is nothing expensive more than free.'' and ``If you buy cheap one, you just lose your money.'' I find this is quite true.

Does your company do outsourcing like this? In many cases, that's more expensive. The people didn't count the people's time, which is actually expensive. Before your IT was outsourced, the problem solved in a day. Now your IT is in somewhere outside of the country, then your computer set up now takes a week if you are lucky. The company thinks this is saving money, but there is a hidden cost. The one asked to fix the problem can not work a week. That is usually much expensive to have a cheaper lower quality job.

http://3d.xkcd.com/806/

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