PHactotum Wheneverly

I've liked my hosting provider since I started with them. Easy start up. Very little service interruption. Everything going along fine.

Then all of a sudden they get the idea to make some changes. Only this time they left out two very significant parts of change management: testing and customer communications.

They did have customer communications, but it was only the day before the change was implemented. Always, always give the customer plenty of time to properly prepair himself for the impending change. One day is not enough.

As for testing. The evidence I've seen leads me to believe that testing was either non-existent, or very minimal.

The change in question, a new email system, changed the basic functionality of a system. It also offered two new features. The basic functionality part went fine, but the two new features took more than a week to introduce, and then there were problems.

The first implemented feature gave me an error when it first ran, but not there after. The second a web based email system, is fine to read the mail, but I can't send mail.

Since my laptop is being repaired I can't access my normal email software and the webmail won't let me send email. Thus I can't even send a request for help.

I will probably amend this entry depending on how this is resolved. I don't want to disparage the company, and it would be easy to find my hosting company, but I really needed this to work tonight.

We'll see what happens tomorrow.