Dear Mr. Oxley

Written by Brent Oxley

Friday, September 30th, 2011

I receive hundreds of emails a month from customer’s thanking me for the great service we provide and even a few letters utilizing the old fashion snail mail method.

The majority of snail mail reviews I receive are complaints about the hosting services my company has provided. The only problem is that more times then not they get my name correct and the company I own wrong.

The Letter:

I decided to have a little fun with my response to them…………

Dear Customer,

I’m emailing you in regards to a letter I received in the mail from you today. In this letter you described a few recent negative support experiences you had with Inmotion hosting. I wish I could say I’m sorry for these negative experiences you had but unfortunately I’m not.

In fact It pleases me slightly to hear about your poor experience with Inmotion. I highly recommend you take your business to hostgator.com immediately.

As owner of Hostgator I’ll do everything in my power to make sure you receive 99.9% uptime along with 24/7 quality support. If you’re interested in signing up with us I’ll be happy to give you the first 6 months of service free to try us out. I’ll also do my best to make sure that the correct owner of Inmotion gets this message. =)

Please let me know if there is anything else I can assist you with.

Sincerely,

Brent Oxley

I respectfully request that if you’re going to snail mail me a complaint that you double check that I do in fact own the company your complaining about. These things make me feel absolutely terrible up until the point where I figure out it’s the wrong company.

Just to clarify………

I do not own nor have I ever had any ownership in Inmotion.
I do not own Godaddy either. I’m not sure why but I have received multiple complaint letters with people mixing me up with them. (ewwwwwww)

Phone Calls:

I also ask that if you’re going to call our support line that you try to remember that you are calling us, and whatever you do don’t sound as crazy as this woman who called us last week……

CRAZY CALL WITH OFFENSIVE LANGUAGE

Posted in

Brent Oxley

Comments

http://www.shaunnestor.com ShaunNestor

Seriously laughed out loud. Thanks for sharing.
http://www.facebook.com/people/David-Wright/100001027093409 David Wright

Haha It amazes me how often people think you own godaddy too. Despite being a former employee, i still have GREAT respect for the company and i have to agree the comparison is “eeeww”. The thing that bugged me the most hearing (or seeing in the case of chat support) people say “but godaddy does this” or “go daddy didn’t do that” both being negative towards HG… my internal response (what i thought in my head) “that’s nice and all, but we’re not go daddy so please stop comparing us to such a horrible company”, sadly i can’t say that to customers, but you get the feeling i went through.

I gotta ask, what’s up with the monthly newsletters, they are a bit… behind.
guest1

I’m with David. I liked coming here to read the blog. Get some more stuff up here. Your blog is missing recent info. Here is what I was looking for: More pics of the new office. Info on the domain registration. How about a little more news on Oxley himself… I remember reading something that he was living on the top floor (or one of the floors) of the 1st host gator building in texas. Updates..???
Daniel Tsang

Brent:

Since migrating from GoDaddy to HostGator, the uptime & reliability of my site at http://www.aspireaviation.com has dramatically improved!

Than you HostGator for the excellent service & support!

But I have a small request here: please increase the php memory limit of shared hosting from 64MB to 96MB.

As a member of the media, Aspire Aviation needs to upload large pixels photos each day, so we keep hitting the php memory limit on our WordPress.

While I fully understand the need to ensure a good environmemt of shared hosting, our site simply cannot afford the expensive VPS plan.

Furthermore, there’s no point in purchasing the VPS plan for just 1 feature that we need – increased memory.

Best,
Daniel,
Founder,
Aspire Aviation.
http://www.aspireaviation.com
http://www.tinaashley.com Tina Ashley

Haha, that’s a classic! :) I wonder if he’s just a professional complainer and got his mail merge mixed up? :-)
http://blog.hostgator.com HostGator Blog

Hi All,

Let’s see if I can address all your comments………

Daniel I’m very sorry but unfortunately we won’t be able to make this change. I know it doesn’t sound like much but even a small change like this can have major negative consequences to our fleet. If we did change it I’m sure it wouldn’t be long before someone requested more, and then more, and more, and the upping would continue until it was unlimited.

guest1 Here’s a quick life update for you….

I recently made the move to Austin about two months ago and am living downtown in a condo. I moved out of the office years ago. I eloped to a girl named Jessica about a year and a half ago. I’m still happily married which is great considering we eloped in vegas after knowing each other just a few months!

I’m 28 now which makes me a dinosaur in the hosting biz, and last I plan to have a kid within a year.

Me there’s nothing more then I want then to be able to have our domain registrar operational and selling millions of domains. We failed miserably with our billing system which is preventing us from doing many things such launching our domain registrar. It’s a miracle our current system functions at all!

This week we signed a deal with a billing company called zuora.com I believe Zuora will be the answer to most of our programming problems and allow us to quickly build the registrar. Basicaly we’re having to start completely over scrapping everything that was done, but with Zuora I believe we could have it all up and running potentially within three months. We’ll see. =(
- http://www.facebook.com/people/David-Wright/100001027093409 David Wright
  
  I didn’t know you lived in the Houston office… oh wait that says you moved out years ago, still, I wonder if I ever saw you and didn’t know it. That happened with Lance several times, then once I met him I nearly soiled myself cause it was un expected. Why on Earth do you choose to live in Downtown Austin, sure it’s nice and all, but the traffic! Meh to each their own I guess. Good luck with the baby plan hehehe I think it’s going to cost more than $7.96 p/m
- http://www.vindicia.com Gordon Huseth
  
  Hmmm, from a billing perspective you should check out a company called, Vindicia (of course assuming the current vendor is not the answer) … I am confident that they would support your billing requirements; however, more importantly they drive revenue via managing best practices with respect to retention and acquisition.
  
  … It may sound crazy, however, have you considered a billing engine that also can be optimized to conduct A/B testing across your subscriber base such that you can quickly quantify the success of the test to figure out the optimal price for a service then quickly launch a campaign to include a coupon, or promotion to acquire more customers ?…. while at the same time capture that data to measure effectiveness by business segment … ? And, since we want lots of customers lets manage fraud to the extent that we open the door for new subscribers during a promotion yet have the ability to fight the chargebacks (and win) in the event that they occur …
  
  The digital transformation is here! In a digital world where customer intimacy and service is defined by clicks, the infrastructure in supporting the organization is becoming soooo critical. Good to hear Hostgator is trading out the proprietary code for a more efficient solution; the next step is using the billing system to drive revenue….
Dmw280

What was the purpose of that phone call? Wrong number perhaps?
Trey G

Hey Brent,
Congrats on the marriage and the baby plans. Nice to hear you guys are doing well. Is this the same girl that was around the office off of 290? She was nice. Working for Hostgator was a great experience. Internally the company is very well ran and extremely ethical. I enjoyed it thoroughly. As a former employee I am also a very faithful customer knowing how honest and well ran Hostgator is. I hope everything with Lance is good too. Keep up the good work. Ill look you up when I’m in Austin. We could have a beer for old time sake.

Trey G.
Bilal

Hi Brent,

I tried talking to marketing & sales but couldn’t get a satisfied response.
I have a simple question. To whom I can talk to if I want to do a large scale reseller program ?
What is the possibility of becoming a country reseller ?

Bilal Ahmad
bilal@visibul.com
http://davezan.com Dave Zan

Heh, I listened to that lady on the call for a few seconds, then immediately closed it. I got those kinds as well in my ex-registrar life.

Fortunately they’re few and in-between.
http://www.giganticwebmaster.com/ Jan Dirk

haha I think it was the wrong number she is talking about school trouble
http://www.ryanpaul.ca Ryan Paul

Brent

I think you should do three things:

1. Put all your effort into getting HG registrar services up and running – FAST!!!
2. Offer one year’s free hosting for disgruntled GoDaddy, Network Solutions, & FastHosts) customers.
3. Call up that stupid woman and offer to pay for her tuition to go back to school.

I hope you manage to destroy GoDaddy & Network Solutions soon. I hope they go bankrupt. I hate them with a passion that words cannot describe.

In all the years myself and my boss have been clients of Hostgator, we’ve had one single major issue which caused me some tension in chest, and throat swelling up (which was to do with not being able to use custom nameservers on a shared hosting plan).

With Network Solutions and GoDaddy… ALL THE DAMNED TIME!!!

If you promise me you’ll take them down – I’ll work for ya for free in any way I can to accomplish that bahahaha!
Kman82yep

What the heck was the lady on the phone talking about? Something about a website blowing up a school? I’m so dang confused….
Anonymous

Hah that’s an awesome letter. Sounds like a great chance to win over some new customers.
http://www.webhost.uk.net Webhost UK

That was Funny :)
http://www.facebook.com/jithin001 Jithin Mathew

I had been using Hostgator services since i planned to start a firm.I hosted my account at hostgator.com and was running fine.When you people started a datacentre in India i planned to transfer the hosting to indian server.Things were going pretty good in the begining.Its about 5 months since i started with indian server and service is becoming extremely poor.i am having 20+ domains hosted here.Most of the time server experiences heavy load and the page load time increases day to day.initaily iwas geting a ping at 60ms and now it is upto 340ms and a pagetakes nearly 100 seconds to load.

I had called your support team over there and they told its something with server load and all.I asked if this can be fixed and they told it will be ready.but now a days am getting a lot of page loading issues in here.I checked eith different ISPs and different dns servers,but in vain.The intresting fact is that even free hosting of 1gb plans offered by diff comanied are even getting beter page load time.

I contacted one support assistant and and he told if you are dissatisfied with your service you can quit.!!.I was on the plans of expanding business and planing for some upgrades.If this is the situation prevailing i am not intrested and the promise made by you of 99.99% uptime is never kept true.This is not the particular case of me.I had promoted your service and a lot of my associates had signed up for the service and all are having more or less the same experience.

I think you the CEO needs to be known of certain things as i am also in such a position and customer satisfaction is our prime interest.Hope that is the same for you too.I am not posting this on FB or twitter because i liked your service once and don’t want to add a negative mark with the public.hope you could make some actions to rectify my problems

Thanks and regards,
Jithin Mathew
Entrepreneur, Director
Ibazar india
http://www.noedge.in
Kayamkulam , Kerala, India.
Phone- +91-9447780150
+919400206150
Email:-jithin001@gmail.com
Anonymous

To: Brent Oxley
President and CEO
InMotion Hosting

Fantastic! I love it! What a great way to grab some new business and have fun at the same time.
This is what this business should be all about…enjoying our time while helping others.
I sincerely hope you had this person sign up for your free 6 months offer. I would like to say it was me but alas it wasn’t.

Great fun!
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http://www.honestinternetcash.com/hostgator-80-black-friday-2010-deal Hostgator Fan Jay

Wow. That lady has got to be smoking dope. What was she even talking about?

Best laugh I’ve had in a while and props to the support guy who answered the phone. He’s a champ.
http://fashcraze.blogspot.com/ Muhammad Mursaleen

wow its Awesome work dude
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http://ultimatemarketingstrategies.net Peter Sundstrom

I listened to that audio of the woman calling HG support twice and I still have absolutely no idea what she was talking about.
Brighttribe

I have hosted small WordPress sites with GoDaddy for years, but because of performance issues and the quality of support (which is often good, but not at all to be compared with HostGator), I have recently setup a SEO Hosting account and am in the process of migrating all of my sites over to HostGator, not to mention recommending HostGator to a dozen clients in the last few months. Just tonight I spent over an hour with a couple of your support people who walked me through the WHM control panel, etc. – very helpful and professional!

Warmest regards,

Brian Dempsey, Owner
http://www.georgialoanresource.com
http://www.georgia-insurance-companies.com
http://mysenseocoffeemaker.com/ coffeelover

Laughed out loud. That was Funny :)
Ojaswi Kaushal

Dear Brent. i know hostgator is one of the best web hosting company in the world, in fact the best one. but me as a customer had very bad experience with your company. My Website http://www.catchmypost.com is being hosted in your Indian branch. I want to write something to you in detail. as your support team could not resolve my issue, i asked them if there is any way i can complain to higher level , everybody refused for that. But i really want to raise my concern. Is there any way i can contact directly to you or your executive team, so that i can tell you my issue which was not resolvoed by your team.. please email me on ojaswi_kaushal@catchmypost.com
Anonymous

Hello. This is a very funny story. I have heard such positive things about your company on the warrior forums. Keep it up.
http://fvkings.com/ Farmville

6 months free i don’t think soo
http://www.strikespots.com/ Adam

While it is somewhat funny, it’s also a cheap shot at InMotion and the lady.

I’m unbiased in that I’ve never directly used either InMotion or HostGator, although I’ve had clients that have used and use the latter. So I’m not saying this as an employee. I’m impartial. But if someone writes in about poor support related to another hosting company, at least block out the company’s name. We don’t know whether or not InMotion is even guilty of any wrongdoing…we only have the side of the story that we’ve seen.

The lady ranting and raving…yeah, anyone with any experience in any web-related industry has heard something like that in the past, and may well even have recorded it. But that’s what would fall under the “inside joke” category, too.
http://topratedwebsitehosting.com/ Top Website Hosting

Wow! That phone call was hilarious. Kudos to Robert for keeping cool and calm–and remaining extremely polite to whoever that was. Great job!
http://www.candleforex.com/ CandleForex

That letter was funny to be honest…seriously writing an email to the wrong CEO of the wrong company…it made my day.