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How do you prefer your provider to post news?
TACServers
Member
in General
Status page? Announcements in WHMCS? Twitter, Facebook? Mass email blasting? I'd like to find out how people would prefer getting news from their providers, be it security related, outage/maint related, or what have you. Also, where would you turn after seeing your providers site is down?
Provider news posting!
- How do you prefer your provider to post news?56 votes
- Status Page (offsite)19.64%
- WHMCS Announcements14.29%
- Facebook5.36%
- Twitter8.93%
- Mail Blasting46.43%
- Other (Please specify)5.36%
Comments
We do 3 of the above. We post on our status page that also posts to our twitter. Then we send a mail blast.
StatusPage.io + Auto subscribe customers = Win!
Email, as long as it's relevant and timely. And automatically unsubscribe me when I cancel.
EDIS - good.
ExpertVM - horrible.
All would be best, most providers I use have a Announcement/E-mail Blast.
Interesting, seems blasting emails isn't as much of an issue as I thought. I figured people liked to be free from inbox debris, but I'll just keep up with it. From the looks of it, you all appreciate a message being dropped your way.
email is obviously the most accurate way to inform customers about issues etc. not all people care about twitter or a status page.
I prefer handwritten snail mail letters.
Failing that, email.
Obviously every provider should spam LET with their status messages :P
Thank you all for participating in this, @Dylan, Ill be sure to stock up on envelopes for you
WHMCS announcements for most things. Email blast for critical stuff.
If it's something that I really need to know such as an outage or planned maintenance then email. For everything else I will see it on Facebook or twitter if I am interested enough.
Anything I see that is non essential from a provider gets deleted without being read.
I prefer email. It just works.
One comment:
I use a special email address for domain registrars, shared hosting services, and VPS providers. The email address is with my home ISP. It is separate and independent of said registrars, services, and providers. If something becomes problematic with one of my domains, hosting, or VPSs, I can still count on being able to communicate with them.
@W1V_Lee - This is my issue. What is it that you consider non-essential communication? I get emails and notices about everything related to my DC, from Generator tests, to HVAC maintenance. Would you personally care to hear about all that? Or are you wanting to know only stuff that directly affects your service like disk failures, RAM replacement, and VPS migrations?
Anything that either directly affects my service to the extent it's either down or going to go down.
If there is a generator test or HVAC maintenance planned that although should not affect me but could because you know how these things happen, then tell me about that so I at least know.
I can't remember which provider does it but I have one that sends a single email about an outage or whatever and provides a link to a status page on their site that gets updated when the know something. I like that, email me once that something is up and link me to the page on your site that will update me.
Somebody has to say this:
Please add
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
@W1V_Lee, Great feedback, greatly appreciated. Thank you for your time in explaining that.
@netomx, I was tempted to post an offer like that once, but I decided against it.
I appreciate providers that rarely contact me. Security, maintenance and billing issues are what I want in my mailbox. All other stuff I'll see on FB and Twitter.
Not email unless it's an uptime issue.
Emails can be quite telling as to how professional a provider is.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Exactly very important, at the top of each email it should say FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
All except E-Mails. When you just use many of providers / hosters / website e.t.c. and all sends you e-mails - you become lost at all of these e-mails.
Mail Blasting because I'm not checking my social media accounts that often.
Mail blasting + Twitter linked to offsite.
Late to this party, but email: because the entire point is that you are notifying me of something important.
Updating a status page or twitter or facebook is a nice additional step, but it's not notifying me of anything, except perhaps that you don't care whether I actually get the notification.
Depends on the news type.
Outages/issues - blog/status page, WHMCS/support system, email, twitter
Offers, other non-critical news - blog, email (monthly/quarterly) twitter
If there's a problem I would be looking in the support area so it helps to have announcements or a status page link on the support system portal (assuming it stays online). I would check a status page first to see if my problem is a related/known issue before contacting support. Email is preferred if client action is required or where downtime is expected (e.g. upgrades, migrations). Some people are subscribed to Twitter and other social networks and like getting updates that way, while some like me don't check those as often compared to email.
For other provider news, I might subscribe to the provider's blog or newsletter. The occasional email with offers is nice, but usually if I'm looking to purchase I'd simply go to the provider's website/blog (providers with currently active services that I'm happy with come to mind), whereas if the promotional emails come too often I might end up not reading them. For this reason people might bin emails from a company regardless and miss important notices when they do appear.
^^This X 1000000000000.
I usually like my news in English. Email is fine as long as I get them. Not sure I get them though.
I like it when my hosting provider has minimal 4 phone lines to receive calls, and a powerful BBS server! And ofc the provider needs to support 9600bps connection so i can load the news at lightning speed!
But no provider wants to invest a little for a good powerful and proven system