Update two hours later: this is fixed. See the resolution and further thoughts in the comments.
This seems to me to be a great example of a process that wasn’t designed reliably, so all kinds of things could be done per the plan yet the result still didn’t work. I’d like to work with them to define a better process. (We need to have the same approach to system failures in healthcare!)
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By the end of this weekend things should be back to normal, but right now links to this site’s pages are broken. The site is mangled due to a bad migration of my site to web hosting company BlueHost.com. (I’m naming them because every step I took was as directed by them, and because their techs assured me this wouldn’t happen.)
Specifically, the home page URL www.epatientdave.com is working, but the links to pages within the site are broken. So, for instance:
- Usually my Schedule page is at www.epatientdave.com/schedule. But if you click that now, you get the so-called “500 error” page:
- The same thing happens with links to my blog posts, e.g. Typesetters have proofreaders. Doctors don’t.
- If you hover over the Schedule page link on the menu, you don’t see
epatientdave.com/scheduleas you should – you see the geeky unnamed page ID# in the database:
That’s how the internet used to work in the early days; for obvious reasons software got developed to let us use friendly page names (like /schedule). But on this site, that’s broken until this gets fixed.
Bottom line:
- The home page URL is okay.
- The menus work. (Internally they use the geeky page ID#s, but it works.)
- But links to specific pages and blog posts are broken. If you need to find something right now, try the site search box on the right. For instance, searching for “typesetters” will find that post.
Sorry about this! Supposedly this will all be fixed by Sunday night.
AND, magnificently, here’s how their Twitter account responded to my tweeting this post:
Seems they haven’t figured out that they can actually CLICK the link they’re responding to, and come here to get the information without asking.
(One reason I wrote this post is because I’m getting tired of explaining the whole story to each tech I talk to.)
BlueHost management, I’m taking substantial time here to document what happened and my suggestions, because I’m willing to work with you to reverse-engineer what went wrong, and figure out how to improve the processes. In the comments below are the problems I had, and, in the end, my suggestion based on my own experience doing complex tech support in industry.
Update, 12:45 pm Saturday Jan 11:
After I tweeted this post, @BlueHostSupport woke up and got crackin’. Note: I’d tweeted with them last night and they hadn’t followed up. The whole exchange between us, last night and today, is in this Twitter search. (I got rude, because they were continuing to act in a way that in my view a sharp tech support person would act. For instance, they asked me for more information without reading the link I’d posted!)
The fix turned out to be a WordPress setting that apparently did not come across correctly when they moved my website content to their system. Specifically, the Permalink system came across as Default (the “geeky page ID#s” I described in the post, and needed to be set to the value I had been using.
I don’t know how that happened during their work, but as soon as I changed it back, the problem was fixed.
Note that last night on Twitter I offered to send them more information, if they’d follow me so I could DM them (send them a private message). They didn’t, so after a while I went to bed.
Today after this post they tweeted “We would like to arrange for a tech to contact you directly. Can you DM us your contact information?” I replied “Well, last night I asked this account to follow me for a DM, and they didn’t. You have my contact info on my account.”
Guys, it’s kinda lazy to not look up my information, y’know? I’m having a problem, and you don’t find out what’s already in your system; you ask ME to tell you and ME to open a ticket (below). Seems to me that clear signs of an unhappy customer are not enough reason for YOU to get to work. Not a good sign.
Another problem yesterday, related to my domain epatientdave.com (not to this website), was that for a couple of hours my business email was completely down. I know this is related to something called “MX records,” which I don’t know about; that’s why I want a company that will manage the change for me.
A tricky aspect of my case for them, apparently, is that my account with them is not under the name “epatientdave.com”. The first tech I spoke with yesterday (AFTER the problem happened) said he fixed it and it should be okay in a few minutes. It wasn’t. The second tech realized that the first one had made the change on the wrong domain. He did it on the right one, and that problem was solved.
It seems clear to me that they don’t have a reliable method for getting everyone on the same page. Continued in next comment.
As I said, It seems clear that they don’t have a reliable method for getting everyone on the same page.
Ironically, when you call them, the robot says “If you have a ticket number, please enter it” – perhaps that’s how they would let each new person read what happened before. But in our 5+ live chat sessions and 2+ phone calls, none of them created a ticket# or asked me to.
So I popped a cork when they tweeted “Can you open a support ticket so we can take care of this.” I replied “Open a support ticket?? I’ve had at least 5 live chats and 2-3 phone calls. What more do you want?? YOU open a ticket.”
Sorry, guys. Perhaps your #1 takeaway from this is that YOU need to take ownership of problems.
And along those lines – as a non-web-geek person (a user and blogger but not a technician), I’m going to suggest something for BlueHost (and all hosting companies) to consider.
When someone like me wants to move all their business to you from somewhere else, why not appoint a case manager, from the beginning??
It seems apparent that a migration like this has a million things that can go wrong, and it can be hard to figure it out. (Right? Your own people failed in many tries to manage my migration successfully, and most of them were unable to fix the problems that had happened.)
The lack of a clued-in case owner caused me immense frustration as I had to ask the same questions over and over. Go read the transcripts of the live chat sessions, including the one late at night where the guy said he was dealing with more than five customers at the same time, and kept “offering” that I could call phone support instead, if I wanted. (I kept asking for a clear definition of “parked”… he didn’t say “I can’t answer that,” he kept just NOT answering it.)
Do you guys, like, horsewhip your chat agents or something?? Whatever your policy is, it sure didn’t work out for this customer.