[jellicle]

Oh, the stupidity, it burns. What sort of righting do you think they could do, several years past the fact? Gandi refused to respond to their web form for a period of about four weeks or more; they let my domain expire and be deleted (if I recall, the only problem was that my credit card expiration date needed to be updated in their system and the charge processed). Besides the immediate hassle and serious annoyance of having an uncontactable company ignore their support form, it ended up costing me a few hundred dollars to buy the domain back from a domain speculator who snatched it up.

What price should I put on that? What price is it worth to Gandi? Are they going to offer me a year's free domain registration with them? That offer has negative value to me; I wouldn't take it unless paid a lot of money to do so. Are they going to offer me a pile of money (no they aren't, it's not worth it to them). So what exactly are they going to offer here to right the wrong?

The point here - which the top of this thread made, but maybe it wasn't explicit enough for you - is that services such as domain registration can easily have effects disproportionate to the cost of providing them. If all of Google's domains were deleted tomorrow, the cost to Google would easily exceed ($10 x number_of_domains). So a poor service experience can easily do more damage than the sum total of all revenue ever received from a particular customer. Thus the commenter looking for companies which try hard to provide good service. Gandi.net is not such a company, in my experience. (Hint: companies which provide good service have email addresses and phone numbers to contact them.) That's my only comment.

[aalbertson]

just to drive a point home about "calling out stupidity". Your follow up statement is the equivalent of stating "I'll never ever ever use a Windows product because several years ago I use Windows M.E. and it was so bad and they wouldn't fix anything so they can't possibly have fixed any of the issues I may or may not have actually experienced".

It really irks me when people use this sort of logic. I can't say what their support was like several years ago, but I have heard nothing but fantastic things about their support and service offerings over the last 2-3 years, and not by the general web user, but by us "nerd elites". So dude, chill the Eff out and don't be such a hard ass against something that happened admittedly several years ago.

Oh, and you call out "what could they possibly provide me after so many years", well you have a direct response from a customer support person who has offered the ability to "make it right". You do not know what they would be willing/capable of doing until you ask. So get off your high horse and just ask. They might surprise you...

/rant

[foxylad]

Maybe I'm stupid, but I agree wit the parent - if a company fails me, I won't go back to them no matter how much they promise to have cleaned up their act.

It's not that I don't believe companies can fix their problems; it's that I believe in feedback and the one form of feedback companies cannot ignore is revenue. It's Darwinian - if a company screws too many customers, they die.

So I haven't used Windows since Microsoft's deeply unethical attacks on OpenDocument; I moved all my US domains from GoDaddy to NameCheap after the elephants broke that camel's back; and Domain Central have all my Aussie domains after NetRegistry de-registered a heavily used domain name in very dubious circumstances.

[chris_wot]

I do worse (I'm bad, I know). A large Telco in Australia once charged me $800 in phone calls several years ago before the TIO and ACCC mandated SMS notifications when accounts go over a certain amount.

I explained the situation to them, that I was a good customer, I'd just had my first child, could they shave off some of the bill as a goodwill gesture. Even $40. They didn't budge an inch.

Over the next 6 years I've made a complaint about every single fault, bill error, outage and mistake they have made. Each time I've demanded compensation. I have a number of accounts with this Telco.

I estimate that I've recovered $700 worth of compensation. I'll keep going till I get the entire amount back, then probably go on for another $100. Then I'll stop. And probably find alternative services and dump them completely.

Don't piss off your customers.

[bananas]

From experience it's generally not worth the risk. Perhaps they got it right but 90% don't. It's like playing the lottery.

[nitrogen]

Besides the immediate hassle and serious annoyance of having an uncontactable company ignore their support form, it ended up costing me a few hundred dollars to buy the domain back from a domain speculator who snatched it up.

I once let a domain expire by accident, but since it was obscure the squatter who snatched it let it lapse after the ~45 day ICANN "trial" period that used to be a boon to evil squatters (AIUI, IIRC). So I just registered it again myself.