February 2009

A recent trip to Hong Kong yielded some interesting finds from the markets. Much were tourist-y gimcrack doodads, but since I was, after all, a tourist, I flung myself into the role with enthusiasm and poked around for items to take back.

I fell in love with a personalized seal and a watch.

On our first day of our trip, we headed to the Stanley Market for souvenirs to take home as pasalubong (lit., “to welcome”). It is part of Filipino culture to take home gifts to family and friends.

After looking at countless tee shirts, silk bags,  and other things, a seal engraving shop caught my eye. Run by a family – the mother, who sp0ke English, was the sales person while the father, son, and grandfather did the custom engraving, drawing, and other services – the shop offered countless blank seals to choose from.

I’d always wanted my own seal, ever since my Mandarin teacher at the Ateneo, Prof. Songbee Dy, gave me a Chinese name – “Ai Fei Fei”.

“Ai” is from the “A” in Alcasid, and “Fei” means “luxuriant and beautiful”, from the “fer” in “Jennifer”. Prof. Dy had thought about the name over a weekend, putting much effort in coming up with something special. After all, it was like she was naming me all over again.

I told the seal lady and she wrote the characters down for me, asking me if they were the right ones. We were taught to speak a little Chinese, not read it, so I wasn’t sure. I gave her the meaning; she nodded and asked me to choose a seal.

Since my zodiac animal in Chinese astrology is a Sheep, that’s what I chose, along with a red box. I was told to return in twenty minutes.

When I came back for my seal, it was beautifully engraved. My Anglo name “Jenny” was added at the bottom, rendering it invalid for use as an “official” seal. Still, it is special as a souvenir of this trip.

The box is of red brocade and fastened with a plastic splinter. Formerly, deer horn was used.

Closeup of the seal, with my Chinese name engraved in the ancient seal script.

The interior of the box is lined in red silk, with hollows for the seal and the covered dish of seal paste.

Playing with the seal.

The seal is marble, while the seal paste dish is porcelain.

The underside of the seal and the dish of seal paste. Seal paste is made of pulverized red cinnabar mixed with castor oil and silk strands to bind everything together.

At the Night Market at Jordan, one subway stop away from where our hotel was in Tsim Sha Tsui, I got this watch.

I don’t usually wear watches. But I couldn’t resist this old fashioned clockwork one, which features Chairman Mao constantly waving his arm up and down.

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Hong Kong in winter, right after the Lunar New Year but still during the celebration, was a a feast of color and texture.

Flowers along Canton Road.

More color comes from other things – seals at a stall at the Stanley Street Market, for instance.

The seals (yin) are usually of marble or other stones, or plastic. They will be carved with a person’s personal name for use on official documents (chop), using an ancient script form. Seals may also be engraved with corporate names and studio names. For the tourist market, seals are carved with the person’s name in Anglo and Chinese and are not for official use.

The seals come with Chinese zodiac animal finials while some are plain cylinders. Those are only for Chinese names; Anglo names would not fit.

Metal exercise balls for the hands.

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I received a  grouchy letter from a Philhosting.net support rep today in response to the blog article I posted about their unsatisfactory handling of my account for six months. I’ll withhold the name of the rep/tech:

FYI, your domain result

Domain Name JENNYO.NET
THIS IS BASED ON OUR REGISTRAR RECORD

Registrar ONLINENIC, INC.
Whois Server whois.onlinenic.com
Referral URL http://www.OnlineNIC.com
Name Server NS1.WP-PINOY.COM
Name Server NS2.WP-PINOY.COM
Status clientTransferProhibited
Creation Date 30-jul-2008 (2008-2009)1yr – (2009-2010)1yr = 2 yr REGISTERED
Expiration Date 30-jul-2010

And regarding your research, we are fond of that because more of new clients coming to us. That’s our company gain some clients. Please tell your IT guy to study more on Internet field before he give you some concrete result. You applied for SHARED HOSTING, and you demand like you have your own admin access. Much better if you apply an hosting account based on outside the country. Let’s see if you can get support without paying dollar. While local hosting company like us giving you FREE support.Anyway, thank you for hosting with us…and goodluck to your new SHARED hosting company. Account is successfully terminated

Regards,

What that entire first part was about, I don’t know. I am not an IT guy. I am a newspaper writer and broadcaster. That’s why I have an IT guy. What I do is the content.

Second, if what it means is about the two-year registration, I have my emails and their emails showing, first, that the “purchase” of two years’ registration was “successful”, and when I asked them why my IT guy said we were registered for only one year, they gave a vague answer and later followed up with “jennyo.net successfully renewed”. “Renewed”. That’s the iffy word there.

Now, what does this mean? “You applied for SHARED HOSTING, and you demand like you have your own admin access. Much better if you apply an hosting account based on outside the country. While local hosting company like us giving you FREE support.Let’s see if you can get support without paying dollar.”

Wow – such sarcasm.

I applied for service – continued uninterrupted service, not daily downtimes and downtimes of five days or more. Admin access- what’s that? Am I “demanding”? I’m a paying customer. Don’t I have the right to get what I paid for? Was I not entitled to uninterrupted service?

“Free support” – where’s the support if my site is frequently down?

And then, on top of it all, to be further treated like this in an email. These people have no idea on how to properly handle customers – especially irate and dissatisfied customers.

Contrast Philhosting’s handling of my situation with the way I was treated by Starbucks (see my earlier post on Starbucks being tops in customer care). Starbucks went the extra mile to make up for an inconvenience, whereas Philhosting lambasts me for being “demanding”. I’m the one who had to put up with downtimes, inconvenience, and lost readership, tapos sila pa galit.

Wait a minute. It was the tech/rep guy who wrote me. Who is the owner of Philhosting, and does he know what’s going on in his company, and how his tech people are treating customers?

At least the small customers like myself. Here’s a comment  from someone calling himself “hades”:

im tracking this philhosting.net you say coz im writing some blog( negative or positive) also regarding this problem. I tried to whois your domain but result…

Domain Name:jennyo.net
Record last updated at 2009-01-28 21:43:46
Record created on 2008/7/30
Record expired on 2010/7/30

Domain servers in listed order:
ns1.wp-pinoy.com     ns2.wp-pinoy.com

it will expired in 2010…am i correct? then that should be 2 years. i have read some blogs regarding philhosting and they’re really sucks in reviews. The question is, why? why more of big companies, goverment, locally and internationally hosted to them? Even www.pcgg.gov.ph and personal website of madamme president www.pcpo.ph is hosted to them…

any comment on this?

Hades, again, I am not an IT guy, so that first part, I don’t know what that means. I guess my IT guy knows.

Next, I have heard that Philhosting has big clients. From what I have researched on the Internet, it’s the small customers like myself who are having problems with Philhosting’s services. What does that sound like to you?

“The thing speaks for itself,” so a lawyer cousin of mine told me. No further comment.

I am not the only victim of this awful company. This is a screenshot of a post by Dean Lozarie.

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To all JENNYO.NET readers – My apologies for this site being “down” for so long and so often.

The problem was my webhost – Philhosting.net. I had been with them ever since I moved my blogs away from a free blog site and put up my own website, jennyo.net, last July 2008.

It was okay for the first several weeks or so. Then the problems started – downtimes occurring regularly throughout the day for several hours. Often, because the server was down, I couldn’t see or access my blogs. I put up with it, thinking it was normal.

Then my IT guy checked my domain registration. Philhosting had charged me for two years’ worth of domain registration, which I paid. They even sent me on July 30 an email confirming my domain registration:

This message is to confirm that your domain purchase has been successful. The details of the domain purchase are below:

Registration Date: 07/29/2008
Domain: jennyo.net
Registration Period: 2 Year/s
Amount: P900.00 PHP
Next Due Date: 07/29/2010

You may login to your client area at https://philhosting.net to view the detail.

–
Sales Department
Philhosting.Net Philippine Web Services

My IT guy found out  in September  that only one  year’s worth had been paid for the domain registration.

I complained to Philhosting. This is what they emailed in response on Sept. 12:

Hi!

FYI, our system will automatically renew it 15 days before the expiration date, that if you CHOOSE the domain to register in 2 year. Then we will billed you an invoice for 2 year.

Not only is the message grammatically incorrect, it also doesn’t make sense. And they misled me because they failed to explain all this in the first place. As the first email claimed, my “domain purchase” was “successful” with a “registration period of 2 year/s”.

They followed up later on by another email:

Hi!

jennyo.net has been successfully renewed.

If my IT guy hadn’t checked, we wouldn’t have known that Philhosting.net had paid only one year’s worth of my registration, although they had billed me for two years’ worth!

From there it became worse. Downtimes became more frequent, stretching from hours to days, but their billings for the monthly fee were always prompt and up to date.

The last straw was during the holiday break. My site was down for five days. On Jan. 5 they said:

Hi jennifer,

your site is working fine now.

There is a problem happened this past holidays where some of our DNS server has been attacked that cause erratic server connection that affects clients site hosted in the server that has been attacked. This problem is already fixed and servers connection are now back to normal.

Regards!

“Attacked”? What, they don’t have security for their clients’ data?

The last straw was this late January. My site was down for five days again. I was given the run-around. I called a tech, who told me again that their servers had “been attacked” and that “Admin” was just “making sure that everything was okay” before restoring the servers.

Last Friday, this same guy said over the phone that he would “ask Admin” to “restart the server” and he would ask if my blog could be “permanently up”.

What the…?!

That was it. That Friday, my IT guy transferred my content to a different webhost. So far my site is running smoothly there.

I gave Philhosting.net every chance to fix it and make it right with me. Sadly, they gave me the worst service and the most horrible experience I have ever had with any company or service provider that I have dealt with.

I am very happy to be free of them. I just wish I had done my research before signing up with them in the first place. Google “philhosting sucks” and see what comes up. If only I had known this sooner!

In the six months I was with Philhosting.net, it cost me a lot in terms of readership lost, etc. Much of my hard work in building up my site was wasted.

And since Philhosting.net did not give me my oft-requested c-panel backup, my IT guy could only get my data out as XML files. Meaning I have to reconstruct my widgets from scratch all over again. That’s why my sites look so bare.

What a waste of time, effort, and money – all because a service provider that I trusted and paid hard-earned money to dicked around with my account and failed me.

The bright side is – there are alternatives. They are not the only webhost in the country, or on the planet for that matter.

There are choices. I could either stay with them and let them keep treating me like merde, or I could stand up for my rights as a consumer, fire them, and find someone who could deliver the services I paid for.

Sadly, a company with potential for a bright and profitable future is frittering it away with their horrible service. IT is a tough world; they have a lot of competitors. If they can’t deliver what they charge their clients for, then eventually they will lose their clients. It’s a fact of business. It’s their lookout.

This arrogant company has angered so many clients that a Facebook Page has been set up to chronicle all the complaints.

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