The last two months haven’t been our most creative. We haven’t been bouncing design ideas around. We haven’t really touched much design work. But, all for a very good reason. Like the birds, we’ve been migrating.
Not us. We haven’t migrated – to be honest, we’re a bit done with moving around and are just very happy to be finally settled in a renovated house! No, we’ve been migrating all of our client websites and mailboxes. Away from IONOS and to a new hosting company. We’ve been clients of IONOS for over 20 years, and we have found increasingly that their level of service and support has diminished and their pricing structure, across the board, has just increased and increased. In a kind of creeping way. In a way that when we compare invoices now to just 12 months ago, we were being charged more and more, but not so obviously. Many of the increases we couldn’t really justify passing onto clients, but neither could we realistically continue to absorb them.
Invoices were also becoming increasingly erratic, with many over charges applied to our account. Services which we requested be cancelled, were not cancelled and so month on month we were being charged for things we did not require. Their support system, as far as we are concerned, is broken. Emails would be sent, and replies would not follow the thread, making it difficult to easily follow anything up. We could be wrong, and maybe they are just pretty incompetent, but we felt it was a company policy to email replies in isolation, so that the initial query/complaint was lost along the way. We could never speak to the same person, despite apparently having a designated customer support person, so it was becoming time consuming to try and resolve anything, as everything had to be relayed again, to the new person picking up the case.
We’ve been researching moving to another company for a couple of years but have always put it off, as we knew the work that would be involved, and to be honest, we just kind of hoped that we’d waken up one day, and IONOS had got a grip and improved. That didn’t happen. In fact, when one of our e-commerce sites was hacked a couple of months ago, they were actually much worse than we had ever known. We immediately contacted them when we knew the site had been hacked, asking that it be reverted back to prior the hacking. IONOS failed to respond within their self-imposed time limit, despite numerous email reminders, causing us – and our client – HUGE problems. Long story short – this was the straw which broke the camel’s back, and we started the migration, after a lot of communication with clients.
Now, two months later, we’ve migrated over 40 websites and well over 100 mailboxes. It’s been really, really hard work as we’ve had to grapple with issues we’ve never experienced before. We’ve had to get very tech savvy. We had to be more organised than ever before. We’ve compiled lists and lists and spreadsheet after spreadsheet. We’ve emailed clients on a daily basis, assisted with the set up of their emails with the new hosting company, at all hours of the day and evening, and even when away with friends. Because it’s what we have to do. We took the decision to migrate, so we have had to be flexible and accommodating when clients need our assistance. But now, we can see the big, shining light at the end of the very long tunnel. Bar one individual who, for whatever reason, has been a little uncommunicative, our clients have been superb all through this process. They have shown understanding and patience and have trusted in our move. This has really helped us to get through this, and we honestly couldn’t wish for a better bunch of people to work with.
We rarely pat ourselves on the back, but on this occasion we’re going to, because we’ve achieved something massive. Something which has been hanging over us for a long time, and which we’ve always been a bit reticent about tackling, because if to felt so out of our design comfort zone. But, it just shows what you can achieve when you challenge yourself. And, now that we’ve finally reached the finish line, we can refocus on what we love doing the most.
Design work…
