Never thought of myself as one to start a thread (especially in the BBQ Pit), but I’m still very angry and frustrated with my former ISP, Earthlink. Up until recently, they had hosted my two domains (small family and hobby-type accounts), but I’ve since bailed on them. I feel compelled to share my experience; the following rant is reposted from my “What’s New” page:
Although viewers would not have noticed any interruption in service, I’ve closed my Earthlink accounts and switched over to a new ISP. I’ve had nothing but trouble, trouble, trouble, and more trouble from Earthlink and their affiliates, ever since they bought out my local ISP, Teleport. I’ve spent hours and hours and hours with their supposed “help” line, which has got to be the biggest joke in the industry… I was always switched from queue to queue, all service reps putting me on hold until I was eventually cut off. Calls were a useless waste of time, links on their online “help” pages were broken, their real-time chatroom “help” reps were unable to answer basic questions, and email to their “help” email and info boxes were ignored and unanswered.
The final straw was when they charged my credit card an extra $800 monthly “fee.” You read that right, an EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLAR FEE FOR A $10 A MONTH ACCOUNT. According to them, I had exceeded my bandwidth quota. My $10 account came with 1 gig free bandwidth. I could have signed up for a 10-gig account for $20/month. According to their (very questionable) web stats, I was using 3.5 gig a month. Notice that this is only about one-third of their $20/month allowable. And yet, I had been charged $800 for the extra 2.5 gig during the time between it began accruing and my billing.
Well, not only is this an idiotic billing technique, I believe that their “web stats” are in error. According to the Urchin 3.0 results, I was receiving about 90% of this phantom traffic from just one site, and this “traffic” continued even after the site in question was taken offline. I suggested to the Earthlink help line personnel (after the obligatory 3 hour wait on hold) that their “stats” were in error, particularly as it was showing the same amount of traffic from the phantom site every month. There was quite a bit of hassle back and forth, and they finally agreed to drop the bogus charges.
I’ll give them that. They dropped their bogus $800 “fee,” but it should never have been charged in the first damn place.
In addition to these problems, I’ll make the following observations about Earthlink:
I was never informed of any “excessive bandwidth fee” when I was transferred from Teleport to OneMain to Earthlink. I was not given any documentation on my account type at all, no email, no URL to a description, no phone description by the salesperson, Nada. As far as I can tell, there never WAS any online description of my account type… when I challenged the support rep on this, he referred me to a page with a completely different account type.
I was not informed when my account began accruing these so-called “bandwidth” fees. My first indication was when I opened my credit card bill, and found their charge. I was subsequently told by the Earthlink help line that I should check my “web stats” daily, to prevent such a problem. I told them that I’m not an MIS department.
Resolving problems with Earthlink is almost impossible. Subscribers can spend hours on hold, being transferred from queue to queue. “Help” line email is seldom answered by anything other than an autoresponder. Chatline operators were also useless.
Well, anyway, I’ve switched to a different ISP, which offers much better rates ($5/month) for a much better deal on bandwidth, storage, mailboxes, etc.
And the moral of the story is…
EARTHLINK STINKS. Do business with them at your own peril.