Take care of your customer

I used a server at a data center operated by a company called Skydio two years ago. Their service was excellent and their charges were reasonable. Skydio was bought over by another company X a few months ago.

I had a difficult time with X. Due to the inexperience of their staff, I encountered several problems. On each occasion, their staff were focused on pushing the responsibility to the customer, rather than solving the problem, and tell the customer about the additional fee to rectify the problem. When asked, the staff were not aware about the fees. In most cases, the fees are rather high. I consider that they are holding the customer to ransom, as the server is critical  for the operation.

Recently, I transferred my domain name from a previous hosting company to X. I only wanted to reduce the hassle of managing my domain names at several places. What should have been a simple operation turned out to be a nightmare. The staff of X did not handle the transfer completely. It resulted in my website being down for 2 days and my mail server down for 5 days. During this time, I had to call their support center and sales staff on more than 1 dozen occasions. They did not reply to several calls or e-mails. When we got through, their staff kept saying that there would be additional charge for each service.

I finally agreed to pay a ransom price of $54 to update 3 records to rectify the problem. This is additional cost that I would not have to pay if I had remained with the previous provider.

Many companies in Singapore are focused on increasing their revenue at the expense of the customer. This is why the cost of doing business is so high in Singapore. I wonder if some of these companies give hassle to the customer on purpose, so that they have the opportunity to levy additional fees. The culture of fleecing the customer or the public seemed to be quite prevalent in Singapore.

It is a simple matter for me to change the service provider at the end of the contract or even to incur the additional cost of early termination. But I wanted to share this experience, so that our leaders are aware about how bad things have become in Singapore over the past decade.

Tan Kin Lian