Brinkster Death Throws

A final (I hope) email from Brinkster Billing Supervisor and Head Clown Cheryl, offering a small refund and a chance to "upgrade" to their "cheaper, better" services. 

It's funny, but when Brinkster first came out with these services (greater bandwidth, email and storage, etc), I asked several times if I could take advantage of them and was told by both support and billing that new features and limits only applied to new customers.  We all know that story.  It's what made me start looking for a better hosting provider to begin with.  The fact that they can't deliver email was the other big factor, of course.

I guess they just figured that I would get a new account and move all my web sites.  Well, they were right about that in some ways! That's exactly what I did, except with a new provider (BlueHost).

I can only assume that they were trying to make older customers drop out for some reason.  Brinkster has a history of this. Some years back, they used to offer free hosting services to FullXML users (FullXML was an open-source, ASP-based, content management system that never really took off), but this never really worked out (they did not keep required software components up to date) and many users complained about this loundly on the web.

Well, at least I got them to claim they would refund $31.55 instead of the $5 credit they were offering. A small victory when compared to having successfully moved all my email to other providers. Now that is a big win.  We'll see if the $31.55 refund ever shows up.

I'm not holding my breath.  Adelphia, my cable tv and internet provider, is always claiming they will refund for down time, but they often don't follow through.

Brinkster sucks.  Check out BlueHost.  I am.  Better price, better features, more storage and bandwidth and, so far, better service.

And then I'll look for another hosting provider.  I figure as soon as you're happy with a new one, it's probably time to start looking for the next :p