Tech Support

It's not a good sign when you explain to the tech support guy roughly 10 times what you need and he doesn't understand the problem, let alone the solution. Our web hosting provider stores our files in two different folders, one called www and the other html. The html directory is the actual location (e.g. http://users.myisp.net/michaelsinn), while our virtual domain name (www.michaelsinn.com) maps to the www folder.

The www folder was missing when I logged in, yet you could still browse to our web site. The instructions on the host's web site still gave the www folder as the location for the virtual web host files, so I recreated the folder structure, thinking maybe they'd accidentally deleted it during the change and were using some backup location as default. This didn't have any effect.

And so I called tech support. The question was pretty easy: where is the new location to ftp my files? Oh, and your web page instructions are out of date.

The guy had no idea what I was talking about. He didn't say that, of course, just kept asking clarifying questions that only served to clarify his confusion, and then putting me on hold to consult with his supervisor (returning periodically to ask more irrelevant questions). He finally said he would need someone more advanced to call me back, but then called back himself five minutes later because he didn't know how to word the report that would explain what he didn't understand.

This is not rocket science. Sure, it's slightly techy, but that's why I'm calling tech support for my web hosting service. I would expect these people to know more than I do, not less.