Complaint Review: Network Solutions

After having Network Solutions be the registration company of my domaine name for 25 years I thought I would use them to host my newly redesigned web site on the latest WordPress platform - WordPress 3.5.   First, Friday we needed to verify that they supported 3.5.  This was just to be something done for proper form is all - of course they support 3.5.  But after two of us - my designer and myself - wasted almost two hours on the phone - their automatic phone menu system is a nightmare in itself - repeatedly trying to reach someone who actually knew what they were talking about - we kept being told by different people that the latest version of WordPress they support was 3.2.1 - which is several generations old and an impossible answer and we knew that the people we talked to were clueless about that - we were about to give up when we finally reached someone who could tell us the correct answer - of course they support 3.5.

Then yesterday we need them to make an adjustment or two to the way they have WordPress installed so that our "contact form" would work properly.  It should have been easy to accomplish.  But this is what happens normally at Network Solutions when you need anything that actually takes an adjustment to their hosting:  After you  make it past the incredible maze of computerized menu items you have to repeatedly select (I kept getting lost in it and having to redial them) you then have wait on hold after that for easily 15 minutes before actually talking to someone that is very polite but probably can't help you at all.  So then you have to hold for however long to talk with a "supervisor" but this could be without exaggeration an hour wait.  And we were eventually told a supervisor that could help us would call us back but they simply never did.  This process started around noon.  Then we called back repeatedly in the evening to see if we could speak with someone who would actually help us.  They apparently tried, but this was never a call center problem - we needed an engineer or someone very knowledgeable that could communicate with engineering to help us. 

It appears the job of their call center is to avoid anyone actually talking to their engineers because that is the exact treatment we got.  We lost a combined 5-6 hours yesterday dealing with their call center firewall protecting their engineers from actually dealing with client's problems with their hosting service.  Good for them but worse than useless to their clients.  They want to charge you $59 to get "dedicated support" - but this is their issue - my SEO designer was trying to help them resolve their issue, not the other way around.  It could be argued that they should have been offering to pay us to help them resolve their issue. 

Anyway, to top it all off, they finally decided that it was indeed an engineering problem and they were going to fill out an engineering ticket and we would be called back or emailed today from engineering at Network Solutions.  That was last night around 11 PM - almost 12 hours after we started dealing with the call center support.  It is now 7 PM the next day and we have not heard from their engineering department in any way.  I'm sure not calling their support center again.  I'm doing this instead.