Complaint Review: SecureNetShop - Melbourne Florida

We don't have account information on file for anyone named "Spencer" and based on the "anywhere in" city provided, the writer of this report wishes to remain anonymous. I also cannot provide times and dates in which our support agents assisted Spencer without knowing his or her actual name. I credit Spencer for admitting he used our shopping cart service for years and was very happy. It's true that we provided 10 years of near perfect uptime (99.9%) before running into problems we could not fully resolve immediately. After a hardware upgrade, our servers began experiencing intermittent problems. The problems were completely unexpected. We've successfully completed dozens of hardware upgrades similar to this in the past, error-free and without downtime, which is why a notice was not sent ahead of time to users. We also thoroughly tested the new hardware prior to the upgrade. The sporadic problems were caused by a unique set of software and hardware conflicts that didn't surface in our test environment. Our System Administrator identified the exact cause and implemented the solution by 11/05/07. Since that time, all issues have been resolved and our uptime and performance levels have returned to normal. From the onset, every resource available was put toward resolving the hardware problems as quickly as possible. We worked around the clock to regain our usual level of stability. As bad as the intermittent problems were, our uptime was still 90.55% or better on each day during this period. Our shopping cart continued to process thousands of orders for our customers daily. Unfortunately, when users become accustom to 99.9% uptime, anything less becomes quite noticeable. The only exception was 10/30/07, when our uptime dropped to an unprecedented 74.56%. There were also periods when server response times were slower than normal, which reflected poorly on the overall performance of our service. It's true that our staff was having a difficult time answering telephone calls and promptly returning voice mail messages. This was an extraordinary situation. We were overwhelmed with calls and emails. Responses were delayed but we never purposely stopped answering calls or replying to emails. We also never mislead customers. We admitted that we were experiencing unexpected hardware issues and were doing everything in our power to resolve the problems. Spencer said in his report that most of our customers are now looking for a new shopping cart provider. We had 2 customers out of thousands cancel service due to the hardware problems. Our company is built on repeat and referral business. Our customers aren't going to leave because our servers didn't operate perfectly for two weeks out of 10 years. Spencer's opinions regarding our shopping cart are based purely on the intermittent problems he experienced from 10/27/07 to the date of this report, not the years in which he admitted being a happy customer or the 10 years we've been in business. We feel it's unfair that Spencer would make such defamatory remarks about our company over one isolated incident. We sincerely regret the problems we experienced and did everything we could to make it up to customers that were affected. Spencer admitted that we gave him free service, as a token of goodwill. We were blindsided by the hardware issues and did our absolute best to limit slowness and outages. We got back to customers as quickly as circumstances allowed and worked non-stop to return to the high level of service our customers have enjoyed since 1997. Robert Houg Support Manager