22 June 2006
Mr Mike Read,
Chief
Executive
PIPEX Communications UK
Ltd
Portland Street
Beeston
Nottingham
NG9
2LP
One page by fax only
to: 0115 877 0213
Dear Mr Read
RE: 123-Reg.co.uk: www.tellshell.net
I last sent a fax to you on 7 June. All I received in response was a standard format email some days later from 123-Reg which, as usual, answered none of the questions I had raised. I have never received the courtesy of any response from you.
I will put to one side the question about the two lots of extra bandwidth purchased last month after the site went down, which was never used because the site did not become operational again until the beginning of June. I am not going to waste time pressing for the refund of £6.
I do however want to press for answers about bandwidth allowance. The following was the relevant paragraph from my letter of 6 June.
What is the bandwidth allowance per month? If I knew I could purchase extra bandwidth before the site is suspended (with the consequential breakdown of the free services I offer and loss of regular visitors). I have never received ANY email warnings of bandwidth exhaustion which123 staff claim are automatically sent out.
Since I received NO response, on 19th June I purchased 1 GB. This morning I purchased another GB.
I also telephoned your 50p per minute support line. I asked the young man who answered how much allowance we have with the “”blog plus package”. During the course of the conversation he also mentioned the “pro” package, so there may have been some confusion. The outcome was that he thought that we had a 5GB allowance and that the corresponding indicator is the .one labelled as “Transfer Usage”. At the time of the discussion this morning it was indicating 4.1. Hence, with what we thought was a 5GB allowance, plus the two extra GB purchased, there seemed to be a reasonable margin available. I had intended to monitor it every day and purchase more bandwidth in plenty of time as needed.
However, this afternoon the “bandwidth exceeded” notice was displayed on the site again, the site was down and the Transfer Usage indicator had jumped to 5431.1MB.
(Last month the Transfer Usage indicator went to almost 10GB before the “bandwidth exceeded” notice appeared.)
We need to establish what the bandwidth allowance is for the standard blog package? We would also like to know what the allowance is for the plus package which we believe we are currently on? (As a matter of interest the website host (Bluehost.com) we are using for the mirror image website gives an allowance of 400 GB for about $6 per month in total).
I spoke to someone called “John” this afternoon at your office after being confronted with the “bandwidth exceeded” notice. He was unable to provide answers, but did promise to get a supervisor to call me on Friday morning. John mentioned the automatic advance warnings about bandwidth supposedly sent out by email. I have never received any such email EVER.
We keep trying to build the traffic on the site. It is then lost together with the search engine results when the site is closed for a week. This is a totally unsatisfactory situation.
When we spoke with Christian early in June he suggested that someone might be trying to sabotage the site. This is possible but if we had your cooperation then we might be able to overcome these problems by buying extra bandwidth as we have tried to do. But we need to have some definite answers.
Thus far the support from 123-Reg.co.uk has been an absolute disgrace.
I spent around £40 on the 50p per minute service last month and do not intend to repeat that exercise this month. I will stick with the faxed letters so that we have a written record of these events.
Yours sincerely
Alfred Donovan