You may have noticed that during a large portion of last week my site was not available. I have had an Australian company called Austar host my domain for the past almost 2 years. You'll notice that when that page I just mentioned loads, it addresses it as going to Austar.net.au, but the page title (in the upper left corner of your browser) says Big Blue Internet. They have recently been bought out by a company named Big Blue which, one would suspect, was a good move for clients. However that appears not to be the case, at least in this client's case.

And the outage this week? When contacted via phone and ultimately connected to a service rep, I was told that the technician who dealt with this type of problem wasn't at work yet (at 9:30am?) but that my concern would be passed on to him when he arrived. Needless to say, this was the last straw.

I have had numerous problems with this in the past, and thus have changed to a company which appears to be worldwide in its scope called Server101 and seems to be interested in serving their clients well. When I sent their technical people an email (via hotmail as my own email service through the old server would NOT send email to the new host - anyone else, no problem, but the Server101 people? No way) it was answered within 20 minutes. Now that is client service. Thus I have been busily transferring all my data to my new webhost company and hopefully the problems of the past will disappear and you will have better and more reliable access to my site and to me as well.

One wonders when Australian and New Zealand companies are going to wake up to the fact that service to their clients is the name of the game? It certainly, for the most part, hasn't sunk in out here in the South Pacific. If you have a client, keep them happy, as it is much harder to gain new clients than it ever is to keep them. I do hope someone out here tries to think of client welfare rather than simply " what can we charge to make more money", wich happens all too often here. In this method of client service, I think we all could learn something from many of the American companies.

Friends and visitors, thank you for your patience and your continued visits. Your support, by visiting my little site each week, and telling your friends and family about it, makes the publishing of new things for you to see each week, worthwhile. Thank you again, and I do look forward to your continued visits and support. *smiles*

just my musings...