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It’s no secret that here at Anchor, we’re not huge fans of the level of support you get from most commercial software vendors. But a recent incident with a certain vendor of crappy hosting management control panels really took the cake…

It all began, as these things do, on a sunny spring morn. The ticket came in, saying “the control panel says our licence is invalid or expired, even though we paid for a new licence a couple of months ago”. As this tends to cause customer-facing outages, it was a fairly important problem that needed fixing.

(Sidenote: Is it really such a clever idea to run a piece of software that has a feature that is deliberately designed and intended to stop the software from working at the deranged whim of the monkeys who sold it to you? I think not)

Digging into the problem, we could find no obvious cause of the fault — firewall open, packets flowing, manual renewal of the licence via the little button in the web UI seemed to work… all very strange.

As the problem adversely effected the customer’s ability to continue to provide money to the vendor, we thought the vendor might be somewhat keen to help rectify the problem, so as to ensure the ongoing supply of said money. So, we contacted their support department.

“You don’t have an extended super-dooper-bend-over-and-take-it support plan; please pay us $90″, replied the support department, with ‘nary a “how do you do” to soften the blow.

“But wait, we’re trying to ensure the customer can continue to pay you money!”, we replied, on the assumption that the support drone on the other end of the e-mail program was just functionally illiterate (isn’t it great the level of service you get for your money)

“We know. We don’t care. Pay up.” was the curt reply.

Well, doesn’t that just obtain the baked goods. In order to get assistance with paying them money, the vendor wants us to pay yet more money. The logic defies all attempts at analysis or explanation.