Blacknight Solutions- Avoid!!

Mr. Incognito

I rarely single out companies for complaint

I would have built sites on Wordpress but a developer friend recommended Blacknight.

I signed up for a free trial and paid a developer to start working on the site. I was emailed 4 times stating that my autrenewal was on and I would be billed once the trial free period was up.

When the trial expired it appears that this was not the case. After 5 days all the data was deleted.

Their customer care team attempted to deflect the blame on me stating that I knew that the free trial would expire and the onus was on me to renew it, despite their emails stating that it would autorenew.

I asked that the matter be escalated. The VP I was speaking to admitted that the free trial was new and that the template emails that were being generated were for the paying annual subscriptions which were set up to autorenew but the free trial had not been adopted to autorenew.

I outlined that they might email their customers and let them aware of this.

In any event, he was most patient. I explained I had to pay someone to develop the site and that I would now have to eat the cost of them doing the work afresh. He said he would look into it and get back to me.

The next day I was offered credit of €24. The site was back up on Friday which was me delighted- I said I did not want the credit all I wanted was the site back. I stated in any event an offer of €24 credit was insulting considering I had lost a few hundred as a result of their flawed system and I would not accept it as I felt it would be accepting it as a adequete offer of compensation, which it was not.

I was at a wedding Saturday and arrived today to an email that said the third party Baskit were able to find the datat and map it back to the domain but there is no backward compatibility built in to assign that content to a new Baskeit Subscription.

The data is now gone again. No-one had the good sense to even take a screen shot before they deleted it for the second time.

Horrific company. Avoid.

I am in two minds for a small claims court claim tbh.

The Ayatolla

I personally think they're great.

Mr. Incognito

The Ayatolla wrote: »

I personally think they're great.

I am sure that people have had excellent dealings with them. In fact they were recommended to me by a developer.

All I can speak from is my own experiences.

1. They have a technical flaw in their procedures.

2. They are aware of said flaw and admitted same, and fair play for that.

All I want is my data back, which it can be obtained from BaseKit and to go on my way to another provider.

I would not trust them when their systems have dropped all my data and it's tough cookie. Whoops, sorry about that.

Not good enough.

dudara

@Mr. Incognito - are you looking for particular consumer advice here? Otherwise, I will move this to the Best/Worst Customer service thread.

dudaara

hdowney

there is certainly some poor customer service and some poor workmanship (for want of a better word) there.

They are not a new company. Yes, the whole free trial procedure thing is new, but the company itself is not. They should have thoroughly tested out every aspect of the free trial BEFORE letting it go live, to know that everything was in place, including auto-renewal and back-up of data.

To offer you a paltry €24, after originally trying to blame you for their mistake was just wrong. And then the mishandling of your data a second time is just ridiculous.

wmpdd3

Just to add, you dont have thee option of a small claims court case as you can only be refunded what you paid for the service. Other losses suffered cant be claimed.

Mr. Incognito

dudara wrote: »

@Mr. Incognito - are you looking for particular consumer advice here? Otherwise, I will move this to the Best/Worst Customer service thread.

dudaara

Hi,

I believe the forum is for discussing consumer issues. I am not sure if it is for consumer queires to be answered expressly, although sadly that is what most specialised forums site wide have decended into.

I would guess the discussion would be

1. Is it acceptible for a company to knowingly have a flaw in their basic product and not notify customers

2. Is a €24 credit note adequate compensation or an insult really.

3. Do other users have other experiences of this company that they would like to share, good bad or indifferent.

dudara

This forum is for the discussion of consumer issues. But a specific request needs to be made, so that specific advice can be offered.

General discussion is generally not allowed as it causes the thread to get muddied and diverts from giving advice specific to the issue.

One more question, if you don't mind. Were you engaged with Blacknight as a private consumer, doing this website for private purposes? Or was there any business context to this?

homer911

You engaged a developer, who developed on the production hosting platform and failed to implement version control and off-line backups?

Sounds like the developers problem..

Mr. Incognito

dudara wrote: »

This forum is for the discussion of consumer issues. But a specific request needs to be made, so that specific advice can be offered.

General discussion is generally not allowed as it causes the thread to get muddied and diverts from giving advice specific to the issue.

One more question, if you don't mind. Were you engaged with Blacknight as a private consumer, doing this website for private purposes? Or was there any business context to this?

I incorporated a company who owns the IP so it is a B2B transaction.

I didn't realise that specific requests can be made. That's very useful.

Is it normal for a developer to back up offline work? Would this include the coding?

What is the liability of a hosting company if the data they host is lost as a result of their own inadequete practices? EDIT - Looks like thei T &Cs say Tough

Data stored on our servers is not guaranteed to be backed up. It is recommended that you keep an independent backup of all data stored on your virtual server or shared hosting account. Blacknight Internet Solutions Ltd. accept no responsibility for any loss of data, however incurred.

dudara

Because this is a B2B transaction, it doesn't fall under the Consumer Rights and the Consumer Issues forum. I'll move it to the Business & Entrepreneurial forum

dudara

smash

The only issue I've ever had with Blacknight is that their web-mail service has a bug which drops attachments from outgoing email. It's embarrassing when a client replies to tell you there was no attachment, but they've assured me that they're working on it.

Apart from that I find them great.

NotCominBack

You had a production website up and running with a web host, on a free trial, and no backup?

dudara

OP - I can move this thread to the Talk to Blacknight forum, which will give the reps there a chance to assist you. Please let me know.

dudara

mneylon

I believe our support manager has addressed this issue with you

If you need anything further please let us know

Michele

Atomico

I have no affiliation with Blacknight other than as a happy customer of over 5 years. I don't like the idea that someone would not become a customer with them on account of one random thread, so thought I'd post here.

It sounds like the offering mentioned in this thread could have been presented better by them, but over the years I've only found them to be really responsive, fast, and helpful in terms of customer service in particular.

And always backup your data! I don't trust any company to do this for me, it's just common sense. You wouldn't write up and save an important report or essay without backing it up somewhere (or at least I hope not), and the same applies to online and with any sort of website.

Atomic Pineapple

Mr. Incognito wrote: »

Is it normal for a developer to back up offline work? Would this include the coding?

Yes, the developer should have been backing up the code periodically.

Daily offline backups at least of your data should have been implemented if it was required.

Tippex

Mr. Incognito wrote: »

I incorporated a company who owns the IP so it is a B2B transaction.

I didn't realise that specific requests can be made. That's very useful.

Is it normal for a developer to back up offline work? Would this include the coding?

What is the liability of a hosting company if the data they host is lost as a result of their own inadequete practices? EDIT - Looks like thei T &Cs say Tough

Any Developer worth working with will have a backup of the work they have done and certainly will not be coding directly onto the webhost.

Graham

Tippex wrote: »

Any Developer worth working with will have a backup of the work they have done and certainly will not be coding directly onto the webhost.

That really depends where you found your developer and what you've paid.

There's huge savings to be made if you off-shore projects to low-cost developers but the downside is you can't expect all the niceties that go with a relatively expensive full-service development house.

The worst combination is inexperienced project owners with cheap and/or inexperienced developers. All sorts of horrible things can happen.

Ctrl Alt Delete

Found them to be a great company to be honest in the 10 years I've been using them for over 30 websites and very few problems which were sorted out quickly.

To be perfectly honest you used a free trial, built a website with third part software using a "developer" who failed to back up anything (which is development day 1 stuff)

Seems to me your issue is with the developer and not Blacknight.

RedXIV

Another thumbs up for Blacknight, no issues with them over the last 6 years and they even had tech support help me when one of my sites got hacked, completely my own fault but I had the guts of two hours of support from one of their guys and got everything resolved.

I'd definitely recommend them.

Mr. Incognito, I'd definitely question any developer that did their coding directly on the box without a backup. I'm not a web developer, but I help maintain a few sites for a friend of mine and I have versions of each stored on my local machine and cloud storage.....I should really start using git or something though...

The Corinthian

Mr. Incognito wrote: »

When the trial expired it appears that this was not the case. After 5 days all the data was deleted.

You hired a developer who didn't know the basic standard practice of backing up your work and/or data, let alone that you don't develop on a live server. They were probably pretty cheap.

Penny wise, pound foolish comes to mind.

pedronomix

OP gone very quiet!!

NeutralHandle

I've always found them good.

Ctrl Alt Delete

pedronomix wrote: »

OP gone very quiet!!

Don't think thread went the way he thought it would

Magnate

My biggest complaint with them is that they pretty much act as domain squatters, charging several hundred for so called "premium domains" eg. firstname.irish which can be registered for 30 euro with their competitors.

Graham

Magnate wrote: »

My biggest complaint with them is that they pretty much act as domain squatters, charging several hundred for so called "premium domains" eg. firstname.irish which can be registered for 30 euro with their competitors.

Aren't they just a registrar, isn't it the registry that sets the pricing for premium domains?

uck51js9zml2yt

homer911 wrote: »

You engaged a developer, who developed on the production hosting platform and failed to implement version control and off-line backups?

Sounds like the developers problem..

Have to agree with you.
Any half decent developer would be doing regular local backups.

jmcc

Graham wrote: »

Aren't they just a registrar, isn't it the registry that sets the pricing for premium domains?

This has been a feature of most of the new gTLDs that have launched in the last year or so. The registries know that some domain names are more valuable than others due to their generic nature and they reserve them for auction or put a premium price on their registrations. Some of the new gTLD registries have set up separate companies to register large numbers of what would be premium generic domain names in .COM or other more mature TLDs.

Regards...jmcc

goz83

Graham wrote: »

That really depends where you found your developer and what you've paid.

There's huge savings to be made if you off-shore projects to low-cost developers but the downside is you can't expect all the niceties that go with a relatively expensive full-service development house.

The worst combination is inexperienced project owners with cheap and/or inexperienced developers. All sorts of horrible things can happen.

Being inexperienced is not the worst thing. Add no forward planning to it and then you've a nightmare coming. I build websites and have had no training. I use third party software and my coding skills are nearly nil, but I think I do a good job and I am slowly building a website company, adding about two websites a week now.

My set up is that I build the website and store it locally on my machine, on the main drive. I then have it backed up to a separate drive and have it backed up online. I plan to have another backup on an external drive and on the cloud too. I even plan to back up each website to disk, just for good measure, so there is always a core copy if needed. For this, I charge a monthly maintenance to host, maintain and store the website. Peace of mind.

Graham wrote: »

Aren't they just a registrar, isn't it the registry that sets the pricing for premium domains?

I see this was already answered. To add to it, i have had several requests over a period of 7 years to buy a "premium" .com domain matching my business name. I first went with a .net and then trumpted their premium garbage with a local .ie domain. The .ie costs me €30 a year. The .com would be half that, but with a premium of just over $1000 :eek:

NeutralHandle

jmcc wrote: »

This has been a feature of most of the new gTLDs that have launched in the last year or so. The registries know that some domain names are more valuable than others due to their generic nature and they reserve them for auction or put a premium price on their registrations. Some of the new gTLD registries have set up separate companies to register large numbers of what would be premium generic domain names in .COM or other more mature TLDs.

Regards...jmcc

Institutionalised domain squatting. Interesting. Hadn't been aware of that.