Due to the amount of morons thinking we’re their ISP’s support department and to ensure a brands image isn’t tarnished by the moronic comments which appear to have amassed since the sites inception, I’ve decided to disable all comments on our site in favour of connecting users with the Twitter hash-tag of “#netstatus”.
Furthermore, I’ll be placing click-through’s directly to the broadband providers sites in-favour of the horrid iFrames currently in use.
This will be rolled out by 12am Wednesday 2nd May; this will give the added bonus of a site usable with a mobile device too (huzzah!) which is kind of essential given the audience a site such as this caters for.
Comments are however enabled on blog posts, so throw in some input below.
We’re glad you’ve found us on the very start of this sites voyage into the vast sea’s of the internets. Being a brand new site we’re a little “slap-dash” right now though hopefully we can pull it all together and make this somewhat a success (of sorts).
First of all, I should tell you a little about the site and how it came about.
I work in the web-hosting industry, so when things dont work I get a hard time and it means I have to do work; when I do work, I get grumpy and swear at the screen. My screen is receiving counselling though the issue remains, its a vicious cycle.
Sometimes the problem I’d be dealing with would be completely out of my control, and I’d quite comfortably say I get at least one client per day experiencing issues accessing their website or email service and they’d come straight to us assuming the server was down. Upon further investigation, their ISP is having transit issues and my time’s been wasted looking for their ISP’s network status page to prove this because they’ve a habit of burying it under all the other FAQ and knowledge-base stuff or sometimes ensuring it doesnt get indexed by Google at all by disallowing search engine spiders documenting their failures.
Here I’ve put together a big list of UK ISP’s service status pages and put them in an easy to reach format, all allowed to be indexed by search engines for your convenience. With this, I’ve placed a few ad’s too to help pay for hosting and to buy me a beer; being a tech-guy is hard enough, don’t deny my of my precious beer, “precious….”.
If you want to get in touch, give suggestions or tell us “your doin it wrong”, please use the contact page and we’ll ignore get straight back to you ASAP.
There, I said it. Twitter, its useful.
If you’re having issues with your internet right now and your ISP’s status page isn’t reporting issues, though you’ve checked using Traceroute and you’re fairly sure they are, just quickly head onto Twitter and search for your ISP name or something more general such as “internet’s screwing up”, “damn internet!” or “cant access Facebook!!!” (that’s all people use the internet for anyway isn’t it?).
After dealing with a clients issues with his “shall-not-be-named” ISP, it took them nearly three hours to document the problem they’d been experiencing before it appeared on their website though many were moaning on Twitter about it too!
The thing with Twitter is that its easily accessible, and whilst many wont thing to check it, the prolific users will instantly think to reach for their iPhone and moan on Twitter first before checking anything else.
Its one to bear in mind should you be in the same situation, and it gives you a little more fodder should customer support say you’re imagining things…