Why Globat? Here’s why not Globat.

I have an ISP, Globat.com. I am going to be rid of them soon, per­haps sooner than I thought, if I have my way. I used to park my Inter­net pres­ence with Earth­link, but they cost a lot, and I had been shown this lit­tle com­pany called Glo­bat that offered a ton of space for your web site for just a very lit­tle money. Earth­link had given me no trou­ble, really, but they were expen­sive, and I was greedy for disk space. So I made the switch.

Glo­bat was fine for a while, until my web site started to choke a lit­tle. And when I had ques­tions about installing Mov­able Type, they were unable/unwilling to help. Each time my web site was inac­ces­si­ble, or if it took sev­eral min­utes to load my home page, I would duti­fully send off a mes­sage to tech sup­port, let­ting them know of my prob­lems. Once it lasted a day and a half, but most times it was sev­eral hours of not-quite-outage. In one or two of these cases (and there were a dozen of them) I received a reply indi­cat­ing that the prob­lem might be other peo­ple on my same server, other cus­tomers, who were tak­ing up too much of the server’s resources.

But most of the time, I’d get a reply from Glo­bat say­ing that they had checked, and every­thing seemed fine with my site, and they were clos­ing the ticket. Of course, this was 24 to 36 hours later, and the prob­lem had been gone for some time.

Finally, I felt they had strung me along enough. I was get­ting two-and-a-half GB of space, sure, but for all the cus­tomer ser­vice I was receiv­ing, I might as well have been beat­ing on the box myself.

I decided to leave. Pick­ing another ISP was easy, but Glo­bat was no help. I deter­mined to move my sites slowly, leav­ing Glo­bat up until it was time to renew, then let­ting it lapse. After all, I paid for a full year in advance.

Well, the jig is up. Tonight, I received a receipt from Glo­bat, let­ting me know that I had been charged for another full year. I received no notice that my renewal was com­ing up. I received no indi­ca­tion that I should check my credit card on file to make sure my infor­ma­tion was still valid. I just got a receipt.

And so, I asked them to rescind the charge and to can­cel my account imme­di­ately. That they have done, and with an alacrity that belies my pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ences with them.

So… if you want cheap host­ing, Glo­bat is good. If you want cus­tomer ser­vice, try some­one else.