Notices and Updates |
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Where did our TV listings go?
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About 18 months ago (mid-2006), we made an organization decision regarding the website to focus our attention solely on radio broadcasting. It's not that we do not like TV broadcasting, because we do. It's more along the lines where we feel our resources are better placed focusing on only radio and all changes that are occurring with radio broadcasting. (We can take this back to the origins of the website where we started as radio only.) So much has evolved in the past 3 years or so, especially with the introduction of digital radio around the world. Digital television had also grown exponentially in nature. With such a changing environment, it is quite challenging to keep up and remain accurate. Much of our TV listings that remained have not minimally updated for over 2 years and information was becoming out-of-date.
We started a slow 18-month process to scale down and eventually remove sections related to TV broadcasting, cable and satellite broadcasting, then removal by geographic location, and eventually to the point where the first of the year 2008 marked the removal of any remaining USA TV listings. We know many of you are disappointed, but it is just as disappointing to have outdated and inaccurate information.
This current year (2008), we have in the works several enhancement to our radio listings and directly. Stay tuned.
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November Outage Incident
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As many of you noticed, back in November, the RadioStationWorld website
experiencing some major problems accessing the website. Many features produced errors,
pages loaded extremely slow, many pages would not load at all,
and many pages came up as missing.
We thank everyone for the numerous emails (i.e. complaints) letting us know about the problems.
Rest assured, we were actively working on this as these incidences as they continued on
for almost two weeks before the website was again functioning properly.
While we at RadioStationWorld.com have been actively attempting to rectify the problems,
our hosting service provider (sad to say) was not helpful at all and have been very
unresponsive to correcting the situation, quite unprofessional in their support and
very unstructured on their communication. They did not correct the problems after 10 days and
problems seemed to spiral out of control. This is terrible and quite unacceptable to our
organization. To avoid these problems, we have moved our hosting services to a new provider.
Our previous hosting provider was WEB.COM. Why do we mention them by name?
First of all, they deserve the negative press for the handling of this. Secondly,
we certainly do not want anyone else to go through this experience, yet we know several
other of their clients also experienced the same issues. I know things tend to go wrong,
but 2 weeks' worth??? And there end response was that nothing was ever wrong! This was the most
shocking part because level-one tech support even documented the problems.
Long story short (maybe), we reported to web.com numerous times over several days of the RadioStationWorld
web server responding slowly or not at all. Eventually, first-level tech support did identify a problem
and escalated it to second-level support. They did very little to provide a solution. Problems persisted over
for several more days and eventually the website became totally inaccessible. We continued to
communicate with first-level tech support. They would escalate to second-level. However
second-level support would close out the incident without resolution (of a website completely offline!).
We would contact first-level support again, they would escalate to second-level which put
us in a waiting queue that lasted 12-24 hours (again of a website completely offline!).
They did this THREE times over a period of 2 days, closing out an incident without resolution
just to put us at the back of the queue to wait around again (of a website completely offline!).
In this entire cycle and pattern of madness, we learned that level-one support (somewhere overseas)
and level-two support (presumably at the data center) are not allowed direct communications. They
are only allowed email communication. They could not communicate for a follow-up, or to
see if there is something for a resolution, or an estimated time for a fix, or anything!
Then we asked (numerous times) to talk with second-level support to talk through the problems.
All level-one support could do is sit there and apologize and do nothing to assist in fixing
the problems (of a website completely offline!).
Second level support REFUSED to communicate directly with their own clients.
Second level support REFUSED to communicate directly with level one support.
So after some 10 days of this, including some 10 useless hours on the phone with
level-one support, and 0 seconds on the phone with level-two support, we made
as organizational decision to no longer use web.com for any of our services,
so a new day was born. Beyond all the fustration, it was quit sad to learn
the organization we entrusted for many years, web.com, could not be helpful in the operation
of their own services and that the system of tech support set-up is so poor and insufficient
that they could not even recognize a problem even existed.
RadioStationWorld.com apologies for any issues this may have caused. It is clearly extremely annoying and frustrating, for both visitors like yourself and myself and our organization.
Happy web surfing, once again!
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