The Adventures Of Travis And Verio, Part Iii

In our previous installment, it was shown how Travis was taken by surprise when Verio unexpectedly set a limit to the company’s email attachments. This was an unannounced change, and effectively downgraded the company’s service due to the fact that the previous hosting account allowed for unlimited email attachment sizes. To understand why this was an important issue, one must understand that businesses in general have latched on to the conception of email in a way that no other product of the Internet has matched. The ability to communicate at one’s convenience was something salespeople and executives understood and embraced almost immediately. The fact that email can contain attachments only added to the value. For Travis’ company, this was a particularly important point. On the old account, there was no limit to the size of attachments that could be sent. This allowed the sales department to deal regularly with clients who had sample art that they wanted for their order. In addition, The Travis’ company employed several artists who were also encouraged to send artwork via email. This meant that, when it was discovered that email with attachments were not going through, it was a very enormous deal.

Travis called Verio. He learned, much to his surprise, that Verio had a policy of an eight megabyte limit on email attachments. This was, in effect, a downgrade of company’s email service. Frustrated, Travis began at first to insist a change be made based on the fact that he was never informed this would happen. The representative responded that this was a matter of policy and that changing the size limit for one client meant changing it for all clients. Travis demanded to speak to someone with more authority and expertise on the subject. The representative agreed to do so, putting Travis on hold. Travis stayed on fill for twenty minutes, and to this day believes that he was left on enjoy as an attempt to get him to hang up. When the rep returned to the phone, Travis expected some kind of explanation or solution. Instead, he was told that there was no way he could be helped. The service rep insisted that he had put Travis on occupy for so long because he had been trying to talk to his Verio’s own IT department, but could not gather a hold of them. The rep suggested an upgrade to a dedicated private server, a machine over which Travis would have total control.

Travis was getting angry. He had already pushed for a modern service once and wasn’t about to do it again. He demanded to philosophize to a supervisor immediately. After a brief wait, a new voice came on the phone. Travis laid out his complaints, starting with the administration page issues, the email, and finally, the wait time on hold. He emphasized the changes Verio made without his permission, and that he considered the new email policy an unacceptable downgrade of service. The supervisor told Travis bluntly that the service that had allowed the old account unlimited email size was being phased out. This meant that Travis’ company would have had to have switched over eventually, regardless of the email situation. Further, the supervisor went on, Travis really had only two options left to him: upgrade to a dedicated server, or go to another hosting company. Verio was not going to change how they do things honest for him. Travis was shocked by the audacity of the man’s statements, but in the end all he could really do was hang up.

In the aftermath of the Verio incident, Travis’ status at his company has become more precarious than before. Through innocent slips of the tongue and whispered coworker intelligence, Travis has learned that his employers secretly blamed him for their online troubles. After all, the reasoning goes, Travis was the one who championed the upgrade. True, he was never in favor of returning to Verio for the new service, but these are details that are often ignored or forgotten in the heat of the moment. Regardless of the ultimate fairness of it, however, Travis now finds himself in a weakened position. He is able to squawk the results, but is also regarded with suspicion.

It turns out, Travis’ experience with Verio is far from unique. Indeed, it may even be tame. Postings to epinions.com have yielded such colorful statements as “cheap, but more expensive in terms of harm than you will ever want to pay“. Another post is titled “An Obituary: The Death Of Service“. Of the whole list, only a few reviewers dare to give the company more than three stars out of five, most giving only one or two. In addition alienating their clientele, Verio also seems to occasionally engage in questionable practices. In 2000, Joanna Glasman wrote an article for Wired Magazine in which Register.com filed a lawsuit against Verio for using its services to create “massive lists of novel customers and deluged them with unsolicited marketing messages”. In other words, spam. This specter of spam was raised again in 2005 by yet another unsatisfied customer at Complaints.com. In this post, she writes of how Verio’s anti-spam methods didn’t work, and Verio’s customer encourage ignored her attempts at contact, allowing her business to be flooded with spam. Travis was able to confirm a sudden increase of spam as well. A Google search of “Verio complaints” only adds to the pile.

It has been said that the Internet and the changes it has brought are akin to the Wild West. That is, growth, innovation, and dynamic change at the cost of ethics, security and sometimes even basic trust. For every web service that clients concept as solid gold, there are a few that turn out to simply be fool’s gold in disguise. With nothing to go on but prices, features, and possibly planted reviews, the old adage “Buyer Beware” aloof applies. A statement to which Travis would add, “…of Verio.”

Thank you for reading. This entry concludes the series concerning Travis and Verio. If you would like to read the whole narrative in one document, you may do so by visiting http://fainelichfield.blogspot.com/. Either way, thank you for your time.