I've finally had enough of this. Yet another weekend when the SH site is broken. The chatroom will not load, the 'contact us' page is not available - convenient, isn't it? I am not by nature a complainer, but when SH became a commercial organisation that charges members for access to a service, it took on certain obligations to provide the services for which it is charging. Nobody - other than serial complainers - expects 100% uptime, but paying customers should expect better availability than has been provided over the last few months by this fully commercial concern. I have a husband who works in IT support - no, he isn't one of the guys in the office who makes sure the printer has toner and shows secretaries how to use MS Word, he is the guy who consistently charges household name companies way, way bigger than SH £1,000 a day - yes, per day - for consultancy on how to make sure their customers do not get the same shitty value for money SH have provided over the last few months. Therefore I'm not speaking from a position of ignorance. Every web-based company can get caught out by excessive demand, hardware or software failure, or other unforeseen circumstances, but only the fly-by-nights do not plan for this by way of multiple redundancy, quick-to-market capacity upgrades and 24/7 expert support contracts. If SH suffers the occasional failure to provide the service for which they charge, then that's life. If, over an extended period, they cannot service the needs of their customers then that smacks of bad management, unsustainable business modeling, or simple profiteering.
SH is unable, or unwilling - over an extended period - to provide the services for which they charge their customers. They will not admit that there are any issues. They should either cut their shareholders' dividends and spend the money on providing a suitable hardware and software infrastructure to support the services for which they charge, or admit that they have failed and just go out of business. I'm not the sort of person who habitually complains, but after the long term poor service and failure to deliver provided by this company I have lost all patience. I would complain directly to the company via the 'contact us' pages if I could, but - guess what - they are not working. So I thought I'd post in the forum and invite comments from others who are probably equally fed up. Despite the many good points offered by this site, I've always felt that SH verged on the autocratic, and I think they are in danger of entirely forgetting who it is that pays their bills. Without us, the paying customers, they are nothing - it's about time they took their heads out of the sand and stopped denying any problems and started addressing them.
Please add your comments - with the 'contact us' pages being so conveniently unavailable it may be the only way to put our message across...
SC xx
Forum Virgin
