With all due respect, I disagree. It's about marketing and perception. They want people to like the service so much that they upgrade to paid. Having no previous experience with the paid service to use for comparison, one has only the perception created by the free service to go by. If I go to a barber with a coupon for a free haircut, and the barber gives me a horrid haircut, I'm not going to go back and pay for a haircut. It's as simple as that, and people remember poor service.
It's all good and well to distinguish the paid service from free WRT feature sets. That's capitalism, and I wish them all the luck in the world. Bottom line, the perception of poor customer service, buggy servers, and protracted down times is driving potential paying customers away. I can see that from the increasingly angry posts here. That's just bad marketing, and x10 needs to realize that.
(Yes, mine is down too).
But here's the issue - the problem actually seems to lie with LiteSpeed [The actual server host] - so, using your example, it would be like getting upset with the barber because his scissors broke halfway through the haircut, unexpectedly. It's not really his fault. It just kind of happened while he was doing what you wanted.
Now, not only is your haircut jacked, you have to wait for him to get a new pair, or fix the ones he has. Same thing here - we have let them know that the issue exists, and they have to fix it.
The problem being, this is likely a busy week for them - there's a big holiday coming up in two days, and they may not have everyone they normally would available. Maybe the server hosts don't have everyone available.
Instantly getting angry about the issue is not the right way to go about it - that's all I'm talking about. People need to calm down and understand that these guys are human beings, just like them, with lives outside of this hosting gig. Not only that, they've been undergoing some big transitions in regards to making moves with the servers - something that can easily go wrong.
Plus, LiteSpeed is based in New Jersey, USA - it's possible they are having troubles due to that recent storm [Superstorm Sandy].
If it's an issue with the hardware - then they have to get in touch with SingleHop - who is based in Chicago, and again, it's possible they are shorthanded, given the holidays coming up.
As I said before, they might not have had a chance to update us on the situation yet - after all, the issues with Vox [Which seems to be the main server affected, though Absolut seems to be a victim as well.] were only recently solved, and this current issue JUST sprang up yesterday.
This is really just a bad time for an issue like this to pop up.
