Commercial Entities That Disappoint

I've made my share of mistakes when choosing service providers. I fully cop to ignorance. When I began writing I knew nothing, absolutely nothing about publishing. I hired a person to format my finished book, because I thought that was what one did. I didn't know how to format a manuscript. I'd typed the whole thing in Arial, probably size 11 font, because that's what I liked. I single-spaced it. I didn't even find a writer's forum until long after that first debacle, and that's when my learning process began. But by then the formatter had completed his task and did a pretty bad job at it. I tried to fix his obvious mistakes, but ultimately decided that he was the expert, so he must have known what he was doing. I uploaded the MS, left it up for a while, then ultimately unpublished it.

Once my fiction writing took hold, I had no idea I could create a website for free, so I went with a company I'd seen advertised on TV. Its site builder was clunky, to say the least, but I figured that was how they all were. I'd try to format some text and 30 seconds later, the site would finally wake up and realize I was changing something. Then when it applied my changes, the line spacing would be off-kilter, so I'd spend interminable minutes backspacing and forward spacing ~ trying to line up my paragraphs to make them look normal. I would upload photos and try to insert them, but the site would decide it wanted to post a different photo instead, and again I would struggle, deleting and trying again, until my BP spiked dangerously. As my renewal date approached, I decided to abandon my site completely. I tried to transfer my domain name to a new site, but the company informed me that they owned it for another 15 months, so I abandoned that, too, and purchased a new one.

You've no doubt read about my troubles connecting a domain to a new site, because the domain registrar couldn't seem to complete the one simple task they were created to accomplish. And thus, once again, I had to purchase a new domain name from a different company.

I'm no computer novice. I do pretty well, actually. It's not me; it's them. It's galling that some of these companies advertise all the time, pouring all their resources into grabbing new customers, and leave their development and customer service departments derelict. 

The thing is, if one is searching for service providers, she can read multiple reviews, she can take note of the number of ⭐⭐bestowed upon a site, but she never feels the actual customer experience until she signs on the dotted line. And by then it's too late. I've thrown away dollars I couldn't afford to flush down the toilet on services that weren't services at all. But maybe that's their goal (not to be cynical). 

I generally don't call out companies by name, except in the case of GoDaddy, whose "service" is abysmal, but potential customers need to be forewarned. Ask someone who's used the service. Don't depend on reviews. Did the person writing the review actually try out every site? Doubtful. Educate yourself. Read, read, read. Take note of the general consensus. If a bunch of people say an entity is good (first make sure they're not paid to say that), then give it a shot.

Just don't be surprised if you end up wasting some dollars.