Has pub day come early?
"22,0000 VoIP and Connectivity customers" ... is this a new number base I've never heard of?
UK comms firm Gradwell quits cloud land after 'strategic review'
Gradwell Communications yesterday emailed clients - mostly fellow small businesses - to let them know that it has offloaded the cloud services "assets". The Bath-based company, set up in 1998 to sell web development and hosting, said the decision was taken following a "strategic review". "We are writing to inform you that …
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Tuesday 12th June 2018 12:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
And the moral of this story is...
To be honest, I was expecting something like this for quite a while. A couple of years ago Gradwell altered their billing system to one which was seemingly completely incomprehensible to their own staff as well as their customers. As a result, it was possible to pay for their services and get one's service cut off by Gradwell for non-payment, as happened to someone I know. This tends to lead to people comparing the intelligence of Gradwell's staff to quite a wide range of notably stupid invertebrates, and this dirty linen tends to get aired extremely publicly.
I would think that it would be this incompetence along with higher than average prices that have led to a lot of people departing from Gradwell in favour of companies that are easier to deal with. Another reason is that Gradwell are based in Bath, a notoriously high-rent place to live.
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Tuesday 12th June 2018 13:01 GMT Arthur the cat
Re: And the moral of this story is...
… Gradwell altered their billing system to one which was seemingly completely incomprehensible to their own staff as well as their customers. As a result, it was possible to pay for their services and get one's service cut off by Gradwell for non-payment, as happened to someone I know.
Same here. My friend had given them a direct debit, but when they changed the billing system they failed to connect the domain and the DD, so he found his domain inactive one morning when it should have been auto-renewed and on phoning to complain was told it was his fault for not setting up the payment mechanism.
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Wednesday 20th June 2018 05:01 GMT Vometia Munro
Re: And the moral of this story is...
Same here: they forgot to collect the DD and then deleted my entire DNS records on the basis of "non payment" having not actually bothered to tell me there was a problem. A website being down is one thing, your entire domain ceasing to exist is quite another. Fortunately it was fixed fairly quickly but it seemed to be the wrong solution even if it wasn't a problem of their making.
Time will tell if the new company is any better.
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Tuesday 12th June 2018 13:41 GMT Paul Herber
They messed up the ownership and email address contact details for all (most) of the domains I used to have with them. It took one devil of a job to extricate myself. Shame, as Peter did a good job initially with his web hosting service. Then last year they started invoicing me for £0.00 for an ADSL service I'd never had with them.
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Tuesday 12th June 2018 16:05 GMT Nick Kew
Paul, glad to hear I'm not the only one.
I used to use and recommend them for years. Then they lost it. Only things still with them are domains awaiting far-future renewal dates to move.
This time, the fact they've notified customers is surely a huge improvement on just breaking a service.
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Thursday 21st June 2018 11:38 GMT Ian Court
I didn't get notified. I only found out that they'd moved their domain and hosting customers to Pickaweb because (1) my domains didn't auto-renew and (2) when I logged into the Gradwell Cloud control panel to attempt to renew manually, nothing would work. I sent Gradwell an e-mail and only then did I find out that they'd sold this particular part of the business to Pickaweb.
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Tuesday 12th June 2018 16:00 GMT R 11
Peter's interest was always communications, at least that's what I gathered from his contributions to numerous Usenet groups in the 1990s. I've used Gradwell for many years as a carrier on my asterisk server and haven't experienced any really significant problems during that time.
Perhaps moving back to focus on what they love will pay dividends?
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Tuesday 12th June 2018 16:28 GMT Mr Humbug
I used to have DNS with Gradwell until they transferred that to Portfast a couple of years ago. I left my domains there because the old hosting system had got into such a broken state (and they weren't going to fix it because I would be moving to Gradwell Cloud any day now ... for two years) that I didn't dare touch anything.
Yesterday and this morning I moved all my domains to Portfast. Seems to be like Gradwell in the early years: one chap who does a small amount of stuff well and cares about his customers.
Now I just have to make sure that Gradwell and Pickaweb don't try and charge me by mistake.
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Wednesday 13th June 2018 09:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Well let's see 20 years and £7.34m in turnover.
Why is that underwhelming? How many small companies survive for 20 years? I suspect it's only underwhelming because somehow we expect all startups to turn into Google.
Note, I'm not a Gradwell customer (I was once) or in any way involved with the company.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
