Hi everyone! I would like to formally announce that BlueFur is now under new ownership! The former owners Gary and Lisa Jones decided they wanted to focus on a new area of their lives and we have worked with them over the last few weeks to make sure the transition would be a smooth one. We wish them the best! We will be continuing their goal of making BlueFur the best hosting company possible!
Who are the new owners and what is our background? My name is Ben Welch-bolen and my business partner is Joel Brown. I’ve been working in the hosting industry for over ten years and Joel has been in the industry for the last five years. We both entered the hosting industry because we were frustrated with the lack of quality customer service and we knew we could do better. You can count on us and our staff to provide great customer service and to always be working to improve it!
What can you expect under our management? There will be no disruption or changes to your service and you can rest assured our goal is only to improve BlueFur! Below is our plan for the next six months to improve BlueFur. We will be updating the blog frequently with the progress of our plans, and we will do major updates every few months so you know what the future holds.
1. The first major improvement you will notice is that and the support department will respond within minutes to your support tickets every minute of every day! If you want to test this or say hi just email Support@BlueFur.com. The sales and billing departments will be open during business hours during the business week and will respond very quickly as well.
2. In the next 4 to 8 weeks we will also be launching live chat for support and sales so that you can easily jump online and get help with any support issue. We will send out another announcement when this feature is ready! We will also be improving the support setup so that customers can rate each ticket and staff member they interact with. We will review this info every morning to make sure we are doing a good job and to get feedback from you.
3. Over the coming months we will be greatly improving the hardware BlueFur is built upon. For our shared and reseller customers we will be increasing both the performance and reliability of the servers by upgrading the hardware on those servers and by adding RAID 10 so that if a hard drive dies on the server it will continue operating with no problem. We will also be rolling out a new and improved backup system.
4. Over the coming months we will be rolling out a new robust billing solution that will feature some major improvements! This new billing system will allow you to login and view all your services with us, make changes to those services, order new services, view past invoices and a lot more! We know the current method of billing and invoicing is unorganized and we plan to change that very quickly. We have talked to a lot of customers and this was one of the first things they mentioned they would like to see.
5. As we finish the major changes mentioned above we will start to roll out some great new features and products! Things like redundant centralized email, business class hosting, VPS, and a lot more!
I would also like to hear from all of you! My email is Ben@BlueFur.com and if you have any questions, comments, suggestions, feature requests, or anything please email me! Joel and I are always available if you need anything. Feel free to leave questions in the comments too!
Thanks,
Ben And Joel
Ben
February 11, 2010 3:08 pm
Hi guys!
Just wanted to say hi and looking forward to any questions you might have!
Thanks, Ben
Derek
February 11, 2010 4:06 pm
Congratulations to all – to Ben and Joel on the acquisition of BlueFur and to Gary and Lisa for the new adventures that lie ahead. It has been a pleasure being a customer of BlueFur and I look forward to the new enhancements that are coming.
Liesa Billings
February 11, 2010 4:10 pm
Great to know customer service will be responded to quickly. I am happy for the transition and for Gary and his crew to move on to a new stage in their lives. Good luck to them in future endeavors.
Liesa Billings
Rick
February 11, 2010 4:17 pm
Congrats guys. I wish u the best. Under Gary bluefur suffered. I’m looking forward to new ownership
inspirationbit
February 11, 2010 5:22 pm
Hi Ben and Joel.
Look forward to all the positive changes at BlueFur.
A couple of things I’d like to see addressed sooner than later:
- send hosting renewal notifications prior to the renewal (having the customer login to view all the billing info would be great, but I understand it may take you awhile to implement). Otherwise, currently I’m getting a payment receipt after I was charged, and it doesn’t even say what domain/site hosting I was charged for. Very frustrating, especially because I’ve got several sites hosted with you, mine and my clients.
I’ve actually emailed the billing dept about that, got no answer (a couple months ago).
- another problem I’m having is not being able to use SMTP email attached to my domain hosted on your site. Tried following the instructions on your site and email, nothing worked. The emails are not being sent using SMTP via your servers.
Ok, enough for now, you’ve got your hands full already, don’t want to add too much ;)
Congrats and Cheers,
Vivien
Ben
February 11, 2010 7:11 pm
Thanks everyone!
Yep the new billing system we are working on as we speak will give plenty of notice on any invoices, it will also correctly say what it was for, and let you login to make changes and loads more. Right now we are planning out how to import customers into this system. I will post more info in the coming weeks on this process. We are going to have to do it manually as the billing system Gary had is pretty unorganized, but it will be very clean and we will be following up with everyone to make sure it is all correct.
Domains are something we are still working out a plan for, right now we are handeling those manually but eventually we will have that 100% automated so you can manage them all from that same invoice. I hope to have that planned out late next week or the week after.
That is very odd on the STMP, can you please email support@bluefur.com and cc me on that email at ben@bluefur.com, we can have techs look into that right away.
Please let me know on that last one,
Thanks, Ben
Ben
February 11, 2010 7:14 pm
Oh, and we have a big website update coming for BlueFur.com and the blog this month too!
Thanks, Ben
Jeannette Duguay
February 11, 2010 7:18 pm
Hi Ben and Joel,
Once again, congratulations! I’m looking forward to meeting you and the new gang at BlueFur.
Jen
Dr. Cossack
February 11, 2010 7:26 pm
I had a feeling that something was coming up: Gary used to give a lot of importance to this blog, but he made very few posts in the last months. I’m glad to hear that this change of management seems to be heading in the right direction. I’ve been satisfied with the service offered so far, and I rarely had to contact the support team… which I consider to be a good thing!
Please keep us informed through the blog once in a while, even if it’s only to say “everything’s A-OK!”. It makes the company look that much more alive.
And of course… Welcome to the both of you. :)
Ben
February 11, 2010 8:36 pm
Yep, we will start a monthly post to update everyone on what is planned for the coming months and what we have been working on.
Thanks, Ben
Net Age | Web Development
February 15, 2010 6:05 am
Welcome and thank you for the introduction. All the very best with your new baby, it seems like you got all your ducks in a row and plans worked out 100%. I look forward to seeing the changes to the blog, and look forward to interaction with you guys in future.
Regards
Jacques
BlueFur.com » Blog Archive » Business 101: Best Day for an Announcement?
February 16, 2010 1:02 pm
[...] Net Age | Web Development: Welcome and thank you for the introduction. All the very best with your new baby, it seems… [...]
Marilyn
February 25, 2010 3:16 am
I wish Ben and Joel success with their new venture; you certainly have your work cut out for you with the acquisition of Blue Fur, a company Gary Jones ran into the ground with poor customer service, unsecured servers (sites I hosted as a reseller were hacked into and used for phishing multiple times without explanation from customer support despite numerous requests) and unethical billing practices (BF billing tried to bill my credit card after I canceled my reseller account two months ago – fortunately, I had the foresight to cancel the credit card first).
I could say more about a situation that arose yesterday when BF erroneously billed a client of mine for webhosting services they do not provide but I’ll first give Ben and Joel a chance to make things right today (Billing certainly didn’t fix the problem yesterday.)
Best of luck, Ben and Joel!
Tom S.
February 25, 2010 7:05 am
Hi Marilyn,
We’re definitely atune to those exact issues you’re describing. We’re working on implementing a brand new billing system that will be far more user-friendly for both clients and for us. Additionally, we are about a week or two away from beginning a server migration that will place all clients on brand new powerful servers.
What is your ticket ID from your ticket with Billing yesterday?
Marilyn
February 25, 2010 5:02 pm
Thanks for your reply, Tom. The ticket ID is [BlueFur #ZXKD-41998]. Blue Fur Billing is insisting to my client that they are hosting a domain that has not even been registered for over two years. Of course, he is not going to pay and has contacted Visa to ensure no charges by Blue Fur are accepted.
It appears that at some point Blue Fur has taken the liberty of linking an old, no-longer registered domain to my client’s current domain which is not hosted with Blue Fur. My client has already clearly indicated via email to BF Billing that he was unaware of this and has no desire to receive any Blue Fur services. Please take corrective action immediately to remedy this situation.
Furthermore, I have also contacted Domain People and transferred all domain registrations for my clients and myself away from Blue Fur to Domain People directly so there is no reason for any of my clients to be invoiced by Blue Fur in the future.
Please let me know if you require additional information to bring this matter to closure. I wish you the best of luck cleaning up the mess left behind by the previous owners.
Ben
March 1, 2010 5:58 pm
Hi,
Billing would be happy to resolve that, just contact them as they would be happy to help!
You can also request Tom or a member of management on that ticket if you need too,
Thanks, Ben
Gail from GrowMap
March 27, 2010 3:19 pm
Just today we had one of our sites go down because Network Solutions “advanced” DNS management will not accept the DNS server name. In order for the site owner to continue using them for their email accounts we had to use the IP address of the DNS server instead (against our better judgement).
We (already knew) and just found out the hard way why that is never a good idea. Usually when a hosting company moves a site to a new server that is totally transparent to the site owner IF their DNS uses the name. The hosting company just updates that information and points to the new server.
If you use an IP address instead and that changes your site goes down as ours did today. Worse still we were updating the content on the OLD server so we would have lost everything between the time the change happened and now.
Fortunately, BlueFur support immediately identified the cause of our site’s outage. They were exceptionally responsive, answering every email within minutes. They offered to restore the missing data and did so cheerfully. We really appreciate not only how fast they answer but also their excellent attitude.
There are always going to be technical challenges because computer equipment is made by humans and anything we make does eventually fail. In the end quality hosting depends on both equipment and support. I would never consider hosting anywhere that does not have support people who really care like BlueFur does.
Ben
April 3, 2010 2:02 am
Yep we send out pre emails so you can contact us and get that new IP, we don’t include that usually with that first email as 99.999% of our customers use our DNS so it is not a problem and we had a lot of confusion when we included that in the first round of emails. I’m really sorry you had a problem and very happy we could get that solved for you!
Thanks for the kind words Gail and sorry for the trouble!
Thanks, Ben
Stephen Siu
April 5, 2010 2:08 pm
Would’ve been nice to know the email servers have also changed… it’s now montreal.bluefur.com. I hooked up my Gmail to receive all my domain emails and for 3 days I couldn’t send out email and finally realized it was because of the hosting.
Severely disappointed. Good thing my hosting contract with BlueFur is up.. can’t believe how many times I’ve emailed billing and gotten no reply, had important hosting settings change without prior notice, and now email not working for 3 days. Each time I had to figure out everything myself.
Tom S.
April 5, 2010 2:11 pm
Stephen,
We’re in the middle of a massive server migration. We emailed the server’s customers prior to the migration; did you not receive that email? If you have any questions regarding your account, please by all means contact us. We don’t ignore tickets as was commonplace under previous management.
The Limey
April 6, 2010 2:17 pm
Doh! To late!!
I moved away from BlueFur last year when my contract was due to expired early last year. I had been fairly happy (apart from the unexplained down periods) until the single hard-drive in the server died. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but when I eventually found out what was going on they only had a partial backup of my stuff. Luckily it turned out all the most important stuff that was backed up, but I still lost some things.
Anyway, I switched to the dreaded 1&1 because they were even cheaper than BlueFur (at the time), but I’ll keep you in mind if I ever get to the stage of switching to a dedicated server, as the support staff were always very nice and helpful (not that I’ve had a need to talk to the ones at 1&1 yet).
The Limey
Anonymous
April 12, 2010 5:06 pm
I hate to be negative but you guys have some work to do to rebuild BlueFur’s once strong reputation that Gary ended up ruining.
We once had a dedicated server that went down–yet again. Nothing from Gary or Bluefur to help us stay up. That’s okay because our company switched to Rackspace within 6 hours and cancelled with BF. So glad we got out while we did.
Good luck to you both for trying to win back customers. It’s going to be one helluva uphill climb.
Btw we just got an email today about our “server” being upgraded. Too bad we switched away over a year ago. Hope this mess you acquired clears up!