Ah. It feels so good to be blogging again. I’ve been stuck with an awful DSL service by Digitel for more than three weeks AGAIN that I think I actually had a “blogging withdrawal.” This was the second time Digitel conked out on us. Having a web design company, three weeks of no high-speed connection makes it extremely difficult for us to do business properly.

You can just imagine how happy I am to finally be able to surf all I want, upload whenever I want, test sites without worrying of bad uploads, and blog whenever I felt like it. We only had Digitel late last March (that’s like about three months only), and we’ve been experiencing nothing but bad service. Marc was already tired of the support representatives’ spiel to pacify his anger (it actually pissed him off more), and I was so frustrated not to get any work done. It took Digitel weeks to fix our connection the first time. You’d think the second one would be better, but it was just as awful as the first. We barely enjoyed DSL speed nearing 1mbps when it conked out again.

We had downtime—lasting about three weeks each—twice in three months. That was the last straw.

I’m a stingy person, so I’d “normally” stick it out with a service if there’s a payment bond involved. But in this case, Marc and I decided that we stick it out, we’d eventually lose more money in the long run. Digitel is bad for business. And if you can’t work properly, it’s just not worth it.

The past three months have been quite… eventful 😛 We endured the stress of moving to an entirely different neighborhood, the frustration of having an awful DSL service, and the disappointment from an unpredictable web hosting provider that lost a website I’ve been working on without any backup whatsoever (not to mention the frequent down times for the past three months and the FTP problems caused by the fact that they transferred our account to another server without informing us). We’re grateful for the good service they provided us in the past, but as I have said, boo-boos like these cause unnecessary delays in production and add strain to our business.

But, as always, there’s always “light in the darkness.” Hehehe. It sounds cheesy, I know, but I prefer to think the best out of what happened than dwelling and feeling sorry for myself. The move was stressful, but it also turned out for the better (the suburban setup was actually good for us). We made a wrong decision with service providers, but I’d like to think of the good that came out of these awful experiences. I learned to do extensive research before entrusting important aspects of our business to any service provider. I also realized that sometimes it’s better to get a stranger to manage an aspect of your business that would make you answerable to your clients such as reseller web hosting, and that getting web host services from a foreign company doesn’t always mean slow support response time—I actually got faster actions from them through email than calling support reps locally.

Sometimes it’s hard to see it that way, but there is good in bad decisions: the experience teaches you a lesson. I rather think it’s not really the repercussions that make up the “bad” in bad decisions. For me, what makes it bad is not being able to learn anything from it, and doing the same old mistakes over and over again. But then again, that’s just me 😛