Hello guys,

I'm always very skeptical about Nigerian hosting platforms and payment gateways simply because of reliability. Yesterday I decided to give them the benefit of doubt and ordered a hosting plan for a client on gigalayer.com.

On getting to the checkout page, I was referred to paga and after entering my card details I got a response that the payment failed. I was taken aback a few minutes later when I got a notice from my bank that the exact amount has been deducted and its marked as payment to PAGA. I logged into my gigalayer account and found out the invoice for this purchase was still marked as unpaid so I called their CS and I was told to open a ticket which I did. The only response I've gotten for that ticket from gigalayer is that they are unable to trace my payment. So I decided to be proactive and I stepped up, I sent a mail to paga yesterday I still haven't gotten any response. I have been calling their CS line now and after burning my airtime on frivolities and jingles I have nothing to benefit from they keep saying hello, hello obviously they are unable to hear me. I have called more than 10 times and now they've resolved to stop taking my calls.

I hope someone who knows someone will read this and help attend to this issue because it is ulterly discouraging that as Nigerians we can't do business online effectively.

one thing about nigerian online business owners is lack of good customer service.the worse is that after calling, your airtime will be left to zero due to their callertune even when no one has answered the call.your airtime will get exhausted even before some picks the call.you will keep contacting them via mails

Gigalayer is one of the few hosting companies doing it right. Somthing must be wrong. Try to reach Rufai on phone.

Hello @gmart,

I must first apologize for your difficult experience and then ask you to login to your billing account at https://gigalayer.com/billing and hit the Get Support button on the menu then select Billing Support to open a ticket!

You should also know that, your challenge can and will be addressed if you communicate properly with our support. If we are unable to trace your transaction, we are to follow up with Paga and not you. Contacting the gateway service provider is a wrong move and in most cases may not yield you results because these gateways provision their service to companies they know will handle all challenges for their customers. Instead you should contact the company you're dealing with and follow through.

With a challenge why not communicate with us. Don't go on forums uttering very damaging words, it's very wrong!

If you have any further comment, please reach me via email "ahmad /@/ gigalayer.com" or best do as I said in the first paragraph.

Thank you.

rufaai:

If we are unable to trace your transaction, we are to follow up with Paga and not you. Contacting the gateway service provider is a wrong move

@rufaai, unfortunately contrary to what you have stated up there, after spending a lot on phone calls just to repeat myself and details to paga CS reps, they finally acknowledged the receipt of the payment and issued a refund today. I was only coming to inform the community here that this has been resolved when i saw your post bragging about how its your responsibility to deal with this and me going about it the wrong way, hence this lengthy post. It'll interest you to know that the only response i got from gigalayer throughout all this was that "they could not trace my payment". What if it was an international payment gateway? How would I have been able to liaise with them? As far as I'm concerned gigalayer failed in their role to serve as an intermediary between myself(user) and their payment gateway(paga).

rufaai:

login to your billing account at https://gigalayer.com/billing and hit the[b] Get Support[/b] button on the menu then select Billing Support to open a ticket!

The very first step I took when this happened was to call you @rufaai, I relayed my complaint and you told me to open a ticket, I immediately did as instructed and if it helps here is the ticket number: #YP552. Nothing useful was said there, infact that ticket has been unattended to for more than 24hours, i had to close it just now after paga refunded me. So don't come on here preaching about opening a support ticket as if it is efficacious and would have made any difference.

rufaai:
Don't go on forums uttering very damaging words, it's very wrong!

Should I have sat down and allow the funds to just disappear because I'm dealing with a host who is nonchalant about the challenges of her clients? Did I not explore every other method of in-house resolutions? Did you guys tell me to wait that you were/will handle the issue? Coming on this platform to air my complaints isn't and will never be wrong considering the position you guys put me in, what i think it does is hurt. Yes! It hurts because now you finally have to take me serious and offer explanations. I didn't come here originally to wash undies but your post has gotten me infuriated and if you do not apologize I'm going to say too much on this thread that might leave you guys and your business very unhappy.


Thanks to the guys at PAGA they really impressed me when I finally got in touch.

Bless.

Hello @gmart

I am glad that your challenge is resolved. In that case it means your transaction has a glitch at Paga's end or at Interswitch's. Either ways that is enough to justify as to why we could not see the transaction at our end (final point).

As per your support ticket YP552, I have uploaded it here for anybody who want's justification: https://www.dropbox.com/s/32b4vuxnis844qt/Conversation%20-%20YP552.pdf?dl=0.

You said we've not responded to you which is clearly not true. In fact our Billing Staff has been following up with you to get your bank alert reference for us to help in tracking it with Paga but you closed this ticket your self. The above extracted PDF has all the communication you had with us.

See what you're saying here now, so inhumane of you.

gmart:
I relayed my complaint and you told me to open a ticket, I immediately did as instructed and if it helps here is the ticket number: #YP552. Nothing useful was said there, infact that ticket has been unattended to for more than 24hours, i had to close it.....

...Did you guys tell me to wait that you were/will handle the issue? Coming on this platform to air my complaints isn't and will never be wrong considering the position you guys put me in, what i think it does is hurt. Yes! It hurts because now you finally have to take me serious and offer explanations.

Sadly I see you've been a customer with us with even active products/services. Why would you do this?

Well... I am sorry that we fell short for you and thus it is obvious we are not able to meet your expectations. To the rest of our happy customers we appreciate them and we will continue give to them our best.

Now that your funds are publicly confirmed refunded, we will have to take you seriously as you said and revoke all your services with us in violation of our terms of service with you. This is considered threatening to us, thus you have to move to another hosting provider on wards. We will officially contact you for that anyway.

We appreciate the time you've been with us and the 4 other websites of yours that we have served!

Yes, Giga Layer should revoke any services they have offered you as this is against their Terms Of Service which you agreed upon when you registered.

So you should find another hosting provider.

@rufaai, It will be in the best interest of your business to modify your post with a "..." as there isn't a delete post function.
You have made that post in anger, I have been there and inside you a part of you thinks you've acted too fast but your anger will keep shutting that part up until you get over it.

The customer has every right to be infuriated and except you are looking for the slightest reason to feel threatened, you won't see any real threats in those statements. Only a shady person will consider "dont push me or I'll say more" as a real threat.

Placing uncensored excerpts of your conversations with your customers is a violation of their privacy.

You may seem to be getting your pound of flesh by cancelling this guy's other 4 websites but think about the audience you were trying to justify your company's actions to by posting that ticket log. You think they will want to do business with a "trigger-happy" host who will threaten to pull the plug on their websites at the slightest hint of being threatened? That's just weak.

The way people play with business and PR.

@DualCore1 I understand completely. It is also very very sad that I had to do this and you know me!

The client will most likely use this kind of mediums in future and this is only a small challenge of payment gateway, we could have refunded him or provision his service in the window period of getting it sorted out. But instead he's chose to use that to libel and slander our business.

In my first response, I gave him my address to contact me directly and I was going through his account but it's still of no good to him (from his trailing his response)

We're a service company and I think (I stand to be corrected) it is crucial that we keep our integrity and ensure our services gets to the the right customers with goodwill and ethics, to whom our services are fully tailored for.

While our staff are putting efforts to assist him. He went to Paga to claim refunds and came to Nairaland to defame us, all in under 48hrs while still being a customer we've served successfully for months. After going through all his other support tickets in the past I saw how our staff have been giving him commendable support. It is not like he doesn't know us or how to reach us!

I'm not sure what else we could do.

Jumping into conclusion in less than 48 hours. Nigerians are impatient. I have been using Gigalayer right from SBOhost days

rufaai:
Hello @gmart

I am glad that your challenge is resolved. In that case it means your transaction has a glitch at Paga's end or at Interswitch's. Either ways that is enough to justify as to why we could not see the transaction at our end (final point).

As per your support ticket YP552, I have uploaded it here for anybody who want's justification: https://www.dropbox.com/s/32b4vuxnis844qt/Conversation%20-%20YP552.pdf?dl=0.

You said we've not responded to you which is clearly not true. In fact our Billing Staff has been following up with you to get your bank alert reference for us to help in tracking it with Paga but you closed this ticket your self. The above extracted PDF has all the communication you had with us.

See what you're saying here now, so inhumane of you.


Sadly I see you've been a customer with us with even active products/services. Why would you do this?

Well... I am sorry that we fell short for you and thus it is obvious we are not able to meet your expectations. To the rest of our happy customers we appreciate them and we will continue give to them our best.

Now that your funds are publicly confirmed refunded, we will have to take you seriously as you said and revoke all your services with us in violation of our terms of service with you. This is considered threatening to us, thus you have to move to another hosting provider on wards. We will officially contact you for that anyway.

We appreciate the time you've been with us and the 4 other websites of yours that we have served!

I just had to catch this in a quote.... This is good

Now this is something you don't see everyday

Ordinarily, to resolve a payment issue like this shouldnt even take upto 24hours. I know Nigerian businesses and their lame customer support. There is no professionalism at all. A client was not satisfied and became angry and rufaai paid him back with suspension of their services to him. If I were the op, I wil spend my last money until I get your server hacked and put you out of business. This is why I can never host anything with any Nigerian webhost. It's either siteground.com, enom.com or stablehost.com or nothing.

Even if I call MTN now and start insulting them, the customer care or the owners of MTN will not block my line. They need me. Should Etisalat and other networks be going around in forums looking for people that use their numbers and who bashed them so that they will block their lines?

Forum is a place to come and heap your burden. It's a community.

Your terms of service cannot include 'do not bash us on online forums or we will suspend your account with us.' That will be trampling on the client's fundamental right to be heard.

If you try this n0nsense with me, I wil direct my Pakistani hackers never to sleep until they bring down your server to the mud.

I thought rufaai is an enterpreneur, now I know he's just a boy. Your response is unethical, unbusiness, unprofessional, unbecoming and uneverything.

Go to any back and start making noise and insulting them and telling people that the bank is a fraud. The manager will quickly come and usher you into his office and beg you. The bank will not shutdown your account. Never!!!

Hey @CreativeWeb.

To begin with we DID NOT suspend any of his websites, we advised him to leave. And yes it is part of our terms of service never to go on public and post such things about us. You cannot be our customer and be defaming us out there at the same time, most especially when you are not communicating with us your challenge or when we always help you and you know it!

Secondly, ye we are not MTN or a Bank and our terms of service are not the same neither are we working with their own business model. Also know that any business can choose not to render their service to certain people. In fact some even keep a blacklist of customers they won't serve! You've never see airlines permanently reject someone from flying with them ever, or banks or infact any business? Try reading online if you've not.

We cannot keep everyone, some are a threat and some we cannot even accomodate. Thus the best we can do is ask them to leave! Most importantly we're not after money, but a service that is great and acceptable to a niche market and particular kind of customers. Two people here have already testify to our nice service. We would like to add more of these people who are loyal and calm to our customer array.

"Forum is a place to come and heap your burden"? Wrong, a forum is a place to discuss, share and improve a community not a place to heap your burden. @Seun didn't create Nairaland for that, but for healthy communications and hence even Nairaland deny/block certain users!

I'm just doing what's best for us in the long run. I will never push our product or services down people's throat, and I expect people to be amicable in solving their challenge us. We made a promise to help from day one someone signup with us, and we will forever continue to upload our promise. Part of our ethics are to always be nice to people and guess what, we do so to even non-customers! (Check this forum for some of my posts)

Thank you for your own view on this, be free to drop me an email if you want. I may not be here now.

CreativeWeb:
Even if I call MTN now and start insulting them, the customer care or the owners of MTN will not block my line. They need me. Should Etisalat and other networks be going around in forums looking for people that use their numbers and who bashed them so that they will block their lines?
Forum is a place to come and heap your burden. It's a community.
Your terms of service cannot include 'do not bash us on online forums or we will suspend your account with us.' That will be trampling on the client's fundamental right to be heard.
If you try this n0nsense with me, I wil direct my Pakistani hackers never to sleep until they bring down your server to the mud.
I thought rufaai is an enterpreneur, now I know he's just a boy. Your response is unethical, unbusiness, unprofessional, unbecoming and uneverything.
Go to any back and start making noise and insulting them and telling people that the bank is a fraud. The manager will quickly come and usher you into his office and beg you. The bank will not shutdown your account. Never!!!

With the conversation flow on this thread Gigalayer rufaai it will be in your interest to edit the posts you have made here and implore those that have quoted you to delete as well. There is only one word for the customer service rendition here DESPICABLE. He allegedly violated your terms and you will close down his accounts, what does it tell a prospective customer but you turn around to post private communications here?

If I were chairman of your company, I will fire you on the spot but wait it seems you own the company. Stop digging a hole

@rufaai, your points are baseless. Which lawyer drafted your terms of use? Or you think terms of user or service is gotten from other people's website and you merely edit and use?

A company can decide not to host p0rn sites. That's different. But you cannot throw me out from your platform just like that becos i made a complain against your lame customer support on a forum. That's the unthinkable.

You advised the client to leave. Just listen to yourself. Are you a businessman or a joker. Listen, one client will leave today, morrow another will leave, next morrow another will leave. And you will keep advising them to leave. Ar you serious at all?

No airline company will reject any customer who wants to fly with them. It's not done. Unless the customer wants to travel with prohibited materials. Even if I walk up to Etihad airways now at MMIA and say at the hearing of everybody that 'I had a very bad experience the other time I flied with them and I complained and they treated my complain without concern.' Then I will turn around and say, 'anyway, give me ticket for Dubai.' Will they say no and advise me to stop flying with them? Or wil they apologize and try to appease me?

"A forum is a place to discuss, share..."

Discuss what? Share what? I didnt say a forum is a place to insult and abuse one another. It's a place to heap your burden and fellow community members will help you resolve your burdens or issues by discussion and sharing ideas. One can come to a forum and create a thread: "I was raped, what should I do?" It's a burden and she needs community attention. One can also come and create a thread: "Pls help, Paga and Gigalayer are trying to mess me up". It's a burden that will trigger discussion that will solve the issue.

Pls dont provoke me to register and host a domain: www.gigalayer-is-fake.com and optimize and advertize it heavily.

@rufaai

I have tried to reach you privately but you aren't responding. I thought you were still asleep or caught up in something until I noticed your reply here this morning and that's why I have decided to reply you again on this thread. if it helps you must understand that I got paga's attention from this same thread, but they didn't even respond to the post here. I do not intend to push it further as you almost have more posts than myself on here. If you misunderstood me and saw my post as threatening like you stated, then I withdraw my statements but if this is some vendetta for something else entirely then let me know.

God bless.

Well I am not siding with Giga Layer but every company has her terms of use which every customer agrees upon sign up.

The terms of service have stated that No customer should come to forums yes it's their terms and they must adhere to it. One thing about Nigerians is that we do not read terms ..we just scroll down and click Accept without knowing what it is..

I remember a website that their terms states we should not open any PayPal dispute even if they don't give us what we paid for. Can you imagine that? So it's their rules and they have the right to choose who they will serve.

As for OP..you were Un professional.. let's assume it was an international processor or a processor that is undisclosed. . Won't you wait for Giga Layer's help? You would not rush to contact anybody else but because you felt it was Paga and that is actually wrong business wise. Sometimes issues like this occur as a result of a malfunctioning API system which would not detect the payment and takes a while to resolve..it's all about patience.

And as for Rufaii your statement should have been made privately..I mean the part were you ask him to leave or posting his ticket conversation displaying his real name. ..should not have been public. It's against the user Privacy (if you have a privacy polocy)

Well, it's all good

Thanks guys....We are currently working with gigalayer on how to resolve this issue amicably without anymore tantrums. I'll let you know how it turns out. Tempers have flared yes, but we're humans and nothing is unresolvable when people are rational.

Thanks for all your comments. I believe myself and the host have definitely learnt a thing or two.

God bless.

As promised, I just want to inform everyone that we've peacefully resolved our issues with gigalayer and personally I think Rufaai is quite a nicer guy than you'll profile from his responses on here .

I would have said a lot more but since I'm not getting any discount on my new order , I'll stop here

N.B: Sites were never taken down, they are live and still working perfectly.

We're happy again.

God bless you all.

Did you know Google landed me here? All In the Name of trying to verify if gigalayer is authentic.

Thank God it was resolved
Rufai needs to learn, I suggest he reads HOW TO MAKE FREINDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE by DALE CARNEGIE


Well I think I will give GIGALAYER a trial

I hope they don't mess up coz I will not only put it on nairaland I will also promote it with Google Ads.

Did you know Google landed me here? All In the Name of trying to verify if gigalayer is authentic.

Thank God it was resolved
Rufai needs to learn, I suggest he reads HOW TO MAKE FREINDS AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE by DALE CARNEGIE


Well I think I will give GIGALAYER a trial

I hope they don't mess up coz I will not only put it on nairaland I will also promote it with Google Ads.

Please is this guy a robot? I'm interested in this guy called nobody