Saturday, April 04, 2015

Bananas, Domain Names, and Hover's Awesome Customer Service

To celebrate their 30th birthday, Verisign is giving away $35,000 in an online contest and they teamed up with a few partners to make it happen. I'm a big fan of [winning] contests and the price on this one was right.
“To enter the contest, all you have to do is register a really great new .COM domain. The .COM domain you choose should be all the things that make for a “great” domain name – original, memorable, and keyword-rich (but, we don’t have to tell you that).”
I've already bought a few domains through Hover (because they’re the best in so many ways) but I had a personal project site unregistered that I thought could be the perfect entry.

Lately I’ve been trying to find people eating bananas in Google Maps and through hours of mouse clicks and some sheer luck, I compiled a list of all that I found.

The grand total? One person.

But this sounded like the perfect chance to throw my name in the hat for the contest and fingers crossed, I submitted http://www.peopleeatingbananasingooglemaps.com/. They said submissions had to be original and memorable and I thought my site hit those requirements nicely.

One day goes by and I open my email to reveal a pretty disappointing message. My entry was denied due to one reason or another and I was pretty bummed out. I did however get another email though that was a total surprise as well. Hover reached out and said that they were sending something in the mail to me because they felt bad I wasn’t in the contest.

That's a really nice gesture and just the thought made me feel better about things. They wouldn’t tell me what they were sending but it literally just arrived at my front door and I wanted to share it with you.


Amazon gift wrapped box? Off to a nice start...


The card read: "Hey Mike, really sorry that your awesome site peopleeatingbananasingooglemaps.com didn't qualify for the Verisign contest. Hopefully this will help you get more noticed by Google Maps. From: Your pals at Hover."


Just by coincidence, today's also my birthday and when I first opened the box and saw this lump, I thought, "oh no, it's clothes. " Who wants clothes for their birthday?! They want doodads and gizmos!


Suspicions confirmed. Clothes. But Hover wasn't wrong. This hoodie will clearly get me more noticed by Google Maps. I mean, it's bright yellow!

Turns out there's more...

This isn't your typical run-of-the-mill-bright-as-the-sun-yellow hoodie...


It's a banana hoodie! Wha?! I had no idea this was even a thing! I probably should keep this in my car in case I see a Google Maps car drive by!


Long story short, Hover has some of the best customer service around. I'm not just saying that because they sent me a banana hoodie though. I've had to contact them in the past and they're super easy to work with and very down to earth. If you're looking to register a new domain or even interested in transferring to something better, give Hover* a try, you won't be disappointed.

Thanks Hover for the banana hoodie and totally making my day! It's actually surprisingly comfortable too!

*Yeah my link above is an affiliate link. I get a small kickback ($2) in the form of store credit and it's only fair because I found them first. But trust me, you'll love 'em.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'm laughing too hard to truly comment! Who knew banana hoodie even existed?!?