Forum Moderators: phranque
For reasons I'll never understand, they waited until the holiday season to migrate all of their customers to new servers, and completely change their hosting control panel. What has followed has been chaos: dozens of clients with sites shutting on and off, two hour hold times for support, webmail accounts completely wiped clean with no backup, receiving only a fraction of emails or not getting them at all. All my clients are losing a ton of money (especially in holiday sales), and I look bad because I referred them to this hosting company. It's a business nightmare, I have never seen a company fumble so badly.
Is anyone else having the same problem? Have you switched to a new host provider?
That said, I now work for a small web hosting place, which I'd like to think wouldn't play games like this.
I did get an email saying there was going to be some maintenance - but didn't read it.
If we were on the same host, you'd probably know it. They aren't just doing maintenance, they're doing a full on transition of their old Vdeck to a new one. They're migrating all of their client hosting accounts to new servers, checking the usernames and passwords in the process. You would have at least gotten an email mentioning the transition.
If you call your tech support and are on hold for 1-2 hours due to "extreme call volume", you'd be with the same host as me.
They even have a company forum where its not uncommon to see posts from the head of support or even the owner himself. Everything is transparent, any downtimes for servers are reported in the forum with frequent updates as to status.
There's good ones out there, you just have to find them.
I got phone calls today from three clients asking me to find them a new host company.
I'll lay odds that I used to use them. Would this, by any chance, be the same company that consistently scores #1 for malware distie and spam sites?
If so, they seem to have converted their business model to serve these people, which actually sort of makes sense. They buy lots and lots of domains and cheap hosting, ask zero questions, and then abandon them after a relatively short time. It's like people who join gyms after January 1st. The gyms base their business model on not having to serve a large number of people who paid for their services.
This makes people like me into a high-maintenance liability.
What I did was set up a VPS with a cheap provider with their own data center and a pipe right into the mainline. It is FAST. Really fast.
With a VPS, customer service isn't such an issue, as you are more or less on your own; which is fine by me. A huge part of my issue with Those We Shalt Not Name was that they were constantly mucking around with the server (including replacing the entire operating system with no notice). When the inevitable gremlins would come out, I would hit a huge brick wall. They would stall me for a week when the fix would be five minutes of resetting a counter or a switch in their httpd.conf file.
In Spanish bullfighting, they have these chaps called picadores, who's job it is to get the bull really upset, so the toreador gets a really angry beast when he comes into the ring.
That's what their tech support is. They should change their email from support@thoseweshaltnotname.com to picador@thoseweshaltnotname.com.
