Final Results - HostWay

This is a follow-up to my original thread [url] regarding my client's experiences with HostWay.

I simply can't believe all of this, and I went through it.

The low points of the whole thing work out like this: In order to set up an SSL for my client's site, we needed a dedicated IP. If you do a traceroute on my client's URL, it resolves to someone else all together. Int he mean time, I tried to purchase an SSL through HostWay, and when they didn't respond in a week and a half, I e-mailed cancelling the order, and purchased a (thankfully) inexpensive SSL from GoDaddy. I got an e-mail back within hours from HW saying, literally, "We never processed your SSL order, so there's nothing to cancel. Let us know if there's anythig else we can do."

As I mentioned before, e-mail support seems to be handled off-shore, and it takes over a week for most answers. Phone support gets you, I found out, a service in Florida.

While the people I dealt with on the phone were always professional and polite, they literally could do almost nothing. I was told several times, "I have to e-mail someone in Chicago - no, I don't know who it is, all I have is an e-mail address."

Back to the SSL - seems HostWay already installed one on my client's site at some point - and it had nothing to do with my client. You could visit a secure version of the site, and it would tell you not to enter, as the cert didn't match the site.

My client and I both were on the phone with the Florida 800 number for hours at a time.

Average wait time to speak to someone was 30 minutes or so. I'm not carping about that part - but they were feeding us false information which was supposedly fed them from "Chicago." Specifically, I told them on the phone and via e-mail that the IP didn't resolve correctly, and that the old cert needed to be removed before a new one could go on (and only their SSL team can install certs, supposedly).

They told my client that the GoDaddy cert was causing them problems, and that it needed to be cancelled before they could install one of their GeoTrust certs. I nuked it - even though I knew better - and of course nothing was done. They lied to my client for several days, saying the new cert was installed (even though I knew it wasn't, and I told my client so, and showed them HW's tech was passing on false information).

This situation went on for almost two weeks. Finally, Monday night, my client got a supervisor based in British Columbia, Canada, who promised that he would walk "the tech admin" through fixing the problems that night. But that was only after my client threatened to pull his account.

Well, the IP is still screwed up, but they replaced the cert that night with one for which they charged my client an arm and a leg. The CC processing company is happy, so we let it ride, and they're now processing payments over the web.

If this is confusing, it's because I condensed many long days and nights into a few short paragraphs. Let's just say that HW didn't have their thinking caps on tight, because they committed to their preposterous stories to e-mails which we all received.

Later this year, at a conference to be held in Canada, a committee of nuclear power station operators will be discussing whether or not they should keep HW as the host of their site. Gee, I wonder what the consensus will be.