To preface, I used to own a web hosting company but sold my customers after I came to college. I started hosting various websites with Cirtex Hosting and my experience has just been top notch so far.
With such incredibly low prices and after experiences with numerous hosts over the past 5 years, I didn't think that Cirtex would render the outstanding service that it has provided over the past year.
I have uptime monitored for my account and I'm amazed to see such a high uptime percentage ... much better than all the previous companies I have hosted with. I'm not hosting mission critical sites, but it's still wonderful to receive mission critical service for my small sites (at a cheap price to boot!).
Support is very competent and responsive. My support requests are usually answered within the day and issues are mitigated quickly. All in all, my experience with Cirtex has been top notch, and I would recommend them to anyone.
Hope someone might find this review helpful ... really do appreciate a good host when I come across one ... after being in the industry I know its hard to deliver a quality service, but Cirtex definitely delivers.
I signed up three weeks ago. In that time I've had constant SQL server issues, very slow load times, four complete outages and the server was hacked at least once.
Reponse from tech support is slow as well and not very informative. From what I read of other clients there they have similar issues but apparently the server I had been put on was the worst. At this writing the server is down yet again.
I packed my bags and moved hosts and I am now demanding a refund. Avoid this company at all costs.
Around a year ago I hosted my forum with Cirtex hosting. I had a virtual dedicated server plan for around 4 months (at about $40 per month) and I was not impressed at all to say the least. For the first month or so it was fine and the server could cope with the large amount of CPU and RAM power required to run the forum...
However around 2 months after initially transferring the forum over the the VDS I noticed that the people on my forum were complaining of the forum being offline for hours and hours during the day. I thought that it might have been a one-off, or that there might just be some problems at Cirtex...So I waited for it to cool off. But after around 1 week there were still complaints from everyone and I came home from school quite often to an offline forum.
I told my dad about this (who manages a whole heap of dedicated servers at his work) and he started to investigate. After around 2 weeks of back and forward emailing with the Cirtex employees (who were total retards who couldn't speak English, nor understand what the hell a server was) we finally figured out that the VDS managing system was automatically shutting down my forum because it was using too much RAM and/or CPU. It's very weird, because they advertised their VDS server as having "1gb of swap memory and 256mb of dedicated", but apparently a lot of the dedicated RAM was used to run CPanel and the swap memory was totally unreliable and caused my server to ****ing crash when it swapped out.
I never once, throughout the 2 months that this **** went on, received any sort of warning or notification that my forum was using too many resources. All they did was shut me down automatically and cost me time, money and visitors....And I paid $40 per month for the experience.
I now receive extremely high quality hosting for free from my dads company, because they had a free server available. It has never been offline once in almost 1 year and is really fast and reliable.
I will never host with Cirtex again as long as I live, and I'm sooo happy that I'm no longer with them
I'm trying to leave my old host, and consolidate all my websites into one host. I have about 5 websites, each running php/mysql with community features such as message boards and flash video.
In total on all the websites I have, i would say that the average is about 30 users online at the same during peak hours.
I need a host with the following at minimum:
# Web Server API - Apache # Supported Operating System - Linux # PHP Version - Minimum - 4.3.3 # MySQL Version - Minimum - 4.1 # GD complied with your PHP Build - Yes # SendMail - Yes # PHP safe mode - OFF # PHP memory_limit - 32M # Unlimited addon domains # FFmpeg # FFmpeg-PHP # Mplayer + Mencoder # flv2tool # Libogg + Libvorbis # LAME MP3 Encoder # PHP file_uploads - 1 # PHP post_max_size - 100M # PHP max_input_time - -1 # PHP upload_max_filesize - 100M
I plan to eventually move into a dedicated server, but can't afford the costs at the moment. However, I need a host where i don't have to worry about:
# my databases corrupting # slow connections # account suspensions for mundane things # downtime
I'm trying to leave my old host, and consolidate all my websites into one host. I have about 5 websites, each running php/mysql with community features such as message boards and flash video.
In total on all the websites I have, i would say that the average is about 30 users online at the same during peak hours.
I need a host with the following at minimum:
# Web Server API - Apache # Supported Operating System - Linux # PHP Version - Minimum - 4.3.3 # MySQL Version - Minimum - 4.1 # GD complied with your PHP Build - Yes # SendMail - Yes # PHP safe mode - OFF # PHP memory_limit - 32M # Unlimited addon domains # FFmpeg # FFmpeg-PHP # Mplayer + Mencoder # flv2tool # Libogg + Libvorbis # LAME MP3 Encoder # PHP file_uploads - 1 # PHP post_max_size - 100M # PHP max_input_time - -1 # PHP upload_max_filesize - 100M
I plan to eventually move into a dedicated server, but can't afford the costs at the moment. However, I need a host where i don't have to worry about:
# my databases corrupting # slow connections # account suspensions for mundane things # downtime
so ive had powervps and they i thought they were good well i just got cirtex for my moms small business and we had some issues. the guys at cirtex were very helpful and fixed my mail issues and even offered to give me a free dedicated IP.
Do they do a good job of supporting OSCommerce? I want to customize stuff using OSCommerce for my site. Let me know from those who have used OSCommerce with Cirtex hosting.
i have been waiting for my vps for 2 weeks, support is poor, no answers by email and icq. now i have a vps but it has a technical problems, hoster has given me another one. now i have two vps's with the same dns's o_0. domain works from the old server and i cant it make to work from new. i cant change the ip's of dns's by domain registrar. stupid situation: support hosting-ie.com says the domain registrar have to change ips's of dns's but domain registrar says opposite.
Processor, Equal Class-Based Memory, 768 MB with cPanel
@ 625$ a year. paid in advance.
I have no issues with the providers.
We run couple of php/mysql sites. Fine.
BUT when I started to move my sites to Drupal CMS, problem started to come! Every now and then the server crashes. I need to go to the port 4643 and restart!
So finally I had to move out the drupal sites to my another reseller account located at DreamHost where I pay about 120$ a year for about 400GB! No issues of running Drupal CMS sites at DreamHost
Besides, I dont want to spend more money to buy more RAM (as suggested by the VPS support guys).
So, will move out from VPS ... back to a Reseller Hosting provider.. may be in another 6/7 months.
Well, pinpointed couple of good providers, including MediaTemple.
I've had Cirtex hosting for about six months now, I setup a simple Wordpress blog and the site was fine, other than being a bit slow to load on occasion.
About three days ago I tried to add an addon domain. I went through the usual process, and when I clicked submit I got an error telling me I could add 0 of 0 addon domains. The package I am on offered unlimited addon domains, but on the cpanel home page it said I had 0/0 available.
I opened a support ticket and told them it looked like my account wasn't configured to allow addon domains. Twelve hours later I got a response telling me how to setup the Nameservers for the domain.
I explained the nameservers are setup properly, the problem is my hosting account is not configured to allow me to add addon domains. Seven hours later I got a reply telling exactly what an addon domain was and how they work. Great, except that had nothing whatsoever to do with my problem.
I replied back again, this time with screenshots showing that my account was not configured correctly. The next day I get another response saying they had configured addon domains, it should work now.
I checked, and sure enough addon domains were now enabled, I added the domain and went to install Wordpress with Fantastico, and discovered that there was no longer Fantastico support on my account.
I reply back yet again, and tell them the addon domains work but now Fantastico is gone. Eleven hours later I get a response that Fantastico is once again enabled on my account. I logged in and clicked on Fantastico, and tried to install Wordpress again.
Now I get an error that that application is not available, please contact support. I tried pretty much all the applications in Fantastico and none of them are available.
This question brought me to this forum in fact. I would like to know about the provider called cirtexhosting(.com). Their plans seem to be quite reasonable and they suit the existing needs very well, so I would like you to tell me if the company itself is worthy of dealing with.
I'm new to building websites. Hope someone can help with answering a few questions about GoDaddy.
1. Has anyone had experience with GoDaddy hosting? How good is their service and pricing? I heard that they have a proprietary control panel, which may make it harder to switch hosts down the road if needed?
2. When I compare GoDaddy's hosting plans, with a Shared Hosting plan, for $14.99/month you can get 300GB diskspace and 3000GB Transfer.
With dedicated server, for $79.99/month you get 120GB diskspace and 500GB Bandwidth. What exactly is the difference between "Transfer" and "Bandwidth" in this case?
And based on the numbers, it appears that the Shared hosting plan allows more diskspace and transfer than the Dedicated server plan? What am I missing here?
3. If I have a website that is mostly text-based with virtually no pictures, graphics or video, what type of traffic can I support with a Shared hosting plan that offers 300GB diskspace and 3000GB Transfer.
Because of the great experience I have had with them I decided to post this here as they definitely deserve a good word put in for them.
I have never had a website before so I was not really sure what I was doing when I looked around for web hosting. I found this forum and I have been browsing it for a while, and I saw the link in the reseller advertisement forum and decided to go for it.
I am so glad that I did! I signed up for the special offer and my account was setup within an hour and I received a friendly email from Mark who is a member of staff welcoming me to nexplorehosting. I am in Australia but I get very quick loading times to the UK server.
Great experience and I would recommend them to anyone who is looking to start a website for the first time!
Have been with Site5 since 2006 and last 2 months the support has significantly degraded. Had 3 outages and 2 out of three times it took them longer than 24 hours to respond.
Earlier this month web access to my sites was locked due to high resource utilization.
Again they didn't respond my proposed solution. My sites were down for two days as the result.
Migrated to a different hosting provider and asked for a refund since I just renewed my 2 year contract with them in July. Was told no refund is possible since I am not a new customer (they have 60 days money back for new sign ups). Will probably be settling this with the help of my credit card company.
Any one had a similar experience? Any tips on how to handle the case when you sign up for a long term and the hosting provider doesn't deliver on the promise?
In my search for a new host, it seems like they're ALL the same. It's so hard to tell from reviews because they all have good & bad reviews. I'm trying to stay away from the ones who claim to give you "unlimited" space/bandwidth.
I found one that I can't find many reviews on called aTech Hosting. Not sure if that's a good or bad thing. I definitely want to go with a hosting company that will be around.
I paid for 6 months because it was a very good deal. During that time, it was down more than 10 times for extended periods... I was on the scratchy server, which sucked.
I never used it for any of my important sites, but still.
So, it was set to renew on December 16th. I didn't want to continue the service, because, uh, it sucked. I sent in a ticket asking to cancel, but that I didn't want my service shut off until the my pre paid time was up. They told me to use the cancellation form.
I did this, and I got an email asking why I was quitting. I said my site was down all the time, they couldn't really argue with that.
Fast forward to the next day, and there we have it. The sites are down. The account is deleted. What a bunch of sleazeballs... I specifically said not to close my account.
I can't in good conscience recommend Cirtex. Steer clear.
Can you please offer your ideas which type of plan is to be better chosen for a video sharing site www.cirtexhosting.com/shared.shtml or www.hostv.com/virtual.shtml, they both offer this feature, so what would be a better solution if I'm still quite unsure about the number of the visitors to the site?
1)I bought a vps from them, got it promptly, except it was set to the wrong port.
2)I requested it reinstalled without there 'extras' so my network admin could do it himself. They do not offer a reboot in there power panel.
3)They reinstalled it, but changed my root password, also it is still set to the wrong port.
4)I then spoke to there live support, they started talking then disappeared for about 10 minutes to chat on the phone without even telling me, leaving a paying customer sitting there thinking 'what the hell'.
5)I requested the VPS be set to my original password by email, and they haven't I just wanted a clean VPS to do my have my own install done on... how was that so much to ask of them?
I have now sent in another password request, but my advice to you all, steer the hell away!
I too had a very bad experience with this hosting too!
The host is not stable at all! I scheduled an hourly cron job there and it executed a couple of times and then totally stopped! I set up the cron job to make my life easier, not to give me more burden.
Some of you may remember when I was asking for help on a good dedicated hosting company. I looked around for a month and finally found a great company to host my websites, WANSecurity. I received at least 10 dedicated server offers, but chose to go with WANSecurity because of the server and service they offered me. With so many options out there, I thought it would be helpful for me to share my experience with some of you. I have been on shared hosting for about 10 years and have never messed with dedicated servers. I had no idea there was so much work with dedicated servers until I got my hands on one. I was used to getting everything set up for me at Lunarpages. Although I love Lunarpages, their dedicated servers are nowhere near those offered by WANSecurity. Robert, the WANSecurity founder, has been particularly helpful. I received a recommendation from a WHT forum member telling me to get in direct contact with Robert for the "best managed hosting" offer out there, and guess what... I think I got it. Robert and WANSecurity moved all my files, installed Apache, Red 5, set up my mail servers, configured all of my large databases, and did so much more.
Although I am new to dedicated hosting, their managed plans are world class and their servers are very reliable. No issues in the last 6 weeks for me. If you are new to dedicated hosting and don't feel comfortable running everything on your own, trust these guys. They do a great job and they are flexible. Their managed hosting plans are new but they have been around for 11 years. They know their stuff and most of all, they care about you. That's the great thing when you are a big fish in a small pond. They truly care for you and therefore offer you the best service. If you are experienced with servers, they are still a great choice. They will give you a great deal on a server even if you don't need all the managed hosting services.
Check them out at: [url]
You can also get in touch with their founder if you are interested. PM me for his email. Feel free to ask me any questions. I'm open to give you my personal feedback.
About us first, we do cPanel shared hosting and also (however you want to put it) fully-managed proactively monitored dedicated hosting - due to this we need access to our equipment all the time so we host it locally.
Ed from RapidSwitch contacted us via live chat on our website at the start of September to introduce the company, he offered us a rack from £650/mo, mentioned we could take it upto 32A power (obviously not for that price!).
We're based in Maidenhead (in the town centre), 5 minutes walk from RapidSwitch and 5 minutes drive from BlueSquare, as we use power-hungry Dell PowerEdges and the DC is closer to us we thought we'd have a look.
We arranged a tour. On the tour we were told about their dual diverse dark fibre, diverse power, how their staff support cPanel, how the rack would be fully managed by them but we'd be able to pop in anytime to do work, how they'd let us move in our kit during the night, sounded great.
The following day the whole Poundhost vs RapidSwitch thing went down, soon after RapidSwitch themselves went down too, which was slightly worrying.
We moved in, or tried to First time we asked for DC access it took 1 ticket, a wait of 60+ mins, then an angry phone call from me to get it sorted out, it was sorted out for the following day -- okay, strange? We moved in the next day.
Some days later we decided to move some of our live kit at BlueSquare over to RS for the evening.
4pm - I open ticket saying I need access to rack some live servers as per our verbal agreement when I signed up, and I get a reply saying No, as they don't accept hardware or visitors outside the hours of 8am - 8pm Monday to Friday.
4:30pm - I phone Randeep (sales guy) and talk to him, he talks to a Manager, arranges an exception, says a note will be put in my account regarding tonight and the other server moves we had discussed before I signed the contract.
4:50pm - I follow up this ticket to make sure they're ready.
8pm - Again, I follow up this ticket to make sure they're ready.
8:45pm - I arrive at BSQ after having sent them one ticket.
9:05pm - I leave BSQ after going through security, meeting a BSQ tech, unracking a box from BSQ1 and BSQ3, signing documentation, etc.
9:15pm - I arrive at RapidSwitch, no one answers the buzzer, so I phone. A member of technical staff (seems friendly, etc) takes my hardware, I ask "Can you rack this immediately?", I am told "No we're really busy", I mention that I had arranged this earlier, he replies "Well I wish they had told us!!!", I am then told "Management always arrange maintenance tasks at the same time and never think of the fu****g monkeys (he said this!!) that actually have to do the work, there is no communication at all"... He then goes on to talk about only 2-3 people being on shift in the evenings, how they have too much work, etc. I ask "Can it be done in the next hour?". Am told "Uhhhhh I'll try but Ive got a mountain of jobs to do". Tech then walks off with the servers, forgetting to take the rails, network cables and power cables. I mention this to him, he says "Oh, I'm not used to this Managed Rack malarkey". He then says "I'll update your ticket to say we took delivery of your hardware".
9:28pm - I drive off.
9:34pm - I arrive at my office, no ticket update. I wait around a bit and reply to the ticket asking if it can please be done ASAP. No reply, I then phone and ask what the deal is, am told on the phone "ohh we'll do it in 10-15minutes, when (unaudible) comes back, but usually colo orders are racked within 48hrs, we're really busy!" (so basically am told that what I'm asking isn't acceptable and they're too busy to cope -- not what you want to hear from someone who's supposed to be managing your hardware)
9:50pm - I phone up and ask what the hold up is. Am told your staff are too busy still, am also told that servers are racked within 48hrs of delivery. (So, basically I'm pushing my luck).
10:27pm - I get a reply saying your staff will do it as soon as they've finished their current jobs.
10:40pm - By this time I am getting customers shouting at me as this is taking too long, too right! I sternly reply to the ticket asking again to please rack them, once again explaining my situation.
10:49pm - I get a reply saying the servers will be racked as your tech has finished his other jobs.
11:08pm - I get a reply saying the servers have been racked but not plugged in, asking how I want them cabled - fair question, if not a bit obvious.
11:20pm - Servers are pinging
11:25pm - I have reconfigured the servers to work on the new IP range, so my job is complete, I then emailed them back asking if they're cPanel trained - turns out they aren't, although some members of their team might know bits and pieces - not what I was told on the tour, not useful to me at all.
I had a think about it over the weekend -- I wondered, if we can now only access our equipment 8am-8pm Mon-Fri (30% of each week) and they won't even allow a Dell engineer in out of hours, plus their staff are too busy to handle our requests in a timely manner -- what do we do if something goes wrong?
Worst case scenario is if a server physically broke at 5pm on a Friday and we didn't have the necessary spare part. We have 4hr SLA with Dell so they'd arrive at RS at 9pm but not be allowed in until 8am on Monday.
I decided it would be unwise for us to use a data centre which only allows us access to the building for 30% of the week and we should have been told before we signed our contract that we'd only be allowed in during those times. Being told their staff were cPanel trained bugged me too, especially if what they're selling me is a 'Managed' rack.
I wrote a long ranty email to them to nullify the contract, Paul Tacey-Green phoned me, we had a chat, he said they'd change the access time rules (but he hasn't yet), he mentioned that 2/4 of their staff on that shift had taken the night off sick and offered me some time free to show their commitment, I wasn't interested, I got the contract nullified and arranged to get out of there.
I then called BlueSquare, they provisioned a new rack, got me a new IP range sorted and assured they'd help with whatever I needed.
Getting out of there was interesting, a week later I opened a ticket to go there 19:30 one night, they made an exception to allow myself and a member of my staff in at the same time (only one visitor on DC floor allowed usually as their racks aren't secure).
We got in there really quickly, the tech guy was nice. (But there seemed only to be 2 techs on site, Paul, on the phone told me there should be 4 during night shift) Anyway, we get to our rack and find the servers they'd racked the previous week weren't done properly, firstly they'd randomly been racked in the middle of the rack rather than on top of the existing ones (at the bottom of the rack), and then, quite scarily/hilariously, the bottom one they'd racked (in the middle of the rack), the rails weren't put in at the back, so it was defying gravity and mysteriously HANGING at about a 15 degree angle in the rack!
We packed up our stuff as fast as possible, got out of there. We got into BlueSquare 10mins later, by the time we reached the door there were already BlueSquare techs waiting for us! They immediately took all our equipment out the back of my car and put it next to the rack so we could get it all installed.
Anyway, I thought I'd just share my experience of RapidSwitch - Im sure they have lots of happy customers. I'm just happy we got out of there before we moved in too much kit. I couldn't handle the thought of giving them another chance, them failing and us being forced to move out some busy shared servers at 7:30pm one night! We'll be staying at BlueSquare from now on.
I went there for the low prices to startup my Shoutcast station. At $3 a month, it sounded too good to be true. I got my service, and the owner, seemed like a nice guy. He was very helpful, and was eager to help me get started. This was back in March. The first half of my stent there was great, however, in the last half, downtimes and even a data loss was getting on my nerves. I saw some really personal issues and arguments in the IRC server about the owner and staff, and even some back talk and really personal stuff that I wish I never had heard.
Because of the downtime, the owner did provide me with some free service and features. In these times, I was itching to leave, but the owner lured me back in with something better.
In this time, the service was 'okay', no real big complaints, I was even promoted to an IRCop, on the server.
Four things happened.
1) There was an incident in the chatroom with a regular joke we have done may times was taken really the wrong way. (I did not use my IRCop powers when this happened)
2) After a long outage (last night from 'this' post date), I was the only human on the irc server. In order for me to ask the owner what happened, I silenced a eggdrop bot by banning it from the main room. This was so I can get a new message notification when a real person enters the room. The bot posted every 2min, and it was at 2am in the morning.
3) I actually found a pretty big security hole in the control panel, the owner thanked me yesterday, and was furious the next.
4) because of the top three things, the owner basically got extremely mad and took away my IRCops.
Those 4 things basically were the last pieces of trash I could take. Yes, I forgot to unban the bot I mentioned in #2, but is that a good reason to get me out? Tonight, after a somewhat heated discussion with the owner, my account was instantly closed, all http/ftp pipes closed. I am very lucky I saw the owner start to fall into this cycle he seems to do, I had a full backup of the space I had.
In a nut shell, I would highly advise people NOT to use Maximum-Hosting. If you want low prices, frequent downtime, and the possibility your data could be gone in an instant, this is the host for you!
I can only hope no one else falls into the nightmare I have had to put up with for cheap hosting.
I am interested in finding out any experiences people have had in the last year or so with Savvis or Net2EZ.
I'm primarily interested in experience with the IP connectivity they provide, as well as their co-location, reliability, etc.
I have experience with Savvis from quite a while ago, but presumably that experience may no longer apply.
It's likely we will end up buying transit from multiple carriers and deal with BGP, etc.
But I am also interested in hearing about Savvis's Diverse Internet availability product.
As for Net2EZ, I'd be primarily interested in hearing about their colo services and if anyone has had experience connecting to Carriers in the next door Equinix facility.
I'm currently running a vBulletin message board with about 26,000 members. At any given time there are about 200 members actively posting.
Right now, we're on a dedicated server with Ilon hosting, however, my members are still complaining that the site runs VERY slowly when there are lots of members online.
To make matters worse, I want to launch a weekly podcast for them, so I'll need even MORE bandwidth.
GoDaddy.com is offering dedicated server accounts with high bandwidth limits (ie 2000 GB). Does anyone have any experience with them? ...
I've been with Blurstorm for 2+ years and I can say alot of good thing about the company and support. I even gave them a 5 out of 5 of webhostingjury and went as far as to say I would give them 10 out of 5, so you can imagine how happy I WAS with their service until this past week.
I has been an absolute hell. First the server kept blocking my ip and locking my session, when I would try and upload files with filezilla. They suggested to try a different ftp software which I did and it worked. At first I thought it was my computer/isp/router, so I tried it from my friend computer, same thing. And by the way, I never had this problem before. So I didn't make a big deal out of it, even though I prefer filezilla.
Now a couple of days ago, seems every time I would browse the pages or try and use the admin section the site would go down, or at least that's what I thought. After sending 8 hours going back and forth with support(Robert) through their support ticket system, because there is not live chat, Robert tells me there is nothing else they can do because they dont see any errors happening and I would have to pay a 3rd party monitoring service to find out what the problem is.
I mean I completely understand that if they cant find the problem but the site was working couple of days ago and I havent done anything different, so something must of happened on their end. Also I uploaded the site onto a friends server with a different hosting company and the site works perfectly with no problems.
Now being left high and dry with no help from Blurstorm, I did a couple of more test and found out that the site was not down but was blocking my ip and locking my sessions and the only way around it was for to renew my ip and to try again, but that would only help me for a couple of mins before it locked it again. Again, I also tried it from my friends computer and same thing. So I know for a Fact that it has to be from Blurstorm's end. I told that the server was blocking my ip and locking my session and haven't heard from them for over 16 hours, which is horrible customer service compared to the way they were before.
The main reason I stayed with blurstorm was for their support and quick response and I've referred them a boat load of business, and this was not the first time i've had problems with the server and support but I didnt make a big deal out of it and from now on no more referrals.
Well there is my review, sorry it's a little lengthy but just wanted to give an indepth review.
Second part - need suggestions for new hosting
From what I've gathers from searching that are reliable
precision effect jaguarpc innohosting
which would you recommend from those or any others?
And my site is based on joomla 1.5 + virtuemart so it should work with it.
I thought I would try the new "cloud" VPS service that WestHost is using to handle all their VPS customers now.
First, if you have a billing issue, expect at least a two day response time. I have had two questions for the billing department. The first was handled in two days with great apologies from the responder on the length of time it took to get back to me. I sent a followup ticket to the same billing department -- that was two days ago and still no response. So obviously, the apology was not genuine or they wouldn't have let it happen again.
Just wanted to make sure everyone understands that:
1) VPS.net has no refund policy in place. No refunds. I asked for one only one day after signing up, and the response is no refunds period.
2) My other hosting experiences allowed me to keep the same base price I signed up for as long as I maintained the hosting account with them. Not VPS.net. Pricing will change at their whim. If you sign up in April, you will receive a huge increase in May. Yeah, they say they "may" have some coupons or something in the future, but hey -- how can you budget your hosting expenses if you don't know what they will be exactly?
I have had accounts with a lot of hosting companies in my many years in this industry, but none as uncustomer friendly as VPS.net -- and its such a shame since their shared hosting sister company -- WestHost -- is famous for their customer service and friendliness.
This is a lesson for everyone, regardless of the type of hosting you're looking for, ALWAYS do your homework first!
I'm a bit embarrassed to admit it, but in March I signed up with a hosting company based solely on the claims on their website, and their wonderful presales responses to my questions. The company is M6.net.
It started off well enough, sales responded to my list of about 20 questions, and I received my reply during the weekend, which impressed me because I thought I was going to wait until the following Monday to hear back from them. I signed up for their Designer plan, which offers 200gb storage, and 1.2tb of bandwidth, with a max of 17 websites.
I signed up for the account and waited. No account setup confirmation email, nothing. So I submitted a support ticket, and it was resolved quickly. So I'm on my way now. I'm a .Net developer, so the first thing I notice is that .Net is disabled on my account. So I submit a support ticket, it was resolved within an hour.
So now I go about checking on all the other things that are supposed to be included with the account, one of which was smartermail. It was setup using hoarde. So I submit a support ticket. Along the way, there were 3 or 4 other things that I noticed that weren't setup right and needed to be corrected, so I submitted support tickets. This was all on day 1. Unlike the first 2 issues, rather than hearing that it's resolved, for all my subsequent tickets I get a response telling me that my issue has been escalated to level3. I don't know what that means because there's no explanation included, but I figure it must mean that my tickets are important.
I don't hear anything back the first day, which is acceptable, because my requests obviously require more attention than my first tickets. So the next day (day 2), I submit another ticket inquiring about the status of all my outstanding tickets. I get a reply telling me that they are working on them.
All of day 2 passes with no resolution on what should be fairly simple fixes. Day 3 rolls around, and that's when I started getting annoyed. I submitted, you guessed it, a support ticket asking for a status, and I get the same reply, "they are working on them". At this point I'm getting really irritated so I decided to call them to see what was going on.
This was where I started to see the light. A man answered the phone, I could barely understand him because he had a heavy accent (which is no problem in and of itself) but there was also a lot of background noise that sounded like a tv. He answered and mumbled a company name that I could not understand, but it was not "M6", when I replied to him "Oh, I'm sorry, I was trying to reach M6 tech support", he stammered a bit and said something to the effect of "Oh, yes, right, this is M6, can I help you?". To which I replied "No, I really don't think you can", and I hung up.
I had a sinking feeling in my gut, because I realized at that point what a mistake I had made. It was then that I started researching them and found one blistering negative review after another. So on day 3 I submitted a ticket (my last one I might add) and requested that they cancel my account and issue my refund per their 30-day money back guarantee.
I've yet to see the refund.
The fact that you're reading this shows that you're already doing the right thing. Read reviews, weigh the good against the bad, especially watch for hosts who care enough to log on and rebut negative reviews, and ask lots of questions here on WHT.
