I had read a lot of good things on these forums about ASmallOrange. So I finally decided to sign up with them for my friend's website which I manage & design.
Unfortunately my experience was anything but good. The issue was that I am based in India & I design my friend's website who is based in the US. Since my friend is a non tech savvy person he gave me his credit card number and asked me to manage everything from signing up for a new web host to designing the site.
Since ASmallOrange's billing department found that the address is registered based in USA but the IP address of the person signing up was not from USA, they marked the account as fraud.
I must say that I very well appreciate this system of fraud detection followed by them & am very much impressed by it. What I was not impressed with was the fact that they didn't bother to inform me about the same nor did they try to verify the authenticity of the account. Unaware of this, me & my friend kept waiting for more than 24 hours for my account to get activated. It was only when I raised a support ticket that they informed me that my account has been marked as fraud.
Subsequent to this I informed them about the circumstances under which this account was signed up & asked them to carry out whatever verifications they need to do with the end client or through the credit card company.
To my surprise again there was no reply from their end & this morning I find that my support thread was closed without reverting on the issue.
I guess its time for me to move on and host somewhere else. My own websites are hosted with Dotable and am very happy with them.
I signed up for a VPS at UltraVPS using their promotional coupon and special offer posted on WHT.
First- it took them 7 hours to activate my account, after bugging them.
Second- it takes them nearly 7 hours to respond to a support ticket.
Third- I am unable to login into the VPS control panel nor the FTP using the login information they have provided. I am not a newbie in hosting, I have several different VPS accounts.
I met these guys through this website and they promised me exactly what I was looking for... a fast, responsive web host with PHP5, MySQL and 5GB - 10GB of storage. I was previously with HostDepartment and they obviously oversell... my site load times were counted in minutes. Anyways, things started great for the first two weeks... the site was always up and clients were amazed at the speed and performance of the site. I considered bringing over 7 other "business" websites because the performance was so great.
Then about 3 weeks ago... the site went offline. It's the internet, stuff happens...
DDoS attacks, DNS conflicts, Server Upgrades, someone trips on the power cord, whatever. I file a ticket and the site is back up in about an hour or two. So, i forget about it. Few days later, its down again... for a LONG period of time... multiple hours.
I file another ticket and I'm told they are in the process of mitigating a DDoS attack.
The outage then starts showing a pattern.. my site will be up late in the evening and early in the morning... but from 11amCST to about 11pmCST.. its unavailable. After another day, I contact them and they say they are still being assaulted by DDoS but they have put measures in place to correct it... that was at the end of May. My site has been down for 2 days straight.. since around 11am CST on June 1st. I came online briefly during the morning of June 2nd... but went back offline around 11am on the second and has never returned. The previously quick responses to my tickets have been non-existant now... I have yet to hear a response to my ticket from June 1st.. I did add a note to it once a day at 11am for the purpose of tracking that the site was still down. I understand that may move it to the end of the queue... but it has been updated once a day, so there was plenty of time between updates to see it.
I highly advise to avoid these guys... I wasn't going to write this until I could access to my site again for fear of losing my database info... but at this point, it seems like my sites are already lost.
I would like to start off by saying M8 has always maintained an excellent uptime, HOWEVER, support has been a nightmare to work with and responses take forever. What prompted me to send this was our sites have been down for over 3 hours so far and you cannot contact anyone by phone and when you email there is no response.
After realizing that a response was going to take a while we decided to try a few things on our own and It appears as though we have been blocked by their firewall or something because we can access the sites via a anonymous proxy. We are still waiting for this issue to be fixed.
Why were we blocked ? Read on
We asked them about a week ago to update our instance of Sugar CRM and we told them that shortly we will be moving another domain to them and when we do this we will want to move our version of sugar.
They did the upgrade (again, response time was horrible), when it was done we went to our URL and found that it had never been updated. I asked them about this and I found out that they moved it to a new service and that the url we were using would not work with all the scripts I had running.
I accepted that and said fine, no problem, we will get our new domain over there and everything will be good. The only problem I had with this is now we are forced to move this stuff right away because our request was not done the way it should have been. Please note, we paid them $100 to update our Sugar version which is no problem…
I started to get ready to move our data and could not connect via FTP, I entered a ticket and a LONG wait later I get the reply, to login to your control panel do this. Needless to say that is NOT what I needed. I needed to know how to login via ftp because all attempts would not work. Keep in mind, that we also upgraded our plan with them.
Anyway, it appears that because we tried to FTP in so many times we have been blocked, however, this would not have been the case if they had answered our support question in a reasonable amount of time… My one contact there when you send him emails comes back with
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at m8solutions.com. I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses. This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.
<REMOVED FOR PRIVACY> user is over quota
--- Enclosed are the original headers of the message.
Can anyone please help with hsphere and how to FTP because apparently they are not going to help and now my entire office is unable to do any work because we cannot access our stuff…
Please note, I am a very patient person, but when it takes days to get an answer to a simple question and we are spending more money with them I lose my patience. I do not like to bash any company because we all have our problems, but this is crazy…
We let them know that we were going to do a post on WHT and still no response back. I feel horrible about posting this and will update you once this has been resolved..
About a month ago I transferred a live site from a host to siteground as they supported all the functions I needed. I could have transferred the site myself, but to help convince to move to siteground promised me a free no downtime guaranteed transfer (which apparently is company policy) So I let them do it. There was downtime during the transfer but not a big deal I was ok with that But then a few days later my site went down big time. Someone called me to tell me it was down and I didn't have access to a computer so I called siteground. The operator (besides having trouble understanding english) wouldn't even report that my site was down to support!! Finally I get back to the computer and report it myself. Their 15 min or less turned out to be about 45 Then when I ask if I am going to be compensated for the extreme amount of downtime like the promise but I get turned down at every turn the excuse being technically it was downtime because it loaded a blank page STILL downtime in my book since it was siteground's fault I hadn't touched it. To add injury upon insult my site that ran perfectly smooth before has numerous problems. Every time I submitted a ticket they either tried to make it sound like it was my fault (again I hadn't touched it) or gave me the "normally this is a paid service but we made an exception for you" line as if I would need the service if they hadn't messed up the transfer. My overall experience with their service left me disgusted. Not to mention when I cancelled the "guaranteed money back" withholds nearly 4 months worth of the year I paid in advance. I have since transferred the SAME site MYSELF to atechosting and now have had it running for a few days there and had no downtime during transfer or a single problem since.
I will say performance wise they were fine even though their was some 169 on my server.
I've hosted with ASO twice now. They are superb hosts. Probably the best. Most webmasters are more capable (trained in hosting mechanics) than I.
I ran afowl of ASO's forum/wiki/support system BECAUSE I am not an ubergeek. These support media are NOT accessible, at ASO, to the casual webmaster walking in with a simple-minded website. It might be prudent to check out the forum, before you buy in, to ensure this is in your league.
I'm with ASmallOrange ( ASO - www.asmallorange.com ) already for more than one year. I have to say I have been very happy with the quality and service I have received.
SERVER Server is very reliable. Yes, I encountered some issue months ago, because some DNS attack and password issue on ASO's staff, but they handle the situation very good and they was honest about it.
SUPPORT Their support is fantastic. Actually, I seldom contact support since everything is okay, but when I did, their reply is fast and prompt.
COMMUNITY FORUM They have good and active community forum.
PRICE Their price is reasonable. Yes, ASO do not offer "unlimited" but their prices compared to quality is okay.
MY SITE: Since it is required, my site with ASO : www.midave.com
well i used them for exactly one month, i thought 25/month, i can get much more ram and bandwith from linode.com
i send them like 6 times already, email saying i want to discontinue vps package
they say they need my billing password, so i give them to prove my identity.
then the tickets are closed!
this is repeated 6 times already. wth?
asmallorange had fantastic support for 3 years i have been with them with another hosting plan but lately i discover much more bang for your buck hosts with similar level of support.
I have been working with Xen over the last week or so and I can't figure out why the performance is downgraded so much when booting into Xen. There are certain things that seem just as fast but other things just don't seem normal.
I have tried this on two different quad-core systems, one new generation (York) with CentOS5 and one old (Kent) with Debian Lenny but neither seem to produce good speeds.
For example, when I use the default kernels I can usually get about ~600 score out of unixbench-wht and things such as top and core systems show up as 0% cpu when running top.
When I boot into Xen kernel however, whether it been from Dom0 or the guest OS, top uses about 3% CPU and unixbench-wht produces scores under 250.
I have set vcpus to 4 and have even tried vcpu-pin 0 0, 1 1, 2 2, 3 3 but nothing seems to be changing anything. The disk speeds seem about the same (hdparm). I'm assuming it is something with the CPU,
I have a VPS plan with them that includes 6 dedicated IP's. they have only issused me 2 so I have asked them to issues 2 more. I have sent about 10 emails to their billing department (which handles this) and no one has responded. The technical department is replying to me but only in regards to technical prblems.
I have two netscreen 25 firewalls linked together via an ethernet cable.
If I connect the ethernet cable to switches I get around 90Mbps. However, if I connect the firewalls together I barely get more than 30Mbps (25Mbps average using iperf). All rules are set to talk to each other and the setup works, but I don't understand where the speed has gone.
The firewall ports and firewall performance per port is rated at 100Mbps and there is little traffic on the other network ports. I have both interfaces set to auto neg duplex as if set to 100 full I get even worse performance.
I finally ditched Site5 at a host. So _anything_ should be better, right?
After only a week or so with ServInt I'm wondering if I made the wrong decision.
Now I thought a few hours resolution time with Site5 was frusterating, try waiting 6 hours, or 18 (my current ticket, still not resolved, with no reply after asking for an update several hours ago).
And having a tech answer the phone doesn't help much either if they don't have a clue how to troubleshoot.
First the tech insists that MX records need to be pointed to my host for OUTGOING smtp to work!
Then after sending him the necessary log files twice, he still insists I'm not giving him enough information to fix the problem and that MX records must be setup. When I call and ask if he read the log file snippets I had sent him, "no" was the answer! AAAAAARGH!
And then being told many times, that the problems been fixed. And then finding out it's not and that they never even TESTED IT before saying so!
Is it time to pack up and leave before I migrate all my customers there?
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I have been lurker for long time already but now decided to ask this question I have been wondering about past few months.
I rent an dedicated server from KeyWeb, with dedicated 100mbps link. The server itself isn't that good & fast, but it's just perfect for my gaming server (E4500, 2GB DDR-2 ram and 2 x 320GB sata 2 drives)
Now to the problem. Always when I download some big files with this server from ftp or html server, and if I only open one connection, speed is very poor... Like 1MB/s or so, but if I use some download manager or torrent client which opens more than just one connection, +10 or so... Then the speed is very good, sometimes it goes up to 15MB/s. The server is actually connected to 1gbps switch but I think the port is limited to 100mbps.
At speedtest (dot) net, I get results like 17mbps down and 8mbps down.
So... Is that normal or is there something wrong? I've not contacted them yet, but if this isn't normal. I will Ofcourse I'll try to solve this on my own.
and before someone asks if this ftp I'm downloading from is not fast enough... I can tell you, it's. I downloaded one big file from it at school and at max speed was about 9MB/s
I have read on this forums and google CSF seem to be the best firewall out there, so i installed it configure and run it. After the installation i found that i received a lot time out error on web service. Page take a lot longer to load. I think it's my configuration.
Can someone take a look at my configuration if possible please share your configuration. I really like to have CSF run without poor performance on web service.
I have had major problems with connecting to my shared hosting space from my home. Sometimes I can only view one page before it times out and other times I can not view any pages.
I have tried tracert, which seemed fine and there is no problem accessing the IP from any other location, only my house.
Has anyone got any ideas of what I could do? If I can not figure it out I am either going to have to get another ISP or move all my web sites.
I don't have a problem with Bluehost, but after getting this email tonight I would have thought that it's not that hard to have enough fuel and a big enough generator to last more than five minutes after a power outage. It seems like pretty poor redundancy planning if a major host can't last more then five minutes with no power. Hospitals and other places don't have any problem doing it with similar or bigger power demands.
Dear Bluehost Customer,
This evening (July 14th) from about 5:25pm-6:55pm many of our servers were offline causing significant downtime for many of our users. The outage was due to a severe power outage in the north end of Orem, Utah where our servers are located. We do have UPS backup as well as diesel generators, but at about 5:30 they finally gave out. The power outage was for much longer than that period of time, but the reserve power was eventually consumed in its entirety. When it rains it pours.
For users on box65-box145 there have been periodic problems with the Redhat linux kernel that we were using that was causing problems with the filesystem that your data is stored on. This issue has been causing periodic problems for users on those boxes. In the last few days we have resolved that issue which also caused those boxes to require a reboot.
The downtime is extremely regretable. We apologize profusely for the inconvenience to our customers and in turn to those who were trying to visit your sites during the outage. With the fixes we have put in place in the last few days coupled with other upgrades you should experience MUCH better uptime in the future.
Why has Ipower turned into a such a poor hosting service? I have been with them for years and now they are leaving me little choice, but to find a new provider. For years they were able to provide me with a smooth service. Over the last year I have experienced tons of down time, long wait time for customer service, and recently downed email service for way toooo long.
I'll second what is said about Lunarpages. They are an absmal McHost whose priority is to lure in as many customers as possible without bothering about the quality of their service. I challenge anybody to ring their telephone support line and see if somebody picks it up. I have tried to call ten times in the last six months and never been able to get through once, despite hanging on for ages.
Just today my entire website was down because Lunarpages moved it to a new server (without asking me) and screwed up. The website, Azam.biz has over 17,000 references to it in Google and is critical to my business. I sat drowing in sweat for hours. I couldn't get hold of anybody at Lunarpages by telephone or live chat and the one support response I received ws addressing an unrelated issue.
Worse thing of the lot is Lunarpages censors criticism them on their forums more so than any webhost I have ever know. Every time I post a comment about downtime or not being able to get hold of anybody on the telephone, they delete the post saying it is "incorrect". I have never met a company with such a Stalinesque censorship policy.
I have feared posting anything negative about Lunarpages on other forums because I've been worried about them closing down my account. But, after having suffered so much stress because of them today, I don't care any more.
I am going to back up by entire site now, because I'm worried they will close down my account after reading this. They are not the type of company to take on board criticism and use it to improve their offerings; their obsession is to stifle any criticism.
I am now suffering pain in my heart for the first time in my life because of how badly Lunarpages have treated me today. Their arrogance shows no bounds - they are smug, full of hype and don't give a damn about ruining customers' businesses.
I had 2 annual accounts with joeusa.com for my website hosting (2 websites). I was a 3-year customer, somewhat disatisfied with tech support service but without time to change hosting servers. My email quit receiving on one website/account about 2 weeks ago. Joe told me they had changed out a hosting server & that was likely the issue. I continued to have no email with Joe being evasive & nonhelpful. Upon logging into the control panel, I noted I was blocked out. I finally got him to agree to check on it, & he stated that the host spam blockers were not activated, & there was too much spam. I had made no changes, so the spam blockers had to be deactivated when they changed servers with no notification to me.
Joe shut down both of my accounts refusing me a prorated refund. I had paid one on Sept. 6 through PayPal for 1 year & the other on Nov. 6 through PayPal, also for a year. I was told by PayPal that they do not cover services, so FYI on PayPal, buyer beware. Joe gave me 24 hours to take my websites down. He also wiped out all of my email that was on the server that I had not been able to receive for the last 2 weeks & I lost all of it with no access to it.
I have email proof of what transpired & only want a prorated refund, what is fair, because I have not received near the full year service purchased for both accounts. He has refused, and I am considering filing fraud charges. My email documentation shows how a simple tech support issue turned into his cheating me out of my money when he cancelled both services & refused any prorated refund.
I have no idea why he has acted so vindictively, including wiping all non-spam email off the server that I was never able to receive, but, based on some of his comments, I believe that he either did not like our Judeo-Christian website or that he had been reading some of my personal email with political comments in the recent election. He was not even aware of my 2nd account until I made him aware that there were two, but he was aware of the ministry website/account, where the email issues were. The other account had no issues, but he cancelled both. Also, the Judeo-Christian ministry website had been hacked on his server by someone alleging to be Islamic about a year ago.
I am not making this report in vengeance. I am only trying to keep the same thing from happening to other consumers. This is a low-bid hosting company, and, once again the old adage, "You get what you pay for," is proven true.
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.
I've been using Xilo.net for just over a year now using a reseller account but the time has come to expand to a dedicated server. The level of support I've received from Xilo hasn't been 100% fantastic and my account is sometimes offline for one reason or another - impacting my sites.
I was just wondering if anyone else has any experience with Xilo and if so what your thoughts are on them? I read the other post from last year about Xilo being useless in setting up a VPN but just wondered if anyone else has dealt with them since?
I'm really not sure whether or not to stay with Xilo for a dedicated server or to move on.
I have recently ordered webhosting on not so well known 3fn webhosting company. The reason why I decided for them is because I had some money on my webmoney account, and I needed new webhosting (they accept webmoney payment).
I decided to go for starter plan to test their quality of service, because they didnt want to give me test account, although their site says they offer them. When my account was set up, it all seemed good - I got Plesk which I prefer over cPanel, etc. But when I connected to ftp server I noticed the server isnt that fast as its supposed to be.
After a few days server speed started to annoy me. My website went offline so frequently so that I couldnt belive. I told the admin im unsatisfied with hosting speed, any their uptime - he said they're going to fix it (or something like that).
Website worked fine after a few minutes, but then it went offline again. Today I wanted to access some files I host on my webserver from school, but I noticed the site was offline again.
I sent complaint to them by email and told them my website uptime is only like 60%, and got no response.
I was looking for a windows reseller plan. I researched lots and found mochahost. They seemed to have a good deal and had all the features I wanted. Anyway, I signed up and immediately requested that they add ClientExec to my account. (Extra $4/month).
After a few hours I received a welcome email and all was good, but no info on ClientExec. I contacted tech support through their chat program (which appears to always be a guy named "Tod"). He told me I needed to open a separate ticket for it. So I did that.
After 24 HOURS, I received a response telling me they generated an invoice that I need to pay. Which I did right away. The response also told me that I needed to re-open the support ticket after I paid for it so they would know to turn on ClientExec for me. The only problem is the ticket was already open.??
I waited about 6 hours and then I contacted "Tod" in tech support again via chat. He told me to open another ticket letting them know I paid, which I did, now 48 HOURS AGO. No response at all. I contacted "Tod" again right now and he can't help at all. In fact he told me to open another ticket. lol.
I did read some bad stuff about Mochahost, and now Im pretty worried. If I ever need support for my customers I can't wait 48 hours for a response.
I bought their hosting 8 months ago and they are simply jerk for hosting a big site on their shared hosting plans. Now I have transfered my domains to one.com which is very good for huge traffic sites.
