Stay Away :: Midphase Review

I have been hosting with An hosting / Midphase for almost 5 months. I am really disappointed with service quality. Here is my honest review:

My Background

* Four years hosting experience with other hosting companies
* 9 years experience as consultant in IT
* I have almost 200 websites and have 3-8 employees working for my websites in the last 6 months.
* I generally keep the websites in shared hosting accounts to minimize downtime.

Account:

I signed up for cheap hosting around thanksgiving time last year. It is something like 4.95 or 5.95 USD per month. I have 40 subaccounts (domains) an huge amount of disk and bandwidth. I just use 2-3% of available resources (disk and bandwidth).

Review

I am very disappointed with the service at midphase. Here are the details:

Technical Support:

First two months were fine. Once midphase was acquired by another hosting firm located in Europe, service quality declined rapidly. Support requests were addressed in 4-5 hours in the first two months. Later, they started to respond slowly.

Most of the time, I felt that my tickets are never read. It was like a robot responding my emails. Answers were generic and has nothing to do with my questions.

The second issue is that they seem to have lost customer touch. I remember telling customer service representative that my website is not showing up at all. I am told that it is OK. I pinged my website from 9 different computers. None of them showed that it is accessible. It is really frustrating to get an email like "Please check it again and if you have a problem still please run the following command ..."

Overselling

I checked the websites on the server where my shared hosting account is. There are almost 350 websites. It is reasonable.


Bad Neighborhood effect
The strange thing is that some of the websites are spamy on the server. I am pretty good at Search Engine Optimization. All I can tell you is that my two websites were heavily punished by google due to bad neighborhood effect. I asked Midphase to change my server. I got nothing.

First site was getting 3000-3500 uniques per day before switching to anhosting. Number of visitors were almost the same in the first 3 days. On the fourth day, it dropped to 400/day. Whatever I do, it never bounced back. Number of indexed pages on website were almost 4000. Now it is just 930. It is unique content. It is an established website for three years, I can't be sandboxed. Anyway, I gave up building that site.

I decided not to host any websites on anhosting even though I paid 1 years' price as there is no point in getting pissed off by bad neighborhood effect.

One employee just placed a newly developed website on hosting without my consent. Here is the result. Website was PR2. It dropped to 0 in 6 weeks. Number of visitors dropped by 74%. I decided to abondon that domain.

FTP

Worst service... After I decided to completely abondon an hosting even though it is paid for a year, I just used it for FTP.

In fact, failure of FTP is the main reason I am writing this review. I just get the following error. "Disk full -please upload later".

This is the first time in my lifetime I get "full disk" error from a shared hosting provider. It is very likely to be the only one in my life.

Uptime

host-tracker.com is the service I use to check server uptime. Here are the stats for the week of 2008-02-18.

Weekly uptime:71.86% Downtime:1 day(s) 23 hour(s)
Day 2008-02-24 Uptime:98.53% Downtime:21 min(s) 10 sec(s)
Day 2008-02-23 Uptime:100.00%
Day 2008-02-22 Uptime:100.00%
Day 2008-02-21 Uptime:97.48% Downtime:36 min(s) 14 sec(s)
Day 2008-02-20 Uptime:59.48% Downtime:9 hour(s) 21 min(s)
Day 2008-02-19 Uptime:6.27% Downtime:22 hour(s) 29 min(s)
Day 2008-02-18 Uptime:40.79% Downtime:14 hour(s) 12 min(s)

This is simply unacceptable. Those stats are for the first website I abandoned at anhosting.

Support Tickets

Once I got so mad and told them that I am going to leave a negative review at webhostingtalk.com. I am told that it is OK. I was busy and decided to keep quite to discipline them.

2 months later, I now have ftp problem. I decided to mention spesific issues happened two months ago. Guess what??? The ticket that I threaten to leave a negative feedback was removed without my consent. This is insane.

Network
I remember that their network engineers messed up with routers once. Anyway, they fixed it in few hours.


Conclusion
I have been living in US for 5 years. An hosting is the worst service company I have ever interacted in this country.

If I am given a chance to get the money back for the remaining 6 months in my contract, I won't hesitate for a minute to get the money back.

I recommend staying away from anhosting or midphase. It is just waste of money, time and other resources.