Uplinkearth Sold

I've been an Uplinkearth customer for over 5 years. Recently, after battling many months of intrusion attacks that left customer websites hacked, Uplinkearth seemed to finally get the upper hand and things were settling down. Then they suddenly started sending out emails about upcoming "Platform Upgrades". I figured it was a result of what they went through, and they were building a better service for their customers. I started thinking otherwise when my client sites started actually getting upgraded.

Uplinkearth's claim to fame has always been their tech support. Aside from the time during the hacker attacks, I would almost always have tickets resolved within an hour, and phone support was equally great. However, strange things began to happen when I recently contacted support about platform upgrade issues. The first strange thing is that you have to contact a different tech support group, and you have to contact them via phone or a different tech support email address. For clients who have been upgraded, the new control panel doesn't even include an online ticket system.

This is where it really started going downhill, responses from the new tech support group were in such broken English that I couldn't even decipher what they were saying at times. Also, I will get multiple response on the same ticket, with one response explaining the problem to me, and another response telling me that they are now investigating the problem. Not at all like Uplinkearth tech support.

The biggest indicator that something was going very wrong was a tech support response that told me the reason I couldn't get to a client's website was because an .htaccess file was coded incorrectly and that I should change the coding or delete the file. I'm on a Windows hosting plan. IIS is the webserver, and it doesn't use .htaccess files.

So at this point it doesn't take a rocket scientist to put 2 and 2 together and figure out what's going on. So I submitted a ticket to tech support (the original support group) to ask them what is going on. I explained the responses I was receiving and point blank asked them "does platform upgrade = sold?", and they were considerate enough to tell me the truth.

Apparently Uplinkearth has been sold to Hostopia. The "platform upgrades" that are being peddled as a wonderful upgrade for the client is simply a migration from one data center to another.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying anything at all negative about one company being sold to another. It's a common business practice and there's nothing inherently wrong with it. The problem I have with it is the way they are presenting it to their customers. For me, the one golden rule for a hosting company is never lie to your customer. And no, they didn't specifically lie about anything in their emails, but in my book this is definitely lying by omission. Just tell us the truth, we're going to find out anyway, and if we like the service we'll stay. If we don't, we're going to leave whether you told us about it or not.

It's even posted on the hostopia.com website, so it's already public knowledge.

It may very well turn out that these new people do a good job with it, but that will be for each customer to decide individually. As for me, tech support was the #1 reason I stayed with ULE so this weekend I'll be migrating my 5 websites and all my client sites onto my new reseller account.