I have never used windows hosting, and yet am not going to do this, but want to know where to go in case of sharp need...
I have suggested aspnix.com as a specialized provider, and I looked it up. I can say that I expected for the higher prices... They have really cheap deals as I think.
Well, I need:
-The suggesstion of a really good reliabló provider for windows hosting.
-Your respectful opinions on aspnix.com in particular.
seems ASPNIX.com and one of my web sites hosted there are down again. Another website seems to be responding. Anyone know what's happening over there?
View 4 Replies View RelatedI highly encourage people to reconsider another web hosting company. I'm a programmer and usually have to pick a hosting for my clients, and because their down time can be as long as 1 week or even more they caused me a lot of embarrassment with my clients. though their support somehow helpful but they must reconsider their technical plan. I never experienced such hosting where we can get down time for week or some times couple a days!
View 6 Replies View RelatedI have been with aspnix using their VPS products for about a year now, 11 months if you want to get picky.
I went to them because I was previously with CIHOST, which we do not need to even go there but they may come up as to why i went to aspnix.
At the time I signed up for aspnix, my server was created in 48 hours. It was always nice and responsive, it came already hardened and patched. I actually have to say I was really impressed with the server. The other great feature was they took paypal, to me this was new, even though my oldest personal domain is 1996 I had never seen a host take payments via paypal. This was extremely appealing to me since since one time CIHOST maxed out my Amex card, they did an audit, said I was 10 gigs over on hard drive space, then just charged me for my overage. No I was not over I was way under I had like 30 gigs of free space and I told them about my offer as I signed up during a special. The billing lady I talked to told me they never ever had a special with that much space which I pointed her to their own website which had the special on there at that time. Anyway never again. I will pay my bill my way that way if there is a dispute in my bill I am not just charged until the dispute is handled. Please note to any other host that read this. I do not want to give you my CC number. Anyway that is why I decided to go with them plus I wasn't finding a lot of windows VPS hosts at the time. Nice to see there are a lot more of them now and those that take paypal.
Anyway, I really liked ASPnix. The server was up, it was patched, you got free SQL2005 databases, I forget the size but it was decent. If you had asked 4 months ago I would have said they were the best host ever. However I never had any problems and never needed support.
Then about 3 months ago, a patch got stuck, one of their patches got stuck it appeared to be the wrong patch, 64 bit pushed to a 32 bit OS and every time I signed into the server it told me about the problem however it didn't hose anything so I didn't care to much I submitted a trouble ticket about it to have them look into it. My response was from support was and I kid you not "Are you sure? That can't happen." Which surprised me and made me laugh because I knew I got some first level support guy who might not have a clue. So I replied back and said I am very sure and if he didn't believe me he could log in and find out. He didn't and he gave me a reply he would send this to an admin to look into. To which I forgot about because like I said it cause me no real problems and the patch wasn't a critical patch.
Ok so I have not needed to log in since then, patches are on autopilot and I had some other things to do, everything else I needed could be handled through the web interface on my websites.
Then early this week, I find my site down. All my sites down, in fact the whole server was down. So I hit their site to find no info, it says something about they are going to have a new site but that is a very old post, I try to hit the forums but the forums have been removed. I mail support, I get no response. I pull up instant messenger, because they say they have support that way and I sent them an instant message, No response. Ok, so maybe it is a major outage and they are flooded I think I can handle that, I can wait until tomorrow. I am a computer guy and have been for year I know what it is like when something major is down.
Tomorrow comes, no server, yet no response. I so IM them again, which they reply and say they are very sorry and my server will be back up in a couple hours they are working on it, I ask them what is the problem, no response. Ok, I can handle this, not pleasant at this point I am wondering what is wrong.
6 hours go by, I IM again asking where we were, No response. 8 hours go by, I IM again, No response. Finally I get to digging into this more I log in to the website control panel. It says my bill is past due. Which is news to me. I go and look through my email, sure enough I have a receipt for payment. I log into Paypal sure enough I made the payment. I begin to wonder did they shut my server off for non payment, it would appear they have a glitch in their billing system, but they would have notified me or something if they were shutting me off for non payment wouldn't they?
2 days, after my first email I fire up a large email I address it to ever single email address at aspnix I can find, in that email I ask say I think my server might have been shut down for non payment so I also include the paypal receipt showing that I payed. 8 hours go by before I get a response from some guy in support saying he is sorry and he has sent this off to billing and support and my server would be on within a couple of hours.
8 hours after that I send them another email in reply saying that it has been 8 hours now and it is still not on. 8 hours later I finally get home from a long day, I have an instant message from support apologizing, guess what it said it would be back on in 2 hours. The message was sent 1 hours ago so I wait for an hour. I send them an instant message, asking where it is and what is going on, no response. Ok so now I am livid. but worried, the last thing I want is for email to go down, email is hosted somewhere else, however aspnix has my DNS entries and my MX records. So after 4 hours more I start moving DNS, logging in to registrar re pointing DNS. What a pain in the rump. There better have been a serious outage and I should be getting a reimbursement or something. At this point I still do not know what is going on. Fed up i go to bed and wait for DNS to propagate. I get up my server is up finally, I have an email from one of the admins apologizing, and saying everything is fixed and back up and my account has been credited for the payment they messed up on. Thats it, nothing else.
Then there is an email from support for my very original submission from several days before. The first one that was never answered. Basically this one tells me your server was turned off because you haven't paid your bill when you pay your bill we will turn it back on. This just pisses me off, so they shut me off for non payment, never bothered to notify me. Not only that I had paid and had the receipts. So the whole outage was their fault then the days it was down it was down just waiting on someone to turn the server on. To me this is just unacceptable. Ok so I log on to my Server to check it out, that original patch problem from 4 months ago. You guessed it still there.
Anyway I liked the server and the payment options however if you need uptime or support it is pretty much non existent and can take days if not weeks even if your server is down. Then other problems could take months to resolve.
We have been with aspnix for quite some time, we have posted good reviews about them, but now we advise everyone to stay away from them.
The History:
- 2 years with aspnix service, they had very good uptime but in the end we always known that if someday something went wrong it was going to be a real disaster, why? Because their supports its a big pile of crap.
- At the beginning we talked to ROMA that seemed to be the only living creature on that company but in the last time an other support guy called Azhar or Pazhar, something like that is the one that respond to questions (1 hour per day, sometimes less), his answers are always im going to send to admin, until now didnīt solve us anything, the best part is that everytime we begin a MSN conversation with him, he always suddenly stops talking and disapear specially when he really donīt know what to say.
- Aspnix has on the news they are going to develop a new website and some parts of the old one are going to be disabled, this is great new website (someday), the funny thing is that the first part to be disabled was the support forums
- Now the best part, most of our websites stopped working and has always we sent a ticket with no answer for 6 hours, than pazhar or something appears on the msn and says "i was out", mmm great, and about our website?? He says "the disk server crashed and we are recovering it, its going to take 3 days minimum" -- 3 days? After this he went away again.
Its really impossible to work with them, and if you have a client that really uses asp.net 2.0 or other windows server functionality, forget support, if something is not well configured the answer is always the same, we donīt support code. This happened us many times but when we move our clients website to another windows hoster it works perfectly.
I know there are many aspnix clients feeling the same, you can post here because their forum is dead and the same applies for their support.
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So what do you think of their offer?
Support 6/10
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I will start with the positive part of this review. The Support at ASPnix was pretty good on Live Chat (when it was online, which wasnt a lot) The technician who I spoke with (always the same guy, so im assuming he ran it alone) was very helpful. He assisted me with anything I needed, from setting up SSL to moving my WHMCS install. The support recieved from ASPnix is what I would expect from any company, but sadly is rare to find these days.
Service 2/10
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After originally signing up with ASPnix I was fairly happy. The control panel (HELM 3) was very nice. About a month after signing up with them, they upgraded HELM to the new version, which was an absolute piece of crap. It feels like your being treated as a child with how little access you have to some of the most basic necessities. The most shocking of which was the fact with the new version of HELM, you can no longer even create your own cron jobs. I find it to be a very serious issue that you have to file a support ticket to have things like this changed. Another major issue was I relied on the HELM panel's database backups. When it finally came time that I needed to restore one, not a single backup worked. After some further testing, I found that not only did none of the backups I had made for any of the databases work, but that I could not upload local backups. Another major issue was the lack of MOD_REWRITE which was originally available to us, and was taken away with the upgraded panel. The switch from HELM 3 to HELM 4 was a horrendous choice, and is reason enough to stay away from this hosting company.
Performance 4/10
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The site performance was nothing to be impressed with. The site loaded, but that was about it. In comparison to every other webhost I ever had, page load times were extremely slow. Also, it seemed that the mail servers were not working atleast 2-3 times a day.
Policys 1/10
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Upon reaching the point of utter disgust with every aspect of this host aside from their support, I decided to request a refund for the remaining months on my account (I paid for a year, and had used 5 months). I finally recieved a response to my ticket stating that it was policy to not offer refunds after 30 days, even on Annual purchases. Pretty sickened by this response, I sent them a response asking them at the least to refund the IP address which I had purchased from them only a week ago (well within the 30 day period) to which they replied the IP was non refundable either, and that the price was not for the IP but the setup of it.
Conclusion
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Stay away from this host!! The owner is a decent guy, and fairly helpful in comparison to some other companies, but the product isn't even remotely worth the price, and the policys aren't any better. They asked me if I would like to cancel the service (I guess this is there way of saying can we just keep your money and have our product back) but I guess I will use it as a file backup service, as thats about all I can imagine they are any good for.