Re: Terrible Hosting Experience

Here's another story to use as an "I told you so" if you choose to try them anyway. CI Host. We have been hosting with them for almost two years now. The only reason we never left was because we couldn't find anyone else offering the same redundant connections that we could actually verify. A lot of people claim to have these awesome networks, but have you ever actually tried to find out detailed information about their network? You know, like location, security, who their providers are, etc. Most likely they are not a real hosting provider, but just someone else with a dedicated hosting package on someone else's network. You'd be amazed. Here are just some of the situations we've had to endure with CI Host. We were hosting a NT client who we wrote a CGI application for. When one of our admins put the CGI application in the cgi-bin and attempted to execute it they got a permission error saying they couldn't execute the application. So they went to the support chat to try to get one of the technical support staff to see why the permissions were failing. After 30 minutes of waiting on others currently being helped they started evaluating the situation. After our admin explained what was going on the technician said, you shouldn't be allowed to execute EXE's on our servers. Then for the shocker. The technician revoked our execute permissions and muted our admin in chat. This of course, not only prevented our application from working, but every other stock cgi which is provided by CI Host in the cgi-bin with all new hosting accounts. Needless to say this took several days to sort out and there was no apology. We signed up some dial-up accounts for a few of our employees to use from home. We did the request online and the accounts were activated the next day. These employees used these accounts for at least four months. We never received invoices for these accounts, though we asked every month why they were not on the invoices and they would say they'd look into it, which they never did. At the end of that four months we cancelled the dial-up accounts as those employees finally got cable connections at home so they didn't need us to provide them with dial-up access any longer. Anyhow, it was 2 months after that when we finally got an invoice. It was for all "6" months (they never cancelled the accounts) and they billed us for a dial-up package that we never activated. We simply activated a normal dial-up, but they billed us for some deluxe dial-up that included hosting and a slew of other features that we never used. So instead of $25.00 a month for each account for four months which should have been around $200.00 we were billed around $720.00 for 6 months of $60.00 a month dial-ups. It took 7 additional months to get that straightened out which caused our hosting account to be de-activated several times in the process because of our refusal to pay it. Even though the account was placed under review and promised it would not be shut down. On at least 4 different occasions we have been hung up on by tech support. Once they even deleted all of the user accounts to MySQL on one of the servers we had a site on. This took several days to get straightened out. Their billing is anything but acceptable. Their technical support is sporadic at best. They seem to have outgrown their abilities and it shows in their day to day processes. While there are so many other things that I could post about it's really just ranting as we have finally found an alternative that we've been testing out for the past few months and we've been very happy with the results. Check out MyBizHosting at http://www.mybizhosting.com/ They're fairly new, but their connection is just awesome and the technical support is great. While they don't give away the same amount of storage that CI Host does with all of their accounts you can upgrade the accounts whenever you need to. Besides, how many sites actually use 600MB of space? We only have one client that even exceeds 150MB. They have online billing and invoice history (which is actually accurate and current, unlike CI Host's online billing system). Their control panel (which is provided with every account puts CI Host's Monster Controls to shame) is also excellent. It allows you make changes to just about any aspect of your hosting account. So check them out if you haven't already. They've managed to impress us so far. Toby ----- Original Message ----- From: "Thomas Deliduka" <thomas@neweve.com> To: "PHP List" <php-general@lists.php.net> Sent: Wednesday, February 21, 2001 9:21 AM Subject: Re: [PHP] Terrible Hosting Experience > On 2/20/01 5:55 PM this was written: > > > I was about to buy a server from Alabanza. Am I ever glad I didn't. The > > only thing impressive about them is their connection. And for all I know > > they could be lying about that, as well. > > Usdatacenters.com has a great connection. We've had great help with them. > They may be a tad high but their support is impeccable. > -- > > Thomas Deliduka > IT Manager > ------------------------- > New Eve Media > The Solution To Your Internet Angst > http://www.neweve.com/ > > > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-general-unsubscribe@lists.php.net > For additional commands, e-mail: php-general-help@lists.php.net > To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php-list-admin@lists.php.net