Hosting Woes
June 22nd, 2002[ NOTE: 28 Jan 2003 – I’ve changed my tune about PHPWebhosting. They’ve really turned the corner and provide value for money. This particular rant is a slice in time when things weren’t going so well with them.]
I’m not particularly happy with my hosting provider this week.
Blogchat.com was completely down for 12 hours or so last week. Then it was brought back to a readable state where people could use it again, however 72 hours later, we’ve still yet to get back the ability to access the files in any meaningful way to change them, including updating the blog, shelling in for maintenance, changing any files, you name it.
PHPWebhosting.com provides support only through their control-panel interface. There is no email address, no phone number. We accept this because it is a remarkably inexpensive yet full-featured service.
However, despite repeated service requests with specific instruction to make some sort of acknowledgement to us that they are receiving our requests and doing something about it, we remain with our problem unsolved and with no attempt at contact with us.
We have transferred our beta operations to CubeSoft and I’ve temporarily moved my blog to my ashleyit.com site. Luckily I use ZoneEdit for my DNS needs and redirection was simple so archives are not broken. Had we had our DNS with them, we’d be outta luck for another 48 hours while we changed Internic info.
Tim and I have 3 accounts altogether on PHPWebhosting which we may now have to move elsewhere. Lost revenue for them, hassles for us.
All they had to do was acknowledge our existence and tell us they were working on it. I don’t expect miracles from an inexpensive hosting provider – I understand their razor-thin margins – but I do expect common courtesy.
just out of curiosity, what version of PHP does CubeSoft provide? Do they have a phpinfo page somewhere?
I personally haven’t had any problems with PHPWebhosting like that. My site may go down for 20-30 minutes at a time once in awhile (I have a service to monitor the uptime).
I co-own this http://www.poehosting.com and I’m pretty darn responsive……
I’m a friend of Rick. I too use phpwebhosting (and I know dozens of sites who do also). I’ve really had no problems with the service. Yes, there is downtime every month but its not much at all. I can handle that. And for their price, features and support (which I think is pretty good – very responsive and friendly), you can’t go wrong. Oh well. My opinion isn’t worth much because you have yours, and a different experience of phpwebhosting.
Take care.
Your opinion is certainly valuable, Jon. I agree that they provide great value for the money, however, my experience differs from yours in that repeated requests for acknowledgement have gone completely unheeded on more than this occasion. I don’t mind being told that I’m asking for more support than they’re willing to give at that price, but over 4 days with no response to a direct request for acknowledgement is inexcusable. I’ve got to wonder what their agenda is in allowing our site to remain broken and ignoring our requests for help. I can only assume that they wish us to go away. Well, they have their wish, but they might have salvaged some respect and goodwill by communicating with us. I think we’re being way more than reasonable and getting none of the same in return.
Not to bash CubeSoft, I was a long time customer, but they have had downtime issues also, I remember a couple day outage while I was on vacation. No big deal, it wasn’t a site I was using for much more than email, but it did happen. I just figure I got what I paid for. And after the outage, they did move their servers to a more responsive & reputable co-location facility, and I don’t remember any other long down times after that.
you are useless. totally. do something about your uselessness.
I’m sorry heard about your hosting problems. I think every host has there problems now and then, as long as its not a constant issue its part of doing business online unfortunately.