Beginning this year I grabbed couple of special hosting deals with Netfirms. I was attracted by low cost and ability to run PHP4, PHP5 and .NET all under same account. As I spent more and more time trying to figure out why the heck a bunch of familiar and well-worked out scripts wouldn’t run on Netfirm’s hosting platform I came to know how messed up the whole deal was. Tech support responded to my e-mail after 4 days (I already forgot I filed a ticket). Performance was iffy at best – sometimes on par with my home-run server, sometimes way slower. ASP.NET application that runs without any tweaking on my company’s internal server failed to start in seemingly similar environment on Netfirms. You think I could use their tech support? Yeah, right.

So couple of days ago, as both my domain and account were reaching expiration date, I decided to move out. Transferring domain was the easiest, so I did this as soon as I have made the decision. Canceling account, however, is a much more difficult task. First of all – there is no way you can cancel from your control panel. And, there is no way of canceling via e-mail request to support. The only way to cancel the account with Netfirms is to call their toll-free number (I don’t want this idea to really get out, but I was expecting a 900- number) between 9am and 5pm EST and request the cancellation over the phone. Let me check what year is this? Right, still 2007.

Generally, I wouldn’t go over such a routine task as canceling some online service unless there was some incentive. Well, the incentive is as follows – nowhere on Netfirms’ web site nor in their knowledge base does it say how to cancel the account. While doing the digging I stumbled upon some blogs that describe exactly same problems with Netfirms I was facing – poor service, non-existent customer service, hard-to-find cancellation procedure.

However, I don’t see anyone at Netfirms to care. They seem to be overly busy taking new sign ups.

Last weekend I was quite busy. Busy waiting. The main Zealus.com server went down some time around 10pm Thursday. At least that’s when we noticed. I went to our web hoster’s help desk to file the ticket, but the helpdesk was down too. So, it would seem, was the e-mail of the web hoster. Then I went to WebHostingTalk (WHT) – the popular forums, where most hosters and their direct clients hang out while datacenter reboots their servers.

The thread on the provider being down has already reached 4 pages when I joined in. Looked like all the servers managed by the same company went down. People were upset, angry and aggravated.

The guy who was answering my e-mails sounded very apologetic – little recourse knowing that our main site is down. Thankfully most of our clients were on another server, so they were only affected in a way that their communications with us was temporarily impeded.

Around 10:45 AM on Friday I found out that the issue seem to be at the data center, not the servers. Our web hoster informed me that they are changing providers. The reason was not, however, clearly communicated, although several people on forums had asked. I was assured that “we expect everything to be working today anytime soon”.

Knowing how annoying the e-mails could be when you really have nothing new to report, the next time I contacted the hoster was around 3:45 PM. Again, I was assured that “Some of our IPs are already up, your server should be up soon”. Future just looked a little brighter.

At 5:35 PM our hoster announced on WHT that most of the servers are up. However, none of the WHT members save one confirmed that. Their servers, as well as our, remained down. By 11:00 PM I inquired (on WHT) what servers have been brought up, so myself and other WHT members could see that the progress have been made. No response to that, though. Just regular “go back to your tickets, we’ll update you there”.

Saturday, 1:01 PM – another inquiry. The hoster replies that “we only have few machines down left, yours is one of them”. Great news! Not only I got in the game last, I’m about to leave the game last. However, by 3:45 PM hoster posts on WHT that there is another problem with some of the servers that refuse to boot. What happened to “you will be updated in your tickets”?

At 4:00 PM I am promised that “By midnight CST we should have your HDD in new hardware and sites online”. Great, it’s only 1:00 AM by EST, so I can cut on sleep again, tomorrow’s Sunday anyway. However, the server was up at around 4:00 AM with cPanel licenses and other minor things yet to be resolved. The whole thing seem operational as of Sunday, the e-mails started to come in and the rest of the dust eventually settled down.

Now, a bit of reflection. The team seems nice and the tickets are responded to properly. However, the constant lack of communication suggests that in critical cases like this one we will not be able to rely on the responses of the hoster’s team. A lot of questions went unanswered, for example – we still have no idea why hard drive from our server failed to boot in others. Why the system failed to boot at all in the first place. What was the reason the servers were down for more then 48 hours? And, ultimately, why have all these questions went unasnwered while they were asked? For example – I explicitly asked for the reason the system didn’t boot three times – and all three times my question was ignored.

By this time the quality of service doesn’t matter much, as well as price and server features. You can get roughly same deal from various hosters, give or take. What matters – is the quality of communication, the quality of customer service, the responsiveness of the whole team – server admins, customer service reps, techicians and even billing. So I don’t even count the past events, I am not saying I am upset because I had to ask for root password 4 times because they kept changing it right after I asked. I am not saying I am upset because I have found several high-traffic web sites left on my server, although it was supposed to be clean install. What I am upset about is that people I trusted with my client’s data and services failed to deliver up to the promise – several times. This – not the downtime – is the reason for leaving.

Some times you get a request that’s just so plain impudent, that you can’t even say no… Consider this – guy asks for 2GB of space, 15 GB of traffic for free hosting. Fine, I don’t mind that, no problem. But the concept there is to get money from the ads to move to normal paid hosting. So not only he doesn’t consider my hosting to be “normal”, he’s telling me that once he’s done eating off my plate, he’s gonna go spend those money some place else. So he gets hosting, money from ads, people to his web site and I get – nothing?

Something’s not kosher here.

Yeah, it’s that time of the life when shit hits the fan HARD! The provider for Windows Hosting went down without notice… And IS down still for almost a week. Then we lost several clients, and finally decided to abandon the whole windows hosting thing and concentrate on Linix/PHP/mySQL in addition to web design services that we offer. Feel sorry for clients though.

Now the second part of the game – contacting 2Checkout for refund and cancellation, since the hoster (myonehome.com/worldseller.com) doesn’t respond.

Right now I have 12 e-mails in the inbox of the free hosting offer mailbox, almost all of them look nearly identical. Something like this:

fei

Reason: freebie

Name: wu

Address: feiwu

Phone: feiwu

Message: Can open the same of space me to do the yellow forum 么 !Thank!If can of words! Please the letter of reply: akcoo@vip.163.com

More e-mails like this: grayer@vip.163.com, caotang@vip.163.com, stupid122431hk@gmail.com, cnflying@163.com, emufy@163.com, doon@xasamail.com, suyan@vip.1488.com, lxycc@msn.com, eoyul@vip.163.com, admin788@gmail.com

It’s just hilarious to see the same guy (the 163 domain) sending same e-mail over and over again. Is it really that difficult to find a free host who DOESN’T care what you put on his servers? I care, therefore I will not approve inquiries that have entries like this:

Address: zhongdongcun27

Phone: rouqingjingwang

Yeah, I was really looking forward at dialing that fantastic number!

What makes people to post requests like these?

Platform: Linux

Space: 1000 MB

Bandwidth: 30GB

Control Panel: yes

IP Address: no

Email Accounts: unlimited

Database(s): unlimited

Expected cost: 1 per year

Right, like someone is really going to give them free hosting like this. The forum seems pretty empty. I mean if the forum would have been up to the resources, then sure, it would make a lot of sense to give the guy what he wants for banner on his pages, but with overall 42 members… I have my own forum, it has 55 members and it takes approximately 300 Megs of bandwidth, not to mention space… and only one database.

On the topic of forums… recently spoke with guy who wanted me to host Chinese forum for free. Two words – get real. Such forums consume enormous amount of resources, oftentimes host illegal wares, porn or both, there is no way for English-Russian speaking host to determine what’s behind those signs they call hieroglyphs, and you want all this hassle for free? You are stealing hundreds and thousands worth of software and you don’t even want to pass the savings? Curse, curse, curse

Trying to figure out how to work out the free hosting idea. So, if you happen to stroll by this blog and happen to need a free hosting – contact us through our web site www.zealus.com and we’ll see what we can do for you.