Hosting Horror Stories

The only hosting horror story I've had is when I had my dad's websites being hosted at GoDaddy using their shared hosting, one day I got an email saying that their was a virus or something on the server and everything was wiped clean on the machine, so I basically had to reinstall everything, but luckily I had everything backed up n my h hard drive so it wasn't a big deal.

Till then,


Jean

I had a terrible experience with Globat Hosting (http://www.globat.com/) with my first website. They kept charging my account for charges and services I did not authorize. Not only that, their customer service was not good. They were rude and uncaring to my needs as a customer. Plus their up time at the time, was perhaps the worst in the market although I am not sure if they have improved any of these things. Nevertheless, I will never host with them again and will never recommend this hosting service to anyone.

This reminds me of when I was at www.Prevahost.com my order was taking forever and then I used the live support to talk to someone for some help. A few minutes later, I got some (apparently a child) who berated me and told me that I was an idiot. I promptly asked for a refund and they told me to fuck off. I had to contact my credit card company and get a chargeback! Stay away at all costs!

Great idea about the open ended blog post. Anyone who has been involved in online business for long is bound to have some horror stories about web hosting.

One of my web hosts was so unreliable at managing server resources. Part of the problem was that I was on a shared server and some other websites on that server were hogging all of the resources. So I was constantly contacting support telling them that all of my websites were too slow to use. They were too incompetent to handle the problem on their end, so they tried to blame me saying that my websites shouldn't query the database on every page. Talk about inflexibility. I tried cleaning up my websites and it didn't change things at all. Eventually they had me reprogram my websites to us pgsql instead of mysql. In other words, their only solution was to have me not using their extremely slow mysql server. The worst part about it was constantly having to contact support only for them to do nothing about it.

Hey Dru, thanks for sharing that story. That must have been incredibly stressful and annoying. It's great to hear though that you've finally found someone you can rely on in a more comfortable way.

My small Internet services company requires affordable yet reliable web hosting (as does everyone else), but hosting with unlimited domains sharing disk space and bandwidth in my case, is required.

Enter VPS Land. A quick look-over of their website hints a good bit of sophistication and reliability. A professional image indeed.

Enter the fine print.
The ONLY, and I mean ONLY support that any customer will ever receive is online via a 'ticketing' system.

Fine. I had a few simple problems such as needing my FTP password reset and things to that nature. My tickets were responded to in a matter of a couple of hours. Some even less than that. Semi-impressive.

Enter virtual private server nightmare. I'm hosting about 15-20 sites on my VPS, and one morning I wake up with about 15 emails from clients wanting to know whats up with their website. I check it out.. they are all down! I make an attempt to log into my VPS control panel to do a "reset/reboot", and I can't even access my control panel!

I head on over to the ticketing system and put in a ticket with the highest importance rating and type "EMERGENCY - SYSTEM DOWN - INACCESSIBLE" in the subject line, and type the symptoms in the message. Wait.
Wait.
Two hours. Wait.
Six hours. Respond " BUMP... I still cannot access my server, clients are angry - reply soon please!" Wait.
Twelve hours from system meltdown: nothing.
Skip ahead 72 (yes... SEVENTY-TWO) hours. After about 15 replies on my part, and no phone number to call, (try finding a phone number on their website) finally a response.
"We have tested the connection and see no problem on our end. Please open a new ticket if you still have trouble after rebooting your machine." oh yes, he did tell me to reboot my computer!

Long story short, at this point, I couldn't even FTP my files to switch to a new hosting company.
After two or three more days, they got my server running, giving me some "Sorry for the inconvenience" crap, and I immediately canceled my account and vowed to never use a VPS again. Ever. I actually ended up losing two clients because of this fiasco. To a customer, I am their web host. They don't know any better (and don't need to know) about some other third party hosting their website.

I am now using a service that is UNBELIEVABLE. The uptime is fantastic, the customer service is FANATICAL, and on top of everything, it's affordable! At $100/month, your site can run Windows AND Linux OS at the SAME TIME, and unlimited sites can be listed under one account. The control panel lets you do anything you could need to do from DNS changes to eMail address creation, and its just in general a real good deal to be a part of. Check them out at Rackspace Cloud.

There have been a few times, when I was first beginning my blogging experiences - that I lost entire posts due to a very latent dial-up connection - and not saving my work before trying to post. I surely learned my lesson the hard way.

Also, once before - I purchased hosting through a small company which probably was down (server-wise) more then the website stayed up. I've now found my hosting company which I spread the word to everyone about. They're amazing. http://polarphase.com