Hosting Mistakes
by Tadas Talaikis
A month ago I made a mistake and ran into big trouble. I've bought hosting from a company without checking reviews of them.
I saw an ad: "5GBhosting.com - 5GBhosting® opens the door to clients that need more than just traditional Web Site Hosting. We have spared no expense in providing the latest server technology and the best support personnel in our Digital facility." http://5gbhosting.com
Looks good, I believe what people say, shame on me :)
I was excited even I waited 5 days (after a lot of emails to them) to my account setup. It's 1 Gb webspace, I need it, I want it!
"Real-Time Setup"
I waited 5 days!! Warning sign.
But how I was disappointed after a few weeks!
This host is total junk... they deleted my files 5 times including my backups. This happened every time when their disk runs out of space. Server was OVERSOLD, disk was 96% full, so without a place for MY 1 Gb. Cool! I am working on my site, then disk fills up, server reboots and all changes are deleted into older version of site. It happened 5 times, I can't believe it!
"Backup - yes."
Actually when you login into control panel, you see "backups are not enabled on this server".
"Triple data back-up."
Haha :) Triple back-up ONCE a month. Once I've got to my site and found it ONE MONTH OLDER.
And every time when they ran out of space, I was unable to login to my account and do back-up manually.
Once I logged on and found "Your CPanel license expired". Cool, yeah...
"Worried about UPtime? 99.9% - or better! - We believe our current clients can give the best opinion on our UPtime!"
Sure, I've checked with monitoring company, they show 99.3%, but I can't believe even in those stats because they server was unavailable few times a day. Night when I started to move to another company, they haven't worked for 8 hours!
Customer support is very poor, they don't know how they are doing. Once after reporting my problem with their server, one of persons said:
"- Tell me your domain. - zongoo.com - oh..."
OK, CPU (server load) now... I haven't found them running on less than 4 (red). One day they ran on 20. What it means? Normal CPU load must be less than 1. For example, my existing server runs on 0.3, page loads in 0.09 seconds, on THEIR server same page loaded in 17 seconds! Where you'll find visitor who will wait so long, ah? Slow load is ruining business.
When I told them about this problem, when they'll upgrade their server and their disk, I've got:
"- We're upgrading it now, check next day."
I've checked. Of course, nothing happened. Actually it never happened.
"Standby Servers - We keep spare servers online of all CPU configurations. If a server were to experience a hardware failure, we would turn a key, grab the handle on the drive, pull it out and insert it into an identical standby CPU. We would then reboot the second machine, and the server would be up and running again in a matter of minutes."
Sure... "Minutes" mean "hours"!
What they advertise and what you get in reality?
"Telnet - Yes. "SSH - Yes."
I haven't saw it in control panel :(
"Web / FTP Stats - Yes."
Actually all stats had stopped after a few their server failures.
They have never worked and they have not resolved it when I asked.
"Auto Installers (Click for Demo)."
Actually this click for demo doesn't work at all :)
"Our clients."
This section doesn't work. Warning sign. No one to see how they sites run.
"Online Ticket Support/FAQ's - Yes"
Where is it? OK, they offer live support, but they don’t have a FAQ.
"30 Money Back guarantee."
They haven't refunded me, I've asked them five times. I am $115 shorter, where's my money back? Is it scam?
"So relax, your business' online presence is in good hands with 5GB Hosting."
What you can learn from it?
* Do a search "hostingcompany.com reviews". * Check real server uptime on monitoring services like http://www.hyperspin.com/ranking.php * Explore them carefully. What you read is not always what you get.
Best regards, Tadas Talaikis
For his new project visit: http://www.zongoo.com Popularity booster for websites through articles and content finder for publishers (cobrands available).
You can reprint this article (if not stated otherwise above) on your website or publication with notice "Reprinted from Zongoo! Computers".
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