Hello
I just wanted to reiterate how much I despise *****.
Wait times of over an hour on the phone.
Plus I believe that they put customer phone calls through to the janitors.
I believe they use "IDtenT" training.

Anyone wanna provide free hosting to *****-sucks.com for me?

Everyone be happy for me, the higherups have agreed to move off of *****. Of course to them its still all my fault that they suck. Even if they are the ones who chose *****.

over here, any ***** sucks related sites can be hosted from me free of charge, simply get the domain and ill host it. ill give it web space to put up anything you want.

just please make sure people dont walk into the trap too often.

ID10T is amongst the best in the world :-)

so you finally figured that out, where have you been the last few years, eh?

haha, the prices is what attracts people but they don't realize too good to be prices are too good to be true there is always a catch, I realized that myself with the regular $20-30 a month hosting services (non-dedicated/non-colocated) they could care less after they collect the one payment of $350 for 1 year of service, same goes with ***** with the $99 dedicated servers. What's funny I saw on the ***** site, prepay for 1 year for a dedicated $99 a month server and get a free pair or airline tickets to florida free. Now which is more important the airline tickets or the webhosting? (grin).

Xtstrike, I remember last time you responded to one of my posts, and it was, well... We will leave it at that. But lets forget that. I acknowledge you on your decision here. I have seen the complaints on *****, and you, willing to give free hosting to others who have prepared "***** sucks related sites". Good move.

One or even five complaints on a hosting company, , I do not pay much attention to, but *****, well, need I explain. They are one to give us other hosts a bad name, simply because we are web hosts, and others might believe we have the same tactics as *****.

I wish you the best of luck and successfulness, to get the ***** word out, until they improve there Quality of Service

Thank you for you Time
J. Strong

jstrong - im a little forgetful any chance you can post the URL?, lol

anyways, im reporting that :

http://www.*****-sucks.com will be up and running at the end of today, spread the word :D

please feel free to contribute to the archive, MattF, if you dont mind may I use some of the content of WHT on the archive?

I will also be linking to:

http://www.badwebhost.com

I love it....LOL Chris Faulkner is gonna freak!

My list for bad hosts is growing longer and longer day by day.

Good work keep us informed :D

Available

*****blows.com
*****blows.net
*****blows.org
*****blows.cc
*****blows.tv
*****blows.ws (WebSite)

Hello everyone,

I'm new to this so please don't hurt me too much.

I have been reading the messages up here for a few days to get some ideas about where to host and I can't help but notice how many people here are obsessed with ***** and Chris Faulkner.

Is he or ***** really that bad?

I read about the problem they had a long time ago. But I also read how the problem was corrected. How can a company that has 100,000 customers be as bad as you say?

I ask these things because I was leaning towards ***** for a hobby site I want to do. A friend recommended them to me and I have been to their web site and I like some of the plans they have. I especially like all the online help they have. They seem to provide much more than other hosts and that seems customer oriented to me.

Have you guys been customers with them recently? Or can you point me to people here that are current customers, or that might have recently left?

I am also looking at Intermedia.net and HostPro.com. These were also recommended to me. What are your thoughts on them?

Thank you for your help.

HobbyGal

I enjoy saying this. :D

***** Totally Sucks!

I was a customer of theirs a month of so ago (is that soon enough?)

the dedicated server had more downtime than a 286 would running Win2000 Server :)

their network completely sucks, one minute its running 100% then the next minute BANG its completely down.

I changed the root password for my server because the server contains confidential information and i didnt want them walking around the box, so what did they do? they rebooted it ever 6 hours until i let them back in, i still have the logs of their repeated login attempts to get into my server. They were still attempting to gain access up until i cancelled my account.

Just before i went to cancel my account the whole network went down meaning i couldnt send them a cancellation ticket, their entire network was down. :angry:

Finally i managed to cancel my account and waited a week for the refund, i had no refund, then i contacted my bank and they refunded the money to me and placed a charge back to *****, i told them i was about to do this and sure enough as if like magic a day later the refund came through.

They refused to support my server IN ANY WAY because i wanted RedHat 7 installing instead of their antiquated Red Hat 5.x

Their support is hopeless, i asked for a DNS entyr to me created and had to talk to 3 people before finally talking to somebody that actualy knew what they were doing!.

The final straw was when they placed an advertisement on the support page which caused my computer to freeze for 10 seconds every minute whilst waiting in the support queue, and this freeze for the ONE HOUR wait it usually took to get a reply was a nightmare.

I can carry on about this but unfortunately i might fill an entire book on how much they messed me about, anybody going with them is due for a ride of their life through hell and back !!

hmm... So basically xtstrike, your not recommending ***** to this person :D :D :D

Is he or ***** really that bad?
In a word: yes. He has so many customers because the host-rating websites SELL their high ratings, sending the unsuspecting to bad hosts who have the money to pay for a lot of advertising. Myself included on three occasions before I twigged to that particular scam.

But you don't have to believe us. Go to the Fort Worth Better Business Bureau website and check out their "unsatisfactory" rating:
http://www.fortworth.bbb.org/report.html?compid=98080001

If for some reason that link doesn't work (as it didn't for me a minute ago), just go to http://www.fortworth.bbb.org/, click on the "Company Reports" button at the top of the page, and search on *****. That's C [space] I [space] Host. Or search on their phone number: 888 868-9931

Also see the last link in my signature. And please believe us when we say that ***** is a host to be avoided. There are plenty of other hosts with good reputations. Why go with a known bad host?

Hi,

I have been a ***** customer not so long ago and I must agree that ***** sucks. They have extremely bad customer services and unorganized / un-helpful billing dept. They treat their clients with absolutly no professionalism, since they have so many I guess...

I had no problem with their network, my site was working okay, but very bad support.

I wanted them not to rebill me next month as I wanted to cancel my account. My month was finishing something like in a week or 2. So 10 minutes after sending a "Please don't rebill me and terminate my account at the end of my billing period", my account was de-activated.

***** attracts a lot of mis-informed customers because they look so good from the outside. But thanks to this board it is possible to get in touch with people from the inside and this helps our industry.


Thank you,

--
Cedric Veilleux,
"A la carte" Webhosting
http://www.inetflex.com/

I am a current customer of ***** and I totally agree that they suck. Tech-support sucks. The only time I can get through to tech-support is when I use their on-line monster chat and more often than not it takes a hour or better to talk to a tech. About 50% of the time the techs were able to help me but I was asked to e-mail the server admin or sales the rest of the time and seldom received a response. I did have a good experience with a server admin who actually responded to my second e-mail and did the requested work very fast. They tout daily back-ups but they don't tell you it costs between $50 - $100 to get a back-up restored. I spent a week trying to get them to do a restore for me before I gave up and started creating the files from scratch again. They do have a lot of on-line help but last time I looked it was very outdated and sometimes incorrect. They also have a lot of downtime. Over the last three months there has been several times when I was not able to reach my website or e-mail. It is usually only for a few minutes to a few hours but it is very frustrating. I have a few months left on my contract before I can move. Don't make the same mistake, find a GOOD host. Avoid CI like the plague !

Regards,
Chas

I'm an ex-***** customer (over a year ago) ...and i couldn't agree more with you guys :D

:puke:***** <-:D

Wow. Thanks for the feedback. I didn’t expect anything this fast

I still wonder why so many people stay with them though. Is it their long term contracts like Chas?

With the number of customers that ***** has, if 5 percent of them were unhappy, they would have 5,000 unhappy customers. That is a lot of customers who aren’t happy, but it still means that 95,000 are happy enough to stay. It also stands to reason that a percentage of customers would receive poor service because of the sheer volume of customers they have. 5% is an arbitrary number, maybe its higher, or maybe its lower. In either case, the majority of ***** customers may receive good service.

People rarely say anything when they are happy with something. When we buy something that works we are satisfied that we got what we paid for and go on with life. Why should we have to say anything positive or negative about something that we expect to work? We don’t drive to work each day and tell everyone the car ran fine. On the other hand, the person that bought a bad product or had bad service will generally say something to someone and the word gets around. Everyone we know will hear how the air conditioner died in our car on a hot day and how the car company is to blame.

Its not that I’m dense or anything, but I come from a family that has always run small businesses. My dad and mom have always been involved somehow with stores and customers. So I have seen customers that have had real problems with the service and products (usually art and crafts stuff) that my folks sold and no matter what we did for a complaining customer it was never enough. The percentage of customers that had problems with our store was small but I still remember them. I know my mom and dad are good people and they were always kind and generous to the customers. But over the years we still had complainers. Every business has complainers.

Because I grew up around it, I decided to take business and marketing in college. From personal experience and from case studies I know advertising works. But it would be very rare, if not impossible, for any company to grow like ***** has on pure advertising. I do see their banners around. I have been online at some of the places I found in Yahoo and Google, etc. and ***** has been prominent. But that still should not be enough to keep so many customers.

It would be nice to know what their lost customer ratio is.

I know I am opening myself up to some attacks on my inability to agree with people here, but I am, by nature a bit skeptical, and always one to venture on thin ice even though everyone else knows the ice will break under me.

I am almost inclined to buy a plan from ***** to test it and see if it is good or bad.

Does anyone here think it is worth the effort to do the test and to spend a little money to try them for a month? Or am I just throwing my money away?

Signed dumb and skeptical,

HobbyGal:confused:

Hmm, may be you are a bit silly. Sure, most of the people here are very exigent customers, but if you read a little bit the posts, you will see as much good comments on host as bad comments. Of course if you do a search on ***** and look only at ***** related posts, you'll see more bad than good (if any).

You can give ***** a try, they aren't extremely bad and they deliver some kind of services, but compared to all the good hosts here that strive every day to keep their clients happy, ***** sucks.


Just my 2 cents.


--
Cedric Veilleux,
"A la carte" web hosting.
http://www.inetflex.com/

Hello
Imagine your boss is screaming down your neck. No email, no website and he has some large deal coming through in an email that has to be taken care of within the hour and then give ***** a call. Just call and choose option 3 (customer service) and then choose 2 (NT hosting is what I had) and see what happens.

Now make that twice a day and maybe you can understand where I am comming from. If that doesnt convince you try sending them an email about the subject.. oh wait you can't YOUR EMAIL ISN'T WORKING!

I could go on and on but one of my sites that i'm trying to get off of ***** just went down.. gotta go.

oooh, wonder how many ***** customer posts are on this forum? maybe 100? maybe 200? maybe 1000? maybe 10000!

***** gave away good cookies , phat alligator clips, and cds full of nicely bundled crappy software whenever i visit them at conventions..

Not to mention the guy who was trying to explain the world class control panel that they've develloped for the Red Hat Managed Dedicated server..

WEBMIN

Originally posted by smash
You can give ***** a try, they aren't extremely bad and they deliver some kind of services, but compared to all the good hosts here that strive every day to keep their clients happy, ***** sucks.
Well, I was up here a while ago and I thought I'd return and let you guys know I did go ahead and buy a web host plan with *****.

I'm happy so far. The site is fast, the support is good.

Elsewhere several people said ***** was off line, but I had to correct them and explain that I was working on my site at the same time others said it was not working. I think that says a lot for the types of criticisms I have seen up here. A lot of people seem to pile on without accurate information. Its not a criticism of any one person, just a general observation.

I wanted to return here to thank the people that sent me emails to give me some input. Thanks. It was all god input, and made me even more curious.

Youll be back tell us "you were all right" soon enough.....

Originally posted by Fred
Youll be back tell us "you were all right" soon enough.....
LOL. I promise I'll tell you all if it turns around on me! But so far so good! ***** has been great so far. Support as well. :)

The only problem I have is getting the site done in the limited hours I have to work on it :(

Originally posted by Jovian
Hello
I just wanted to reiterate how much I despise *****.
Wait times of over an hour on the phone.
Plus I believe that they put customer phone calls through to the janitors.
I believe they use "IDtenT" training.
Anyone wanna provide free hosting to *****-sucks.com for me?

rotfl! i'm just glad i found this forum when i started looking for commercial webhosts... *before* i signed up for anything! i look forward to checking out your new website when it's ready :D

Originally posted by weagle
Now which is more important the airline tickets or the webhosting? (grin).

LOL. No way am I reading this whole thread, but I just thought this was funny. :D

It would be a GREAT deal if their offices were located in Florida... you could give them a nice little visit when your site's down and their tech support isn't responding. :D

Anybody want to host *****scam.com?

I want to use the site to build a database of all of the compaints against ***** from as many customers as I can find...then send it to the FTC and get them shutdown! :beer:

:flamethr:*****:smash:

B- Broker

If they were shut down, 100,000 people would be out of a host.

Good effects: smaller, better companies would have a better chance at making some good money.

Bad effects: 100,000 people out of a host. A bunch of jobs lost. Lots of problems for the people who *****' hosts and their domains, etc...

I'd rather that they be baught out by a better company than shut down fully.

I'll never use ***** again.

And their Tech support is rubbish, one of them did not know the difference between a folder and a sub-domain. FOOL

Im surprised of how many people come here and want to know about *****, get bad reviews and then sign-up and come back and complain. HobbyGal, I understand your point that when they have sooo many customers, they can't be that bad. I agree. but hey, there's not one person in this thread that has any good things to say about them. And still you sign-up! Well of course it's none of my business and I hope you'll have nothing but uptime and good support. About the complaining, Im not saying that you're complaining, I just think people come of 'stupid' if they sign-up well knowing about their bad reputation, and then return when they don't get any support and complain. This could be said about any company, I know, but when it comes to *****
:rolleyes:

Good Luck!

Add me to the list of unhappy ex-***** customers.

Absolutely, without a question, the most incompetent company I have ever worked with. And I don't just mean hosting companies. I mean of all the companies I've ever done business with, ***** is the absolute worst one. I have never been so unhappy as a customer in my life.

Why would someone come here to ask for opinions and then ignore them? Its senseless...

Jim

As another ex-***** customer
I have to agree that ***** sucks. I signed up and prepaid for a year, bad mistake. There were many times I had to wait several weeks for a reply from support or anyone else there. There were times they were down for hours at a time. At times it took weeks to setup an email account. The server always seemed etremely slow for my small site, which had no server side scripting. My max page size was 70kb including images.

This was over a year ago, so they may have improved since then. But, I wouldn't go back just to find out.

As many of you post about how bad ***** sucks, they also have many many happy customers

So though the 30 or so hate them here, they have about 100k customers.

Its pretty hard to keep everyone happy.

I would disagree with all of you in the ***** sucking department. They are very large, and do pretty darn well.

Screwups are going to happen, but overall ***** is probably one of the biggest hosting companies out there

Joe

At the risk of being beaten by a mob I'm going to say that I'm happy with *****. I had their $99 dedicated server plan to start. I've since upgraded to the next level ($199) without incident.

My site did go down twice (about 6 hours each time) in two days a few weeks ago. Since then it's been fine. I find their customer support to be the best out of the 3 hosts I've been with. I went with them because of their prices and 24h tech support. They always answer their trouble tickets within 6 hours and this is the best I've seen anywhere.

I was in shock after reading how many people hate them here. Even though I'm not having problems at the moment, I think I might be switching at the end of my quarter to be on the safe side.

I live about 10 minutes from the *****ing building. I drive past it almost daily and each time I'm tempted to stop and spray paint a warning on the billboard out front.

If only I were a few years younger...

:)

I would recommend ***** for Windows Hosting because they offer IMail, ASP, Cold Fusion, and SQL Server 2000 at a pretty decent price for their resellers. Support is good enough. Gotten better.

I haven't been able to find a better Windows 2000 alternative. I've looked.

They did manage to delete one of my customers SQL Server Databases a few weeks ago with little apology. _ _it happens.

For Linux Hosting there are many cheaper, better alternatives.


! JC

Fact-they obviously do have some satisfied customers.

Fact-they have more than their share of dissatisfied customers.

Belief-like all their P. R., their customer count is grossly exaggerated through clever use of language....

Fact-They are incredible at P. R.

You learn all you can about them....and their owner....then decide for yourself if this is the company and person you want to do business with.

where is the belief in all this? lol

YES they do

I'm a current customer of *****.

A friend, who is also still with CI, recommended them to me. He told me of the slow network CI had in the past, I know they've done considerable upgrades to the network in recent and my site is incredibly fast. I mean blazing.

Speed aside, I'm not completely happy with CI. I emailed tech support (response was fast) asking if mod_perl could be installed on my shared server. The reply was "Perl is already installed"...huh? what? That's NOT what I asked. So I went to the tech chatroom, took 23 minutes to get in (not bad to get one on one support in chat) and asked the same question. I got the same answer. I had to explain to the tech what mod_perl was. I was shocked and disappointed! He's a tech? Surely he had at least *heard* of mod_perl, I guess not. I've searched @INC and mod_perl simply isn't there, nor are the required Apache modules.

The features listed on the website and the hosting manual seem to be at least somewhat outdated and not always accurate.

My site has suffered downtimes that have enraged me. A server reboot here or there, ok sure. Replace some hardware, make upgrades, yeah ok. A dns problem occasionally, well I guess. My site has experienced downtimes of several hours on more than one occasion in the past month. If this is a pattern, it's unacceptable.

I hear a lot of hosts repeating things like "well sir, the downtime is spread out over a year and we are well within the 99.9% that we guarantee". I don't care diddley about 99.9% *spread out over a year*or spread in whatever direction. My site is ecommerce, downtime is money straight out of my pocket! My greatest concern is that my site remain reachable at peak times.

I pay monthly so I'm not locked in, I'll continue to test their service over the next month or two, mainly to see if downtimes improve. If not, I will seek another host.

Thanks to everyone that has posted comments on them, rest assured I will post (whether good or bad) my experiences with them.

~bud

Personally I think that the majority of their customers have just never been on any other host or a host of a higher calibur. ***** must be doing something right because they sure do have a pretty good customer base :). (i.e. advertising .. not hosting heh)

please folks, we could really use a thread similar to this at http://www.scamwatch.org

probly be best to post this in the "bad hosts" section, since I wouldnt consider ***** a full blown scam.

Any help getting scamwatch.org started would be GREATLY appreciated!

Good day! ;)

I believe in giving companies a second chance so I gave *****ing one.

The first person I spoke with was very helpful so I ended up ordering a dedicated sever. It was to be up and running within 48 hours (I called on a Thursday eve) Friday morning I faxed in the credit card file & the signature page of the contract to them. On I then called their accounting office to make sure that they had all they needed & was informed that they did. I then called back that eve (Friday) to see if they could give me an eta on when the server would be ready. I was informed that it would be ready in about 12 hours (not promised) and to call in at that time to get a better timing if it was not yet up.

I then called that eve and was told that it would be another 12 hours or so (still not a problem) try on Saturday morning. (The tech put in a trouble tic about this saying that if it was not ready within 12 hours they would "kick it up" to a level 2 person. (NICE).

I then called on Saturday morning and was informed that it was still not ready and that they had no idea why. Try again in another 12 hours (notice a pattern here) I tried again on Sunday morning I was told it was still not ready but would be with an hour or so. I emailed sales asking for an eta they never answered.

I called again Sunday afternoon and was told that it was still not ready, had not been started and they did not know when they were going to get to it. I got a hold of sales and was told, "you only sent in one page of the contract. You have to call tomorrow and speak with accounting" --Remember I spoke with accounting Friday and they said they had everything they needed-- I cancelled the account that night.

I called the sales rep the next morning (the one who had helped me Thursday) to inform him of what happened and he asked, "If I can get this corrected for you within 3 hours would you reconsider?” I agreed (anyone can make a mistake, so I gave him the opportunity to correct it) He backed off the 3 hours during our next call (5 min later) saying, I might not be able to do it in 3 could you give me more time? I agreed to 6 hours.

We resent the contracts, confirmed the arrival of information and waited. I called back 2 1/2 hours later to see if all was well and was told it was. I then called an hour later to see if we were still on track as the initial account information showed that I was set up but ZI could not yet access my new server. I was told at that time that they needed "all the pages of the contract, not just the signature pages".

NOTE: This is after I was told that they had all they needed and after their "monster ticket" said the account was confirmed and set up. This information was faxed within 5 minutes to them.

Twenty min before the deadline I called and was told that the server would be up within the time they promised. 30 min later I was called and told that the server would not be ready for another 21 hours... YES ANOTHER 21 HOURS!! Needless to say I cancelled the server. I am so glad I avoided a continued mess with them. Nothing has changed over there. They do not deliver on anything.


I will admit that I failed to mention to their sales rep that I had 7 other accounts to set up over there immediately and that we were going to also move the resell accounts of 39 of our clients as well. I tested the waters with one of my minor accounts and they burned me. I can't imagine the nightmare I would have had if I had told them about my other 40+ accounts we are seeking service for. I wonder if them knowing I had so many accounts to move would have made them more agreeable??

"Where downtime is not an option, it's a reality."

lol

I had to reply after reading this post below. What the hell is this guy talking about?

[QUOTE]Originally posted by WillT
[B]As another ex-***** customer
>I have to agree that ***** sucks. I signed up and prepaid for a >year, bad mistake. There were many times I had to wait >several weeks for a reply from support or anyone else there.

They always answer my support tickets within an hour or two, sometimes it just takes minutes. It's even faster if I call. They usually fix it while I wait.

>There were times they were down for hours at a time.

They do have downtime that sometimes pisses me off.


>At times it took weeks to setup an email account.

You set up all email account yourself and it takes a few seconds to do it.

>The server always seemed etremely slow for my small site, which had no server side scripting. My max page size was 70kb including images.

I don't even understand what the hell this means. I can download from them at 1500 kbps. Max page size??? They support just about everything available including Coldfusion for free with resold accounts.


Anyway I have about 15 domains with C I Host and although I have been unhappy at times when sites go down, they have been fairly reasonable for the price. They provide anonymous tech support for my clients and I have had clients tell me that the guys are great and always very helpful.

I would admit some of the level one techs are clueless, like the guy who told me just today that they just lay towers on thier sides for colo, so they fit in the 4U space hahaha.

They are a huge company, almost like a baby bell now with 200,000 clients. They are not perfect but they are very competitive. I can get 4u Colo with full daily backup and firewall, 1000GB of traffic and 127 IP's for $79 a month. Show me something comparable to that. I can get a simple dedicated box and for $50 more a month they will provide end user domain level support for my customers. That means when joe blow wants to have a guest book or doesn't understand that he needs to have a page named index.html, I don't need to take his call.

I have been with them for almost two years now. I have had days when I was very unhappy and days were I was very satisfied. I really do think they are getting better. Just stay away from those level one techs hahaha.

OK go ahead and tell me how much of an idiot I am. :)

Not sure if you realize this or not, but this is about a 2 yr old post!
06-01-2001 12:10 PM

a classic!

Well the general rule might be more than 2 years.

If the company has ****** in the name its been blocked out. Most companies dumb enough to get ******ed out at WHT are not worth doing business with.

Cheers
Jeff