Our little company has just been through something I guess many others have. We have been damaged by a poor hosting experience but assisted by a much better host.

This is not just another report critical of a host though, of which there are plenty on here, most of which are deserved. It is an honest report of how one let us down, and another has been excellent. Hopefully it will be helpful to others.

Our existing/old host, BargainHost, has provided intermittent service. Even before this weekend, there were outages which seemed to occur once or twice per month for many hours. We emailed several times to check if there was an on-going issue. We never once received a response. Maybe we should have acted earlier on that alone. But we didn't.

Unfortunately our site there has increased in importance to us. Outages have become more damaging.

Yesterday morning the site went down again. It was down all day. This morning we received an email stating that "We have ordered new parts for server one and will try and get the server online as soon as possible and where circumstances allow, we are unable to estimate when server one will be active again.".

It is still down then and nothing optimistic in there to suggest short term recovery. We emailed immediately of course, several times, and raised support tickets. No response whatsoever.

The site is still down now, Sunday evening.

That's the bad news.

The good news? We decided this morning we had to act.... the site could still be down in another week as far as the BargainHost message goes. We therefore contacted another host to seek help: AlwaysWebHosting.com.

They were really exceptional. They held our hand in setting things up (bear in mind it's a Sunday - and our first email to them must have been about 3am their time), we have uploaded the data and altered the DNS. Worst case scenario now is just another 24 hours whilst the DNS resolves.

With this host (AWH) we did our homework. We checked them out a few weeks ago: did they have a good reputation (eg: via this forum), were their proper contact details on their web site (eg: tel number), was there a forum of relatively satisfied customers there, what did their hosting look like in terms of infrastructure, did they respond quickly to a test email,etc. They passed easily.

These are things we have learned but were totally unaware of with our original choice. We went for them solely on the basis of a magazine advert. Obviously a mistake, but we didn't know any better at the time. Whereas AWH passed all the above tests, BargainHost would actually have failed most.

I suppose it's called the benefit experience.

I hope this proves useful to others then... not just with respect to the two hosts I mention, but the process to choose hosts as well.

It good to see you finally got a good provider now.

This is an interesting read and a fairly accurate assessment to date of both companies. The only thing that is missing from this is how you will feel about AWH in a month or two. But that's something you can't answer today (only time can) and I suspect that you'll have the same opinion. AWH has been around a long time, and Ronnie (the owner) is a pretty nice guy and he's not going anywhere.

I transfered my last domain away from bargainhost about 6 hours before i got the email.

I was hosted on server1

Email:

This message is only for our customers whose hosting accounts are hosted on server one: one.bargainhosts.co.uk

Please accept our apologies for problems with server one, this server has gone offline due to unforseen circumstances. Server one has been offline since approx. 5 am this morning, we tried a routine reboot but server was not responding.

We did not have a technician available at Telehouse until 6:15 pm this evening, on inspection server one has suffered a serious hardware failure and we will therefore unfortunately be unable to bring the server online again today.

We have ordered new parts for server one and will try and get the server online as soon as possible and where circumstances allow, we are unable to estimate when server one will be active again. Please bear with us while we work to resolve this situation as soon as possible, once again we apologise for these problems and the inconvenience caused.

Best regards,

IT Manager: James Innes
http://www.bargainhost.co.uk

I'm kicking myself because the signs were there and we didn't act upon them earlier. As we learned more we knew that this sort of thing might happen. Inertia has caused us all this grief.

Yes, that's the message Phision... you must have read the tea leaves better than us!

Still down of course, and still no response to our emails begging them to stick our site onto a different server. That's like adding insult to injury.

We are very comfortable with AWH though now - or will be when the DNS resolves! My stress level can then normalize!

Just for the record.... BargainHost is STILL down and still no email response to the cries for help. That's about 60 hours so far. Anyone who looks at them wants their head testing.

Glad to have you aboard Jenni! Thanks for selecting us as your hosting provider.

As was mentioned above, if you could post a followup reply after you've been with us a few months to let everyone know if we're still making the grade that'd be really appreciated. (I have no reason to think we shouldn't be, ;) ) Thanks!

P.S. Your first post above was 4 days ago... And your DNS is still pointing to your old host. Please contact us at AWH directly if we can be of any assistance to you in changing your DNS information to point to our servers. :D

I was with AWH for a while. They are fairly a good operation. You should be well taken care of.

Ronnie... thanks very much.

The DNS for the site impacted by BargainHost seems fine from here... they are picking up the version we uploaded to your servers. The site in my profile here is totally different. I have a stack of hosts and that is a different one.

Certainly so far AWH has been top notch. I always value a host when they are there at the point you REALLY need help. You were there when we were in panic zone and the chips were down (on a Sunday), and that is always appreciated. I'll be sure to post again downstream.

As for BargainHost, at the opposite end of the quality spectrum, they still haven't bothered to respond to our Priority 1 tickets of almost a week ago. Just about sums them up I suppose. Even for a rock bottom cost host you expect some basic manners. Ah well... down to experience again.

Just to add my couple of cents.

I sent a transfer request to them for one domain I have with them in December last year which has been ignored. A total of 27 emails i have sent to them also ignored.

I do have another domain with them, again on server one which is still down and again no replies to any of my emails.

Grrrr

I am not putting any one down, but here would have been my big clue,"BargainHost."
Maybe should change the name to Bargainsupport?