Is it just me or are they allowing sign ups again? They just went from a blank page to a new sign up? Good propaganda if you ask me :rolleyes:

The flip flops in the stories is quite drastic. In any case, you are right. I can go to an order page. Perhaps they got a new payment gateway now.

Originally posted by sprintserve
The flip flops in the stories is quite drastic. In any case, you are right. I can go to an order page. Perhaps they got a new payment gateway now.

Whatever gateway it is, it doesn't do realtime credit card checking. You can sign up with completely bogus information.

True, but they probably end up verifying it before creating your account.

but what if someone had a devious little plan to send in thousands of applicatoins?

*whistles*

They've been collecting credit card information (from anyone dumb enough to give it to them!) for about a week.

But they can't do anything with it, as they have no merchant account.

I don't understand why anyone would even *think* about signing up with a host whose support page looked like this:

http://www.featureprice.com/support.php

I don't see anything wrong with that support page. What did I miss?

Whats wrong with the support page? I see nothing wrong, or is it the lack of support?

What's wrong with the support page? Well if you look closely you'll see Suspended next to every support option.

As a FeaturePrice victim I can attest to the fact that support is non-existent. :(

They even have a maximum amount of tickets you can have open. If it wasn't already suspended that might make a difference. They should mention in their TOS that support is obsolete.

FEATUREPRICE.COM is gone with my money. There is no place to complain and get my money back. I am really angry.

They are son of pezevenk.

Is there any body tell me how can I refund my money?

Thanks

Sinan Akdeniz

Goto the address listed in the domain's info and knock on the door.

Reference: http://thewhir.com/marketwatch/fea050903.cfm
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Feature Price Rejects Bids, Shuts Down

May 9, 2003 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- In a rare instance of what appears to be one man walking away from a million dollar payday, Feature Price (featureprice.com) appears to have disintegrated amidst strange behavior and customer outcry.

Rumors of the Ft. Meyers, Fl.-based Web hosting firm being troubled have circulated for months, helped in part by Travis Johnson, co-founder of the firm, who reportedly shut down the site in April to post an open letter informing customers that the company had closed and that clients had two weeks to evacuate. Since then, the site has switched on and off almost daily, customers and people close to the situation say, with employees being told to help themselves to equipment and office supplies. At press time the company's site was operational, but the only number listed on the site was giving a busy disconnected signal.

"Feature Price.com / Hosting-Network, Inc. is closing business April 2003," read the letter title posted by Johnson in April, which has been removed from company's site but cached in Google.

The news was shocking to many in the hosting industry since Feature Price was known to be vastly profitable in 2002, reportedly racking in $1.6 million in profits. At its peak, the company had 60,000 customers serviced by 23 employees and several co-founders, of which Johnson was one and Fathi Said, an Austrian citizen, the other. Feature Price is said to have been adding about 3,000 customers per month, with churn averaging four per cent. Technical support, outsourced to a company in India, was reported to be average.

The business started disintegrating in December 2002 when Said and Johnson had a falling out, sources say. Said left the company, reportedly returning to Austria, and sources report that Johnson starting acting erratically, at one point reportedly physically assaulting a pizza deliveryman. As customer service deteriorated some clients added to the stress, allegedly trying to break down the door to collect on a $16 charge they felt was unfair, and slashing tires on Johnson's car. One self-styled activist and a former customer in contact with Said, Maggie Sedai, told theWHIR that by April the customer churn had reached 20 percent.

Competitors willing to buy Feature Price assets did come out of the woodwork during the course of Q1, with at least one getting as far as signing a final sale contract with Johnson, said people familiar with the situation. One offer was as large as $1 million, but Johnson reportedly signed off on the sale and then reversed the contract through his attorney.

Johnson is believed to have suffered an anxiety attack after Feature Price's merchant account holder, Nova Information Systems, alarmed by the number of charge backs on customers' credit cards, stopped processing new accounts for Feature Price, say sources familiar with the situation. Upon rejecting the offer to sell Feature Price in April, Johnson posted his infamous letter on the site, listing all five companies that did due diligence interested in buying Feature Price - GlobalHost, IPowerWeb, Atlantic.net, SERVER4FREE and Affinity - and essentially outlined the acquisition terms except for the financial details. Johnson also wrote that customers had two weeks to leave, essentially trying to destroy the value of the company.

People familiar with situation suggest that upon deciding not to sell the company Johnson told employees to start taking servers home, and while the staff has never been formally laid off Feature Price stopped operations in May, de-facto. The Florida Attorney General's office confirmed there is an investigation into the company, which is owned by another Johnson venture, Hosting Networks Inc., which also owns another Johnson venture CLEC Edison Telephone. All these corporate entities appear defunct.

Johnson was not reachable at the press time. His attorney did not return a request for comment by deadline. SERVER4FREE, a German hosting provider, has set up a St. Louis-based firm, Server4You, which has introduced a program to welcome existing Feature Price customers. Several other Web hosting firms have implemented similar promotions.



=====

IMO it sucks , i mean their support page. (suspended) is what their mistake is. Don't know what to say about it. (suspended)(suspended)(suspended) ?

THER ARE NOT SUSPENDED THEIR SERVICE.

THEY CRE CLOSED. THEY ARE GONE WITH MILLION DOLARS

Sinan

Featureprice is definitely not 'back' in regards to support and service at all! Seeing this message on the forum, I decided to go see for myself. Almost all support options are listed as "suspended"; my tickets have been untouched, and unanswered for close to or exceeding a month! Is this back? I don't think so. I'm still looking for a new host for our church web site, but after being burned twice in a row, I'm a bit leary. I'll just have to do my homework, and maybe follow up a few references/recommendations before I purchase again. Still frustrated.

Pastor John

One of the reasons we got into the hosting business was because of the horrible service we received from FeaturePrice for our software site. We dropped them last year and have never looked back!

Oh my god.... I can't believe I didn't know any of this!

I am (or apparently... was) a featureprice.com customer. I signed up with them in early 2002 and I never had any trouble with them really. (their support service sucked, but since nothing ever really went wrong with my account or my site it didn't matter).

But early this year my site started experiencing a lot of downtime. Then they had me switch to a new control panel and then my FTP account would upload files but those files wouldn't work. (I had to upload things one by one via the control panel to have them work).

And then last month I noticed that my bandwidth had gone from 10GB to 5GB without warning. When I submitted a support ticket, I was told that I had only even had 5GB. Which is crap, because for over a year I had 10GB.

The control panel sucked. It didn't work. It only ever said I'd used 1.2GB of bandwidth. All month.
And the more I uploaded the less space I seemed to be using. I didn't make any sense.

I never saw the letter that was apparently posted. I never got an e-mail.
My site stopped working last week. I submitted a support ticket after 3 days and 4 days later... I still haven't heard anything.
Then this morning I get an e-mail that says:

C I Host Offers FeaturePrice.com Victims Huge Incentive Package Including Three Free Months of Hosting. Refugee special aimed at helping some 60,000 abandoned customers get back online fast!

Which is the first news I ever got that Feature Price was gone!

What am I supposed to do? I don't get it! My control panel (for all the good it does) is still there. All my files are still there... I don't know what's going on!

Back up your files, and get the hell outta there.

People who recently renewed or signed up have had some success with credit card chargebacks. Others who are outside the chargeback window have also had some success, but it seems to depend on the credit card issuer and case by case evaluation.

Otherwise, kiss your money goodbye, and find yourself a host that will treat you like a paying customer instead of a bit of dirt.

Glad my contract was expiring right as this happened... I still have access to my accounts... Since my contract is expired... maybe any sort of website can be run from them? Nobody seems to monitor them...

Great article by the way (whoever posted that one about FeaturePrice).

Alile - whatever you do, do NOT go to C I Host - they're not exactly the ideal business to work with (and have been banned from WHT).

- Matt

As an Investment Banker who has worked in hosting and ISPs for seven years, it still never fails to shock me when a company goes out of business without selling their customers. As the article mentioned there were five companies that wanted to buy the customers. It appears that selling them would have at the very least reduced their chances of significant law suits, and of course been the right thing to do for the customers. Even if they couldn't sell the company/customers for some reason, such as recalcitrant shareholders or bankers they could have at least made an arrangement with another hosting company to take on their customers.

allie, I sympathise with you. Keep in mind, though, that some businesspeople think nothing of implying instability in their competitors to try and convince clients to switch over, even if there isn't an instability. It's a vicious tactic, and the tragedy is that the customers are the real victims.

I'm leery about offering any kind of 'refugee special' to FeaturePrice clients because I don't know -- for sure - that FP is declaring itself out of the hosting business. From the rumours that have been going around here, it sounds like the people who started the company had a falling-out, and now one of them is looking to destabilise the business by spreading (even more) ideas that they're closing the doors.

If FeaturePrice does indeed decide to close its doors, I know of several hosts who will be more than happy to welcome former FP hostees. We're just keeping things quiet because...like I said, we don't know for sure.

This whole thing could be maliciousness on the part of one or more of the people behind FP's current business. Regardless of what I may think of the quality of the service they provide, I don't want to be adding to the confusion.

their support page goes to a yahoo geocities page! lol

I used them back in the day when I was told on this board that they were decent and they really sucked then!