I have just tried ucvhost.com and had bad experiences. I wanted to warn others who might be considering them. I signed up to their partner program (reseller) and had to pay for a year. They have attractive pricing, advertise 24 hour chat support, 30-day money back guarantee, etc.

What I experienced was the 24 hour chat support was definitely NOT 24 hour. Much of the time no one was online. My emails and were either never replied to, or (in the case of a couple) replied to several days later.

Their web pages clearly stated there was a 30 day money back guarantee, full refund excluding setup fees and overages. The plan I signed up for had no setup fees (clearly stated on their pages), I was with this host for a week I had no overages, yet they refunded me $24 less than what I had paid. When I queried this the support person said there were charges not listed on the website. Then (as an afterthought) he also said that the 3rd party they use for payment transactions charged him, so he was basically charging me for those fees. Even if this is true, it is blatant false advertising on his part to say 'full refund', because I was not refunded the full amount I paid.

You have to manage everything through their control panels (set up, configure and manage accounts), although you can ftp in to upload files, etc. They have a separate control panel for email.

The control panel is not well designed, very unintuitive. Fortunately as I was setting up my accounts there was a support technician online for much of the time, so I could ask direct questions. I set up my accounts. 2 days later I tried to access the control panels again and they were 'under construction' and not available. When they finally came back online my details had been changed, someone else's email address was in my profile, so I had to reconfigure everything. In the 5 days I was with this host the control panel was not available for at least half of that time.

There are lots of spelling mistakes in the control panel and various help files have contradictory information, even within the same help file. For instance, in one case 2 sentences side-by-side had different port numbers listed for the same service.

Email also has to be configured via a separate control panel, the url of which is not documented anywhere that I could see (although there is documentation on this, that url never worked), I had to find out from techsupport. When I signed up the email control panel was available and I configured email for all my accounts. I set it up to forward my mail to me. The forwarding service finally worked, the day I closed my account, 4 days later. In those 4 days I could not collect my mail, nor access the control panel, nor webmail. The url which was supposedly for my webmail access page never worked.

After my experience with ucvhost.com I can only recommend -- stay well away from them.
:eek:

:eek: that is a horrible host!! Glad you dumped them and thanks for the warning....I think I looked at them once, but luckily I didn't sign up :)

Yes. . . .Warnings are always appreciated:D

:cool:

xor, me and a few other members on this board agree, ucvhost is horrible. Check these threads:

Thread 1 (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=13212)
Thread 2 (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=11321)

Originally posted by Foo-Dawg
xor, me and a few other members on this board agree, ucvhost is horrible. Check these threads:

Thread 1 (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=13212)
Thread 2 (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?threadid=11321)

Darn, I did a search of this forum for ucvhost.com before I signed up with them and didn't find anything. I'd better brush up my searching skills.

Donna

Originally posted by AnIdiot
Yes. . . .Warnings are always appreciated:D

:cool:
Their starter hosting package is $1/month and includes unlimited bandwidth.

That should be warning enough.

Yes. . . .UNLIMITED means :(

^ BUMP ^

Sorry, I just had to bring this back up again. I have been using ucvhost for almost a year now, and they suck! Right now my mail is down, and of course there is nobody online to help.

DO NOT USE UCVHOST UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

Oh, and as to their 'unlimited bandwidth', I specifically asked them if hosting a busy forum on thier servers was going to be a problem, and they said no. So, of course, one day the site was down, and when asked about it, they said that it was using too much bandwidth so they shut it off. No problem to them, no questions asked, it was just gone.

I repeat: DO NOT USE UCVHOST UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

Sorry for the rant, but I am REALLY sick of these idiots, and I want to make sure that I warn as many people off as I can.

Don't go through what I have.

BTW...I love these forums. They freakin' rock!! :D I just wish I had found them earlier.

well, the so-called support guy got online, so I tried to contact him...here is the conversation (as it were...):

kwbarron: do you know why mail is down?
kwbarron: anyone home? :D
*** ucvsupport signed off at Sun Jan 20 11:52:09 2002.

how charming...30 minutes after I sent the message, he signs off without so much as a 'bite me'.:angry:

once again - DO NOT USE UCVHOST UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.

For $1/month, it's a wonder that they can even afford to offer technical support at all! :eek:

I think the bottom line here is that you get what you pay for. And while this might not always be the case, generally speaking you don't often receive lightning fast support for $1.

That said, it isn't the customers' fault as they are CLAIMING to provide great support. Which quite obviously they can't do, so in other words they are making false claims, which in turn is giving the whole web hosting industry a bad name. :angry:

I think that $1 for unlimited says enough. I don't see how they can offer 24 hour support for $1/month. Even if they have 10,000 clients! :eek:

If you want good 24 hour support, you should be prepared to pay more. I think you should create better criteria when choosing a host to be a reseller with.

Originally posted by HostNutt
I think that $1 for unlimited says enough. I don't see how they can offer 24 hour support for $1/month. Even if they have 10,000 clients! :eek:

If you want good 24 hour support, you should be prepared to pay more. I think you should create better criteria when choosing a host to be a reseller with.

Agreed...unfortunately, this was my first shot at hosting....and a vey bad one at that :D I have learned my lesson, and I hope that others will heed the warning information available about 'unlimited' hosts.

Sounds like UCVhost hasn't changed at all! The scary thing is that they are advertising on Google, where heaps of unsuspecting people are going to see their ad and possibly fall into the same trap!

In hindsight the comments along the lines of, "For $1 a month you get what you pay for", sort of make sense but it's not really a hard and fast rule. I'm not really sure you can determine how good a host is by how much they charge. Especially since it is so common for them to say unlimited bandwith (with miniscule, contradictory footnote saying in effect, "unless you use too much in which case we won't tolerate it"). So where do you draw the line? My previous host (before UCVhost) was USD$5-6 a month and they were fine most of the time. I've also had FREE hosts that were better than UCVhosting. I don't want to start any kind of fight here, I'm not being sarcastic to those people who have posted this sort of comment, or necessarily disagreeing or saying they are wrong. But, really, how can you tell? I guess the best learning experience I got out of this was... determine whether the potential host is a reseller, and if they are, go somewhere else. At the end of the day, the thing that made me angry, was that they lied (blatant false advertising), they did not refund all my money (again, blatantly lying). And it does ruin it things for all those really good honest hosts out there, by giving webhosting (and online business in general) a bad name.

Someone posted (I think on this forum) and quick and easy way to tell if a host is a reseller (using telnet I think). I wish I could find that information again, it was handy.

Anyway, it is so great to have these forums where free speech rules and we can let others know of our experiences (bad and good)!
:D

This make since to you ?

Domain For $1 - NT Web Small Business + Domain Name for
1 year ($84 + $1 = $85 / year)

(Actual Price $84 + $10 = $94) You Save $9



Why are you so cheap?

That's a company secret :)

:D

i hosted a few domains with them a while ago... and during the 6 months i was there i had no problems at all. The sites were just homepages used to test their services.

I would never host real sites with a company like UCVhost... it just doesnt make sense because it costs more than $1/month just to provide proper support to your clients.

UCVhost must have changed their prices since I tried them, or maybe I was using a different plan, but I am sure it was more than $1 per month that I paid. Yes $1 a month is suspicious, although I am not sure how much $1USD is and how far it will go in India. I am pretty sure that UCVhost is run from India and I imagine that $1 goes further there than it would in the US.

What I find is that if a host is really good (ie. everything works and the servers are up and running fast most of the time), they have less work to do as far as customer support goes. My current host (ABIhosting) which has been excellent has spent no customer support time on me in several months. I've had no reason to contact them. The first month (well first week probably) they had to send me some information by email so that I could get my database up and running and they had to do some work to set it up to begin with, but they have not had to work too hard since. This is because they know what they are doing and they keep things running smoothly. The ironic thing is that UCVhost probably spends more time on customer support and more money on advertising than my current host, because they are so bad. They must have a hard time keeping customers, which means they must always be setting up new accounts and sending information to unsuspecting new customers.

$1 really doesnt go far in india or pakistan for that matter. i guess they're simply trying to acheive a lot of signups by advertising a 'phony' price.

Even though they operate from india doesnt mean thier b/w prices are low :)
They still pay the same prices as the rest of us considering their servers are in usa.


~asher.