I have been with AIT (aitcom.net) for over 5 years now, since they were a small company. During the first two years of business with them, I could not say enough good things about them. During the last two years, their service and performance has gone steadily downhill. There has been problem after problem with the servers becoming inaccessible either via ftp or thru the web. I write and write to them but they just ignore me. I am fed up this time. All my sites have been down for 36 hours now and no sign of them coming to life. My customers have been calling me all day long wondering what is going on. I got a call from one fellow who was willing to spend $800 to sign up for one of my online services, but he is probably history because he cannot see my site. I am a small time webmaster struggling to make a living today and I cannot afford this kind of loss of income in my life. I am wondering how much of my advertising budget has been blown because of people like him who have not been able to get to my pages to see what I have to offer. The way they see it is if my site can't be reliable, how in hell am I going to be able to convince new customers that my services are going to be reliable. Fortunately I have been hosting a couple of my sites on another company's server out in California for the past 6 months sort of as a trial run. Now that I am convinced that their system is rock steady, I am going to move all my existing customers sites over there during the next few days. Oh, yeah, one more point. AIT was recently on the blackhole list (see spamhaus.org) of spam friendly hosting companies that, despite repeated notification, insist on hosting websites that promote the selling of spam tools, many of which are illegal in various states in the US. What this means is that many of my customers were not getting their forwarded emails from their websites because various ISPs and backbones were killing all email traffic from AIT because they use the blackhole list to filter email traffic. I had to engage in an email writing campaign to AIT, threatening potential legal action, if they did not do what it takes to get off the blackhole spam list. Finally they killed the offending sites, but not after a week of me once again having to explain to my customers that I am doing everything possible to get their websites' email working properly. Well, I am now doing what I should have done a long time ago and I am leaving them for a better company. So long AIT! Get your act togther cause people like me are just getting more and more pissed off every day.

I wasn't going to reply to this thread, but i am going to anyway..

uhm
are you just trying to start up trouble or what?

why the hell would you let this so called bad service go on for 2 years
if it was really that bad you would of left atleast the last month

what is up wtih these people who suffer from long term bad service
i dont understand why i see so many people out there saying things like "Oh my server at company $A has been down for $months"

a week's downtime should be clear that you should be going with another company.

I agree with you Node.. he should have left along time ago..

However, being an EX-AIT customer, its a real pain in the ars to move all of your accounts over to someone else, and AIT is good at making excuses..

I signed up with AIT as a reseller when I first started out hosting (somewhere around 1996).. AIT was then a smaller company and I was up on their list of one of the largest resellers for them (300 or so domains). After time it made more sense for me to go colo (since dedicated servers weren't really "the thing" then) and stop paying AIT *per domain*, which was still a really good deal back then.
Long story short- they got pissed I canceled my accounts and started making up charges and saying that I didn't pay certain fees, even when I showed them my credit card statement that they charged which showed I did.. anyway, after legal action I finally got them out of the picture. It's sad that it resulted in that.

I would <B>never</B>, ever recommend AIT to anyone. Their plans and support back in 1996 were awesome.
Today, there are just to many other great reseller, dedicated, or colo options for less money with far better support and business practices.

Not to use this post to slam them (totally) but maybe this will help someone who might search for info about AITCOM.NET.

laterz,
raqworld

PS- Move on timewarp!!! :D

I see there is a question as to why I would put up with the abuse for so long. Well the answer is simple. None of the sites I host are static html pages or that would be a simple issue. I would just move the pages and supporting graphics to a new server. No, the real problem is that I specialize in automated business solutions that depend exclusively on processes written in Perl. All of my scripts - (Typically 30 or so per site) are so intertwined with the existing file structure of the server that I just simply cannot move them by relocating files. Each and every one has to be recoded on the new server and rigorously tested before I will deploy my customer's site there. My customers depend on my systems running 24/7 and I get bitched at if the site is unaccessible for even 15 minutes. Trust me on this.....

Well, to make a long story short, I have spent the past few months rewriting and reposting all of my customers systems, one at a time, to a new server, one that I had a couple of intensive sites running on for 6 months before making the final decision to use them. Needless to say, they passed the test and I have just completed the last recoding of my last system that I had hosted with AIT and am fixing to move the final 10 of my customers' sites over that depend on this system. It has been a total headache but I am so glad that my divorce with AIT is nearing finalization.

I hope this helps to explain why I have been unable to jump ship as easily as other webmasters have. Just for everyone's information, my new server is a Sun Solaris machine running SunOS 5.8 and the Zeus web server. I will have to say that this is a killer setup and it really puts little PC servers running Linux/Apache to shame. The cost difference is great as the Sun server is a $70K machine vs. the little $2K units that AIT operates. The company I am now using is Silicon Valley Web Hosting and they can be found at http://www.svwh.net .

My test site was an automated directory search site for adult TGP sites at http://www.thumbspy.com . This site really tested the server in that I was getting upward of 250K hits a day in traffic. The server handled this in stride and didn't so much as hiccup. Keep in mind that this is a shared server too, so it was cranking out everyone elses webpages at the same time. Impressive. I really doubt that an AIT box could even compare and would probably have shut down under that kind of load. Also, the reseller solution that SVWH offers under the Zeus allows me to have a single master account in the file tree on the box with any number of virtual servers under that and any number of virtual hosts under each virtual server. In addition I have total control over my email system. I can create any number of sales@ email addresses (or any other name that I like) as there is no alias naming limitation to requiring every site under a virtual host to have a distinct alias. Nice feature to offer my customers. I can guarantee that they can get the email address of their choice. In addition I have total control over how messages are handled that are incoming to the server. I can setup "no such user" and similar filters that will bounce or kill unwanted email. These are some of the many features that AIT simply does not offer.

Well, best of luck to everyone out there to everyone and shop wisely....

timewarp186

Not to sound rude, but if your scripts are hard-coded to that server and are not portable, then you really gotta learn how to program properly.

With my sites that use dynamic content, I can literally copy them to new site, set permissions and edit 1 config file, then whammo - good to go.

--James