KG
11-28-2001, 04:53 PM
In order to make an informed decision about a host you need to be able to weigh the good and the bad. Everyone's experience with a host will not be the same. Hosts that everyone seems to criticize may work for some people. Hosts that everyone praises may not work for some people. Such is my case. I'm offering up my experience not to condemn or attack what may be a perfect host for some people, but to suggest that the quality of service is not always the same for all customers. My purpose is to provide a balance in the reviews to help others make a more educated decision.
Background:
We have a large site: 5 active domains, one a "home site" with folders branching off for product specific sites. We have about 1,200 pages worth of data. For a small B2B company we get a fair amount of traffic and it is increasing. Our site has been live for 5 years, so we are not new to the experience. Being a geeky sort of company, we have the knowledge to set up web servers--in fact we have one here for something else--but none of us wants to be on call 24/7 for our websites, so we choose to outsource the hosting.
We were in search of a new host, because for the second time in four years, a megahost bought out our perfect little host and killed the great service. Last spring I selected a host that was highly praised on WHT and other forums, Jaguar PC. This host was specifically selected because they had the features we needed and more importantly their support department had very positive reviews. In fact most of the comments here and elsewhere were extremely gushing in their praise. I know that a few of their employees post here regularly and signed up for a Supreme Account, fully confident that we had found another "perfect host." Alas, the quality of support just wasn't there for us and we cancelled our account last week.
A few specific examples:
Server down or inaccessible.
This happened more often than acceptable for us. Mostly server problems; sometimes due to another another account on the server, other times I don't know why. These occurances often lasted 1-2 hours. This downtime was not good for our business. Then on Oct 21, our sites were down 12 hours. This time the problem was with their NOC, and beyond Jaguar's direct control, but our customers don't care about that when they need information. Now many of you may think that is a Sunday and we are a B2B company so it shouldn't be a problem. However, we have an office in Australia and reps in Singapore and Indonesia, and our sites get a fair amount of traffic from companies in Asia and Oceania. Our site was totally unavailable to these customers for an entire workday. If customers and potential customers can't access our sites, they will go elsewhere for information and they may not come back.
Support ticket response:
In Oct 2001, I submitted 4 support tickets.
1. The first was an enhancement request, PGP, and this was addressed quickly.
2. The second concerned the subdomain option that was not working on our site, although it came with the account we had. It may or may not have been connected to Cpanel. This ticket was submitted Oct 15, 3pm, and was resolved, 10 days later. Long turnaround, but not completely hateful.
3. We require access to the raw log. We had requested a change in when the log was reset because we lost some of the data when it was reset overnight on a weekend. The requested change was made and the Aug-Sept rollover was perfect. Then from Sept-Nov, it didn't roll over at all and our log file grew to 89MB. I submitted a support ticket on this on Oct 16, 9:40am. I heard nothing even after I modified my ticket to ask if anything was being done 2 weeks later. Finally, 3 weeks after I submitted the support ticket, we were contacted and the problem was resolved within a couple days.
4. The fourth ticket was the most serious problem. Sometime between 10am and 11am on Oct 17 form mail from our site quit coming to any address @mycompany.com. We had made no changes and we had received a form at sales@mycompany.com around 10am. Our forms were processed with a cgi script that we had been using without any problems for five years. The forms could still send mail to any other address just not to @mycompany.com. I quickly set up a yahoo account so that we would not lose leads and orders. But then I had to redistribute hundreds of these within our e-mail system. Again after initial clarification e-mail, we sat in the dark for weeks. After I posted on WHT asking hosts how long they let customers hang on an open support ticket (10/25), we finally heard something. We were asked if we were still having the problem. I said yes. They then thought they fixed the problem, and asked me to confirm. The problem was not fixed. I modified the ticket to say that the problem had not been fixed, but the support ticket was closed anyway on Nov 13 with the problem unresolved.
Five weeks after submitting the support ticket, we threw in the towel and moved to another host.
There were other issues, but I think this post is explicit (and long) enough. Some of you may have the leeway to be more patient with a host. We don't have that luxury. When our site isn't accessible or we can't get data the customer sends to us through the site, it hinders our ability to conduct business. Our problems with Jaguar maybe unique to us, but based on my experience I would not recommend them.
Background:
We have a large site: 5 active domains, one a "home site" with folders branching off for product specific sites. We have about 1,200 pages worth of data. For a small B2B company we get a fair amount of traffic and it is increasing. Our site has been live for 5 years, so we are not new to the experience. Being a geeky sort of company, we have the knowledge to set up web servers--in fact we have one here for something else--but none of us wants to be on call 24/7 for our websites, so we choose to outsource the hosting.
We were in search of a new host, because for the second time in four years, a megahost bought out our perfect little host and killed the great service. Last spring I selected a host that was highly praised on WHT and other forums, Jaguar PC. This host was specifically selected because they had the features we needed and more importantly their support department had very positive reviews. In fact most of the comments here and elsewhere were extremely gushing in their praise. I know that a few of their employees post here regularly and signed up for a Supreme Account, fully confident that we had found another "perfect host." Alas, the quality of support just wasn't there for us and we cancelled our account last week.
A few specific examples:
Server down or inaccessible.
This happened more often than acceptable for us. Mostly server problems; sometimes due to another another account on the server, other times I don't know why. These occurances often lasted 1-2 hours. This downtime was not good for our business. Then on Oct 21, our sites were down 12 hours. This time the problem was with their NOC, and beyond Jaguar's direct control, but our customers don't care about that when they need information. Now many of you may think that is a Sunday and we are a B2B company so it shouldn't be a problem. However, we have an office in Australia and reps in Singapore and Indonesia, and our sites get a fair amount of traffic from companies in Asia and Oceania. Our site was totally unavailable to these customers for an entire workday. If customers and potential customers can't access our sites, they will go elsewhere for information and they may not come back.
Support ticket response:
In Oct 2001, I submitted 4 support tickets.
1. The first was an enhancement request, PGP, and this was addressed quickly.
2. The second concerned the subdomain option that was not working on our site, although it came with the account we had. It may or may not have been connected to Cpanel. This ticket was submitted Oct 15, 3pm, and was resolved, 10 days later. Long turnaround, but not completely hateful.
3. We require access to the raw log. We had requested a change in when the log was reset because we lost some of the data when it was reset overnight on a weekend. The requested change was made and the Aug-Sept rollover was perfect. Then from Sept-Nov, it didn't roll over at all and our log file grew to 89MB. I submitted a support ticket on this on Oct 16, 9:40am. I heard nothing even after I modified my ticket to ask if anything was being done 2 weeks later. Finally, 3 weeks after I submitted the support ticket, we were contacted and the problem was resolved within a couple days.
4. The fourth ticket was the most serious problem. Sometime between 10am and 11am on Oct 17 form mail from our site quit coming to any address @mycompany.com. We had made no changes and we had received a form at sales@mycompany.com around 10am. Our forms were processed with a cgi script that we had been using without any problems for five years. The forms could still send mail to any other address just not to @mycompany.com. I quickly set up a yahoo account so that we would not lose leads and orders. But then I had to redistribute hundreds of these within our e-mail system. Again after initial clarification e-mail, we sat in the dark for weeks. After I posted on WHT asking hosts how long they let customers hang on an open support ticket (10/25), we finally heard something. We were asked if we were still having the problem. I said yes. They then thought they fixed the problem, and asked me to confirm. The problem was not fixed. I modified the ticket to say that the problem had not been fixed, but the support ticket was closed anyway on Nov 13 with the problem unresolved.
Five weeks after submitting the support ticket, we threw in the towel and moved to another host.
There were other issues, but I think this post is explicit (and long) enough. Some of you may have the leeway to be more patient with a host. We don't have that luxury. When our site isn't accessible or we can't get data the customer sends to us through the site, it hinders our ability to conduct business. Our problems with Jaguar maybe unique to us, but based on my experience I would not recommend them.