Question of the Day:

Anybody got anything g-o-o-d to say about *****?

Just wondering.

Watches as the tumbleweed drifts through the ghost town...

:D :D :D

ROTFL!!

This needs a lot of thinking.... wait... need more time than that.. Ooo wait.... 2 days passed..... 2 years... 2 decades... oh no my brain froze... :D

Heh, jokes in the 'Lounge' forum please.

Hmmmm. Maybe you should wait untill the next arctic age?
That thread is going to need a lot of bumping :D

Considering their 149,000 clients, there must be someone that is at least semi-happy with them? I would also love to know.

If someplace had a plan similar to their Dedicated Private Label Reseller, I would sign up. But with all the talk about CI, one can't feel very sure about them.

Hey... maybe my brain froze cause I'm in the arctic age :confused:

On the more serious side, forgive me parawing742 and NetXL.

i like there site design

No.

They have some nice games in their over-used break room.

Sales person George of ***** is the most fun to infotainment call, and takes it the best.

Originally posted by 9onlinehost
i like there site design
I like it too, that's a good thing, right? :)

Originally posted by 9onlinehost
i like there site design I like their marketing budget. At least, I'd like to have it.

By the way, speaking of marketing, I'm not sure I'd take that "149,000 clients" as completely accurate. Though certainly they are big.

They have the best public relations staff imaginable.

I like the fact that I managed to get out of ***** about 1 1/2 years back without them trying to charge my credit card a "cancelation fee".

They are very very good at charging extra fees...

I can't think of one additional revenue source they missed. In fact, I think the only thing they didn't do was make you pay for support.....well, unless your time is free I suppose.

My experience was positive usually. They are one of those, when everything is good, their great....when things are bad....they're kind of stinky.

I think you all agree with me when I'll saythey have one of the best marketing departments among hosting companies....

I am a soon-to-be-defecting PIR Reseller with *****. When I found CI I was with a horrid local hostco, and was thrilled with the service/features CI was promising. This was AFTER CI's Y2K DNS meltdown and other documented issues.

THE GOOD
fast servers - dual PIII 933, 1gig of ram
constantly upgrading their network
servers are half full with parked domains and geneology or missionary sites. Translation: you usually only have 5 other "heavy" sites on your shared servers
spot-on with patches and updates
usually less than 5 minutes on hold
good pricing ($5-12 Unix accounts, $11-18 NT)
fast mailservers (usually)
good firewalls
pleasant techs
shared Win2K accounts include lots of goodies like unlimited DSNs, serverobjects.com toys, WebTrends (or LiveStats), iMail, shared SSL on every server


THE BAD
lately I have endured hold times of 1 hour or longer
Unix techs are logging NT problems (WTF!?)
get the feeling that the majority of the staff is on Spring Break
serious FTP issues; firewalls are a bit too quick to autoblock
when servers go down, they stay down
had to resort to death threats to get a COM object installed (provided by the Merchant Account reseller they are partnered with!)
WebTrends updates quarterly
poor monitoring of server resources; fought an overflow problem for 2 months when supposedly they run load balancing
have begged to get iMail and WebTrends updated on one server; they truly couldn't care less
level 1 techs are usually lame; finding a talented tech is the key to getting things fixed, otherwise it's 6-12 hours for the simplest of requests
Unix boxes occasionally flaky with MonsterControls; 3 months and still not fixed
many troubles with Fake IPs; though once fixed, it did stay fixed
CEO is a bozo! Chris Faulkner sued his alma matter for $69 million in 1997 :angry: dailycampus.smu.edu/HTMLPages/Fall97/DC.09-10-97/DC.09-10-97-n.suit.html (http://)
billing department is an enigma (I still think they charged me 2x for my initial reseller setup, but after many conversations I just said screwit)
they are a high-profile company; when Code Red happened they were a prime target for scans. Even though the patch was installed long before the DDOS happened, it still sucked to be on CI that week.
I am a designer, not a geek -- I should NEVER know more than the tech answering my call. Sad to report this was often not the case.


Why did I stick with them for over 1 year? Same reason everyone does... it runs good most of the time, and although the support can be frustrating, not knowing what OTHER companies may offer, why risk another move (20+ customer sites plus my own, email, DNS, 24-48 hours downtime) only to find out that it's "bad" everywhere.

For the record I am switching to a dedicated managed NT box at Rackspace.com. I will have to pay $1000 for iMail, another $700 for LiveStats, $300 for ServerObjects, and buy a site certificate ($120) to approximate the features offered on CI's servers. :crap: But I figure that $2200 on the credit card is another $175 per month of "value" that the server offers, bringing my total monthly to $435. That's still cheaper than the $499 dedicated CI box, and Rackspace's reputation (on WHT) is pretty damned encouraging.

Hopefully I can now go 8 hours without compulsively checking the servers, as was the habit with *****. You don't know how many times I heard the phrase "oh, really? I didn't know that it was down" :rolleyes:

CEO is a bozo! Chris Faulkner sued his alma matter for $69 million in 1997 :angry: dailycampus.smu.edu/HTMLPages/Fall97/DC.09-10-97/DC.09-10-97-n.suit.html (http://)

Wow, that is wild, does anyone know what happened with that law suit. I had hosted a few accounts with ***** back in late 1999 and have really nothing good to say about them.

Originally posted by JaniceH
CEO is a bozo! Chris Faulkner sued his alma matter for $69 million in 1997 :angry: dailycampus.smu.edu/HTMLPages/Fall97/DC.09-10-97/DC.09-10-97-n.suit.html (http://)

Wow, that is wild, does anyone know what happened with that law suit. I had hosted a few accounts with ***** back in late 1999 and have really nothing good to say about them.


When they went to court, the settlement was for $2 million then that's how they started *****.

Amazing huh?


einstein, welcome to real world. I have big problems with them either and yes you are right, they suck, enough said.

My suggestion is file chargeback and get your money back then you will be happy, then ***** will learn a lesson, that simple. This is free country so you have the right to get the services you paid for so you get them back! They are trying to make money thats all. They care about MONEY $$$ not CUSTOMERS!

Enuff said .......

I read all the threads on *****. It is evident that more than a few are disatified with them. My question here is who would you recommend for good uptime, great customer service and an 800 tech support line that is 24/7 I mean actual 24/7 Alot of hosting companies say they are 24/7 but when you try to reach them they are no where to be found.

***** SUCKS

Honestly they can't be all bad, I seriously doubt they have 150k unhappy customers considering the number of alternatives there are out there.

-Brendan

You're right, ***** did many things right. They bundle a heap of goodies in their shared hosting, including serverobjects.com COMs, WebTrends or LiveStats, a shared SSL certificate for every server, iMail, etc. The problem lies in their service...it varied from damned excellent to piss poor. Wait times of up to an hour? As a reseller that is utter bullsh*t.:angry:

The techs are nice, and the simple problems are quickly fixed (once you get thru to a tech). But something as simple as changing permissions on a single directory took up to 3 days. Give me a farkin break.

Other problems arised with certain servers acting funny...one server didn't install Frontpage extensions correctly. Another used WebTrends, and NEVER EVER updated automatically (as it should). These problems were reported numerous times to numerous techs at all levels, and nothing has been done to fix them.

I am a reasonable person. But waiting over one year for problems to be resolved? I am an ass for not acting sooner, moving to a hostco that can give me the support I need.

As for the 150,000 sites, I believe that is inaccurate. I speculate they are counting the number of IP addresses they have assigned to their servers. If you cruise IPs on any server you will find they are about half full. Considering the light-load of most sites, this type of load balancing is unnecessary for dual-933 PIIIs with 1gig of ram.

Sad to leave them, because they DID bail my ass out of an even worse hostco. I used to be able to speak to a tech within 5 minutes of calling. No more, and I can't accept that level of support. :(

I forgot to address the "what IS good" question. Truthfully, I thought CI was good until I began to add up all of the service failures. Compounded by the inexcusible wait times.

I only looked for IIS hosting, but I did find many excellent *nix-based hostcos. site5.com seemed quite reasonable. tiernetworking.com is good, and their bandwidth is pretty cheap.

I ended up with Rackspace. I forfeited some of my time; I will be responsible for many aspects of the server that I previously left up to techs. But that's acceptable tradeoff to gain root access and total system control.

Caveat: just last week I left an FTP anonymous account active. It only took 2 hours for someone to find the hole and begin throwing warez into an account. It is TOO EASY to f*ckup your own box, so be careful about jumping into a dedicated server. Stick with shared managed hosting if you don't want to sweat the details.

Interland, interliant, oem.net, yada yada yada. They all begin to look the same. Of all hostcos, only ***** seems to have this type of hatred against it, and largely for actions in their past (the Y2K meltdown being the most notorious).

I guess my bottom line would be this: if you're looking for good, affordable hosting for one or two personal sites, they offer great packages. But I could not recommend them to resellers/developers based solely on their support problems. If you can dig 24-48 hour turnaround on support requests, they may suit you just fine.