Can someone tell me a very short thing that happened with *****?

I think I heard that they are ripping people off and their servers are down?

How can these people stay open for business if this is true?

I don't know too much, but I have heard many horror stories concerning ***** - legal problems abound, apparently. I wouldn't get near them - ever!

Hmm.. How about doing a nice lil search on them? :) That should make for interesting reading for you ;)

Hiya Chris,

Great to see you over here at WHT :)

*****'s tales of woe can be read from Deb Suran's article - http://www.forumhosts.com/hosts.htm

To see a copy of the class action lawsuit petition filed against ***** earlier this year, visit:
http://www.evolvedsites.com/cipetition.html

To see nice coverage of the story, go to msnbc.com and search for *****. A couple of nice articles should come up.

I personally was charged $900 for a $300 package; then they kept restoring their servers (8 times total throughout a year, from what I found) from old back-ups, which would mess up e-mail and server settings if you had changed them since the old back-up... I lost a ton of e-mail.

The outage was the worst. I actually had problems dating back to 12/5/99 thru early January 2000. I lost several thousand dollars in Christmas sales. It was devastating. I was really heart-broken.

I filed a complaint with the BBB but they never responded so the complaint was simply filed.

Avoid at all costs. :-)
Bailey

"How can these people stay open for business if this is true?"
Those of us who run a web hosting company know. When you tell a possible costumer that another host is bad, they wont belive you but just think you are trying to scam them and get their money. Also ***** is like the AOL of web hosting, the newbies do not know how bad they are and that is how ***** stays up. Not by providing quality service and keeping exsisting costumers but by getting new costumers all the time.

***** is by far the most "famous" web host with problems but not the only one by any stretch of the imagination.

When I first got involved with domain hosting for personal reasons, I didn't need anything too terribly high-end. Just static HTML and and an email. That's it.

So I chose a cheap host. Big mistake. For 17 days of shoddy service costing $14.95 (the cheapest I could find at the time), I was billed $90. Since I chose a host that only had ICQ tech support (and the guy was never available), I called my MasterCard bank and told them not to authorize the transaction (since they had a 30-day money-back guarantee and I filled out the form to cancel 3 times, only to find it down each time). I promptly cancelled the service as well. I thought that was the end of it.

Somehow, two months later, they managed to get my MasterCard rebilled for the $90 and then another $28.90 for two months of hosting which I never agreed to. I still haven't figured out how. I then had to provide proof that I did attempt to contact for cancellation (fortunately, I still had my ICQ history where I did make three attempts to contact the guy to tell him the cancellation form was down and that (and an attempt by MasterCard to use the form themselves) was all that saved me from losing $118.90.

I actually had a similar experience with AOL back in 1995 (the first time I ever owned a modem...whatever happened to that old 14.4?). For half an hour of "service" and six disconnects, I was charged over $70. (on a "free trial").

It's amazing how places like ***** can stay in business. If they are losing customers left and right and staying in business via new customers.....where are they getting enough new customers to do so? I mean, if you lose customers as fast as they supposedly do, you have to bring in 2-3 times as many new customers to make up for the loss. Considering numbers in loss tend to grow unless you change, it would soon become a number no host could keep up with.

As for the cheap hosting, several things factor in. How long has the company been around, how many customers they have. The longer they have been around, they have had that time to build up a customer base. The more customers they have, the cheaper they can go. Sheer bulk can keep them going (provided they dont have tons of technical problems to which they have to answer to every single customer every few days and bog them down). So I guess what should be said is not all high priced hosts are good, and not all cheap hosts are bad. On the Internet, the phrases "You get what you pay for" and "If it's too good to be true, it probably is" no longer hold water. You just have to look for hosts that have been around long enough to have a trail behind them. Is a trail of happy customers? Or is it a trail of unhappy customers? A good thing to look for....do they have a support forum? If they have been around a while and dont have one, expect there will be probs with them. Good hosts that people are happy with have no problem keeping up a public forum.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/360102.asp

Like I said. I can't believe after the lawsuits that they are still open..

I was just about to get an account from them!!

thanks for doing this post

Originally posted by interservermike
http://www.msnbc.com/news/360102.asp

This *did* happen almost a year ago. I think some more current references would be more helpful if anyone's got any. I don't mean to say that I'd recommend them, just that anyhing past a certain point is errrrr.. a bit old news. Good to show a history though, eh?

People are still posting negative reports about them -- there's a current one in the dedicated hosting section here:
http://216.74.75.101/showthread.php?threadid=3983

This has been going on for years. They will never change.

Fellow ***** victim.

With such a big hosting company any negative posting on the web about them does not affect business much. maybe 1%

I remember a while back they were offering a special. I think it was unlimited bandwidth and 2.5 GB webspace for $17/month.

Gimme a break. I wonder how many of those accounts they put on a single server. ;)

Matt
mlightner@site5.com

Matt you silly! If the server had a 10GB HD then of course only four. Simple math really.

*wink wink*

Golly, how come I didn't figure that one out? Thanks Chicken!

(Note: Apparently Chicken never took a course in WebHosting Math. Math and WebHosting Math are two completely different subjects, however the two are often confused by the uninformed buyer.) :D hehe

Matt