Hello all,

Please bear with me as this might turn out to be a very long post (or posts). I am enraged at a company called OCHosting (www.ochosting.com) for their lack of support and care of customers. I have a pretty complicated story to tell, so here goes...

I, like many on this board, had been lurking for a while. I've been a web developer for many years and thought it time to try my hand at reselling. I looked all around for a host that would offer just what I was seeking (in retrospect what I was seeking was probably to good to be true). OCHosting turned out to have the right features and price for the kind of reseller account that I wanted. I checked on here and there were a few threads about them, but nothing major. In every case, Lance (the CEO) had countered bad reviews on the board. I signed up with them on Thursday, April 4th (my first mistake!).

The problems that followed are long and complicated, but what it came down to was that my hosting account, to this day, was never fully active. I cancelled this morning but not without another round of despicable support. They told me that I was not due a refund because I hadn't quit within seven days. My question is: Does that mean I never sould have given them so long to try and fix things?!

The best way to explain the entire problem is to include the email I sent to Lance detailing my whole problem...

Lance sent me an email this morning after I told them I wanted out telling me something about a problem with Plesk and offering to help transfer my domain. Here is my reply, which should explain the situation:

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Glick [mailto:dave@glickcreative.com]
Sent: Monday, April 22, 2002 12:05 PM
To: CEO
Subject: RE: Cancel Account


Lance,

Why do I get the feeling you're very out of the loop on this. I do not have a problem with DNS propagation or moving nameservers. My problem is this:

On your reseller website you claim that all resellers receive "personalized DNS servers" which I asked about and was told means DNS aliases to your DNS servers in the form ns1.mydomain.com and ns2.mydomain.com. This was what I was looking for and so I signed up. I waited several days with no word about the personalized nameservers. In that time, I changed my DNS to point to ns.ocservers.net and ns2.ocservers.net. To my surprise, after the DNS propagated, my site had a nice Apache welcome message. Even after uploading pages, nothing changed. This was approx. three to four days after my initial signup. I then emailed customer support and asked about my personalized nameservers (which I still hadn't heard anything about). I was told to email the DNS admin. I did so, and was told you were in the process of a DNS upgrade and my dns servers would be online within a week. This was on Monday the 8th. A week came and went without a word. On Tuesday the 16th, I emailed the DNS admin and asked what the status of the nameservers was. I received a very rude reply telling me essentially that they would get done when they get done. I decided to wait one more week. Another week came and went. This brings us to today.

It is now two and a half weeks since my initial signup. My domain was pointed to ns.ocservers.net and ns2.ocservers.net successfully, but those DNS servers were not set up correctly so my website never showed (I have since begun to move to a new host). In addition, I had been promised personalized nameservers two weeks ago and never received them. It for this reason - my site NEVER WORKED - I am requesting a refund. Unfortunately I'm told that I only have seven days to figure out the incompetence of your admins. What this says to me is that instead of giving you the benefit of the doubt and waiting for your admins to finish things, I should have canceled right away. I will be sure to fill others in on this little detail.

Finally, if there is a problem with Plesk (which I don't know why there would be since I was a CPanel/WHM reseller customer), that should be told to me before it takes two and a half weeks and countless emails. I would suggest that you give your customer support reps some training in following up with customers and that you give your admins some training in etiquette.

This matter is closed to me. I do not want to do any further business with your company. I also do not wish to talk to you about these problems on the phone. I feel I have given you every chance to make this right and only now that I am leaving do you (or anyone else) contact me and offer to fix things. At this point the only issue is if you are going to give me a refund of my money due to the fact that I never received the service I signed up for.

Dave

------

Anyway, believe it or not, he still refused my refund. Anyway, stay away from these guys at all costs!

Hi Dave,

Thanks for your message. I'm sorry our company wasn't able to get everything working to your satisfaction. I sent am e-mail you hopefully received by now which addressed the issues above and included an apology along with an offer of two free months of our services. We do however, need to stick with our 7 day money-back guarantee. Please contact me if I can be of ANY service to you or your company.

Lance Larson

I would rather return 30, 40 or a 100 bucks than lose the business of others that will see this thread and run like hell from your company.

I have never refused a customer a refund if he was unhappy with my service and they felt I did not meet their expectations.
And I never will.

Monte

Hi Monte,

Thanks for your post. We like to tackle issues head-on. Policies and a strong TOS can carry a hosting company a long ways.

We almost-always get praises and customer referrals from those reading our interactions with customers on WebHostingTalk. Our customers and potential customers understand that there is a strong likelyhood that not every single customer will have a 100% positive experience with our hosting services (Even though we strive for this).

Thanks for the comment Monte, I would like to stick to the current customer issue at hand. Please contact me Dave if I can be of service.

Lance Larson

Originally posted by dancies
It is now two and a half weeks since my initial signup. My domain was pointed to ns.ocservers.net and ns2.ocservers.net successfully, but those DNS servers were not set up correctly so my website never showed
What are you pointing your nameservers to ocservers.net for? I thought you had your own nameservers. [I am assumming here that ocserver.net is ochosting's nameservers.]

Did you register your nameservers with the company you purchased your domain name from? You should have received 3 IP addresses with your hosting account. 1 for your site and 2 for your own nameservers.

Anyways, hope it all works out for you with your next supplier. :)

But 7 days for a refund :eek: That's a tad harsh. :eek:

Originally posted by Aussie Bob

What are you pointing your nameservers to ocservers.net for? I thought you had your own nameservers. [I am assumming here that ocserver.net is ochosting's nameservers.]

Did you register your nameservers with the company you purchased your domain name from? You should have received 3 IP addresses with your hosting account. 1 for your site and 2 for your own nameservers.

Anyways, hope it all works out for you with your next supplier. :)

But 7 days for a refund :eek: That's a tad harsh. :eek:

I was thinking the same thing. But perhaps dancies didn't realise that he had to first register the nameservers himself with his regsitrar before they could be set-up with his reseller package? Which is no crime - his host should have been proactive in advising this (IMHO).

<IMHO> It is unfortunate that ochosting don't have a 30-day money back guarantee - which is pretty much industry standard these days. But I am not about to start telling them how to run their business. </IMHO>

Aussie Bob -

What are you pointing your nameservers to ocservers.net for? I thought you had your own nameservers. [I am assumming here that ocserver.net is ochosting's nameservers.]

I was supposed to get two personalized nameservers at ns.mydomain.com and ns2.mydomain.com but OCHosting never actually set those up. While I was waiting for their DNS admin to get off his bum and send me the two IPs that I needed to use to register the personalized nameservers with CSL, I went ahead and used OCHosting's default nameservers (which I were told were already set up) so I could at least do development using the domain - only problem was those weren't set up either.

As for starting anew, I should have listened to the folks on here more carefully to begin with. It seems there are a couple (maybe four or five) of really well regarded hosting companies on these boards - I went with one of those and am extremely happy so far.

Dave

Originally posted by dancies
Aussie Bob -

I was supposed to get two personalized nameservers at ns.mydomain.com and ns2.mydomain.com but OCHosting never actually set those up. While I was waiting for their DNS admin to get off his bum and send me the two IPs that I needed to use to register the personalized nameservers with CSL, I went ahead and used OCHosting's default nameservers (which I were told were already set up) so I could at least do development using the domain - only problem was those weren't set up either.

Dave

So you never supplied with the IP addresses for your personalized nameservers, and thus you were unable to register them.

The best advise for the future is to choose a host with a 30-day money back guarantee.

I am glad you have found a new host you are happy with - best of luck.

I have two things to say...

If a admin is being rude, ignoring you, or being unproductive you should try to contact his manager. You are basically saying that OCHosting is the worst hosting company just because you had one bad experience with a admin who i have delt with personally.

The issue with the nameservers not being setup for a week because of a upgrade with the front end software of the dns interface. The upgrade didnt take long but righting manuals so that the users can use it is a diffrent story.

Remember OCHosting is a Corporation and you should not base you view on OCHosting by a problem you had with one admin. For anybody who is or ever has problems with a admin should email ceo@ochosting.com or you can call in.

Originally posted by ochost-shaun
Remember OCHosting is a Corporation and you should not base you view on OCHosting by a problem you had with one admin. For anybody who is or ever has problems with a admin should email ceo@ochosting.com or you can call in.

I too am not one to say how to run a business, but one thing is forgotten with the above mentioned statement. This admin who was apparently "rude" represents your Corporation. As with any business, if one worker decides to be a jerk to your customer, it only takes one negative comment from that customer for it to spread like it just did.

Shaun/Lance -

I didn't really want to get into all this on the forums, I simply wanted to relay my overall experience to the group here. As for forming my opinion based on one rude email and a single admin, I don't believe that I did that. I will list, in order, the short overview of problems I had with OCHosting (again, wasn't really going to do this, but you oppened the door):

- Asked in an email titled "new acct" on 4/4 if I would recieve instructions on how to notify you that I have a new customer that needs an account - asked the same question again in a second email to Ranae on 4/5 - question was never answered.

- The account was created on 4/5 (I signed up on 4/4), which is great, but it was not set up correctly. I was told in an email from Ranae that I had to wait for the admin to recreate my account and that it would be done in a few minutes. It was ten hours before I heard back.

-I wrote a followup email on 4/6 to ask about the nameservers. I was told that I would need to directly request the personalized name servers be set up not only initialy, but after every account I create for a client.

-On 4/7, the entire server went down (I had two accounts, both of which were offline from three completly seperate points of access). I emailed support@ and request statistics on how long the servers were offline. I recieved a responce on 4/8 that didn't answer my request for stats (it's fine if you don't want to give those out, but at least tell me).

-I recieved a response from the DNS admin (whom I had emailed on 4/6) on 4/8 informing me "It is going to
take one week for the servers to be set up and to give you access".

-I decided to use your default nameservers in the time between to try and do some development. The default ocservers.net nameservers weren't configured correctly either so my domain was still useless.

-On 4/16 (one week and a day after the admins message) I asked "Any word on the name servers yet?" (this message was also CCd to Ranae who had told me on the phone a week or so earlier that I just need include her in corispondance and things will be taken care of) - I received the following reply on 4/17: "one week means approx one week.. not 2 days... or 24 hours...you will be notified via email when it has been completed.." from the admin.

-I waited one more week without any word from Ranae or the admin and thus requested my account be canceled.

I am not mad at just the DNS admin, nor am I mad at Ranae. I'm not even really mad at the lack of a refund (I figured I wouldn't get one, though it would have been nice). My main anger comes simply from the lack of communication your entire team has shown throughout the whole process. I understand if things don't work, I worked for a small ISP for three years - stuff was always breaking. All I ask is the consideration to be kept in the loop as the person who is paying of your service. Especially after I was assured the first time I complained (to Ranae on the phone) that there wouldn't be any more communications breakdowns.

Further, I was troubled by the email Lance sent me just after my request for service termination which demonstrated he, as the CEO contacting a customer, had no idea what was going on and didn't bother to research my specific complaints.

I have aired my experience with your company and we have settled any business there is between us. If you have anything further for me specificaly, please email me. All I wanted was to relate my experiences to others considering OCHosting so that they may be better informed in their decision.

Dave

Sorry WHT folks - didn't realize I had posted so much until I looked at the thread! Yikes!

I need a beer.... :)

Dave

Originally posted by dancies
Sorry WHT folks - didn't realize I had posted so much until I looked at the thread! Yikes!

I need a beer.... :)

Dave

:beer:

Originally posted by ochosting
We do however, need to stick with our 7 day money-back guarantee.
This isn't a satisfaction-guarantee problem, this is a case of someone not getting what they paid for.

If I ordered a radio with a 30-day money-back guarantee and it never arrived and I then called the company 31 days after ordering asking where my radio was, would it be right for them to tell me, "sorry you never received it, but it's outside of our 30-day satisfaction guarantee so sorry."

Since your tech basically admitted the problem was on your end (your were upgrading your DNS front end and "righting" manuals :rolleyes: ) I would strongly suggest you refund this poor guy's money. You'll be doing both of yourselves a favor.

Originally posted by Intelligent Hosting

This isn't a satisfaction-guarantee problem, this is a case of someone not getting what they paid for.

If I ordered a radio with a 30-day money-back guarantee and it never arrived and I then called the company 31 days after ordering asking where my radio was, would it be right for them to tell me, "sorry you never received it, but it's outside of our 30-day satisfaction guarantee so sorry."

Since your tech basically admitted the problem was on your end (your were upgrading your DNS front end and "righting" manuals :rolleyes: ) I would strongly suggest you refund this poor guy's money. You'll be doing both of yourselves a favor.

Well said!

If you didn't get 3 IPs with your order, 1 for your domain and 1 each for your 2 nameservers, then you should PUSH for a full refund. They failed to deliver. That's if they promised personalised nameservers in the first place. Maybe they promised anonymous nameservers and if that was the case, you don't get your own and just use their anonymous nameservers with their IPs etc.

Anonymous nameservers are ok, providing they can't be traced [googled] back to the source if you want to resell and keep your supplier anonymous. Anonymous nameservers also allow your clients to resell your services and keep you out of the loop too. :)

But it's damn near impossible to keep anything away from those damn google bots these days!! :eek: :rolleyes: :D