Anyone have good or bad experiences?

Thanks.

forget them.. i had a virtual account on them for 1 yr last year and at first it was okay.. but ever since the started the new online support thing.. i was never able to get any replies to my support questions..

a friend of my is or was colocated with them and he wanted out but had prepaid 12 months..

interland try really hard to get customers to pay 12 - 24 months in advance.. which ain't good.

I have a few virtual accounts with them and they are absolutely horrible. Over a 6 day period between Christmas and New Years they were down a minimun of one hour each day and a maximum of 10 hours on one day.

Also a few days ago they sent me an e-mail telling me they had changed my IP. However, they did this BEFORE telling me. Therefore some of my scripts were not running because they referenced the IP.

Please stay away from them. If you need any more reasons please contact me and I will be more than happy to share my experience but I think you get the idea.

The feedback that I'm getting about Interland isn't the best but I appreciate everyone's opinion. I was also looking at verio and a few others.

I'm about to launch an adult site and I need a reliable co, with minimial downtime. Price and space are also major factors.

If anyone can give me suggestions, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks.

WebGuy

This one has several reviews..the majority if not all, are negative!
If youve got alot of time you can go to scriptkeeper.com in the hosting forum and do a search..here is one of many posts over there
Not recommended!
http://www.scriptkeeper.com/ubb/Forum5/HTML/000718.html

Holy cow! How do these people stay in business?

Originally posted by etLux
Holy cow! How do these people stay in business?

They stay on business by advertising through Networksolutions. Every domain registered through networksolutions gets a ad by mail.

And advertising everywhere else... I get flyers in the mail from them all the time.

They are indeed well known for being aggressive spammers... something you can check out here:

http://spamcop.net/hosttracker.shtml

Now I don't want this to be interpreted as an advertisement post, because it is far from it, but I have been with Interland for my one site for about 10 months and overall it's been fine. I've only had my own site go down twice and I got the problem resolved with a 10-minute phone call (which sure as hell beats most hosts who give you that whole deal where you email them and it gets ignored and you get frustrated...we all know that story.)

As far as receiving flyers and spam, I've seen absolutely nothing from them (possibly because I am Canadian.) And since I signed up with them, I have received absolutely no mail from any other website-related products/services.

I don't know where everyone gets all this "information" from but, at least from my point of view, it's unfounded.

How about I mail you all the mailings I get from them every week?

;p

Originally posted by Spider John
As far as receiving flyers and spam, I've seen absolutely nothing from them (possibly because I am Canadian.) And since I signed up with them, I have received absolutely no mail from any other website-related products/services.

It has to be that you're Canadian, because I assure you they send out junk mail far too often (my own experience).

I usually mark the mail "Refused, RTS" so it gets sent back or something.

God dammit, I get snail mail from interland all the time .. maybe one of these days I'll make a nice flyer from Wizads Hosting and send it to them ;)

Yeah, I always get snail mail from them too :) Annoying..

I am most grateful for all of their snail mail.

It burns nicely in the dung stove, and with it, I can heat my yurt for all of the winter.

How do these guys get hold you your addresses?

Network Solutions

O yea, the no good piece of crap eh.

Hmmmm. hosting with Interland.....

This is a bit of a rant, but I thought I'd paste in an email that I sent to Interland recently that didn't get any reply and was simply ignored. It might give you an idea of one persons' experience with them.

Regards,
Mark

------------------------------------------------------------

Hi,

Imagine, if you will, the following:

You develop a website for a club and their members, and search around for a hosting company for it. You settle on a big "Top 25" hosting Company, reassured that the service will be good, and have no hesitation in signing up for 24 months hosting since they seem to be large and professional enough and "99% uptime" is prominently displayed on their site as a selling feature.

You pass the hosting bill to the club, who have to pay out of their own limited funds since they're a not-for-profit voluntary organisation.

All is well, and you're really impressed with the hosting Company in terms of speed of set up. Technical Support is great and the Account Manager is very helpful. You don't hesitate to recommend them to others and even go so far as to put an article on the Club site detailing the technology used for it, including a large logo advertising the hosting Company.

A few problems occur necessitating calls to Technical Support - one or two unexplained outages.

One of them turns out to be that the mail system was being upgraded which had a knock on effect to the web servers - you think, "strange - I might have expected an email to let me know of the planned outage, so I could have let the users know" but nonetheless remain reasonably happy.

Another similar situation occurs shortly thereafter, this one due to a planned upgrade to SQL Server. But the outages are only for a few hours at most so you're happy to accept this since everyone is really helpful.

Then connections to the site start being refused for no apparent reason; Technical Support can find nothing wrong. This continues on a random basis for a few weeks until one day when the server breaks down completely and refuses to serve anything at all.

After a long outage of a day, you email Support asking for an expected time of resolution. Expecting that they will be getting many irate calls all day about this, you're quite pleasant, and simply ask what is happening and when the server will be working again. You're a little surprised that you haven't received anything pro-actively to let you know, but an answer is forthcoming; everything should be resolved by 9pm. The cause was a malicious IP attack on the server.

You place a temporary default page on the site explaining what is happening and try again the following day. The situation is unchanged, except that now, the explanation is that a virus has struck the server. This does seem a little odd, but you accept that you can't do anything about this, and that everyone is doing their best to solve it as quickly as possible. It will be working again soon.

Three days later and the situation is unchanged. Users disappointed that the site was down on Friday go to the site on Monday fully expecting it to be working again - after all, no site goes down for as long as three days - instead they are greeted by a page of updates about the outage but no time of resolution.

No email, update or apology is forthcoming, so you think it reasonable to call your Account Manager and see if there is an expected resolution time. He suggests it will be today. However as at lunch time the site is still down, and you're copied on an email that suggests it might be the end of the week before all is sorted. One possibility is to upgrade to a dedicated server - however the Client cannot afford this since it's run not-for-profit.

In the meantime a stack of emails build up from disgruntled Club Members and you get a call from the Membership Secretary asking what we can do to resolve the situation. You cannot say how long it will be before the site is running again because you have no reliable information.

The only guaranteed solution is, therefore, to move the site to another ISP. This takes six hours to complete, and costs £320 which you pay out of your own funds, since it's embarrassing to have to ask the Client (the Club) to pay, since you feel partly responsible for having chosen the Company you did in the first place.

You put up a temporary redirect page with the old host directing users to the new server until the DNS updates, but the server then actually gets worse rather than better and refuses to serve this as well. So you have to email the site users and tell them to use the IP address rather than the domain name until the name server change goes through.

Seven days after the outage began, the domain name details change for the last users, and the site is fully online one week after it went down. The Club extends everyone's membership by four days at a cost to themselves to apologise for the downtime.

No further communication is received from the old hosting company at all; you might have expected a formal apology, perhaps with a detailed explanation of exactly what happened, why it was so complex to resolve, and the action that has been taken to make sure it cannot happen again, perhaps with a voluntary extension of hosting free of charge to compensate for the problems.

Therefore you cannot assume it is safe to use that server again for hosting any Client sites, so that web hosting plan is useless except perhaps as a development testbed. However you do need your own dedicated box for a few new sites that are up-and-coming, and despite all the problems with the shared server still think that the Company would be a good choice for a dedicated box of your own, since it would not suffer the same problems and be backed by good connectivity and helpful front-line Support staff such as Gert-Jan, Sherod and Patrick.

However you can't afford it immediately, especially since that Company has now been directly responsible for your being landed with a £320 bill as a result of the site move, with another £320 bill to follow this time next year. So you politely request a refund for the unused hosting period in the meantime in order to clear this.

The email is completely ignored. By now, you begin to suspect that you're dealing with a Company, when it comes to it, ultimately couldn't give a toss about after sales service provided new people continue to sign up for hosting plans - the evidence was there over the handling and length of the outage, with the lack of information, no time of resolution, no updates provided voluntarily and the time it took to resolve. You copy it to the Sales Department and again the email is ignored, so this suspicion is confirmed.

I'm sure by now you've realised this isn't a hypothetical situation. It's the reality of one Customer's experience of the service provided by Interland.

I will know better next time, and keep an eye on newsgroups and web forums that I use; if anyone is considering hosting with you or asking for people's opinions on ASP hosts I can simply paste the above in as a reply to let them know one Customer's experience of dealing with Interland so that they may make an informed decision. Three months ago, I'd have recommended you highly.

Clearly I had expected better from you, and have now turned to another hosting company to co-locate my own boxes for future development.

While I'm sure this email will end up in the bin along with the other ones, you should bear in mind that you have successfully managed to turn a very satisfied and loyal Customer, who would have placed additional business with you and did not hesitate to recommend you to everyone, into a disappointed, frustrated and out-of-pocket one who can only be thankful that he has an understanding Client and did not place any Commerce related sites with you.

Regards,

Mark Phillips