After few days :eek3: with my domains being down I sent to the AWH a support ticket where I mentioned that:

* My sites were down for more than 24 hours.
* The 99,9% uptime that they advertise means that they have to keep their servers up and running for the next 65 years:rolleyes:
* And that my sites were in the development stage and I should have serious dubts to trust them for my operational sites.

This was exactly my support ticket (I can't send you the original because they deleted it...)

Do you want ti know the response?


From: support@alwayswebhosting.com
Subject: {TICKET-2406} Help Desk Response

Sir, have you even read our forums? We clearly explained what has
happened to server10 there.

http://forums.alwayswebhosting.com/showthread.php?threadid=293

You are MORE than welcome to cancel and go host elsewhere, your attitude is NOT appreciated.

Ronnie T. Moore
AlwaysWebHosting.com


In the above mentioned link AWH announce that their server10 was down because of a exploit attack and that everything in the server is lost.
They also mention that the last back-up they have was a month ago :eek2:

So domains and data has been lost...

And above of all these my attitude is NOT appreciated and I'm MORE (pay attention to the capital letters!) to cancel!

Shame on you...

Mr Moore,

I would really appreciated your responce, if the
second paragraph was missing.
It seems that you have your own ideas of marketing and
behavior to the customers.
Since you want it so much I will cancel and I'll go
somewhere else (as many other of your customers, I
believe) but till then please set up my domains.
I sent you the xxxx ticket.

Best Regards


I quote some of the things they adv in their home page just for the fun of it...

Standard Features on every account:
...
» » Daily Data Backup
...

And the best of all!
With our feature-packed hosting plans on powerful servers, incredible technical support, 99.9% Up-time guaranteed, trust your site to us today!

Now I can understand what the incredible technical support stands for!

Wow, and they said great customer service was dead :eek:

I hope you have a local backup, can't believe a responsible host would go without one for over a month ESPECIALLY when they advertise daily backups. I hate what's happening to the reputation of this industry :angry:

Best of luck getting yourself back up and relocated.
Simon

Wow after reading the thread on their message board, I wouldn't host with them for the following:
Our phone line has been out of service for the last few days, and is causing the 'out of area' message if you tried to call us
I can't believe a legitimate company would allow their phone(s) to be down for more than 12 hours. When my business line was down, I raised heck with the company when they told me they thought the fault was on my end, (making it a low priority) and it would be a four days before they could get some one out to fix it. I went outside and disconnected the lines myself, then called them back and asked "what does your trouble codes say now?" They said "your lines are still off the hook" (meaning an open connection - indicating the phones are in use) I then said, "Good, I disconnected the lines at the box, so now that you have all the proof your need that is is on your equipment, get you (word for butt) out here now and fix it!" They re-routed all calls to my cell and fixed the line early the next day. Anyway, I didn't just sit by and do nothing when my phone lines were down.
most server10 clients, however, will have to request we re-setup their account on server 10,
What? They don't even know the details of who was on that server enough to set them up again? Sheesh, how much trouble would it be to back up the 10 kb (or less) per individual of important client info?
... backups are up to 10 GB in size, and downloading that more often that monthly would use a good chunk of the 400 GB/month RackShack offers
Wouldn't you think if the backups did indeed take 10 gigs (not all files have been altered, so it should be less) they should take that into account, and buy more bandwidth? If it costs more, then, they should charge more, it's the price people should be willing to pay for reliability.

Oh, and finally, why couldn't they take the time to replace the vBulletins logo of their forums with their own for crying out loud?

What sort of customer support do you expect when you're paying as little as $9.95 per month for 60GB of monthly bandwidth and unlimited domains per account? Or do you need the $14.95 plan for that? :D

I'm not aiming to bash anyone here, but I honestly don't know how one would be able to provide good customer support for prices like that. In fact if they even get just a few customers using all their bandwidth, they'll already need to set up a new server, or overload the existing one.

The server 10 is down more than 24 hours!

According to your advertisement in the main page about 99,9% uptime, you must have the servers up and running continuously for the next 65 years!


My sites are still in the development stage, but after this incident I have serious doubts about if I gonna use alwayswebhosting for their "live" operation...


Do you believe that the the response I've got from the AWH was the appropriate for such a message?

Originally posted by fx1024


Do you believe that the the response I've got from the AWH was the appropriate for such a message?

No, it definitely wasn't. I'm sorry if I gave that impression. The least they should have done is:

1. Offer a sincere apology
2. Refunded your money for the entire month where uptime was not at least 99.9%

It seems each week we see yet another example of a host that

a - doesn't back up properly
b - doesn't keep customer account records properly

And then surprise, surprise, acts all goofy when challenged.

Yet I'm in full agreement with Avara -- when signing up for these 'incredible' offers, is anyone really surprised when the host in the end does not live up to them?

Quality support costs, in time and $. There is no free ride.

Turn them in to the Attorney General, it's a lot like the ResellerMatrix (et al) case. You have plenty for a complaint.

That's absolutely disgraceful.

My reply (and I'm sure many decent hosting companies will vouch for something along similar lines is as follows)


Dear FirstName,

I am very sorry about the downtime. I sincerely hope it hasn't affected your business. There was a notice on the forum about it, but I understand that doesn't make it any less acceptable, and I should have contacted you directly.

The downtime was out of our control, although your contract is with us and hence we do accept responsibility for the downtime. This aside, I realise that our site advertised daily backups, however due to our neglience (or whatever) we can not restore the backups. This is a situation of which I am personally ashamed of. God! I screwed up.

You will receive a prompt refund for the month, and additional 2/3 months free for our failure to properly deliver/retreive the daily backups.

I hope you can trust us once again with your website, if not then I understand your reason for leaving.

Yours Sincerely,

blah blah blah

the way he was treated was disgraceful. No host should treat a customer like that.

It is called customer service, that seems to be something lacking these days.

Monte

Hi everyone,

Just to set the record straight, we DO a server backup nightly. However, the most recent backups for server10 were stored on the server that was compromised -- and we're unable to access the backups. The last OFF-SITE backup (which regretably was before a handful of our latest clients joined) was the one we restored. We set up the other accounts as quickly as possible when requested.

As for our phone system, we did our best to get it up and running again -- it is up and running smoothly if you wish to contact us.

We're sincerely sorry for the trouble and have taken the necessary steps to ensure this problem does not happen again in the future. We are refunding this months hosting fees to clients as requested.

avara; We are able to run a very successful web hosting business (with a TON of happy clients) with the 60 GB at the prices listed on our home page. The occassional mishaps will happen with any host, we're doing our best to minimize the damage and take additional preventative measures to ensure they don't occur again in the future.

If you have any further questions feel free to contact me. :D

from here (http://faq.alwayswebhosting.com/general/#3) I read this:


3.
Where are your servers located?
All of our servers are located in our data center, which is in Houston, TX.
4.
Are you a reseller?
No, we are not a reseller, we manage our own servers at our data center.



from here (http://forums.alwayswebhosting.com/showthread.php?threadid=293) we all read this:

We are experiencing a network issue with Server10 and are working with RackShack to resolve the issue asap.


Gee, I must be missing something.:rolleyes:

Dont you just love other hosts bashing other hosts :confused:

I use AWH for my personal webspace ... i'm on server10 ... i'm an extreamly happy customer :)

Yeah I don't know what has changed with AWH recently. In the vein of 'you get what you pay for', I'd say we are getting near-adequate service for the price despite all the problems we've endured in our short life with AWH.

When I came to this forum a few months back, ***nobody*** had an unkind word to say about AWH. I did extensive research on this host with two other people... checking through hosting newsgroups, reading threads on this forum, and looking at host search type websites for any shred of negative feedback... and we couldn't find ANY. It *did* seem too good to be true, but we couldn't find evidence to the contrary, so we signed up. For a year. In advance. :erm:

Well, we've experienced sporadic periods of downtime as well as some... inconsistencies between what we're told and what we find out in the AWH forums, but considering the really nasty hosts we've had in the past (Loosefoot Computing), we didn't even get our knickers in a twist about those problems.

The real kicker (for me, anyway) is a seemingly bizarre request that I check my email less frequently - every 30 minutes.

Ronnie's reasoning for this request is that he is "concerned about the server's ability to handle that load in the future."

Now, it's possible that I'm oversimplifying here, but if a server can't handle someone checking their email frequently, how can it possibly be expected to handle something more strenuous like frequent page requests or something?

I've been with some pretty dodgy, awful hosts in the past (lfchosting.com for example) and they have NEVER asked me to check my email less frequently. I must be a weirdo because I like to receive an email when it arrives. *shrug*

When I told Ronnie that I would set one email account to check only when I manually do so but that I would not set my primary email account to check less frequently, he gave me the "I'm sorry but you are free to host elsewhere if you wanted." line.

What *really* got me hot, though, was his quip: "Geez, you are overreacting." :angry:

Excuse me? When did it become acceptable to tell your customers that their concerns aren't valid and that they're overreacting? :eek:

I was humiliated after that 'scolding' email. I don't like being treated like a child and worse yet, I feel like our site/account is subject to retribution if I report problems or express concerns. Is this really what we should expect as customers?

When we first signed up with AWH, we were full of hope and trust having read such great things in this and other forums, newsgroups, and websites. I'm still optimistic that this is just a rough patch for AWH and that they'll persevere. From what Ronnie told me before we signed up, he started the company to be what he would want in a host: good service, good features, and good pricing.

Here's hoping. :)

Peter, "our" servers are located in the RackShack.net data center. We manage them remotely, just as many other RackShack hosts do. :D


Pixelchiq:

The real kicker (for me, anyway) is a seemingly bizarre request that I check my email less frequently - every 30 minutes.

Ronnie's reasoning for this request is that he is "concerned about the server's ability to handle that load in the future."


You completely misunderstood here -- I was troubleshooting a mail issue on your server and noticed a TON of check/send lines from clients on your domain that made sifting through it difficult. I don't know why it was a big deal, but I asked if you could check mail less frequently (I can't remember how often some of your email users were checking, it was in the neighborhood of every 30 seconds...) I just was lookin for a little cooperation to help me resolve that other issue -- and, I didn't say 'never check your email ever again' as you make it sound. :D

Don't worry Pixelchiq, things are clearing up and we're aiming for clearer sailing from here on out. In the future I won't ask you to check email less, I'll just grep out your domain's mail checks if I need to review mail logs (looking for spammer). Should of thought of that from the beginning, sorry.

I did start AWH with this premise: good service, good features, and good pricing. I think we're making good on that, despite the occassional issue here and there that any host may experience.

Dont you just love other hosts bashing other hosts

It kind of reminds me of someone starting a blacklist site to bash other host. :rolleyes:

Well, I do not quite this weird from my perspective as a paying customer.

On AWH main page, you see Rackshack listed as Premier Partner.
It is no big secret that AWH 'rent' dedicated unmanaged servers from Rackshack which are hosted at Rackshack data center. They do not resell plans from Rackshack per se. They rent the unmanaged dedicated servers and market shared hosting services. Thus this does not make them a reseller or an agent but what they are marketing is a total different product altogether.

If you check Rackshack's contact page (http://www.rackshack.net/support/index.asp) and also Network page (http://www.rackshack.net/aboutus/networks.asp) , you will realized that the three listed location, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio are all part of the state of Texas. At least it is so, the last time I checked. At the same time, AWH is also based in Texas.

Edwin


Originally posted by petertdavis

Gee, I must be missing something.:rolleyes:

Originally posted by UmBillyCord


It kind of reminds me of someone starting a blacklist site to bash other host. :rolleyes:

:bawling: i left myself wide open to that one

However , my website will NOT be bashing hosts .. it will just provide a information source for all unlimited hosts .. and explain why NOT to use them :)

Originally posted by avara
I'm not aiming to bash anyone here, but I honestly don't know how one would be able to provide good customer support for prices like that. [/B]

Being polite costs nothing. This host has behaved disgracefully, and should be avoided.

Tim.

However , my website will NOT be bashing hosts .. it will just provide a information source for all unlimited hosts .. and explain why NOT to use them

:)

Originally posted by alwaysweb

Pixelchiq:

You completely misunderstood here [/B]

You, too. The reason for my post wasn't *really* to gripe about the email thing... it was to illustrate the patronizing and condescending way in which I was treated. It also looks like I'm not the only one.

I also have a site with AWH. Actually, three domains and two sites. One domain is just an alias and the other is just for testing purposes. This domain for testing purposes was in server 10 and although I knew server 10 had had some problems, I didn't even know my testing site was down. I tested it right now and indeed, there is no more testing site. I'll have to ask Ronnie to re-setup it.
About my experience with AWH, so far, I haven't experienced any downtime that I know of (I'm not the kind of guy that is all the time testing the site to see if it is down or not) but I guess that my site hasn't had a problem because if it had, the visitors (around 1,200 unique a day) would send some sort of messages to me, complaining. Never received any. I'm in server 9. I use around 12 GB out of my theorically 60 GB. My site is always fast.
Since I'm new to using a lot of features that AWH offers, like PHP, CGI, Perl, MySQL, a real control panel, etc... (my past web hosting companies were for amateurs, like Geocities), then I have a lot of questions. I sent a lot of questions to Ronnie and although the replies are not as explained as I wanted them to be, I always received the replies without much delay. Also, I understand that I pay for a hosting company, and not for a teaching company, so I forgive the short answers I received. Noticing that, I now ask a lot less, I prefer searching the Internet to find the answers I need, and I have been succeful this way.
So, for 9.95 a month, I guess it's a good deal. Since I do not trust completely in any web hosting company, I always pay monthly, so, if ever I have to leave, I'm not going to lose too much money. Only the angriness of having my site, a non-commercial one, down for some days.

Originally posted by UmBillyCord


:)


:eek:

I'm not out to bash anyone ..

Just thought i'd confirm that again :)

From AWH customer in AWH forum:Well server 10 definetely is not currently running at 99.9% uptime. My site judochop.co.uk has been down for the last 24 hours and some time before. do we get refunds, because its a 99.9% uptime Guarantee.. and this is certainly not 99.9%

From Ronnie:We can refund for the 1 or 2 days out if the 30 or 31 days of the month of your $9.95/month payment. If you want me to stick $1 in the mail and send it to you, we could do that.

Is this how uptime guarantees usually work? I thought if uptime isn't reached for the month, the whole month's fee was refunded.

Lol that last post about sending $1 is pretty bad.

This isn't a problem that is limited to AWH, though.

It seems as if a lot of hosts make promises and guarantees, then if their customers expect them to abide by their own guarantees, the customer is seen as petty and treated as if they're making outrageous demands.

It has gotten to the point where the customer is made to feel as if he is getting a favor from the host instead of paying for a service.

Same thing happened to me. They completely failed to meet any of the service level agreements for their hosting plans and simply refuse to offer refunds.

There "daily backups" are apprently hosted
on the machine in questions. The site I had
was new, and wasnt ever backed up at all,
as best I can tell.

At no point was a notification sent out, aside
from a not at all useful post to a support forum somewhere. When I submitted a support ticket, I got essentially the same response as above.

Un****ing beliveable.

And to make it even worse, apparently the machine was compromised becase it was running lpr. A version with a widely known exploit for over a year. And god only knows
why a dedicated shared webserver was running lpr, and why even if it was "accidently" turn on, why it wasnt firewalled off.

Complete incompetence, outright lies,
and total lack of respect for customers.

Time to see if the corporate lawyer has a
few cycles to burn...

Hmm, I've always thought Ronnie's kind and helpful, but erm, his support replies come across as a little childish? $1 for every day of downtime? My host gave me a month free for the downtime I had last month.

AWH always seemed to be too good to be true but it never had any negative feedback, till now. I hope Ronnie has a good explanation for all the issues above. Even if he had reasons for the downtime, which every host would experience, I don't think it's right to reply to customers in that way.

Gee I was considering moving one of my sites there.

Originally posted by alwaysweb
The occassional mishaps will happen with any host, we're doing our best to minimize the damage and take additional preventative measures to ensure they don't occur again in the future.
Yes, every host has problems at one time or another. May be on their end, and may not be at times.

Bottom line is... How clients and problems are handled is key here regardless of what an individual, organization or company is paying for service.

To those who have had bad experiences or were told "You are MORE than welcome to cancel and go host elsewhere...", do so and don't look back! There are too many quality hosts out there who would be more than happy to take your money and treat you with more class and dignity.

Exactly. I expect some downtime, and some
issues. But I always expect a respectful
and useful reply when I inquire anout those
issues.

In this case, alwayswebhosting demonstrated
to me that they certainly didnt care about having me as a customer. Of course, they
already have my money and are refusing
a refund, so I dont suppose they need to.

As far as I'm concerned, they didnt provide
the services they advertised, and are
not showing the least bit of interest in
rectifying that. If there were even remotely
close to meeting the service they promised,
I might not mind. But they simply dont seem
to care.

I agree. Mr. Moore does not know how to treat his customers. I wouldn't host my site there.

Granted, some customers are VERY hard to handle and require a LOT of patience. But if you do not have it (patience), they don't go into a business where customer service is required.

Jessica

The way i see it he thinks he has a good company and profit and he doesnt really care if someone decides to host with him anymore or not.If it was me and a customers site was down for 24 hours i would automatically contact them and tell them i would give them a month free.:rolleyes:

Originally posted by BadBoy
The way i see it he thinks he has a good company and profit and he doesnt really care if someone decides to host with him anymore or not.If it was me and a customers site was down for 24 hours i would automatically contact them and tell them i would give them a month free.:rolleyes:
I would love to have contacted every person on server10 right away, wasn't technically possible.

I do apologize for any posts or comments that came across as brief, childish, or otherwise rude... Maybe the 18 hour days are catching up to me... I think I need more sleep... :D

Oh, and we did refund many server 10 client's FULL monthly fees. My $1 refund comment was inappropriate and I will adjust it promptly. Thanks for keeping me on my toes everyone.

Originally posted by MattF Example Reply:
Dear FirstName,
I am very sorry about the downtime. I sincerely hope it hasn't affected your business. There was a notice on the forum about it, but I understand that doesn't make it any less acceptable, and I should have contacted you directly.
The downtime was out of our control, although your contract is with us and hence we do accept responsibility for the downtime. This aside, I realise that our site advertised daily backups, however due to our neglience (or whatever) we can not restore the backups. This is a situation of which I am personally ashamed of. God! I screwed up.
You will receive a prompt refund for the month, and additional 2/3 months free for our failure to properly deliver/retreive the daily backups.
I hope you can trust us once again with your website, if not then I understand your reason for leaving.
Yours Sincerely,


That was excellent, Matt! Every host should reply in that manner.

for the way you handled the original poster, so I will also hand you a kudo's for making an apology to your customers here. I can understand the stress and strain of the long days and how it gets to you sometimes, it becomes hard to deal with every request in a rationale manner.

Good job on taking a look at your own replies and realizing you were a little off.

All the best to you guys, and I hope things settle down for you and your customers and everything gets back to normal ASAP.

Monte

do they really use redhat 7.0? lol

I don't noe for u guys but Ronnie's been great ;) recently i think AWH got more and more customer so he is not available all the time but whenever there is a problem, it is fixed pretty fast

I'm currently looking for another host for my phpBB forum and i would love to have the service level like at AWH

Originally posted by alwaysweb

I would love to have contacted every person on server10 right away, wasn't technically possible.

I do apologize for any posts or comments that came across as brief, childish, or otherwise rude... Maybe the 18 hour days are catching up to me... I think I need more sleep... :D

Oh, and we did refund many server 10 client's FULL monthly fees. My $1 refund comment was inappropriate and I will adjust it promptly. Thanks for keeping me on my toes everyone.

mr Moore,
between sending an email to every single customer of "server10" and the...
"You are MORE than welcome to cancel and go host elsewhere, your attitude is NOT appreciated. " as a response to this message:
The server 10 is down more than 24 hours!
According to your advertisement in the main page about 99,9% uptime, you must have the servers up and running continuously for the next 65 years!
My sites are still in the development stage, but after this incident I have serious doubts about if I gonna use alwayswebhosting for their "live" operation...
there is a HUGE difference!

If you need more sleep not to be rude, is your problem and not mine as a customer.

This definitely doesn't look like a professional behavior.

I believe that at least you owed me an apology NOT as a member of this forum (thanks god!) but as a costumer of yours.

Originally posted by utadmin
Dont you just love other hosts bashing other hosts :confused:

I use AWH for my personal webspace ... i'm on server10 ... i'm an extreamly happy customer :)

Maybe you are a happy customer but when I see this :

Announcement
Author: admin
Time: 13-6-2002-09:05
Subject: Server10: Unavailable, network isue

Announcement: We are experiencing a network issue with Server10 and are working to resolve the issue asap.

It is not necessary to submit a support ticket on this issue as we are already aware and working to resolve the problem. Thank you for your patience.


And after 2 days I still have no access to my sites I'm not a happy customer! I'm a furious customer!

And as you can see above, there is not any reference to the forum, as in the legentary reply...

Sir, have you even read our forums? We clearly explained what has happened to server10 there.

http://forums.alwayswebhosting.com/showthread.php?threadid=293

You are MORE than welcome to cancel and go host elsewhere, your attitude is NOT appreciated.

Ronnie T. Moore
AlwaysWebHosting.com


Maybe you received a e-mail, or you were clever enough to visits the forums (when the AWH home server was finally up).

webhosting business is pretty much like any other service business. If you can not take criticisms, complaints, difficult requests from customers, then you're not going to make it for long. I think all webhost owners should sign up for a course in human relation at Dale Carnegie or at their local universities. Just about any technical problems you ran into you can fix eventually, but it is very difficult to mend an already broken relationship with your customers, and most customers have very big mouth now a day (thanks to the web). Most of the complaints from a customer can be solve with a helpful, polite email. The majority of webmasters are very knowledgable, they understand there will be technical problem at time. 100% just doesn't exist in webhosting service. When problem does arrived, they want assurance that it is being working on, they want advance notice from the hosting company

just a suggestion to Ronnie: Taking care of your existing customers first, they are your best sale force. I saw that you have time to post replies here, but have not reply to many of those unhappy posts from your customers at your forum.

Thanks Balto and everyone for your advice. I personally was completely upset that the issue with server10 happened at all, and that apparently showed in my customer interaction.

Again, I apologize, and will be more cautious in the future.