I was with phpwebhosting.com for a number of months, and had lots of problems, as well as plenty of limitations, for an account that was supposed to be unlimited in all sorts of ways :rolleyes:

I had heard about some bad things on OCHosting as they transitioned away from C**Host.com, but I took the chance on the fact that they seemed to have a pretty robust support plan (namely the 24/7 800 number), as well as that fat little gig of storage.

Right off the bat, I had a problem with paying for adding subdomains (something I didn't see in the original sales material :eek: ). I called to cancel (now that I'm once bitten), and the sales staff basically negated the issue by waiving any monthly fees and only charging me $5 to setup two subdomains, within an hour. Mind you this was at 12:30am. I've had more typical problems here and there setting up things, and they've responded very quickly and effectively each time. I feel so much more secure setting things up now.

I've loved being able to call or IM 24/7 (I'm a bigtime insomniac)...DJ is usually there at night and has been very helpful.

Check my previous posts for validation that I'm not BS'ing...I don't post here because webhosting is not my life, it's just what keeps my business running. I'm happy to say that I've had zero downtime that wasn't my fault :stickout

OCHOSTING SUCKS.

Now, I can usually overlook little things like occassional downtime, bad webmail readers, and general insecurity of logins, especially since they had a (supposedly) good deal on HD and BW..

But now they've gone too far.

My website was down for at least 8 hours last night. They do have phone support, but they are no more than drones punching in trouble tickets, and could give me ZERO information of when my website would be back up, or what the problem even was. All they could do was confirm that it was down (duh).

Finally, this morning, when (the real) customer service opened, I learned that their RAID failed. That sucks. I also noticed that they had restored service, but used a backup from SIX WEEKS AGO!! So much for their claims of a "daily backup". Now, my website has certainly changed a lot since then, so I was not too pleased.

Worst of all, we lost ALL OF OUR EMAIL SPOOLS, and email was completely nonfunctional for an ADDITIONAL 8 hours. Only recently did it come back up. So I immediately forwarded all of the accounts to other hosts that I CAN TRUST.

This was totally catastrophic, and indicates a huge degree of incompetence on the part of OChosting. Once I find a new suitable provider, I'm gone.

Here's a review for them. I called them and their phone people had no answers to any questions. They pretended to own their own data center, yet had no techs available to answer questions.

I'm going to be short on this one.


2 of the servers partitions /usr and /home where hosed. Raid only protects the server if a hard drive fails. If the drive slowly slowly becomes corrupt for any reason then it becomes corrupt. Thats why we have backups. We checked and the only backup that didnt have corrupt data on it was from about a month ago. You guys should be happy that we have backups from a month ago. Most companys will overwrite the backups every time they backup the server. anyhow, it's true, the server went down at 6:00pm and came back up close to 4:00am. I sat here my self and rebuild it. Anyway, we found and replaced the failing drive.

Thats all i have to say.

Hi Chris,

We actually DO have our own datacenter. You're welcome to come take a look if you'd like. I'd be happy to give you a personal tour! :) We're located in San Clemente, California

Sorry to hear about our sales department not referring you to a tech for technical questions. Can I ask when and what number you called?

I'd like to get a little more info so I can see what happened.

Vesuve,

I think I actually spoke to you a few times on the phone.

I can understand your being angry about your website being down, and loosing e-mail you had not downloaded, I was angry myself.

Our drones are actually quite knowledgable. Sorry they weren't able to help you out anymore. Any "website down" situation is hard to explain to a customer in the first place, as I'm sure you know.

There are a couple questions I had:

1) Insecurity of logins? Not sure what you mean by this, please explain.

2) Bad Webmail readers? Are you referring to the two e-mail readers that come with CPanel?

It's really a drag when a hosting company experiences a problem that is really truely out of their control. I think the best hosting companies are the ones who are able not to point fingers, and fix the problem as fast as possible. No SCSI RAID or external backup system can ever truly 100% guarantee the completeness and uncorrupted storage of data (I will love when this day comes).

Again I apologize. I know business is business, but I just wanted to let you know that we did everything possible to get you online, and operational, as fast as possible (I came up to the office till 5am yawn.).

Coldblooded,

Thanks for the positive comment!! We try VERY hard to please every single one of our clients. It really seems that the happy ones never post or say a thing.

Please give me an e-mail if you ever have any comments/troubles/suggestions

We're here to help!

p.s. DJ says thanks for the cheer ;)

Well, looks like I opened my big trap too soon. I used OCHosting for 6months while I established my website. I've been steady at 10Gb of traffic & about 500Mb of diskspace/month for at least 4 months now. My account limits were 1Gb disk & 20Gb of traffic.

So today we get an email, saying that our server is utilizing too many resources for a shared server, and how they'd love to bone me dry for $100+/month for a dedicated server...since "it's time for me to upgrade", by their account.

I'm :angry:furious:angry: & not happy at all with OC Hosting right now...which makes it worse since I was willing to put up with a fair amount of downtime & slowness. The overall service was bearable, and support was not as bad as some I've used, but this takes the cake.

I'm back on here shopping for someone legitimate...considering VenturesOnline.com

Pretty strange a 500mb site doing 10 gig of traffic is too resource intensive unless you are running a forum that is know to be a "resource hog" or bouncing alot scripts off of the cpu.

It is nice to see someone coming back after the intial setup period for a follow-up review.

Coldblooded: Space and bandwidth have very little bearing on how much resources your site actually uses. When they say resources, they mean cpu time and memory usage. Perhaps you have outgrown the shared hosting environment. If you move to another host, your bound to get the same thing happen to you.

We have been dealing with OC Hosting now for the last 2 years and we are extremely happy with our business relationship.

Shaun is a very good admin and helps me out alot when Cpanel support isn't around, He keeps their network and servers running at optimal performance.

We have a personal ongoing relationship with them and they are certainly no fly by night company. If your looking at virtual hosting, OC Hosting should be near the top of your list.

Hi coldblooded!

Good to hear from you again, hope you had a good time watching the Superbowl (I saw my team get their butt handed to um') :(

We are definitely not out to "bone" you in any way. Many users choose to go dedicated in order to have a) complete root access b) unlimited server resources c) control every aspect of thier server.

Here is a TOP on your server resource usage. You're running vbullitin, a VERY large amount of daily hits, and are ALWAYS on top of server usage at about 50% of server CPU usage, and 2% of MEMORY. We can't have you use 50% of a $6000 shared server, all by yourself for $19.95/month. I'm sure you can agree that's not good business for you, us, or the other clients on the server. I've *** out some parts of your script, for your security.

wheel****.com 2.17 1.33 0.4
Top Process %CPU 17.0 /usr/bin/perl -T /usr/local/cpanel/base/neomail/neomail.pl
Top Process %CPU 15.0 httpd [www.wheel****.com] [/phpAds/adlog.php?***********(remarked out)]
Top Process %CPU 9.0 httpd [www.wheel****.com] [/specs/]

>So today we get an email, saying that our server is utilizing too >many resources for a shared server, and how they'd love to >bone me dry for $100+/month for a dedicated server...since "it's >time for me to upgrade", by their account.

Your welcome to go to a dedicated solution, semi-dedicated server, trim your website or do whatever you want. We're just informing you that you have outgrown shared hosting. The decision on what you want to do for your website is yours.


>I'm back on here shopping for someone legitimate

Well, sorry to say Paalo, in my 5 years of web hosting experience, managing over 4000 dedicated, shared clients and about 300 servers, your not going to find a shared hosting plan to accomadate your website at it's current popularity and usage.

Please e-mail me at any time, for ANY assistance.

Hi AlaskanWolf,

Thanks for your praise : ).. Good to hear from yuh'!

Haze,

Excellent point. It's very hard to try and relay this to the customer. Some understand because they know what their running on their website. Others get confused with memory, bandwidth, and resources.

I remember one guy, that said we had "slow bandwidth". I asked him why he would say that. His answer: "It's slow, I keep getting the message total disk quota exceeded!"

(He had 1000MB of 1000MB used.) ;)

Hi Lance! I agree with you! We've drafted a lot of shared plans, and shared plans have limits to how big you can grow before you have to upgrade to another solution. I experienced it a lot when I first started my adventure into the hosting realm! I had a shared account which I outgrew, it happens. So I agree with what you've stated, excellent ground point :)

I've had a decent experience with OC. Downtime has been minimal since the split with "SeeEye" Host.

But then I'm not very demanding. My little porfolio site does maybe 5 gigs/mo, and I'm not running any scripts.

Hi balistic,

Thank for the comment.. We do the best we can in good-old Southern California :)

I appreciate the quick response & relevant info. I was a bit charged last night...the OC message was a bad topper to a rough weekend. I can appreciate your viewpoint on the server's utilization.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do right now. I may end up putting this site on a friend's server for a while (better to be a bit slower than not at all). I really can't afford much more, and didn't realize the site was using so much CPU.

coldblooded,

We'd be happy to work with you. We have semi-dedicated servers which may work great for you. We'll workout something to keep you as a client :).

I just want to butt in here and say how impressed I am with the way OCHosting/Lance handled this issue. Zero condescension towards the customer. Willing to work something and explaining the problem so a non-techie like me understood it! Kudos! I'll for sure keep you in mind for my hosting needs!:D

I think there are lessons here to be learned both by customers and their hosting companies. I agree that Lance handled the situation well and even coldblooded darn near apologized in public.

I don't know all of what was said in the original "notice" to coldblooded, but it seems to me that Lance's excellent explanation here would have been a good thing to include in the first place.

Lance, can I get a tour of the San Clemente data center sometime?

I agree that Lance did an excellent job of trying to resolve the situation. And I find it interesting also that it had to be done via WHT vs. direct contact with OC hosting.

Good luck coldblooded with whatever you decide to do

Lol, I need to start paying more attention. Working late really gets to my head.

(sorry) :D

Kyle, the "good review" was posted six months ago. I missed the date differences at first, myself. Coldblooded resurrected this thread with a not-so-kind update. But you really need to read through the rest of the thread to find out where coldblooded and OCHosting stand at the moment.

arpmn,

>I just want to butt in here and say how impressed I am with the way OCHosting/Lance handled this issue.

Thanks for the compliment!

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

cove,


>Lance, can I get a tour of the San Clemente data center sometime?

You can come by our place anytime, just give us a ring. Directions: http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?BFCat=&Pyt=Tmap&newFL=Use+Address+Below&addr=920+Calle+Negocio%2C+Suite+%23F&csz=San+Clemente%2C+CA.+92673&Country=us&Get%A0Map=Get+Map

Watch out for the snipers on the roof!

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

m0nkeyhost,

>I agree that Lance did an excellent job of trying to resolve the situation. And I find it interesting also that it had to be done via WHT vs. direct >contact with OC hosting.

Good point. I think that playing with public opinion is a great way to get yourself heard. But hey, I don't mind chatting on here a-bit. Gets me out of my darn office Intranet one in awhile! :)

I have been with OCHosting for close to a year now and all I have to say is that I have never been let down with their service, and/or the performance of my hardware. I have spoken with them A LOT over the last eight or nine months or so, and they have never failed to resolve issues, or lend me all the help I need. When you get as large as they are you're bound to run into hiccups, but if the service I have received is typical than their running a damned fine business by those standards.

How's that for a postive review??

I CANNOT begin to disclose my level of disgust with ochosting. I will leave it at that for now!

OH... i dont even KNOW where to start... when I have time..

Hi OPEN,

I'd like to hear it. Please open a new thread or e-mail me and we'll discuss.

I think it's great that we have companies like OC Hosting on WHT. It shows A LOT about the company and their care for customers in general.

Some of the posts about OCHosting are confusing to me.
I had an idea for a web site just over a year ago and a friend of my who teaches CISO referred me to OCHosting.

Before I even forked over any money they found me someone to assist me with problems, created by myself, that I was having getting my web pages put together. Once I got the site up with OCHosting they helped me get the site running, taught me both through email and live chat how to use CPanel, how to set up payment options and how to monitor my site. They answer questions so that I understand and don't get upset if I ask for more help in an area.

there has been an occasional down time but they seem to get things working again pretty fast.

Hey, I have had a good experience with these folks and I was totally inexperienced and they did not turn me away but went out of their way to assist me with a bunch of newbie questions and newbie screwups.