admanis
11-26-2002, 12:37 PM
This subject has already been broached a few times on this forum but being new to the forum and also being one of the latest victims of TotallyHosted,Benjamin Barr,Ben Hawker, Samuel Barr or whatever guise he may be under now I feel that I have to talk about my experience so that others can take note and beware.
I wish that I had discovered this site six months ago so that I could have avoided all the hassles that I have gone through.
I had the misfortune to come across eshore about seven months ago when I was looking for a reseller host.
I liked what I saw and spoke to a 'Karen' on the live support link (I am pretty sure Karen was Samuel!), I signed up for a month then the problem started, first I was inexplicably offline for about a week with no contact with eShore when I tried the phone number in Scotland I got an answering machine! when I finally got back online and said that I wanted my money back I was offered a free month, extra disk space and an assurance that they were merging with a bigger better company called TotallyHosted and that Samuel Barr was leaving the company and Ben Hawker was taking over.
I had my suspicions that Sam Barr and Ben Hawker were one and the same because I noticed from their correspondence that the grammatical and spelling mistakes were identical. Whenever I brought this up with 'Ben' he would deny it vehemently and criticise Samuel Barr for running a shabby operation.
He then apologised profusely and offered me an astonishing deal : 3GB disk space and 55GB bandwidth for $150.00 a year! now get this.. if I paid in full he would give me an extra year! I thought it was too good to be true so like a fool I signed up.
This was in July.
A month later I got a call from my credit card company saying that someone tried to make payments on my card but they declined the transaction because they got some of my details wrong. Further investigation revealed that it was Totallyhosted, the card was cancelled and I was issued a new one Ben denied it and blamed his bank.
I should have cut my losses then but still was stupid thinking that these were gliches in a new company as he always sent newsletters expalining what progress they were making.
Apart from this the site worked ok for a while and I moved a couple of my customers to Totallyhosted I was a bit weary because the site goes down a lot without warning and goes down for days on end.
I started getting phonecalls from my customers about their sites being down at that point I knew that his could not last for two years as I would gain myself a bad reputation and loose the customers that I had worked hard to get.
Then all of a sudden Samuel Barr was back! when I asked him what happen he said "let's just say Ben Hawker is no longer with us!" funny!!. I can say that in the five month period from between July to November the sites have been down at least 80% of the time sometimes as many as four days a week.
The final straw was last week when I found that I could not open my emails because Totallyhosted's CPanel license had expired. From postings on this forum it is clear what's going on and I cannot see him getting a license from anyone.
I have also seen here that he is trying to offload the company! There was also a time about two months ago when I got an email from another company that said they were going to shut down Totallyhosted's servers for lack of payment.
After reading about Samuel Barr and his admission that Ben Hawker and him are one and the same and all the things that he had got up to previously I have removed my sites to one of the ones rated here.
I am also going to contact the trading standards office in Scotland.
There must be a way to stop this crook from doing this to other people. I did not realise that he has been at it for so long. Be also aware that he goes by the name regwizards as well.
On a number of occasions he had tried to get me to design or proof-read his websites but I declined because he was not willing to pay. There must be a way that we can get this scum of the web-hosting field as he is giving every hosting business a bad name.:angry:
You are not hosted ...on TotallyHostedTotallyHosted,Benjamin Barr,Ben Hawker, Samuel Barr
I wish that I had discovered this site six months ago so that I could have avoided all the hassles that I have gone through.
I had the misfortune to come across eshore about seven months ago when I was looking for a reseller host.
I liked what I saw and spoke to a 'Karen' on the live support link (I am pretty sure Karen was Samuel!), I signed up for a month then the problem started, first I was inexplicably offline for about a week with no contact with eShore when I tried the phone number in Scotland I got an answering machine! when I finally got back online and said that I wanted my money back I was offered a free month, extra disk space and an assurance that they were merging with a bigger better company called TotallyHosted and that Samuel Barr was leaving the company and Ben Hawker was taking over.
I had my suspicions that Sam Barr and Ben Hawker were one and the same because I noticed from their correspondence that the grammatical and spelling mistakes were identical. Whenever I brought this up with 'Ben' he would deny it vehemently and criticise Samuel Barr for running a shabby operation.
He then apologised profusely and offered me an astonishing deal : 3GB disk space and 55GB bandwidth for $150.00 a year! now get this.. if I paid in full he would give me an extra year! I thought it was too good to be true so like a fool I signed up.
This was in July.
A month later I got a call from my credit card company saying that someone tried to make payments on my card but they declined the transaction because they got some of my details wrong. Further investigation revealed that it was Totallyhosted, the card was cancelled and I was issued a new one Ben denied it and blamed his bank.
I should have cut my losses then but still was stupid thinking that these were gliches in a new company as he always sent newsletters expalining what progress they were making.
Apart from this the site worked ok for a while and I moved a couple of my customers to Totallyhosted I was a bit weary because the site goes down a lot without warning and goes down for days on end.
I started getting phonecalls from my customers about their sites being down at that point I knew that his could not last for two years as I would gain myself a bad reputation and loose the customers that I had worked hard to get.
Then all of a sudden Samuel Barr was back! when I asked him what happen he said "let's just say Ben Hawker is no longer with us!" funny!!. I can say that in the five month period from between July to November the sites have been down at least 80% of the time sometimes as many as four days a week.
The final straw was last week when I found that I could not open my emails because Totallyhosted's CPanel license had expired. From postings on this forum it is clear what's going on and I cannot see him getting a license from anyone.
I have also seen here that he is trying to offload the company! There was also a time about two months ago when I got an email from another company that said they were going to shut down Totallyhosted's servers for lack of payment.
After reading about Samuel Barr and his admission that Ben Hawker and him are one and the same and all the things that he had got up to previously I have removed my sites to one of the ones rated here.
I am also going to contact the trading standards office in Scotland.
There must be a way to stop this crook from doing this to other people. I did not realise that he has been at it for so long. Be also aware that he goes by the name regwizards as well.
On a number of occasions he had tried to get me to design or proof-read his websites but I declined because he was not willing to pay. There must be a way that we can get this scum of the web-hosting field as he is giving every hosting business a bad name.:angry:
You are not hosted ...on TotallyHostedTotallyHosted,Benjamin Barr,Ben Hawker, Samuel Barr