10 Reasons why you should NOT host with Vexxhost.com
I have been with Vexxhost.com for over 3 years. I am NOW jumping ship to another webhost. As much as Vexxhost.com appears to be a better than average webhosting company, they are no longer what they appear. Vexxhost.com used to be really honest above the industry standard. But since expanding greatly,and increasing their customer base they have now become an arrogant, sneaky, greedy and dishonest webhost company like certain others.
Vexxhost will not tell you this upfront but when you sign up on any of their webhosting plans, that also appear to be better than the industry average, there are many hidden things NOT said. (the devil is in the details i guess for most webhosting companies so make sure you really read these details before you sign up)
1 - Vexxhost.com has a maximum cap of 100 bulk outgoing emails per hour on all their webhosting plans except on their pay per use "cloud servers". Even free hosting companies like **********.com and serversfree.com have a maximum cap of 500 emails per hour. That means if you send frequent newsletters and such to your clients, dont count vexxhost as a webhosting company.
2 - Vexxhost.com outgoing email server on all their hosting plans is fake, except on their pay per use "cloud servers". Email outgoing servers are NOT the true SMTP mail service. Since all Vexxhost hosting plans have a dedicated IP address as they claim, when you send outgoing email, the senders outgoing smtp server should be the real "smtp.yourdomain.com" But in actual sense for vexxhost accounts it will be "youraccountname.vexxhost.mtl.something.com". Now since your outgoing smtp servers will be different from your domain name. Major email companies like gmail, yahoo and hotmail can detect this falseness and route your outgoing emails from your vexxhost accounts to the junk/spam folders of thir clients. As a result, most of your outgoing emails sent to your clients will end up in their junk/spam box.
3 - On all Vexxhost.com webhosting accounts, except on their pay per use "cloud server" you NO longer have cpanel control on outgoing email features. For instance if you send more than 10 emails at once from an email list, if two or more emails at the beginning of your list are incorrect, your vexxhost email server account will abandon sending the remaining 7 emails altogether. There is a setting on cpanel to correct this restriction. But since Vexxhost email server service has now become fake, They No longer provide you access to these email control features.
4 - However they will tell you that from $30 to $40 a month you can buy additional outgoing email privileges to your account. Not sure exactly what the email maximum caps are or the current true pricing. Email sending is a very critical component to any website worth its while. So in the end webhosting with Vexxhost.com is like buying a sports car that can go up to 150 MPH but the car is equipped with a speed governor limiting it to 10 MPH. One should then just bought a bicycle instead.
5 - Vexxhost.com also has since introduced the dreaded "you have exceeded server resources" scam. 2 years ago, i received a barrage of unusual website spam traffic from China. It increased my webhosting usage greatly. vexxhost.com then, was kind enough and for free to give me notice and block these spam Chinese traffic without penalizing me even though I had greatly exceeded server resource usage. But today they will NOT block these chinese traffic, instead they will shut down your account, and without notice. Then force you to upgrade to the next upper expensive webhosting account or else you will not have access to your data or account.
They have got me upgrading from 5K plan to 15K plan to 30K plan. That is $10 to $20 to $80 a month? I am not upgrading anymore! Now at every chance they get, when I ask for Customer support, they instead try and sell me their pay per use "cloud server" claiming that if I bought that "cloud server" pay per use, all my support problems will disappear. Seriously Vexxhost! Really?
6 - In the good old days of vexxhost. Vexxhost.com used to have a customer support telephone number that if you were in Canada, you could call them toll free. Guess what? since a year a go they no longer have a customer support telephone number, so you can only reach them by email or live customer support.
8 - Vexxhost.com live customer support has become very useless!. 3 years a go, vexxhost live customer support would try and solve your problem there and then while you wait. Nowadays even for the simplest things, live customer support will tell you to submit a level3 ticket. If you contact live support you will always find rachel and armie almost all the time. Rachel is very helpful and tries a lot but probably tied down with new company rules. Armie is not as effective, even though they are still very polite they will do nothing but refer you for level3 customer support.
9 - Vexxhost.com level3 (support@vexxhost.com) has become another lame duck. In the good old days of Vexxhost.com, when you submitted a ticket they would reply within 24 hrs and let you know that the problem is fixed or ask you to send snap shots of the problem if possible. Nowadays, when you submit a ticket, apart from getting an automated reply, acknowledging the submission of your ticket they will do nothing for 2 days or more, then guess what? within 24 hours they close your ticket claiming that they got no response from you.
10 - To get service from support@vexxhost.com these days, you have to be very persistent and send the same ticket over and over before they really do something, that is if they do something at all. It also appears that they lack the technical know how, because nothing really gets fixed. There is a support agent named gille. He is a specialist at being polite, with excuses but argues with the customer and makes it look that the technical problem is from the customers side. Gille never fixes anything but good at closing the support ticket as serviced.
In the end, webhosting companies like Vexxhost.com start out all different and end up like others.
Please if any one has suggestions for some honest and resoable priced webhosting company please, let me know. And Please do not suggest any company owned by "endurance International group (www.enduranceinternationalgroup.com | EIG)". That would be just jumping from the pot to the frying pan. I would rather stay with vexxhost than go for any EIG webhost. "The devil you know is better than the devil you do not know".
Is it legal for Vexxhost.com to ask for Cpanel Passwords?
I have been a vexxhost.com customer for over 3 years. But recently I have become concerned. In the last year or so when you contact Vexxhost.com customer support, they will ask you to give them your webhosting cPanel account username and your cPanel password as prove of your account ownership, before they serve you.
I find this to be very strange, because other webhosts may ask for the last 3 digits of password, or some verification question etc. Also vexxhost.com never used to ask for a hosting clients password.
I just wanted to know from other webhosting companies if this practice is acceptable in the webhosting industry.
I fear that there can occur issues of disgruntled employees and possibly dishonest employees who may use a clients username and password to commit undesirable acts, like steal domain names, steal licensed software etc etc.
Are there any other webhosting companies that tell their employees to ask hosting customers for their Cpanel account password? Do hosting company employees have access to client's passwords?
Is this NOT a very dangerous trend that Vexxhost.com is setting? I would assume that employees of web hosting companies do not have access to hosting clients passwords, since the passwords in the database are encrypted plus usage of random salt keys etc etc.
This is another reason why I have become skeptical of Vexxhost.com can you people please give me your opinions on this?