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  1. #1

    Unhappy (former) Netfirms Customer

    I signed up with Netfirms on December 21st 2007 with their NetFirms Advantage package @ $9.99 per month. I got a refund from them on January 21st, 2008. Here's why:

    I transferred and set up two of my sites from the host I was already using and immediately noticed that after being hosted on NetFirm's servers that the sites were down periodically throughout the day for periods of 30-60 seconds. These were static sites; no data backend or anything. I noticed the downtime from my home computer in suburban Philadelphia, PA and my office computer in downtown Wilmington, DE.

    I reported this to them for the first time on January 5th, 2008 and the ticket was assigned in their system as Interaction#004-596-791. Their response was:
    ---

    Hello,

    Thank-you for your e-mail inquiry.

    Please be advised that we experienced a temporary problem that affected a small number of customers being hosted on one of our web servers. The problem has been resolved and all web services are currently operating within normal parameters. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused you.

    Regards,


    --

    OK, fair enough. But the problem kept happening. I was checking the sites manually maybe 5 times per day and I was seeing failures at least two of those times per day! I kept reporting the problem to them and they kept assuring me that everything was fine with my site and that they would monitor it. But it wasn't fine, and the last straw happened on January 18th. I noticed my sites were down - hard. They weren't coming back after 30-60 seconds like they typically did. They were down for hours. So I called their tech support and they assigned it tracking number {Interaction#004-633-487}. The site was down for about 12 hours. After which I got this response:

    --

    Hello,

    Thank you for your e-mail enquiry.

    Please be advised that we experienced an outage earlier this afternoon that affected a large number of Netfirms clients. Our systems administrators have been working diligently all day to have this issue resolved. At this time all websites have been restored and are online and our team of administrators will continue to monitor the situation. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this issue may have caused you.

    Regards,

    Dan
    Netfirms Inc.

    --

    So then I switched my domains back to my old host. NetFirms was good about honoring their 30 day money back guarantee even though they made me pay for the two "free registrations" @ about $10 each. Even though they were transfers and I had to pay my old host to transfer them back to them. Ugh.

    So anyway, I wasn't going to write up any of this or make a stink about it. Until today, when I got another form letter from their tech support department, 3 weeks after I cancelled my account. It was the same form letter I was getting all along that said that my sites were working fine but they would monitor it if anything else happened. How are my sites working fine when they were cancelled three weeks earlier?

    Anyway, here was their response today to {Interaction#004-628-296}:

    --

    Hello,

    Thank you for your e-mail.

    We are happy to inform you that your ASP pages are presently working. Netfirms will be happy to closely monitor your website(s) over the next 24 hour period to ensure that no other issues arise.

    We apologize for any inconvenience however appreciate your patience in this matter.

    Regards,

    Brandyn
    Netfirms Inc.

    --

    I don't know if these problems are typical with them, but this was all basic stuff. They failed miserably for the entire 30 days I was with them.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Oct 2002
    Location
    EU - east side
    Posts
    21,920
    Thank you for sharing your experience colossalc. I must say that the end of your review is pretty funny.

    May I ask what attracted you to Netfirms?

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Oct 2006
    Location
    Wisconsin
    Posts
    377
    also, there was a recent hicup among many providers recently that caused alot of sites to be down, but there is also a great chance that the problem was isolated to their network too. Sorry to hear about your troubles, I hope you have better roads ahead.

  4. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by rllunzmann View Post
    also, there was a recent hicup among many providers recently that caused alot of sites to be down, but there is also a great chance that the problem was isolated to their network too. Sorry to hear about your troubles, I hope you have better roads ahead.
    What hicup would that be?

  5. #5
    Ouch...
    Thanks for sharing your experience...
    NOTE: I won't be sympathizing with you because you did your refund

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Apr 2007
    Location
    Massachusetts
    Posts
    484
    I have a netfirms thing. It typed in MAX and i got $120 hosting and 2 free domain names. for the whole year and it only cost 10 dolllars!
    Last edited by Chris Patti; 02-09-2008 at 01:48 AM.

  7. #7
    What attracted me to NetFirms was their too-good-to-be-true price vs. feature set. They offered ASP.Net hosting, 250 GB of disk space and SQL Server database for $9.99 per month.

    As for the 12 hour outage that I suffered - it appeared to be from my vantage point an internal DFS or shared SAN problem. I could FTP into my account during the outage but then I got an "Access Denied" or some similar error when I tried to access my files. I think they said something about a disk connectivity error or something.

    That was another weird thing about NetFirms - even though it was Windows hosting (for me), because they use shared disk between their Unix/Windows platform, their Windows systems have case-sensitive filenames and folders. It broke a few links in my site because every other Windows system is case-insensitive.

    If you sign up with them for a Windows package, be mindful of this - if you have any links pointing to default.aspx instead of Default.aspx, they will break even though it works fine in your test system.

  8. #8

    Netfirms

    Are you still using Netfirms for any of your hosting needs?

    If not who are you using?

    here seems to be a lot they still need to do for their asp/asp.net hosting side (e.g. with sub-domains sites you cannot use asp/asp.net)

  9. #9
    I am not using NetFirms for anything right now. I went back to 1and1.

    1and1 isn't perfect either but at least my sites hosted with them stay up constantly! I haven't had an issue with 1and1, but hte biggest one I've run into in the past is that their support is pretty bad if you have any sort of unusual problem. Fortunately I haven't had a problem with them in some time.

    For ASP.Net hosting, you can have up to 5 applications created within a single account. It's kind of annoying in that they can't be top-level domains; you have to forward from whatever domain to a subfolder. It works though.

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