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  1. #1
    Join Date
    May 2005
    Location
    San Diego, CA
    Posts
    1

    Caveat Emptor: FuitadNET.com

    I've been hosting my website, wtfbbq.com with FuitadNET.com since January of 2005. I found them through a good friend, who recommended them because of their excellent entry-level hosting plan: 3GB storage, 25GB bandwidth, 15 MySQL dbs, and CPanel, PHP, Perl, etc. for $4.99/mo. I set up an account with them, and within 3 days was up and running.

    Note: I do not run even a medium-traffic site, much less high-traffic; I have a personal blog running WordPress 1.5 and Gallery 2.0beta3, and that's it. I do a post or two a day, and have maybe 100 or so photos. It's just a blog for family and friends to keep in touch, see what I'm doing.

    In the last 5 months, I have had poor reliability and service, and with the end of this holiday weekend tomorrow, I will be switching to a new host. (Likely Site5 or BlueHost.) MySQL crashes regularly, approximately once a week; in their defense, once a trouble ticket is submitted, it is usually resolved within 2 hours. However, the frequency of the crashes is troubling, and questions concerning prevention of this have gone unanswered by the Support and Customer Service people. Server uptime has been mediocre at times, with 2-3 outages a month; again, once a ticket is submitted, it is usually up within a few hours.

    Other issues include techs outsourced to India/Pakistan; it makes it difficult to communicate at times, but then again - their English is sometimes better than most Californians. The techs don't always answer all of the questions in tickets, or seemingly read the questions completely - because they provide "answers" to things never mentioned or asked about. (This may have to do with language problems, I'm not sure.) FuitadNET servers are also placed in SpamCop, IBL, and other spam server repositories, meaning it is common for your sent e-mails to be automatically sorted as junk/spam.

    There are more problems others have experienced with their service, but since I haven't experienced it, I will refrain from comment. FuitadNET's forums can be viewed here (fuitadnet.com/forums/index.php) for those interested.

    In the end, they offer great features for the price, but you also get what you pay for. If you need reliability or stability, go elsewhere. If you're looking to host a large amount of files, they might be considered.

    - John

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Feb 2005
    Location
    Woonsocket, RI, USA
    Posts
    31

    * Welcome!

    Welcome, John. I'm another Fuitadnet customer, who came here because I was totally fed up at the time.

    You've come to the right place; there are some totally fascinating Fuitadnet-related threads here, including a meltdown one in which nearly every former Fuitadnet employee spoke their mind. Much dirty laundry, very illuminating.

    Run a search here for "Fuitadnet" and you'll find it all.

    As for the spamlists, I've noticed that. It's yet another reason that I'm shifting my own personal email accounts over to Gmail. Speaking of which, I have 100 of them to give away, so if you want one let me know.

    ->Peter

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Jul 2000
    Location
    Colorado Springs, CO
    Posts
    2,288
    Is that $4 mo for a long term commitment or just month to month basis? If it was just month to month then it could be part of the reason their service wasn't up to your standards. I would recommend that not just yourself but everyone looking for hosting start by picking a provider that has some experience under their belt.
    Greg Landis | Director of Growth Jaguarpc - Unlock Superior Hosting with JaguarPC
    Managed Servers - Virtual Private Servers | AMD EPYC Dedicated servers
    Follow us @ Facebook.com/Jaguarpc | (888)-338-5261 | greg @ jaguarpc.com

  4. #4
    Join Date
    May 2004
    Location
    Lansing, MI, USA
    Posts
    1,548
    Good luck with your next host. Make sure to check them out on here too.
    Jacob - WebOnce Technologies - 30 Day 100% Satisfaction Guarantee - Over 5 Years Going Strong!
    Website Hosting, PHP4&5, RoR, MySQL 5.0, Reseller Hosting, Development, and Designs
    Powered By JAM - Professional Website Development - PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, AJAX - Projects Small & Large

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Jun 2005
    Location
    Scotland
    Posts
    2
    It seems that only the people who've had bad experience with FuitadNet are posting here, which is a huge shame

    I host my web-site with them at haravikk.com and have been pleased with their services so far.

    Initially I had trouble, however this was entirely the fault of my previous host who seemed reluctant to let go of my domain, and very nearly "delayed" the termination of my account just so they could charge me for the entire month my site spent down because of them.
    FuitadNet and their staff were helpful during this time however and were the ones who discovered who's fault it was (ie the reason the transfer wasn't happening) and so-on.

    Since then I've had only one down-time which was when they were upgrading their machines, although I didn't experience it personally one of my user's commented on it.

    I've only had a handful of issues, and most of them have been superfluous ones such as questions about X feature and Y service, or a database problem which turned out to be my fault (oops ).

    Overall I'd rate the service very highly as a budget offering, with it's generous 3gb space, 25gb bandwidth as it's entry-level at $4.99 a month (excluding domain name), rich feature set (PHP, MySQL, CGI, optional auto-install of phpBB etc).
    Although occassionally the servers run a bit slow for some countries, they appear to be genuinely working hard to improve their service, and don't mind hearing negative comments in their forum as it helps them to know what needs improving.

    [edit]
    I know I only signed up today, but I've been in and out of here before. Must of been when I was looking for a new host before choosing fuitadnet actually!

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Jun 2004
    Location
    Northwest Colorado
    Posts
    4,636
    Originally posted by haravikk
    I host my web-site with them at haravikk.com and have been pleased with their services so far.
    Welcome to WHT, haravikk! How long have you been hosted with FNET?

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Jun 2005
    Location
    Scotland
    Posts
    2
    Thanks

    It must be just over a year now as I recently paid the bill for my second period (6 months) and renewed my domain. So I was there during their difficult period where there was a lack of staff and a number of their machines decided to start playing up (despite being fine when there are plenty of staff, I know the experience all too well with computer networks!), they coped admirably with that tough time and seem to be bouncing back now though.
    I personally have experienced no stability issues and I suspect the majority of users are the same, just a few problem cases.

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Feb 2005
    Location
    Woonsocket, RI, USA
    Posts
    31

    Fuitadnet's forums

    Well, I'm glad that things are working well for you. And they may be working well for 95% of Fuitadnet's customers, for all I know.

    But a recent look at Fuitadnet's forums painted a pretty bad picture, to be honest - customers leaving, fed up with problems and bad service.

    I myself am still experiencing recurrent outages of SpamAssassin, and the most recent response by their support team was to suggest that SpamAssassin was, in fact, working correctly. Since overnight I went from 1-2 spams getting through SpamAssassin per day, to well over 1,000, that seems pretty questionable to me.

    And I'm also pretty sure that a properly working SpamAssassin would not allow hundreds of messages with the subject "FIND YOUR F-CK-BUDDY" (without the modification I used here) to get through.

    Now, it's almost certainly true that people are far more likely to show up here to complain than they are to compliment. But that's true for customers of ALL webhosts, so unless there is a conspiracy by a cabal of Fuitadnet customers to sully Fuitadnet's reputation, the reasonable onlooker would presume that Fuitadnet is, in fact, having more problems than many other webhosts.

    I'll also point out that complaints here about Fuitadnet were virtually nonexistent before the sale of the company, and skyrocketed after the sale. You can look that up for yourself.

    Look, I'm still a Fuitadnet customer. And I continue to hope for the best, although at this point a number of my friends think I'm a complete idiot for doing so. I was holding off writing about the continuing SpamAssassin problem here, because I honestly don't want to complain about the company unnecessarily.

    But I'd hate for anyone to sign up with Fuitadnet because they read here that everything was now okay. It's not.

    Check the forums for yourselves and see.

    http://fuitadnet.com/forums/

  9. #9
    I would just like to add my own negative experiences with Fuitadnet.

    I joined their service only based on several good recommendations from people I know. They praised it for excellent service, uptime, etc. When I started having problems, I went back to them to find out how they'd got it so wrong. They all agreed that everything had gone downhill since the sale, and one of them had already left for another host.

    Here are my particular experiences:

    When I first signed up, I had to add several additional domains (I resell hosting services to several of my old web design clients). In setting the first one up, an error occured (I'm really not sure who's fault it was - I was following their tutorial, but I'm certainly not mistake-proof). Following help files on the server and my own experience, I tried several tactics to get things working, until I concluded that the initial setup had created a bad DNS entry that I could not fix with the limited access I had. At that point, I submitted a support ticket explaining the problem. My reply: they told me to go follow the online tutorial, and then marked the ticket "Resolved" without waiting for any confirmation. In fact, this problem was only resolved after three such tickets lead me to go spend two hours in the live chat support area. The next day, the problem got fixed, though no one bothered to tell me so and they would not explain whether I'd been right about the source of the problem. In all, this domain was down for almost two weeks total.

    A few months later, my client's shopping cart script stopped working. I figured out that the problem was a full disk cache, but I could not find any files on the server that accounted for ~120 MB of used space. I sent a support ticket, which got marked "Resolved" when they gave me some pat answer that I'd explained didn't work. And, when I told them it had to be log files (which I don't have direct access to on Fuitadnet), the problem disappeared the next day, but with no confirmation or response from the support staff.

    I find this a little funny. This way, the management can claim that whatever percent of support tickets get resolved in just a few hours, thanks to marking things "Resolved" when they actually have not been. If you look around on these forums and the Fuitadnet forums, you'll see that this is a regular problem, with some issues lasting months before they finally get fixed. And, in my experience, issues never got fixed until I could explain to the support staff exactly how to fix it.

    If it were only these two problems, I wouldn't mind quite so much. However, my real annoyance is the constant loss of service. The sites, e-mail service and/or SQL services will go down for about twelve hours per month. These things resolve themselves, usually after just a couple of hours, but that's long enough to become a serious irritation to people who rely on their websites for business. And in the case of my client's shopping cart site, a loss of revenue each time. Neither of our sites are particularly processor intensive (the shopping cart is about it) and we get less than 2 GB of traffic every month (much less than our 15 GB limit).

    The bottom line right now is that I'd gladly move to another server, except that I really don't have the time to manage the migration, and it would cost my clients another short period of downtime while all the DNS changes propogate. I suppose that the cost of staying with Fuitadnet will eventually become greater than the costs of moving... but if you can avoid moving to them in the first place, you'll be doing yourself a huge favor.
    Last edited by jdagna; 08-13-2005 at 03:01 PM.

  10. #10
    I joined FNET right as it was changing hands. I have a reseller account and for the price it can't be beat. Support wise I found that the trick is to post a ticket and then hop into the irc support channel and reference it.

    I recently moved over to ServerMatrix (The Planet) with whom I had (what is apparently a rare,) awful startup experience. I was so angry at their horrible support that I went back to the Fuitadnet support channel and thanked them for being so fast and informal with me. Of course TP realized their mistake, apologized, and fixed what was broken. Relatively happy now.

    The only reason I moved is because I am taking on large clients that deal with real money and I don't trust FNET with that kind of stuff. Personal and small-business sites, boards, blogs, cms, fine. International enterprise e-commerce no.

    Overall, in the year and a half that i've been with them I've been pretty satisfied.

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