Web Hosting Talk : Advertising Forums : Web Hosting Offers : Shared Hosting Offers : dZones fall promotion extended

[hurricanedz]

Digital Zones is proud to offer the following special promotion. Since 1999 we have offered quality, reliable hosting services.
If you are serious about your business or personal web site, consider a serious web host...

Plus Plan Special - $9.95/month
300 MB Disk Space
10,000 MB transfer/monthly
25 Sub-domains
3 pointer domains (host a separate site)
5 FTP accounts
5 MySQL Databases
Up to 10,000 POP Mailboxes, unlimited forwarders
up to 25 parked domains
Easy to use control panel
Webmail and IMAP supported

Installed software includes:
PHP 4.2.3
Perl
Mail List software
3 Shopping Carts: Agora, Akopia, OSCommerce
CGI-Scripts: Formmail, Counter, SpamAssassin, FrontPage support, PGP, Chat Room software, search engine submit tool.

Fantastico Script Installer Included:

Portals/CMS:
PHP-Nuke
Post-Nuke
phpWebSite
xoops

Discussion Boards:
phpBB2
Invision Board

Other Scripts:
OS Commerce 2.2
4images Gallery
PHPauction
PHProjekt
phpLinks
b2

Control Panel with multiple language support:
English, Spanish, French, German, Romanian

Server:
IBM Servers Pentium Processor
1 GB of RAM
SCSI Drives (RAID I)

Network:
Dual OC48 Smart Ring from BellSouth
OC3 (155 Mbps) To UUNet
2 x OC3's (155 Mbps) To AT&T
OC3 (155 Mbps) To GlobalCrossing
DS3 (45 Mbps) To Qwest
DS3 (45 Mbps) To UUNet

Backup:
Hardware RAID I (SCSI) in case of drive failure.
Weekly Remote backup.
Built in backup facility within your control panel

Check out our web site for more information or to sign up:
http://www.dzones.com

Regards,
Andrew

[Ayman_Mo]

Don't trust those people. They just disappear all of a sudden without telling their clients anything.

They will look very efficient at the begining, but afterwards you will discover the truth.

I have been sending them e-mails and faxes for the last 2 weeks to fix the server problem but got no answers at all.

I have finally moved to another hosting company after loosing many of my clients.

[TheViewer]

Ohh..OK.

[Alareach]

There apparently was a problem with Dialtone/Interland and restore of backups after Dialtone replaced 3 drives 2 times in one week. Then the backup system caused even more problems. I got this from the horses mouth. They will be announcing a new Dell Server line in a new Datacenter soon is what I have learned.
We have had some trouble recently as well.

[roadchild]

Just as a FYI for people thinking of DZones for hosting:
-- Their secure 6 server had a hard disk crash in early December 2003, the server was down/unavailable for about 18 hours. They claimed this was because of a Tomcat error.
-- Then on Dec 7, they claim to have had a cisco router crash that took down all their servers for about 38 hours.
-- On Dec 21st Secure 6 went down again, according to alertra it was for 38 hours and 42 minutes. Dzones support claimed it was another hard disk crash.

-- They had other smaller (10-20 minutes here or there) downtime windows and its resulted in a 62% uptime for the month of Dec 2003 to date.

I requested credit for my hosting charges and they have yet to reply to my orginal request from Dec 9th. 8 emails to billing @ dzones and not a single solitary reply.

I have hosted with them for nearly 2 years, even weathered the 2 week up/down/up/down/mostly down time back in March 2003 where they lost everyones site and didn't have a backup, but no more. If they have downtime the least they can do is answer emails, and then the next least is to credit their accounts.

It should also be mentioned that on many other review sites people have pointed out that there is an individual named Andrew that posts great reviews and it turns out he IS their billing depatment. Any company who has to have their own employees post favorable reviews, is a company everyone should avoid.

[Friel]

A quick post about Dzones in 2004 (and now 2005).

They were quite simply, awful. My website was down over a dozen times in 2004 (not just for half an hour here or there, but like days at a time).

The biggest failure was in November 2004, my whole site went down for two weeks, I lost ALL my data and files. When they restored everything, they had restored from December 2003 -almost a year before. When i asked them of this, they happily informed me this was the most recent backup they had.

They have no support to speak of. Emailing them kicks off a series of automated responses which are randomly picked from the following list.

1) Your site is working fine our end, please check it again
2) There is a coding error with your pages, please test them properly
3) We are doing routine maintenance, it will be up shortly
4) We are experiencing technical difficulties, we appreciate your patience.

Its quite a funny pastime to just email Dzones support with something like "hey, i was just wondering how you guys sleep at night sucking as bad as you do"
and then receiving "There is a coding error with your pages, please test them properly" as an explanation.

I was wondering how long into 2005 i could go without my site being down, can i manage the holy grail of an uninterrupted month? or maybe a week? No chance, 3 days is how far i got, the site went down on Jan 3rd and it is still down as i write.

Dzones I believe once had a good reputation, but I shall not be renewing my membership with them when it comes to that time of year. They are quite simply an utterly pointless company, what good is webspace if it is never available? They have obviously made huge cost cuts in order to maximise profit, at the cost of offering any kind of service at all.

Stay well clear of these clowns, unless you like wasting money or you have a site called "500 server error"