LiquidWeb's Stormondemand 12 hr review:
Signed up online through the stormondemand.com website. You have to enter you cc card info, before you can see all pricing details – although you won't be charged until you built a server. I don't know why they do it like that. Usually only bait and switch deals operate like that. Why not make all that info public before somebody signs up?
After signing up you will receive an automated phone call to verify your phone number and 2 minutes later a sales person will call to verify the cc card info that you just entered.
Building a server is fairly straight forward although a help menu or examples would be nice as the lack thereof caused me to call tech support for the first time. ( I didn't know what to name my host. I'm not the most technical person, but an example such as “host.yourdomain.com” would have helped me and would have made my call to support unnecessary. )
I then proceeded to write another short question to tech support to verify that all software that I needed was installed. My ticket was answered promptly.
I then logged into WHM and created a new cpanel account.
My server was now fully set up and I activated the standard firewall.
I was finally ready to start uploading my files via ftp, but I had problems connecting via ftp (Filezilla) so I called support. Hans took my call, but couldn't resolve my issue while I was on the phone with him. He asked me if it was ok for him to summarize the issue and enter a ticket for me. He said he would work on it right away. This was around 3:45pm PST. At 5:35pm I receive a message from Vicki stating that Hans had left for the day and that she would take over. I briefly thanked her for working on my issue. I logged into my dashboard and saw that Hans had assigned the ticket to Russ and Russ had assigned the ticket to Vicki.
At 8:21pm I wrote her an email inquiring about an update. No response. At 9:10pm I called support and talked to Rob who then assigned the ticket to himself after briefly speaking to Vicki. Rob thought he knew the fix since he had faced the same issue earlier today. I'm on the phone with him for about 22 minutes, but he can't fix the issue. While I'm on the phone with him I received an email from Alex stating that Alex will work on the ticket now. I tell Rob that I just received the email from Alex and he states that that's ok since he and Vicki would leave soon since their shifts are over.
It is now 10:10pm and my issue is still not resolved. Keep in mind this is a brand new server with nothing on it. I'm sorry, but how difficult could it be to fix that issue. I just feel uneasy about the idea that if I would actually face a real crisis on my server how LiquidWeb would handle it.
I'm currently with WiredTree and was looking for a cheaper alternative that could easily be scaled up in the future, but I'm very unsure at this moment if I will leave WiredTree. All I can tell you is that I had a few tickets with WiredTree and even the most difficult one was resolved after 45min. Average response time at Wiredtree is 5 -25 min to solve issues. Am I just spoiled?
BTW it is now 10:10 pm and my issue is still not resolved. I will call StormOnDemand tomorrow and cancel this service. I better not get charged anything to my cc as I feel that I almost wasted a full productive day with the most basic server set up.
Update
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