Web hosting horrors, what’s yours?

Yes , but, customer service people cost money. The companies in the list set the “low cost” expectation in most hosting customers minds.

Now the market place has to go through a tough period where customers learn which ones suck and which ones are superior and I can assure you the ones that are superior will charge more!

Yeah, there may be a low cost provider that does a good job in a niche or two. I am talking about companies that offer a full spectrum of services and provide excellent customer service over most of that service offering.

I use Dot5, and although they aint exactly the best, it wasnt bad for 2 years hosting, domain name 500gb bandwidth, etc, etc for about $18

My worst experience had to be with fuse9.net (note how the domain is just parked now). Started out fairly good and responsive, but they started having serious downtime issues about a year ago, with DAYS of downtime. I started getting more and more annoyed and finally went over to DreamHost who have been great. At the time I couldn’t get the old host to transfer the domain over so I just set it on auto-renew. Lo and behold April 1 rolls around and my domain fails to be re-registered. At which point I realize that fuse9 has dropped off the face of the planet and their phone number at that point goes to some other business with a recorded message in spanish. All in all, it worked out OK though, I called their registrar told them what happened, and they gave me control of my domain.

The really dirt cheap deals, especially with providers one has never heard of are not worth it. It’s good to know they have some other customers and a stable support as well as a stable business model before getting sucked into their web.

RegisterFly *are* absolutely terrible, as are Streamline.net (a UK company).

I’m surprised BounceWeb isn’t on that list. I had a horrible time with them a few years ago. They were down for several days and lost my entire account for one of my domains.

http://www.webserve.ca are horrible company. Steer well clear.

Woah…

I used Globat for 4 years. I mean, overall the service was ok. Rarely had an outage and they kept giving me free upgrades (started out with like 500MB of storage for $100/year, and eventually went up to 2GB for the same price), but the email service SUCKED. My email would frequently stop working and I’d have to call them and they’d fix it.

I finally got fed up and joined HostMonster. Been pretty happy with them overall. More than double the features for about 2/3 of the price.

I’m happy i’m not using any of those sites. My current host is BrainServers.net and they are great

Surfspeedy is absolutely horrible.

They did a PHP upgrade once that killed my site for over a week.

Those were some fun calls to India.

I use streamline :|

After crashing 1&1′s servers with one too many Diggs, they told me I had until the end of the month to find a new host and they disabled FTP and telnet. Hard to frickin’ move when you punish me like that! Fortunately, they left ssh open and I was able to move my stuff off. Of course within 48 hours of moving it to Bluehost, that server went down (no fault of mine) and they turned off the catch-all email feature (plus the CEO’s blog scared me), so I moved yet again in the same week to Media Temple. It’s been rocky at times as they figure out this “Grid Server” architecture, but they’ve been open and honest plus it’s easy to talk to tech support when needed.

I used to have web space with CI Host….at first everyting was great. Slowly thoughout a years time things started to get crappy….e-mail, speed, and then they raised their rates. I got out.

Now I’m with aPlus.net. A much better deal (….so far)

All hosting providers are the same… Only the clients are different. Some people are patient on the 5 minutes downtimes, some take the 5 minutes like 50 days, that’s what make a negative comment.

What about the top 13 hosting sites? That would be some good info to have.