Regan (gothic_hamlet) wrote in bad_service,
Regan
gothic_hamlet
bad_service

  • Mood:

Bad hosting experience

I'd had a domain hosting plan with iamyourhost for about two years last May. Extremely cheap hosting and excellent customer service... admittedly, it suffered a fair amount of downtime, but I didn't mind terriably. My main complaint was the fact that the maintainer had for some bizarre reason never gotten his email system to work properly (something that I've complained about multiple times). For instance, the way I would find out about hosting problems was that I would realize that my site had been down for three days and wasn't coming back online, journey over to the support forums, and read there that lo and behold we needed to change our nameservers. Stuff like that. Bizarrely enough, I would get re-subscription reminder emails, but never any advance warning on changes to the server.

Of course, this was all livable until last may when my site went down (again) and refused to come back up. After a few days of waiting, I did the old routine, went to the forums, and discovered that a while ago iamyourhost manager decided that the work load was too great for him, so he was downsizing and transfering some of the accounts to a new host who would offer a different (admittedly more expensive) set of plans (for clarification, he had decided this prior... it was posted on the forums after my website had gone offline). Great. Lovely. Whatever. Would have been good to know this beforehand, but eh. So we wait a few more days. And wait. And wait.

And come to discover that - oops - the new host isn't responding to iamyourhost's emails. And nobody's heard from him. And peoples' websites aren't coming back online. Several stranded webmasters attempt to contact this guy (myself included). He only replies to a few, and to those the only responses they get are instructions on how to sign up for his hosting plan, and a mention that he has their data, but he's not going to tell them how to retrieve it at the moment. Some of us are willing to sign up just to get our information back. However, we have no idea if this will work. Iamyourhost just shrugs his figurative shoulders and says that we can try.

Weeks of this goes on. The final conclusion - as far as we can tell - is that the mysterious new host was a random guy reccomended to iamyourhost by someone that he knew. He decided to let the new host have the responsibility of informing the customers about the switch... But when server A was "transfered," none (or most) of us never got an email (according to iamyour host this is our faults of course... our emails must have been wrong). And by "transfered" I mean all of our data was deleted unconditionally and without warning. Those of us who still had time left on the hosting plan that we had already paid for were out of luck, because server A had already been dumped - but if we wanted, we could go over and pay for new guy's more expensive hosting plan, hoping that maybe, maybe, maybe he'd backed up our data and would kindly give it back once we shoved some money at him (thus far, this hasn't happened). To top it off, iamyourhost's primary concern on the forums is the downsizing of his workload, the creation of new plans for the rest of the customers who he has kept, and all of the many "reasons" as to why this wasn't his fault. All of this rather than trying to actually help his former clients who are now dealing with a service terminated without warning, and are trying to recover all of that data that has been completely erased. (I myself had backups of some files... but it's a bit difficult to keep copies of a 2 gig website).

I am still pissed to hell about it. And I would offer the links to these conversations on the forums, but interestingly enough all of the threads concerning it have vanished. Ho hum. Bastards.
Subscribe

  • Silly Sprint people

    I want to change to sprint so I contacted them via phone. Here’s what happened and why Them: you can join for 200.00 Me: that’s a lot of money your…

  • (no subject)

    Well,  I unofficially long my last non - grapevine tested  and advice from Facebook nurses and things.  Add it id's , it is. I'm going to harshly…

  • HOA Woes

    So I live in an HOA. Back in December, our mailbox was hit twice and we had to fix it to the tune of $150 because our HOA use uniform mailboxes. In…

  • Post a new comment

    Error

    Comments allowed for members only

    Anonymous comments are disabled in this journal

    default userpic

    Your reply will be screened

    Your IP address will be recorded 

  • 7 comments