Now I Remember….
My luck with web hosts has not been spectacular, though it has probably been about par for the course. Although my current web host has done the best so far, two that I stuck with before had to treat me pretty badly before I left. In every case, the thing that has torn it with me with web hosts has been flaky service–site outages and things just generally falling apart. But the two hosts that really let me down went farther than that.
If you like to read people who vent their whining, read on below the fold–I won’t inflict my incessant whinging on those visiting the main page. Essentially, I go into detail about how the two web hosts were very, very sucky, and how I had to revisit one of them just the other day, in a way that brought back all my memories of just how sucky the suckers sucked. If you for some bizarre reason don’t like to read other people moaning and bellyaching (what’s wrong with you?), then just go on to the next post.
The first web host I used was ait.com (formerly named, confusingly, “aitcom.net”). These guys have now been around for about a decade, and even now they’re regarded as scammers to a certain degree. When I signed up for them, all was OK for a while, but then I got burned rather badly. It started when my account got suspended due to “nonpayment,” rather strange as they were charging me automatically. So I started looking more closely at them. One thing I found out: they swapped out the contract on me. And not just me, but lots of people.
When I signed up with AIT, it was on a monthly contract. Never sign up with any web host who fails to offer monthly payments; it usually means they suck and want to bag you for a whole year before you discover how much they suck. With AIT, they sneak up on you. When they got to be so bad that I considered quitting, I checked my contract–and found that I was not bound to a six-month contract. Whoa! When did that happen? Well, most online companies have a silent-switch clause in them. The clause says that the business may:
make changes to the terms and conditions of this Agreement at any time, and to the on-line application to include service pricing, advising of the change and the effective date thereof by publishing it to the appropriate AIT web site…. Utilization of the Service by the Customer following the effective date of such change shall constitute acceptance by the Customer of such change(s).
Essentially: we can change your contract anytime just by changing the long, boring and confusing legalese, and if you don’t re-read the contract every month and notice even the smallest change, that means you agree.
Most people accept this as a way for them to make reasonable changes without having to get a positive confirmation from every single member, an impossible task. The understanding is that if there is any change that is significant, the company will at least make a good-fait effort to contact you. They do not expect that the clause will be used to sucker you.
That’s what AIT did. They changed the contracts to six-month contracts and didn’t tell me or any of the other members I asked. I was getting email from them, and never heard a word about it. Fortunately, I happened to check just as a new six-month contract was about to start, so I pulled the plug and went elsewhere. Not that easily, of course–I had to deal with them overbilling me as I left, with outrageously rude customer support people and maddeningly frustrating run-arounds… until I finally emailed their top execs and threatened to make a big noise to the Better Business Bureau–at which point they immediately coughed up what they owed me and claimed that it was all a big mistake. The whole painful story is memorialized here. That was October 2001.
For a year after that, I used a service called Aletia. They were OK people, but the service got so buggy that I had to bail after ten months. Just as I was leaving, they said sorry–in the form of promising to host my web site gratis, indefinitely. I left my main email domain there, while moving my blog and other accounts to newer pastures. Ironically, after I left, their service got better, and even when they were sold to JaguarPC web hosting, they continued to keep me on as a freebie.
But the next host for my blog was another nightmare: Myacen, an Aussie firm. They were OK for about a year and a half, except for billing problems. They kept promising an autopayment system which never materialized, and the manual payment system was a joke. They kept sending confusing invoices and messages that seemed to say that payment was not due when it actually was. They even sent emails to me noting that many people were having the same problems.
But then, in 2004, they started experiencing major difficulties. Repeated outages, my domain would drop off the Internet repeatedly, settings would be lost, all kinds of problems that would take lots of work to fix. Myacen would change servers, IP addresses, and carry out prolonged maintenance without warning. Worse, their customer support sucked. AIT sucked by requiring international phone calls. Myacen sucked by not reading your “helpdesk ticket.” Either their responses were automated or the support personnel never read the tickets well enough to give a helpful answer–and it could take hours to get an answer, after which you would inevitably have to send another ticket to tell them how they got it wrong.
So I wanted to quit. Like all businesses, they will accept the minimal application to start billing you, but they make a huge production out of making you jump through hoops before they will believe that it’s really you trying to quit. Further, when I called beforehand to ask about lead time in telling them to cancel my account, they told me one thing. Then, when I canceled my account, they said that because of the billing problems (which they had previously admitted were their own fault!), I was “on probation” and so they’d bill me for an extra month for canceling “late.” That was summer, 2004. That lovely story is chronicled here.
One last detail: in both AIT and Myacen’s case, they claimed to want your feedback when you left. In both cases, when you tried to go to their “feedback” page, the page was inaccessible. That pretty much sums it up nicely.
It’s been two years now, and SurpassHosting is surviving the test of time so far, outlasting the other hosts now with no major problems (oh, they all have outages and stuff from time to time).
But by chance, I had to deal with Myacen again. My father still uses them for his business web site (he signed on before I hit the worst spot with them), and has just left the thing on autopilot for the past two and a half years. Now we need to access his account–and Myacen changed the login system, which apparently erased his user ID and password. We’re locked out.
So I submitted a helpdesk ticket telling them the story, referencing emails they sent him about the billing system changing (none of which said his login info would be erased if he did not act), and I specified that the login using his email address and password did not work, and could they please tell us how we could log in.
Some time later, the answer came back. It simply said, “here is the URL to log in,” and gave the URL. That’s it. Not a word about why the user ID and password don’t work. Ah, the good old days. How nostalgic.
In this case, the answer they gave demonstrated a complete ignorance of my problem: the URL they gave me to log in was the same one I used to submit the ticket. Apparently, they thought that I could not find the page that I used to send them the ticket in the first place.
So I sent them another ticket, in the vain hope that they would understand this time and send the correct information. No answer after 8 hours. So I sent another ticket after that, high priority, lights flashing… another 8 hours later, still no response. Sent a fourth ticket. What is wrong with these people?
Finally, I got an answer. Their response? It’s my fault because I didn’t understand their answer. According to the “support” message, “The page that was linked to you provides users with the oppurtunity to reset their passwords.” What is that “opportunity”? The “I forgot my password” fallback. Which, of course, is BS–I didn’t forget the password, the password simply didn’t work. They forgot the password. And there is no reason to believe that the “forgot my password” option will work anyway–if they forgot my password, why should they remember the user ID? It’s a bad answer to try to cover up for the bad initial support message.
Recently, my SurpassHosting account got upgraded, and I got a whole slew of new add-on domain slots, hard disk space, and bandwidth. So when my father’s contract with Myacen comes around in December, I’m going to save him more than a hundred bucks a year and simply piggyback his site on my own.