More on Hostway and ‘Mash from the UK April 11, 2007
Posted by Stray Dog in : Web Hosting , add a commentOK. Since the previous blog post of mine in regards to Hostway the email situation has reared its ugly head once again. This time taking nearly a week to resolve. Something to do with being on a newer server I was told. Hostway suggested moving me to an older ‘tried-and-true’ box. I said whatever gets the email notices working again. Shortly thereafter email was back up. Not sure what they did or how it was ultimately resolved. The support person told me that once a support ticket is sent that they do not contact the customer until it is resolved. That works fine for quick fixes but not so shit hot when it takes several days to resolve and you are left wondering what the hell is going on.
My recommendation to Hostway customers is to ensure you are a Gold Plus account holder so you can pick up the phone and call their support. Once you get a person on the phone (which is actually easy to do) they do tend to look after you alright. But man - emailing support really blows - my opinion.
Now - as for ‘Mash at Hostway in the UK. Thanks for commenting on my post. To be honest there was a period of time when my original discount offered by the Lovell’s was more than what I was actually paying for the accounts I had with Hostway UK. I might have felt bad about that but not after having my initial deal with IARNA/Hostway UK pulled on me in the manner it was. IARNA and the Lovell’s had it right. I even called support at IARNA mid-evening here (3 am in London) and I spoke to Rob Lovell directly (pretty sure it was Rob). He had my issue resolved immediately. That was quite spectacular.
Currently I look after hosting for 30+ sites. Not enough for Hostway to make it or break it obviously. Still though that would make me a decent customer and the value of all those hosting accounts over time would be fairly significant.
So ‘Mash — If you wish to respond further feel free. My situation was likely somewhat unique. For what I spent on hosting with Hostway UK and what I made by reselling it was likely a wash. So I’m just chalking it up as a lesson learned.
Why Hostway Annoys Me - A Story I’m Compelled to Tell February 15, 2007
Posted by Stray Dog in : Ranting and Raving, Web Hosting , 2commentsWhen I first started shopping for Hosting some years ago I was looking for somewhere that provided a decent resellers package and offered ColdFusion as a web application platform. At the time these were harder to come by but were available if you did some homework. I found I nice little start-up in London England called IARNA. For a sizable amount I could host unlimited domains with them. Sounded good to me although I knew it would take awhile before I’d make any money with them.
So about 18 months goes by and I finally have enough accounts to make it worth my while and Hostway buys out IARNA and away goes my unlimited plan. Buggers tell me that I’ll have to pay for each separate account and the amount for each was going to be nearly twice what I resold it for. So I bitched them out. Guess one of the IARNA founders was still involved in running the joint and gave me a ’smashing good’ discount. So all was well but any new accounts I resold would be full price minus their lackluster discount. I should have moved the entire bunch of resold accounts elsewhere at the time - but the overall discount was good and moving all the sites would be a pain…
Then over a year ago Hostway bends me over and screws me hard by taking away my discount. Note that this is Hostway in the UK - but still the same company overall. So now I’m paying big Hostway dollars for everything plus puking out the exchange difference from dollars to pounds (I’m not in the UK). So before they could rape me for too long I pulled all my business away and went with another company who actually gave me two free months on each account in order for me to get things setup properly.
This same company was already hosting a site I was involved in but they kept screwing with the servers, changing settings, PHP libraries etc. and breaking the site. So I actually moved it to Hostway in Chicago quite awhile back. Hostway is big and reliable and better for a site like the one I had to move. But I’d keep the smaller basic sites away at more economical hosting companies.
So why does Hostway annoy me? Their support sucks. And for what I’m paying it should not be that way. Seems like their support people rarely completely read a support request and then respond to it before they truly understand the nature of the request. That pisses me off.
Here’s an example. I noted that the application generated emails on the server were not being sent so I questioned Hostway on it. They replied:
This email is in response to your phone call. We do not allow webserver to be used for mail because sendmail is not installed on the server. Please use smtp.mydomainname.com as the outgoing mail server name within php scripts and please make sure that you authenticate the users by using a valid user/password for an email account under mydomainname.com.
What the #$%&??? Until the day before everything was working. Why would this be the case now. So I reply (and I am far, far too courteous):
When did this change? Is this a new policy? Should account holders not have been informed about this? This was all working on our site up until approximately yesterday. Please confirm that you have in fact made a change on your end.
To which I never received a reply… But the email started working again. The Hostway reply really annoyed me as there had not been any code changes on the site for weeks, the mailboxes were not full, the emails were just not working and it was Hostway - nothing else - but they are so quick to respond like that. And I really needed to know what was up as I did not want to have to make code changes in the site based on this dumbass support person.
So last week same shit happens. I email Hostway:
Since Dec 02, 2006 email for the site has been functioning fine. Yesterday afternoon it appears that our ordering system is not being able to send out email messages once again. Can you please look into this.
They quickly respond with:
Our logs show that email from your domain is being sent out correctly. Can you provide us with the email that your orders are being sent to? We will search our logs for that address and make sure that the messages are being received there. We appreciate your patience.
I reply:
This morning I received a whole bunch of the system generated emails that should have gone out over the past three days. The email messages generated by our code on the server go to the following addresses:orders@mydomainname.com; web@mydomainname.com; her@mydomainname.com; him@mydomainname.comIt appears to me that the messages are getting spooled and not going out — or at least not when they should be. Could there be that much email that a three day delay is occurring or potentially SPAM being sent??
Hostway replies:
Our systems engineers discovered a problem on that server that was preventing mail from getting delivered. This was corrected on the morning of Feb 9. When that was fixed, the queued messages got delivered. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please let us know if you have further questions.
No shit Sherlock!
And it seems like every support request I make I need to ask twice before I get results and I don’t know how many small items I’ve asked that have gone unanswered completely. Hostway - stop wasting my time! Don’t assume that all your customers know nothing. Perform due diligence on your part please!
Incidentally - this email problem - which appears to have been on-going was the cause of me thinking I was getting a sudden burst of sales. Once the email was working all the previosuly sent ones on the spool would come through all at once. I had never had time to check the actual sale date and time.
Anyway - approach Hostway with caution if you are looking for hosting. Their uptime has been nearly perfect. It is the support that makes me crazy. I should note that phone support does seem to be better than email support. Also - the other hosting company that I have much of my business at these days is 100 Megs - 100megswebhosting.com. Great for smaller basic sites!!