This is a warning to anyone considering using 800Hosting as a monitored dedicated server host. They have a GREAT web site and they sure sold me BUT my web sites all went down just before holiday season of 2009. Completely down so that I was out of business for 6 days with much data lost forever. Then following that failure of 6 days during which time we were repeatedly told “four more hours, one more day” we finally resumed at about 50% of our pre-failure effectiveness and slowly we re-built over time what they ruined in one minute! If your business can afford a loss such as that easily then please disregard this post. If not and you are still considering 800Hosting please read on.
I have e-mails, web history from Google analytics to substantiate my claims and am personally available to talk by phone with qualified business owners considering 800Hosting who reads this post and seeks verification.
At the end of November 2009, all our web sites went down. My staff from Asia and the US were all in San Francisco for a meeting and company outing. Since I was the only person working I was checking our sites on a Sunday night. I was shocked to discover all were down. Apparently our sites went down due to some catastrophic failure at 800Hosting and when I called to ask what is going on they did not even know there was a problem.
I had to notify 800 hosting they had no idea, and never provided monitoring. Previous issues as well, required us to first notify 800Hosting!
No Monitoring
We purchased monitoring 24/7. If they were providing that monitoring how could our sites all go down and they not know?
In their dealings with me and my company 800Hosting continually over promised and undelivered. This aforementioned monitoring is but one example.
Based on their website homepage we really believed we had found the solution for our hosting. We checked and they were well reviewed too. You obviously were impressed or you would not be reading my post. In my experience there is no relationship between their home page claims and the service they deliver.
No Managed Hosting
With the managed hosting, what we asked for SPECIFICALLY we were assured the health of the server would be maintained and monitored and we would be secure from malicious attacks.
However once the server went down, we had to notify them. They never notified us of any problem and often erroneously reported all was well when it was NOT!
Then they suggested maybe we were the victim of an attack by a competitor until they realized protecting us from that was also their job. Another exaggeration or lie.
During the aforementioned 6 days they repeatedly called or e-mailed us that everything is now fixed.
No Communication
When we would discover nothing was fixed and we were still down you will not believe what occurred. They disabled our E-mails claiming we were sending “too many”. Their excuse for that insensitive and bad behavior was we already know you are down and that and it wastes time to respond to your e-mails that could be spent fixing the problem. What were we to do? They called and said everything is OK BUT it was not. If we said nothing maybe it would never be repaired BUT when we attempted to tell them that nothing had changed our E-mails were returned. By this time we realized we had been had and were dealing with incompetents or people who at best were very careless with the truth. We had to contact them by phone, and when the tech answered they noticed it was down and question if we even had a website hosted at the domain that existed for 14 years.
No Backups
As soon as we noticed data was missing we requested back-ups. We were told they were already restored, but “this could not be verified until the server was back online”. I do not know why but at that time we still bought that. Wishful thinking I guess. However once we had FTP restored and we were able to view or site to compare files, we realized MOST of our images were gone and a lot of additional files were missing as well. 800Hosting had no complete copy of our websites and had NO idea what they lost! It seemed as if they thought they could mislead us to believe everything was ok when it obviously was not!
We had bought daily back up BUT when it came time for them to deliver our backed up data they finally said we only keep data three days! We realized however it occurred the missing data was gone forever and there were no back-ups. We lost secure customer data that is unrecoverable and cause a serious strain to our companies.
Four months later we are still replacing missing images and apologizing to customers for missing data that they must resend.
No Explanation
We were NEVER given an explanation as to EXACTLY what happened even though we said repeatedly that was a prerequisite to continue using 800Hosting. We said we need to know how it happened and what steps have you taken so it will not happen again. They said your request perfectly understandable and all promised to do that BUT never did so!
I asked our tech please tell me what we have to buy from you to be safe? They took days to work up a proposal which was unacceptable but what I remember was that when we finally talked on the phone their head tech asked, “How much down time can you afford?” Can you believe that?
I told 800Hosting IF I was making my original decision to use 800Hosting for all my businesses someone had told me one of the choices I had to make was how much downtime I could afford; obviously I would have gone elsewhere immediately.
Has anyone asked you that question yet?
No Character
FINAL blow for me was the owner refused to come to the phone to explain, apologize or tell me to go to hell. NOTHING from him. From my dealings with all at 800Hosting I believe it is fair to say they are an organization with NO CHARACTER and never did they seem embarrassed by their poor performance – NEVER! You know sometimes when something like this happens someone from the offending company will acknowledge the error BUT that did not happen at 800Hosting. They all seemed comfortable telling me that is the way it is. I guess it is their policy and they are following their leader. They did issue a free memory upgrade retail value $10-$15 USD WOW!
I realize this is my side of the story and there are always other sides BUT I left 800Hosting and I am still in business. My independent web monitoring service now rates my sites performance much higher since leaving than when they were hosted at 800Hosting. I do not know exactly what that means BUT I suspect it is another reflection on 800Hosting’s competence to do their job. We have changed nothing but our host and have already seen a drastic improvement! I am not a technical guy so all I can say is the facts are correct.
If you are a business owner considering 800Hosting and want to verify my story give me a call. I will talk only to owners with a web site that will identify themselves and their business. I will not spend time bashing 800Hosting to amuse others. I am in Bangkok BUT this number is a US toll free number: 888 842 4633. If you get voicemail please leave a message and I will call you back.
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