Miffed

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old.[BroTheR]Grim

Guest
I apologise in advance because this posting has nothing to do with gaming in any way. But you might find it interesting, if a bit long.

With virtual web servers getting cheaper and cheaper and domain names going the same way, (You can now own a domain for as little as a fiver) many of us will be wanting our own domains and webspace. But beware it's not as easy as it sounds.

Until just over two months ago I was hosted by a company called truehosting.com. Now this is the most unprofessional company I have ever had the misfortune to deal with. The server was plagued with problems, you had to request your desired page three or four times before it would load. At one point I was locked out of the server for over a week, nobody could view any of my pages or hosted pages. I couldn't upload or download to the server, and nobody could read their mail. If you look at their homepage they tell you that they guarantee 99% uptime, while I was with them the server was probably down 40-50% of the time.

When you sent mail to this company it would take them a day or two to reply, and when they did it was like banging your head against a wall. They were very unapologetic and just didn't give a damn. To cut a long story short the three or so months I had with them was just pure hell.

In the end they decided to get rid of me, I think they were sick of replying to my mail and I have a feeling I had used too much of my "UNLIMITED" bandwidth. Anyway on the day Truehosting decided to part company with me I purposely sent them an e-mail asking that they make sure I was no longer charged for their service. I recently discovered that they have still been charging me for their services, two months worth to be exact. I have spent the last two days banging my head on that brick wall again, it's turned into what can only be described as a mini e-mail war. I eventually got them to stop the charges going through, but they refuse point blank to give me MY money back. I have exhausted all the arguments I can think of and am starting to get headache, but if anybody in the know reads this I would love to hear from you.

Anyway all I can say is;

If you are considering opening an account with a hosting company don't go for the first or the cheapest one you see. Try to find somebody else who has their own domain name and ask them for a recommendation.

Never open an account with a company who uses a middle man (e.g. Ibilling) to process credit/debit card transactions, as you will not be able to hold the company directly responsible for your money if anything happens to go wrong. Make sure they have their own Merchant Account, you can find this out by asking them who will be billing you. If the name of the billing company is different from the name of the company you are dealing with, don't bother.

If a company does happen to have it's own merchant account this is usually a guarantee that the company is a quality one. You have to be in business for at least 6 months before a bank gives you an account and the bank will go over the company's history to look for anything unusual.

Many hosting companies offer "UNLIMITED" bandwidth. Don't believe this for a second, most hosting company's will themselves not have unlimited bandwidth. If you start to use a lot…. Expect to be shown the door. (The exception being Barrysworld, because it happens to be a pure gold company run by diamond gezzers.)

If you got this far, thanks very much for reading. I hope you don't get suckered like I did.

Jon
 
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DApea!

Guest
Heh, so did i, they use Globalnet to manage their web space and domain names.

What is not obvious is the because THEY have to initially pay the 90 quid to the registration ppl, when you quit your account they will bill you for that 90 quid.

Which is nice.
 
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old.TUG

Guest
u pay 90 quid if u wanna swap domain name to another isp or something... but seeing as its free i reckon ill keep it for a bit...
 

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