How not to run a webhosting company
After getting burnt by my previous webhost, SolidInternet (previously Myacen), I am more cautious when it comes to webhosts. I was with VirtuallyDedicated since November last year, and several things led me to switch to another webhost recently. These are how not to run a webhosting company.
- Promise first, don’t deliver.
VirtuallyDedicated promised me a few times a control panel for my VPS. I didn’t really need a control panel. I just wanted it to be able to tell if my VPS was down by my own fault, or if the node was down, and to reboot my VPS if needed. Yet, I was promised again and again, and no control panel was delivered. - Don’t communicate with your customers. Don’t inform them of downtimes or system failures.
Throughout the time I was with VirtuallyDedicated, my VPS experienced a few occasions of extended downtime. Extended being in the range of hours. The webhost didn’t bother to inform me nor offer any explanation. Unless I e-mailed them to ask about it. Over time, I just gave up and let the downtimes be, since they were rare. - Let your servers go down for really long, and not only not inform customers, but don’t reply to their e-mails.
This last one took the cake. My VPS went down for over 24 hours. No word from the webhost. I submitted a support ticket, but did not receive a reply. I directly e-mailed the webhost, and over a day later, received a reply that the downtime was due to a hardware issue and that I didn’t receive a reply because “for some reason tickets were not reaching the support system”. No further explanation, not even why a hardware issue resulted in downtime of over a day.
After that, I simply had enough of VirtuallyDedicated. I decided that for my next webhost, I would go for an established company, one that actually had a real team of technical and support staff. Although there were some negative reviews, I am now on BurstNET. So far, so good. There was an incident where my VPS was performing very slow due to (I suspect) high disk I/O by some other user on the node. But since then, everything is working well and I’m happy with BurstNET.