I have been with rochen for years, and otherwise thought besides the lack of contact options other than help desk tickets, this company was pretty reliable.. on Friday July 17, 2009, I experienced very high traffic to one of my websites. I was excited and very happy to see one of my campaigns became very effective, and yielded record conversions. As I monitored my traffic, I noticed a dip in visitors which always means server down, I checked my website and there it was, my site offline...I continue to check my other sites hosted with rochen, and yes they took those down, Sites completely unaffiliated with the traffic spike. Why would rochen pull a website down because of high traffic, simple...this is a company who will not charge you for extra bandwidth usage, Yes that's right every other webhosting company would love for you to get a traffic spike, because they can now charge you more money, and gladly give you more bandwidth. this is fine a perfectly acceptable for me..My website continues to run, make money and host company earns more money..Every body happy! The not so brite staff at rochen seems to think you are a bad guy for over using your bandwidth limits, they treated me like I was the words person in the world.. They said well you need to upgrade to an mvs server and charge me 399 usd per month. In a panic, I proceeded to contact rochen, no live chat, no support line, just submit a ticket and wait, thats right, and wait I did 45 minute response time in an emergency.. They were rude in there response telling me, what do I think bandwidth is free!!!, and all of a sudden I use to much bandwidth all the time, funny my control panel does not reflect this. I responded charge me for the extra bandwidth just bring my sites back up...Rochen (response) No, they will remain down and I have violated there terms and conditions...Yes thats right my websites were deemed unacceptable for use on the rochen platform. After years of use, years of rochen viewing and troubleshooting my website, all of a sudden my websites are unacceptable. I mentioned I was going to report this, then they said well ok, we will give you 24 hrs to remove your sites then we will terminate your account. And if we see any posts in forums, they I will be hearing from their lawyer. The A**holes have the nerve to cost me thousands in revenue then tell threaten me if I report them. Conclusion, if you wish to use rochen be aware of there bandwidths policy and also be aware if your website makes it big, rochen will pull it for high bandwidth usage. Rochen is an amateur joomla company built for amateurs. use rackspace instead. rochen.com
We have already responded to this trash on our own forums. Large parts of what you have posted are inaccurate and you have left out the key reason why we closed your account. You can find our official response here: http://forums.rochen.com/showthread.php?t=13384 Also to address a couple of points that you have made in your post here but not within our own forums - This is not what was said to you at all. In fact I said that you were free to post on any forums you like but if I saw any posts that were libellous then you would be hearing from my lawyer. I found some of the threats you made against us very childish. You are entitled to your own views but we host Joomla themselves. We also host sites for some of the biggest organizations in the world including the United Nations, World Health Organization, Bank of America, M&C Saatchi, several Premier League Football Clubs and the list goes on. I wouldn't call any of these people amateurs. Our key customer base though are small business users and that's the group of people you caused disruption for. - Chris Adams
Seems Rochen has at least has the basic rule right to defuse negative remarks on forums fast Most people want hosting for almost nothing and then complain about restrictions. Nothing new. OP, did you move to Rackspace? Did you see *their* bandwidth and server prices? That's another league entirely. I don't know Rochen, but so far they seem decent enough.
As a long time customer, you guys had no right to do what you did, from your biggest to your smallest clients everybody has the right to be treated fairly....You guys obviously wouldn't treat Bank of America this way...Pull their website and see what happens. My lawyer will also be in touch with you, Dont think for one second you have gotten away with anything. I got the money and the man power to f*** w/ you so keep on fending me off cause I will keep posting away. What you need to do is apologize and make offers to correct this situation, you call me childish because I react to you pulling my websites. you are an obnoxious bastard and a prat! (figured this might make more sense to you) you took some of my revenue, now sit back and watch me deplete yours. stand by for Press release!
Was that a shared hosting account terminated? If so, keep in mind that shared hosting is generally meant for low traffic websites (also reflected in the symbolic price), and you should always expect reaction as soon as your stats show a bandwidth spike, regardless of the hosting company. To avoid such kind of conflicting situations, be sure to consider a VPS or a Dedicated server as soon as your business registers a step up in growth.
Some of these have already been addressed in our official response at our customer forums, but to address a few points raised above - a) the account was hosted on a shared hosting server. The client exceeded their purchased bandwidth allocation and for the level of concurrent traffic they were pushing really required a dedicated box. They were trying to push so much concurrent traffic in fact that the network port on the shared server was maxed out disrupting service for other businesses. b) the account was terminated by us as the site violated our Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) by hosting adult material. We don't allow this material on our shared servers. Our AUP is clearly linked to from every public page on our website and is presented for the acceptance of the client during the signup process. The OP agreed to our AUP. c) although our AUP allows for us to terminate an account outright we gave the client 24 hours to retrieve their data so they could move to a more suitable provider. d) we did not charge the client for extra bandwidth they consumed before the bandwidth check (which runs every 24 hours) detected they were over their purchased allocation. I don't think there is anything further Rochen needs to clarify here so this will be my last reply to this thread. The OP knows where he can contact us if need be though.
Hi Folks, As you will no doubt notice this is my first post on this forum, as a long time Rochen customer, having read through this thread I was compelled to register an account so that I could reply to Mr MNights' slanderous posts and comments regarding the service he's recieved from the guys over at Rochen. The very first point I'd like to make is that MNights shows the true level of his intelligence quotient by having to resort to profanities in calling Mr Chris Adams an "Obnoxious bastard". As far as I can read into the situation Rochen and Mr Adams in particular have been fair with MNights regarding his hosting package and the clear violation of Rochen's Acceptable Use Policy. Rochen's Acceptable Use Policy clearly states that they do not allow hosting of Adult themed websites - let's get this bit straight! Secondly as you were on a shared server any unusually large spike in bandwidth to your account would adversly affect the accounts of other innocent customers who do not break the terms of the Acceptable Use Policy which they too signed up to in good faith. In response to some of MNights comments: As a long time customer I'm relieved that Rochen took the stance they did, they had every right to treat you as such not only did you think that it was fair to ignore the Acceptable Use Policy you signed up to but you also jeapordised the websites / reputations of other Rochen customers by hosting Adult content and content relating to prostitution. One might well claim that prositution is the oldest trade in the world but one cannot deny that millions of men, women and children all over the world face daily exploitation due to middle men such as yourself. I very much doubt that Bank of America would be peddling in human misery and or breaching the terms of their hosting agreements - so I think they'll be safe from Rochen shutting down their account Am I the only one that suspects that MNight's lawyer may well side with Rochen, when one signs up for a legally binding contract (Rochen's AUP) then breaches that contract one shouldn't expect the law to side with them. I seriously doubt this claim... If you are so considerably wealthy and well connected then why did you purchase a shared hosting account with any company let alone Rochen - I'd have thought an outright owned hosting server in a top-of-the-range data house would have been the obvious solution for an XXX-Rated website owner. I wouldn't for a minute think that resorting to tawdry profanities would convince any serious business to make any offers to correct a situation such as this. I for one would immediately join the facebook group demanding Rochen's immediate closure if they cow-towed to nonsense like this. I'm sure Mr Adams would relish any press release which you might send out so that he could counter with a press release of his own. Once any sensible, honest and moral webmaster saw both I'm certain they'd sign up with Rochen in the knowledge that they were dealing with a reputable and professional hosting company. No Support line & No live chat to me equals no "barely trained" support staff. I know from personal experience that all of Rochen's support staff know their servers inside-out and when they pick up on a support ticket (for which 45 minutes is not too bad a response time considering the nature of your problem) they fix any issues that need fixed in a timely and professional manner. As far as I'm aware Rochen are not a Joomla company. The Joomla! trademark is owned by the not-for-profit organisation Open Source Matters. Rochen may well host the Joomla.org websites as well as hundreds of thousands of other Joomla based websites but I know for certain that they do not own Open Source Matters. I host WordPress, Drupal, Magento, OpenCart and phpBB based sites with them as well as my clients' Joomla based websites and I've never had one solitary complaint to make in all the years that I've hosted with them. In conclusion, I urge anyone who's read both this post and the post on the Rochen forum (which Mr Adams referenced in his reply) to see through MNights' thinly veiled slander and see him for the morally corrupt pornographer that he is. I'd also like to take this opportunity to publicly thank Mr Adams and his company for standing up against this diatribe and protecting the thousands of loyal and honest customers who use Rochen's services from the likes of MNights. Best Regards, Waseem (A very happy Rochen customer)
This thread needs to be closed to avoid further endless debates. We now know what both parties had to communicate to the public. The whole thing about the shared hosting accounts is that they are meant to serve literally dead websites exclusively. A portfolio that has 10 visitors per week, a photo album which is viewed by friends occasionally. $3 a month can't do much more than that, one should be aware and make a decision beforehand. No reason to start bashing a hosting company which charges you beer money to host your website.