This major hosting company is a pain in the nethers. How tight is their agreement!? In June of this this I upgraded my web hosting account to a Reseller account, for £320. At the time they triple billed me and I had to get legal advice and have Trading Standard intervene just to get a refund. Finally I started adding new sites to the account at the end of October, at £50.50 each. Since then the web server hosting these accounts has been repeatedly down - once for about two weeks solid. They were down yet again today, needing yet another call to customer services to get it sorted. Basically, I have paid for a years hosting in advance and, frankly, they have the money and don't care. They are more than happy to cancel the account - but without a refund of any type. They promise 99.9% uptime, yet despite the fact I am seeing at little as 50% uptime a month they stand by the small print in their contract. One line is a cracker: By agreeing to their contract you accept that they are not liable if they are negligent!!! The rest of the agreement is as bad. As a final compromise, they offered to upgrade me to a VPS account - but only if I sign a new agreement for a minimum of a year. Given their current track record I have no intention of tieing myself to them for so long. Personally I'd like a refund for the balance of the account and for the three 'resold' domains that i bought and have had repeatedly go down. I've kept a log of the activities here: [ http://www.ackadia.com/home/blog/blog-2005-june.php ] [ http://www.ackadia.com/home/blog/blog-2005-nov-webfusion-mango-server-downtime.php ] and here: [ http://www.ackadia.com/home/blog/blog.php ] Any advice would be appreciated, please. I'm also looking for a new host. I have set up a low end server with GoDaddy but it's not good enough for my long term needs. I can probably managed as I am for a bit, but I will need a monthly VPS account with rock solid reliability and healthy specs - 2Gbs, 160Gb RAID, Dual Opteron/Xeon process and fast connectivity. Nothing critical, but it will be hosting forums and photo-galleries... Cheers, ~ Paul
You sound like you're having the same problems - four pages of outages in under a month! http://www.hosting-status.pipex.net/index.php?topic=Current&page=4 I signed up last June for Webfusion, which had been bought by Pipex. When I signed up, I'd done lots of homework and review reading. Things were looking OK. Shortly after, they had a promotion and massively overloaded the servers. Since then, we have suffered extended downtime, extreme slowness (30 seconds per page, was under 1 sec at first), email lost and general lack of service for our £400 (which is top whack pricing for shared hosting - we paid the extra for the alleged reliability) I finally (months after first asking) received an email from management in response to my simple request: all I was asking for was a pro-rata refund (as all other companies offer). Here is the reply today: -------------------------------------------------- As advised I am writing to advise that we do not unfortunately have a service level agreement in place with our shared hosting solutions and therefore would not offer a goodwill credit for any loss of service. Furthermore, as a company we do not compensate for consequential loss as per our terms and conditions of service. One of the reasons that we do not guarantee a level of service within our shared platform is because other users can impact upon service performance which is unfortunately one of the potential issues within a shared environment. For any business critical solutions we would of course recommend one of our dedicated solutions which does however demand a higher level of technical knowledge, responsibility and management but does provide a more stable hosting solution. As a company we have invested in a new platform which is more secure and resilient than the current platform that the mango server is based. As it has just been released (and at present only new accounts are being provisioned on this at present) the facilities available are very basic compared with the current Linux platform. We are adding to the current facilities as the platform is further developed but at present: The following main differences are as follows: There is no longer ssh access. -This is for security purposes There is no longer the ability to set up cron jobs, no bandwidth alert, no facility for secure certificates or front page extensions, no announcement lists, databases have to be manually created and are not set up by default, accounts section is more basic with no facility for printing a copy invoice at present, .net nuke not currently provisioned on the new platform. What is involved in moving over to this new platform? This is unfortunately going to involve some downtime as the process involved would be 1) Close existing account-by contacting a member of the customer services team and asking them to push the closure through the usual 5 day waiting period. 2) Open new account-either online or through our sales team. 3) You would need to transfer existing files over to new account and update domain name servers to point to the new account. (You would also need to reconfigure any mail settings on the new account). The main downtime involved is the propagation time it takes to update the name servers which can take 24-72 hours to update. Unfortunately this timescale is outside of anyone's control as it is just the time it takes for the rest of the world wide web to recognise the changes made. I hope that this assists you with your enquiries and if we can be of any further assistance please do not hesitate to contact the customer services team. -------------------------------------------------- Would you believe this came from customer SERVICES?!? And as you can see, we'd be being pushed onto a server which doesn't provide us with the same facilities we signed up to (cron, ssl and ssh are essential for our merchant facility) So what now? There is nothing to prevent me from taking my business elsewhere, but we'd be "giving" them £100. I've found a provider in the states which guarantees 99.96% uptime or an automatic FULL refund. I paid for premium hosting based on the service offered at time of signup. If that service seriously deteriorated (and I have downtime logs which match their own extensive outage page), is there ANYTHING I can do? Here's the relevant bit of their T&C. Notwithstanding the exclusions in 4.2, I think the "reasonable skill and care" bit is interesting, and I have certainly notified them in writing on several occassions! http://www.webfusion.co.uk/terms/webfusion.php 4 Service Delivery * 4.1 The Client acknowledges that, given the nature of such services, PIPEX cannot guarantee that the Services, when delivered via the internet, will be uninterrupted or error free. * 4.2 To the fullest extent permitted by law and save as provided elsewhere in the Agreement, the Services and any Client Systems and Ancillary Systems are provided by PIPEX to the Client on an "as is" and "as available" basis and no warranty or representation (express or implied) of any kind are given in connection with the Agreement including as to satisfactory quality and fitness for a particular purpose. In particular, PIPEX gives no warranty or representation that: o 4.2.1 the Services will meet the Client's requirements; o 4.2.2 the Services will be provided on an uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free basis; or o 4.2.3 any results obtained from use of the Services will be accurate, complete or current. * 4.3 PIPEX warrants that it will provide the Services with reasonable care and skill and in accordance with any SLA. PIPEX will not be liable for a breach of such warranty unless the Client notifies PIPEX in writing of such failure within 14 days of the Client becoming aware of the failure. * 4.4 If the Client makes a valid claim against PIPEX based on a failure by PIPEX to comply with the warranty set out in clause 4.3 PIPEX may, at its option, take such steps as it deems necessary to remedy such failure or refund such part of the Fees as relates to such Services, provided that the liability of PIPEX under such warranty will in no event exceed one and a quarter times the amount of the Fees paid to PIPEX by the Client (excluding VAT and expenses) in the 12 month period prior to the date on which the Client makes the claim. If PIPEX complies with this clause, it will have no further liability for a breach of the said warranty. Also, yesterday morning, no-one could send email. Here's the error From Telnet ------------------------------------ 220 hosting.pipex.net SMTP Server HELO NETPC 250 rubidium.webfusion.co.uk Hello host-X-9-X-1.X.com [X.9.X.1] MAIL FROM: <mail@XXXXX.co.uk> 421 Unexpected failure, please try later ------------------------------------- From OE log ------------------------------------- SMTP: 07:40:27 [tx] HELO NETPC SMTP: 07:40:27 [rx] 250 rubidium.webfusion.co.uk Hello host-X-9-X-1.X.com [X.9.X.1] SMTP: 07:40:27 [tx] MAIL FROM: <mail@XXXXX.co.uk> SMTP: 07:40:27 [rx] 421 Unexpected failure, please try later SMTP: 07:40:27 [tx] QUIT SMTP: 07:40:27 [rx] 221 rubidium.webfusion.co.uk closing connection Note that the symptoms are identical, from OE or Thunderbird, from Bulldog or BT Broadband. We've created new accounts too and tried to send from them. Pipex Webfusion are saying that it's definitely not their fault. I have to admit that when logged into my hosting server via SSH, I can send mail from the command line (via MAIL). But when logging in in a "normal" way via a client, this 421 error appears. Googling for this error, some people say it is because the /var mount is full, but I did a DF and that looks fine. Any ideas? I'm serious about going forward with action against this company - if anyone wants to PM me perhaps we can club together and shake Webfusion up a bit.
Nineteen minutes on hold listening to "The Four Seasons", still not through. No support, no reply to my email yesterday. No acknowledgement of the problem. All going in the logs!