Hi all, Just wanted to leave a small friendly advice: never trust your site to HostDepartment.com company. Back in february 2007 I had to find a new hosting provider for one of my biggest sites. Somebody recommended HostDepartment for their unlimited packages. Sounds great, right? WRONG. In 2 weeks my annual contract expires and I'm moving to a different server. During this year, every month, my site would be offline for at least 8-16 hours / week. Daily my site drops at least 10-15 times, for 2-10 minutes, sometimes for longer. During this year, they moved my site to 3 different servers. During the first one - they lost my DB, it is a good thing that I had a backup. After about 6 months of frequent downtimes I sent them a very nasty e-mail. You can't imagine their response! "Sorry Sir, we can move your site to a more stable server. Should we do that?" Yeah, right. They have stable servers for normal people and not-so-stable servers for shit clients. I can go on and on about how many problems I faced during this year, how many braincells I lost because of them, and how many times googlebot saw my site offline. My contract expires in 2 weeks, and for the last 2 weeks - the site has been going down every hour for 2-5 minutes... Great way to keep a customer happy. Ok, my site is up now, so time to end this rant. Remember: HostDepartment.com == 'shit' and a waste of money.
Sound's like youve been through a lot, although I would like to ask a question, Why stay with them for a year if you have been getting "shit" uptime and losing visitor's? If that was me, I would have switched after a couple times of downtime if the host never said to me a valid point in WHY they were down.
I was into a 1-year commitment. The site being non-commercial, I didn't really lose any revenue, just nerves. But yeah, I should have parted with them much sooner...
I never sign a year long contract for hosting if i'm trying a new host. Month to month and then after a year if i like them enough i would do a full year contract if they have some good discounts. There are tons of hosting companies so hopefully you will find someone better.
Damn,i signed two hostings,both of them provide a free domain,i have to go with them if i want to keep my domains,but they really sucks. Your way is much smarter.
I triedseveral hostings...like 5 , and ALL of them had issues andmy website was downand up, up and down... I think it's hard to find a good hosting provider nowadays...
Don't consider this as advertising or something, but I host other of my websites on a dedicated server of a friend of mine, he rents it from HostGator. I have about 10 online sites, none of them were ever offline, or at least I've never noticed that.
Did they have a network / uptime SLA? If so, you could have claimed near enough 100% of your money back.
This is really bad to hear about them, they did wrong mate. Sure i am going to take care about that company, recently i was planning to move to host 4 websites. Now would re-think.... thanks for saving my a**
My friend, check out a bunch of web hosts and read reviews before you do anything. The fact that I have never heard of them just makes it that much worse. Seriously, research is the key in life the unlocks the door.
I just love Site5. My server hasn't been down once in over 2 months! NEVER, EVER get an unlimited bandwidth/space host, they ALWAYS suck. Oh, and get a host with phone support, that way you can yell at them and get them to do something. Also, NEVER pay for hosting more than three months at a time, you will loose money if you change hosts and if you want it back you WILL have to go to court. Luckily, my one host I had issues with was in the United Kingdom and couldn't justify coming to the U.S. for a $1,000 court hearing. My Default Judgement, there loss.
Well, I'm not in USA, so phone support isn't an option. I chose HostDepartment because a friend recommended it, so I followed blindly... never again