Let me change that. I looked and anything uploaded for the past 3 YEARS is gone!

I am disappointed in Hostway’s sluggish response to customer concerns, as well as their “circle the wagons” attitude when it comes to communicating with their customers. I’ve had several client’s over on 1and1 and have had no major problems. Their customer service & tech support is always just a phone call away.

Folks,

I’m very sorry to hear about the recent outage again. I’m not sure if you guys are aware, but I’m now the CMO for Layered Technologies (http://layeredtech.com). If you need to make a move feel free to contact me and I’ll put you in touch with one of our sales guys who can get you set up with a server usually in 24 hours or less. I’ll try to expedite any for people whose servers are currently down if you just let me know.

Alternatively, drop an e-mail to sales@layeredtech.com and tell them that you are one of my readers and what the situation is and I’ll make sure the team is sensitive to the time critical nature of the requests.

Good luck to all,

John

Well, that recovery didn’t last long. All e-mail accounts down again (including via Webmail), along with one of the two domains I still have with Valueweb.

At least they’re consistent.

J.R.

Make that both websites down.

J.R.

Like you, I still have one website hosted with ValueWeb. They acquired my former Hosting Provider about 10 years ago. Since then, a prior server outage caused them to lose all my data. Fortunately I had everything backed up. Many of the hundreds of other customers affected did not. About 2 years ago, another server outage caused me to lose all my back email. Yesterday my website went down for almost a full day (not for the first time, but it appeared to be massive as even their own website was down). Today my website is back up and running, but my email service has been down for several hours. I suspect this has something to do with their merging their data-center with Hostway, since their recent acquisition. I currently own several websites hosted by a variety of different hosts. I only have one left over at ValueWeb. Nothing but procrastination has kept me from consolidating them. Screw them all, I’m going to move everything over to a Grid-Service plan with Media Temple.

Any other disgruntled ValueWeb or Hostway customers feel the same?
Here’s the link to the plan I’m looking at:
MediaTemple.net – Grid-Service

I have almost 1,100 pages on ValueWeb. ALL pages died last (Tuesday) night, along with my email. The pages were back up this morning, but now they’re off again. All of them. A few emails finally came through, but now they’re blocked again. No one can write me to ask what’s going on, so they’re starting to telephone. As for ValueWeb, all ITS phone lines are dead. What annoys me more than anything is that their “System Status” page says that ALL IS NORMAL! If this is normal, then I’m looking for another host tomorrow morning.

P.S. to my comment above:

I just noticed that ValueWeb’s “System Status” page hasn’t been updated since April 23. Isn’t that about the time that Hostway acquired ValueWeb??

What else do we need to know?

I had first Affinity, changed to Value Web, for 8 years, with never a problem. Now they are bought by Hostway (I cringed when I heard that, but it was OK for a couple of weeks.); now they have been down for more than 24 hours! I just called their tech support, put it on speaker phone; they did finally answer. I asked the guy when they were going to have this problem fixed. At first, he acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. When I explained to him that their website was down and had been for 24 hours, he asked, “What do you mean, just exactly what is the problem?” He said the problem was a power failure and a fire. I said, “I don’t believe it; they just told you to say that, the problem was caused by Hostway trying to cut corners.” He said it should be up by midnight.

Valueweb continues to be out today Thursday May 29 2008 at 11:30am EST. This has been going on since Tuesday evening. I have 40 customer sites on them and they all continue to be dead. I have some of my most coveted customers now questioning our brand. Thanks for screwing us valueweb.

Valueweb has acted in the worst possible way during this. Nothing on their web site, the worst customer service, complete lack of technical capability, and has shown that they absolutely cannot provide any hosting or customer service. Their lack of disaster preparedness goes all the way through to affinity and hostway. Customer service either doesn’t answer or hangs up on you. They made the time to keep their own site up after the outage took down their site and phone systems but continue to be non-existent no the customer service and technical front.

Valueweb has cost me business, thousands of dollars, they created brand damage, have had a major effect on search engine rank, missed crawls, trickle down anger by our customers and haven’t even fixed anything.

They currently claim all systems are normal yet I still have 40 sites down.

This is unbelievable. Who’s running things down there in Florida?

It’s going to suck, but I have to jump ship. I cannot support the lack of customer value and lack of technical capabilities shown by valueweb affinity hostway.

Just took a look at MediaTemple.net Grid-Service and was duly impressed, especially since it would cost less for a lot more hosting than I’m currently paying ValueWeb – or DreamHost, where I have been intending to move my ValueWeb-hosted sites. But what their sales page says and what they actually deliver can be two distinctly different things (as we’ve all learned the hard way). Does anyone have any real experience with these guys?

Thanks,
J.R.

OMG..
Valueweb is down again…….

I’m convinced that valueweb really doesn’t care.

I’m also convinced that they cannot fix the problem.

They obviously don’t care about the loss in revenue that will occur now.

BTW – the phone message continues to say all systems are normal. They must be referring to their own web site which they’ve diligently kept alive but failed to notify customers on.

Is it really possible to work so hard to gain so many customers and build a brand, just to let it all go away in 48 hours?

I’m guessing this is the current formula:

Hostway management really doesn’t care + Valueweb legacy management is holding hostage solutions + complete lack of technical infrastructure for what they offer (false advertising) + complete lack of technical staffing + dismal customer service and management = knot in my stomach facing my upset customers and the mountain of work I have to do to move all my customers.

… fast forward a 36 months … repeat the above, just change the business names.

Just Googled Media Temple and found a flood of complaints – many this month – very similar to those about ValueWeb. Also checked out several others and found two with few complaints and several recommendations – WebFaction and SliceHost. Lots of differences between the two (and I still don’t understand what the heck a “slice” is), but would love to hear any comments on them from anyone here. Neither appears on any of the most common “top sites” lists, but one of those has LunarPages in its top position and a quick Google will find a ton of complaints about them. After almost 15 years, finding a decent host that remains decent over time is no easier than it ever was.

J.R.

I am so disapointed in Value Web, this has been going on for almost 3 days now and I have lost so much business and money. I would like to swtch to another provider that is reliable and affordable, any suggestions???

The final proof of ValueWeb’s incompetence and indifference is the fact that they don’t post anything on their System Status Update page ( http://tinyurl.com/6p5ocs ). That would be so easy for them to do. It would take only seconds for them to tell us what is going on and approximately when they expect to have the problem solved. Then many of us would try to be patient. But they cannot be bothered.
We’re dealing with a real garbage can outfit. (P.S. Note that that System Status page hasn’t been updated since April. And it doesn’t note the YEAR . . .)

it’s 5pm EST and looks like (no) value (no) web is down again. They were up for a couple hours.

I guess that they can’t handle it when people use the internet.

Maybe there new motto should be “hosting for when nobody is on the internet and the best customer service when nobody needs it …”

I’m completely disgruntled.

Is it even possible to move your web sites when you cannot get hold of the hosting company to do that??

I’ve been with this company (mostly happy) for about 7 years. They have now managed to lose me (and all my web sites) within 3 days–it isn’t so much the outage (which is bad enough on its own) but the fact that THEY DO NOT COMMUNICATE OR ANSWER THEIR PHONES for something that is effecting my livelihood and business.

I noticed HTMLHelp.com is up–are they just taking this one server at a time? I’m getting a “server not found” error message when I try to get into my site–is that the error message all of you are getting?
Would it help if we ALL called corporate headquarters in Australia to complain?
Since commenting, have any of your sites come up this evening? My customers are emailing me, asking me if I am still in business…

Well, three days and no website. I spent the last day uploading my valueweb sites to startlogic (probably not much better) and I am waiting for dns to probagate. Sorry about spelling. Funny, my site just started showing on the first page of google results the day that the website went down. my forms do not work now and I need to rework the cgi scripts. My shopping cart with hundreds of items was on the valueweb server as webstore.valueweb and I do not know how to fix that problem. I have been with valueweb for many years…where is the emergency backup and 99% uptime???

Mine is not up yet. It was offline from Tuesday afternoon, back online for a few hours, and it’s been off since Wednesday afternoon. I get a “page cannot be displayed” and “unable to connect”. This is the first time in over five years my site has been down for more than a few minutes.

This morning I called every number I could, and finally reached someone in the web design dept. He told me there was a major accident, no one’s fault, couldn’t be helped, etc. I asked him if it was due to Hostway and he said no. But what else could he say? This doesn’t make sense. They should have better back up for “accidents”.

Looks like valueweb is back up – longer today.

They sent out a funny ’cause of the outage’ email notice at 3:26am this morning (Friday). It mentions how they will be shutting down the system again at 2am Friday (yes, a notice about shutting down 1.5 hours before the email went out). Nice work :-|

What have we learned:

1. even the most redundant systems can fail when a coolant system breaks

2. if a coolant system can take down a whole host with 80k plus customers, their own web site and phone system, I can only imagine that we are all on a computer in someone’s rental apartment. It can get hot in Florida and I would put my air conditioner on top of my server too.

3. It’s a sign of very novice management who didn’t execute with the first step in fixing the problem – managing customer perceptions – not bypassing water soaked back up batteries. i.e. CUSTOMER SERVICE before technical fix. It’s amazing what we will all put up with if we are just communicated with. I personally would not have such a bad opinion and may even sympathize with them if I was involved more truthfully with the problem and the progress toward solution. At least I could have given my customers honest and more accurate information about the future and progress.

- still moving customers to a new host because -

Primary reasons to leave valueweb:
1. Complete lack of customer service – i can’t believe i was actually hung up on after waiting an hour on hold. I spend over $10k per year with those monkeys.
2. Inability to handle disaster scenarios in both people management and technical management.
3. Proof of network infrastructure beyond capacity to handle current customer base during high traffic periods.
4. Placing an unstable coolant system near a server room.

valueweb continues to have connectivity problems to ftp on a significant number of servers.

This is almost a week now that customers are out of service for site hosting ftp access.

Hi all,

My advice is to keep your hosting from anything that is related to hostway.

We have been their customers for a few years and I must say that something went really wrong in the past 2 years.

They offer no real customer support, and things that could have been solved in 5 min sometimes take 5 days or more to be solved.

Their mail server crash often, leaving you without emails for days.

Last time my website was down for over 10 days cause they couldn’t set miva merchant on my server (something that takes 10 min top)

We have decided to move to a new host and just regret we didn’t do that some years ago.

Keep away from hostway.

Is anyone else having problems getting e-mail through ValueWeb? From about the time they “came up” again, almost every attempt to log into their server via Thunderbird and download e-mail on multiple accounts and domains has resulted in a “server could not be found” or “connection timed out” message. A call to tech support resulted in a smokescreen obviously devised on the theory their customers are idiots who don’t know how the Internet works. To be fair, he tossed out three equally dumb possibilities, all devoid of any problem at ValueWeb.

In my case, e-mail is even more important, on a day-to-day, minute-by-minute basis than whether my site is up or not because that is how my clients contact me.

This cannot continue. At the moment, I’m considering three new homes: DreamHost, SliceHost and WebFaction. Anybody have any real experience with any of those?

J.R.