The nameservers have gone down three times in as many weeks. Our email and vpn is accessed through a subdomain, so when the nameservers go down, my entire company has no email and can’t access the server. Fantastic. On top of that, the last time it went down and I waited on hold for 40 minutes, I got some guy who matter-of-factly states, “Yes, the website is down because the nameservers are down.” When I asked him how long it would be down, he answered, “eh, probably 2-4 hours” in a tone as if I had asked him how often he goes fishing.

I’m switching to Godaddy this weekend, and will figure out someone else for a host. It’s absolutely ridiculous.

I too lost a lot of money that day. Considering how much we pay to the Google (couple hundred throusand dollars a year), we paid dearly for clicks on dead links. Add to that frustrated customers who might have gone elsewhere (who knows) and I’m sure it was a considerable sum.

I did receive a month’s courtesy credit for the outage. I’m not sure how to proceed. Who knows how really reliable the next web host provider will be.

Overall, Valueweb doesn’t seem to have frequent outages, and you can’t argue that they don’t work as quickly as possible to bring the system back up. I’m concerned about the trouble of moving our website, the outage as the new IP address propagates, and the outages I might experience with the new entitity. No server will function fully 24/7 365.

Once we get up I am going to switch to 1&1 Internet….anyone have experience with them?

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

This company is the worst I have ever seen. I let them know I was trying to change registrar, and they deleted my whois info.. now I can’t do anything except renew the domain with them because my other registrar can’t send an email to the domain admin (b/c there is not any whois info) I try to edit on their site, and it gives me an error.

I’ve been trying for over 1 year to get a refund back on their crap hosting.. they said I had to talk to customer support.. I always get a voicemail, leave a message, and am never called back.

I would recommend trying your best to host your domain with a dirty sticky popsicle stick before ever going to hostway.

http://center.spoke.com/secure/search/person/advancedSearch.spoke

Good luck!

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.

So every other day my site(which is wordpress and a Vbulletin) is down sending me emails about database problems… Sad but true…

So I will be moving from there too as soon as I get a little time…

Kim:)

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.

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

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.