I’ve had my share of shit hosting services over the years. Sometimes it feels like I’ve had them all. EIG Companies owns so many it is hard to avoid shit service. It’s all he same shit company with the same shit service. They make their money by customers getting pissed off and falling for yet another teaser rate at yet another shell company they’ve stood up.
1and1.com
One of the first shit hosting services I had was 1and1.com. Their reputation is so far down the sewage system they recently changed their name to IONOS. Same shit company. Same shit service. I’ll never forget the last straw. I contacted support about my site performance sucking bad. Hey, for cheap I don’t expect good, but 3+ minute load times for a blog that doesn’t have too many images, no.
Well, you’re running on really old servers. I can’t really give you any more memory. You need to pay to migrate off of them.
1and1.com support
I shit you not.
“No child. I pay for hosting services. What it runs on is up to you. If you want it migrated to something newer and more capable, then you do it. I paid for a host with adequate performance. You agreed to do that.”
JustHost.com
This was my first venture into EIG Companies, not that their business model is much different from 1and1.com. Cheap teaser rate. Charge hundreds of dollars per domain migration even though it is a single line script they keep feeding domain names into. For the first two weeks run them on the really fast hardware that isn’t over loaded. Before they end of their second month move them to the completely overloaded boxes.
I toughed it out here a long time. It just became too much. Whenever I was at a client site I would attempt to load one of my sites over the lunch hour. Like watching fruitcake mortify. Their email started getting wretched too. They were providing services to a relentless quantity of spammers and 70% of the time I sent an email out it was rejected back to me as coming from a spam source. I contacted tech support.
Oh, just wait half a day and try again. We rotate the IP addresses of our outbound mail servers.
JustHost.com tech support
I shit you not.
The final straw came when I got the exact same line from support about slow site response.
BlueHost.com
This was the first time I fell victim to the EIG Companies scam. Provide shit hosting services and let them jump ship to another of our paper shells. Charge them hundreds of dollars per domain to migrate while offering a teaser rate. If they stay long enough raise their rate by hundreds of dollars per site so it is just like they would have moved to one of the other shit shell companies.
Not long after I left Bluehost.com they had a breach. I started getting bills from them via email. At the time I was on HostGator.com. I first contacted HostGator.com “support.” They looked into the billing issue and came back laughing saying it wasn’t them, but BlueHost.com. I waited forever on hold with BlueHost.com.
They did everything to deny they had a data breach.
I have worked in IT over 30 years, I recognized a breach when I saw one, I demanded they report it to the FBI.
They finally acknowledged they had a breach. They promised to report it to the FBI.
I’m damned certain they never bothered to report it to the FBI. The breach was trying to bill customers and I’m certain it wasn’t reported.
HostGator.com
This was my second time of getting scammed by the EIG Companies hosting scams and it didn’t last long. In fact, it lasted only as long as the above data breach. That was also when support let slip it was “a sister company in the same data center.” Oh, don’t worry. My customer data with them was safe . . . yeah, right.
InMotionHosting.com
I don’t remember exactly when I started here. I was just looking to get onto a non EIG Companies hosting service as quickly as possible to avoid complete identity theft. As it was American Express replaced my card not too long after this incident. I just got a sudden notice from them the card had been compromised and a new one showed up a few days later.
Like every other hosting company they charged all kinds of fees nickle and diming me for migration. They put me on really fast servers for the beginning. Lately page load times has been like watching roof shingles with a 30 year warranty wear out. When I contacted customer service about this each time they wanted me to walk through and manually flush all caching for my sites.
No. If you have a leak and need caches flushed you should have a batch job that runs once per day. Obviously this is a script that runs somewhere because it is a button on the user menu. If we don’t have to drop to the command line to do it, then you can automate it.
It’s the email server
What has honked me off completely has been going on a loooong time. I get emails from the illegal alien pimps. They like to call themselves consulting firms, but when you are a voice over IP (VOIP) phone operating from a mud hut in a foreign country, you’re a pimp. You arrange a date, collect a fee, provide no service, just like your streetwise counterpart.
No, what is honking me off is the complete lack of proper email server configuration and the fact I waste time looking at emails that if I reply have this happen.
They claim that SpamAssasin takes into account SpamRL lists. Obviously not the case. This process has gotten worse week after week. I just wasted most of the morning on chat help with support. Absolutely nothing was resolved. I’m now emailing back and forth with GeekStorage. They seem knowledgeable and are digging into a method to weight SpamRL more heavily so nothing that will bounce due to being listed on it will ever get through. I suspect I will be leaving InMotion hosting before the end of the month.
Summary
Shit hosting services are all over the Internet. They rely on the fact so few people know anything about computers or Internet hosting. Some people got locked into $1500/year hosting agreements over a decade ago and are still paying the money because switching involves too much pain in their mind.
Not mine.
