Considering leaving hostnine

[interdev]

We have been a Reseller Central customer with Hostnine for 10 months now, and were very impressed with their offering and the way it has been packaged.

Generally support tickets are answered fairly quickly and staff friendly. However, certain issues have slowly eroded our faith in their abilities as a host and their ability to provide us with the kind of service that gives us credibility with our own customers. Allow me to share some of our experiences.

Earlier this year a clients dating website had its entire mysql database deleted in error after a support ticket asked that a second corrupt database be deleted (the ticket explicitly stated the 'live' database was critical and was not to be deleted.) Backups were not available and we had to restore from one of our own backups, which was over a month old. We were compensated for this error with 2 additional months free on our reseller package, but our clients has still not forgotten this episode.

On another occasion we had a clients website transferred successfully only to have it transferred again two hours later after querying why the transfer was taking so long. The support department and the transfers department clearly didn't speak to each other. Ironically the transfer resolved an email issue, which Hostnine insists had nothing to do with their servers.

Earlier today we setup a new account for a client and after having migrated the client to our hostnine server, the site never came up. We had planned the move to the hostnine server meticulously, in order to impress our new client, and the site has been down for almost 8 hours now! It now seems this was created by an issue with Reseller Central when creating the new account and while the ticket (critical) shows it's been assigned to level 3 support, we have not had a response in almost 3 hours now. I now face the unenviable task of trying to explain to my new customer that their move to us was the right choice. Not only has our credibility gone with this customer but it was not even our fault.

Ultimately we know that technical glitches happen and mistakes do too, but we cannot afford to be in a situation where we don't trust our service provider to provide the kind of service we want to provide to our customers. As a reseller we are reliant on our service provider and we have reached the point where we are being forced to consider leaving Hostnine...

An honest account of our experince at Hostnine....

[H9NickH]

interdev,

Could you please reply with your ticket number(s) related to this incident so we can look into this?

[interdev]

The tickets related to the latest incident, which is currently being resolved are #ULN-111133, #VHS-453480 and DAV-881663. The clients site is being transferred to another node right now because we cannot wait any longer.

MySQL Database Ticket: ZSX-153650

Duplicate Transfer Tickets: WAB-272690 and AON-996793

[H9Dan]

Hello Interdev,

I do remember working on tickets VHS-453480 and DAV-881663 with you in another ticket, the issue was related to two lines in the accounts .htaccess file that were supposed to be separate, however was instead stuck together. Has this been fully resolved for you?

As for the other tickets I do see they have since been resolved, however yes I agree there should have been better communication. Please let me know if you have any further issues and I'll look into them personally for you.