| Hi All,
I have been using WHT for a while now, but have never posted - always lurked with intent. I thought I would add to the community as I have just had an awful experience with a reseller package and am so angry and disappointed (with the hosting company) that I thought I must contribute my experience.
I run a business providing IT support for small/medium sized businesses in London and the South East, UK. A while ago we started to host our own sites under a reseller package and then started to resell space to customers. Initially, we had a shared reseller account with a small hosting company based outside of London (geo-location was important to us). The company was Krystal.co.uk, who in retrospect I would highly recommend. We eventually had to move from them as their servers wouldn't allow us to run WHMCS (though they do now). So we started looking at other hosting companies. This was the checklist:
- More service offerings than just shared reseller accounts. I knew that I would want to stay with this company for a while and so having a wide array of services was important - I wanted to start off with reseller hosting but wanted to move up to managed dedicated or a colo in the near future.
- Decent support opening hours - 24hrs was nice but not 100% necessary - with the previous company I had used their support ticket system maybe 4 times in over a year.
- Decent uptime. Speaks for itself.
- More disk space. The last company had 25GB diskspace with a limit of 50 cpanel accounts. An upgrade would have been nice, but I am aware of the problems with 'unlimited' plans.
- Geo-location. As most of our customers as well as us are based in London, having something close by for speed and the minor SEO gain was desirable.
- WHMCS. I wanted something that would 1) be able to run WHMCS and 2) would offer a discounted license or 3) offer a free license. I'm not unreasonable, I know software doesn't come for free but any reduction in cost in good and also feels nice when you get it
Out of all of the companies that I looked at Hostdime seemed to tick the box. They offered reasonable hosting plans for about the same cost as Krystal.co.uk. They have 24 hour support, free WHMCS license, unlimited cPanel accounts and were based in roughly the same area as our last host - I was later to find out they are in the Custodian data centre located in Maidstone, Kent.
I called them to have a chat and their pre-sales team was great, they answered the phone quickly, were knowledgeable and polite, got back to me with an answer if they didn't know something - I felt confident in their abilities straight away because of this.
I decided on the rHD1 package which is a monthly £20 service. I didn't go for a more expensive option as the pre-sales team told me that they didn't separate resellers based on package - everyone is mixed up, so it wouldn't necessarily mean a performance increase/decrease either way. As I didn't need 200GB disk space I thought I would start on the lowest one and get a dedicated or colo server when I needed more space.
So, I purchased the service and had a web developer we work with develop a site live from the server. The developer was on it for about 10 days and said there was nothing mega wrong or at least when it was slow he thought it could have been his internet and maybe not the server. OK, so we applied for the account migration and pencilled in when we were to move over.
About a week later, the migration was done, 'great!' I thought and we started moving the name servers over. This was where it started to go wrong.
- Firstly, we are notified that the accounts were transferred over before we confirmed the request which was before one of the developers we work with pushed out an update to about 6 sites on our server. OK, not that bad - a bit eager of the HD support centre to do that, but we simply requested another migration. This did slow the whole process down a bit.
- The day we were moving over everything started to go very slow. We checked on a number of sites after DNS had propagated and yep, there was a problem. We called support and asked them what was happening and they said that there were 2 accounts on the server suspected of abuse. OK, I guess that happens every once in a while? I wasn't too worried, but this is where my colleagues started to doubt the quality of service. I can see what they mean, generally I don't believe in coincidences and the suggestion that this was a once in a blue moon occurrence on this exact day, I wasn't too sure either
- When the request for the re-migrated accounts went through we waited a day and got the email that it was done. Apart from the support guy didn't actually transfer the databases of the sites, only the static pages. After a bit of toing-and-froing the support team retransferred the accounts and applied the wrong ownership to our accounts and then applied our ownership to someone else's accounts so we had them in our WHM and they had ours - we decided to stop wasting time and manually transfer the sites over. In all there were about 20 which wasn't too bad, but a bit of a time consuming process.
So the server was OK for a bit - maybe a week. I had some support tickets open, things like mod_deflate wasn't on by default but nothing major. All was OK. This was 28th November. December was a quite different story
On December 1st the server started to respond very slowly - pages would take about 20 seconds to load on all websites from multiple locations - Pingdom was returning pings of between 500-700ms, sometimes longer (about 1.2 seconds) and I was being contacted left right and centre by customers complaining of slow load times. One customer said it took 30 minutes to load a /wp-admin.php page - probably an exaggeration, but still it took him a very long time.
The server would frequently drop out over the next few days and I was told by HD support that the server's RAID array was rebuilding or verifying. OK, I am a server administrator and I know that RAID arrays do degrade and need rebuilding and verifying but this happened probably about 4/5 times over a couple of weeks and when it takes 2 days to rebuild and verify we literally on had maybe 4 days in 2 weeks where everything was running OK.
I would constantly call HD support and open a ticket - I would get excuses about the MySQL server when it wasn't something to do with the RAID array. When I had my tickets escalated to 'Client Relations and Development' I had a very long discussion with someone over email about how damaging this was for my business and what the real problems were. I was told that there was a suspected RAID card failure on the server and that they were waiting for the RAID to fail again until they were going to take a look at it. To me, that was crazy - the RAID had been verifying on and off for a few weeks and HD were doing literally nothing to resolve the problem and were being extremely unhelpful in the process. All I can say is that their client relationship team was about as useful as a chocolate teapot, and I'm not joking
During this time I had an admission from one of the support guys that this was happening a lot with this server and that it was 'teetering on the edge' and was happening 'way too much', but sadly HD were doing nothing to resolve the issues, and this was their only constant. I forwarded these tickets to the client relationship team and they said to resolve the issues they would provision another server in the UK and move myself and some other customers over to it to reduce overall load on my current server, increasing performance for everyone, hopefully. The promise was that would be done within 48 hours. Well, that was on the 2nd January and nothing has been done since then. I received an email about transferring my HD account over to this new server on the 8th January, but that was the last email I received
Between December 1st 2012 and January 8th 2013 I had a total of 58 emails between me and Host Dime support. I must have called them about 20 times and probably spent in the region of 10+ hours dealing with them and probably double that dealing with disgruntled customers. The whole Christmas/new year break was spent trying get this sorted out, moving customers to other servers and fielding angry calls and emails, it was very depressing.
Honestly, and I'm sure you can tell by the length of this post, I am really really unhappy with Host Dime. It was honestly a distressing time with them - I have had customers leave my hosting business as well as my core business as they were unhappy with the performance of the server for web and felt it reflected badly on me. I can only agree with that and I am really disappointed and angry that Host Dime were completely unable to manage the situation in a professional and timely manner. When dealing with them anything beyond a simple ticket I felt they were uninterested and unable to fix the real issues. Hate to say this about anyone but I felt they were real charlatans with the way they handled things.
If you are thinking of joining Host Dime all I can say based on my experience is STOP! and walk away - there are so many other suppliers on WHT that have positive current reviews and I would urge you to check them out before you do anything - they may not give you the same amount of diskspace or may limit cpanel accounts, but a server that can't load pages is absolutely useless, even it it does have a lot of diskspace.
I have since left Host Dime for another provider, I have been with them since about 10th January and have honestly loved them - absolutely no issues, such a breath of fresh air. I won't say who it is as in this thread as I don't want a web host vs. web host situation, but if you are interested to know who it is, PM me. I may also write a review of them when I have some free time.
I know that HD frequent the forums and I have read of someone called Manny or something - I don't know who he is, maybe one of the Directors/Owner of HD or senior consultants/interested party and he seems to have a good reputation on the forum. If he is one of the main guys at Host Dime, I hope he is reading this as there must be something seriously wrong further down the chain. This wasn't a serious of unfortunate events - it was blunder after blunder with a large slice of serious mismanagement. Totally FUBAR.
Honestly there is zero chance I would ever go back to them or refer someone to them. The whole experience was truly horrific, a complete Omni-shambles. I could go on forever, but I think I have run out of adjectives and my fingers are hurting from typing so much
Hope this helps someone and if you are unlucky enough to choose Host Dime for your reselling needs, good luck, you'll need it.
James
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