Horrible web hosting providers reviewed
It's been an awful long time since we had our 'bottom 5 web hosting providers' list on the frontpage of the site. We removed it from the site a number of months ago after asking ourselves who really wants to see the worst web hosting providers!
Please note that the data below is based entirely off the user submitted reviews on HostJury. All scores reflect those reviews submitted from previous or existing clients of each company. If you feel your company may be listed here in error, talk to your clients, not us!
From top to bottom, up first:
AccuBurst
AccuBurst Reviews
AccuBurst deserves an applause, they're the lowest company on our list of reviewed hosts. In fact they've scored a zero for support, uptime, features and price. With over nine reviews submitted for the company and all of them having given AccuBurst a score of zero: That deserves a round of applause. Several of their previous clients have left fairly unsatisfied remarks, some even going as far as calling AccuBurst "scam", "horrible" and one user has filed an injunction with the state of Connecticut against the company owner, Bradford W. Galiette. Oops!
The company was even listed as 'Editor's Choice' at FindMyHost. Good grief, the editors there must be sadomassochists!
AccuBurst Review Score: 0% -- Kudos, if this were golf.
Vizaweb
Vizaweb Reviews
Up next we've got Vizaweb, founded in 2002. Since 2002 Vizaweb (at least from what we can gander based on the score) has been sucking like a Hoover. Sadly, this is the web hosting industry & not home appliances. If it were though, these folks would be in the lead! Based on their reviews we're lead to believe they've been going down more often than Paris Hilton.
But I suppose if you like it on the bottom..
Vizaweb Review Score: 7% -- At least they've got a lucky number!
Serverway
Serverway Reviews
There isn't much to say about Serverway, customers had an awful lot to say though: Serverway reviews I'd go into great lengths about their reviews given the widespread abuse their own clients are giving them but since Serverway recently let their own domain name expire, I don't think they care much.
Serverway Review Score: 12% -- Finally, we're getting somewhere!
GISOL - Global Internet Solutions
GISOL Reviews
Uh oh. Founded in 1998, Global Internet Solutions has grown to become a leader in the web hosting industry. Our mission is to offer customers industry-leading Web hosting services and tools, coupled with superior customer support - at an affordable price. With a mission statement like that, who can go wrong?
GISOL can go wrong. Their customers on our review boards have described their service as "painful", "poor" and "horrible". Another client goes as far as detailing information about their 300+ Better Business Bureau complaints, that's satisfaction I tell ya!
GISOL Review Score: 12% -- With a 0% score for support, oops.
Greenlush
Greenlush Reviews
Founded in 2007, Greenlush originally began their start as a cPanel web hosting provider. Within days of their humble beginnings they were already posting fake reviews here on HostJury regarding their own services. That's not very nice!
Despite their fraudulent past though they decided to shutdown their web hosting operation a few weeks later & converted their site into a web hosting news portal. Bravo, one down.. Their clients didn't get out of it so easy though with the large majority losing their prepaid fees in the process.
Greenlush Review Score: 17% -- At least they gave up on web hosting.
AIT - Advanced Internet Technologies
AIT Reviews
AIT started off as an excellent provider, according to a number of the reviews posted by their clients here on HostJury. Since their humble beginnings providing service though they've degraded. I suspect somewhere along the line, their company outgrew it's team, outsourced or was sold off.
Sure enough though despite AIT ranking in as one of the bottom 5 hosting companies here at HostJury, their site is covered in awards ranging from 'Top Dedicated Host' to Best Reseller hosting. Award sites like HostReview and WebHost Directory are beginning to show their true colors -- they rate some of the worst the best!
"Seems like they hire warm bodies off the street with little or no training. Putting in trouble tickets with AIT has become part of the weekly routine. Watch out for extra charges in the fine print if you cancel, you will be obligated to pay another 6 months hosting fees even after you leave."
AIT Review Score: 17% -- Top Reseller Hosting, unlikely!
SmartyHost -- These guys take down under seriously!
SmartyHost Reviews
I'm one of those sort of people that simply expect anyone with a British or Australian accent to be intelligent, it's a flaw of us North Americans. In this case though the scores say otherwise. SmartyHost has been dragged through the mud here on HostJury by their own clients with statements like "Their support is pathetic" and over 25 other reviews agree.
"SmartyHost is great.. until something goes wrong. Personally, I still like them though because they have those hot, sexy Australian accents. Oh, did I say that outloud?
SmartyHost Review Score: Sweet 17% -- Fresh, hot Australians ready to suck... at web hosting.
ByteFortress
ByteFortress Reviews
After leaving hundreds of users in the dark & disappearing without a trace there isn't much that can be said about ByteFortress. They're joined by unscrupulous other providers on the bottom of our list but this company really takes the cake. Not only did they disappear high & dry without so much as a peep they blamed it all on their company being sold out.
That's taking care of business!
"They are scam artists, with no integrity or professionalism." Nuff' said, sadly.
ByteFortress clocks in at 20%.
HostOnce -- Not twice.
HostOnce Reviews
HostOnce was originally started in 1997 and seems to do a lot of interesting things outside of annoying their customers. One of the few providers that I've seen offering 'charity' programs to allow you to pay your hosting while helping those with eating disorders, Kudos to them. On the other hand their clients beg to differ regarding anyone getting helped. One client even goes as far as saying "The worst host in the universe", I wonder what other planets he's hosted on. Sadly, from a quick glance at their reviews it looks like HostOnce's support is out of this world. As in, non-responsive and even SETI has given up looking for them.
Their clients say it best:
"Hostonce has got to be the most unreliable hosting provider out there. I spend more time in their support system (when it is available) than I do conducting future business. They have cost me and my clients great financial loss to which they do not seem to care. My advice is steer clear and avoid the nightmare." - DesignWeb
HostOnce Review Score: 20%
VistaPages - Hasta la Vista to your pages.
VistaPages Reviews
Last but certainly not least, we've got VistaPages. VistaPages is the 'top' of the bottom list clocking in just barely ahead of HostOnce. VistaPages was started in 2004 and founded by Kaumil Patel.
"At VistaPages, we understand that our customers' web sites are important and they require reliable services to ensure that service is not interrupted. We have established a solid foundation to offer a reliable, easy to use and low cost web hosting solution for small-to-medium sized businesses."
Somehow, we'd suspect their clients might disagree with that. One review even goes as far as saying their service was "abyssmal":
"I was with Vistapages for a year and although their live support is very good and prices very cheap their actual service was abyssmal with very slow servers and downtime" - Paul Turrall
VistaPages has recently gone as far as requesting to pay us to remove their negative reviews. We didn't adhere, I never did like dead presidents all that much, let alone the ones still living! After we denied their request they threatened to sick their lawyers on us. I suspect we'll see them in court soon because their clients won't stop posting negative reviews :(
VistaPages Review Score: 20%
The end.
Plus Oftel haven't existed since 2003, it's Ofcom these days :)
Ian,
For hosting, you've got the likes of Hostjury. :)
Delighted to see HostOnce getting mentioned here as they are so appallingly useless! Enough of that, though, as I've reviewed them appropriately elsewhere.
I am interested to know whether there is an official body that we can complain to? (I mean one that would take action).
If I was a dentist that continually ignored the cries of my patients until their teeth fell out, I would be reported to some kind of medical authority. Likewise in the UK we can complain about poor telephone company services to Oftel etc etc.
What about hosting companies?
OMG, I can't belive no one has mentioned Hostway here. I have dozens of clients with Hostway (for now) most of which have been there from before they started sucking so bad. On many occasions I've had to contact support and even had to contact Customer Service on several others. Now imagine this. You call the support team and they can't even find my customer's account. Now that's support! Strangely enough, I only have this problem with what I believe is an "overflow" support team based out of India. It seems that they take calls when Chicago support is overwhelmed which is often. I base this on the phone line quality and the accent of the operator(s) I've had the pleasure of attempting to interpret. Needless to say, when support can't identify my client as a customer - no support. Now mind you, this is after waiting about 20 minutes on hold. OK, so I call Hostway Customer Service (the usual escallation chain)... Guess what? I wait on hold another 10 minutes and then, no one answers. I tried calling back to Customer Service, again, no reply. I finally get a hold of support in Chicago tell them about how their new Flash-based control panel sucks and is slow and now won't even let me add an email account with the exact same user name/password naming convention as 30 other accounts I created a month ago. A week goes by, no response. I call back, wait another 20 minutes, get India (or whoever) again... guess what, can't find my account again - go figure. I call back a few days later, lucky to get Chicago support. I ask to speak to a support manager. Still no resolution on my email issue. They're going to escallate it to 2nd tier support. From past experience, 2nd tier support is a code name for "black hole" - as in, you will never see your support ticket again and surely no one will respond to it. Here it is two weeks later, no resolution, no response, still 10-20 minute hold times or worse still, a support agent across the globe who's accent is so thick you can't understand a word they say. Even if you could, they can't find your account anyway. As a Hostway reseller for 7 or 8 years, I've seen this company go from stellar to sewer across all lines of their business: features, functionality, up time, especially support and customer service. Last of all, anyone considering dealing with Hostway should know this. Over the years as a reseller, I've tried plenty of times to escallate issues up the chain of command. Guess what? Beyond a support manager or Customer Service, there is no escallation which means fat, happy, upper level managers that only get told the good news their underlings care to tell them. From my many attempts to alert management about my poor experiences, I can say that Hostway upper management is completely isolated from the very public they claim to serve.
I want to nomiante another prime candidate: simplehost (wt.net)
I just spent 1hour and 40 minutes on hold for technical support, and never received a response, their system is currently down, and I was promised a response on line within 24 hours, 48 hours ago.
Awful all the way around.
I already contracted with another host.
Good riddance
I give Vistapages good marks for effort and communications if not politeness. However I am disturbed by all the performance issues and down-time that I have experienced in the past six months. My site has been down for four days now and now they tell me that they don't know IF & WHEN they will be able to restore mySQL data.
I'm not sure if it is industry practice to depend on customers backups in the case of system crash, but I had assumed that hosting companies have sufficient redundant hardware and periodic backups in this situation. I would not have thought that restoring mySQL database would be so difficult.
Here are excepts from their Vistapages Support forum and email conversion with their support staff.
05-28-2008, 11:35 PM
At approximately 7:00PM EST, we have detected an issue with Apollo spitting out errors. We have technicians looking into the issue. Further updates will be made as available.
05-29-2008, 03:08 AM
Our technicians are still working to resolve the service interruption issue with Apollo.
May 30 , 12:22 AM
The server is now online. The technicians are now working to restore files from our regular snapshot backup files.
May 31 05:57 AM
User /home files have been restored. Files are accessible via FTP & SSH. Mail should also be accessible via POP/IMAP.
Technicians are still working on restoring Apache/HTTP service. Once this is done, customers will be able to access cPanel, Webmail and their web sites.
May 31, 02:32 PM
Customer's websites will be loading now. We're working on restoring MySQL databases.
May 31 05:32 PM
Thank you for your patience thus far. The last 36 hours have been a very difficult, frustrating time for everyone, including our support staff and technicians whom are currently working around the clock.
...
2. Add-on domains are currently not functioning. Our programmers are working on a script to rebuild these configuration files. Once this is completed, your add-on domain web sites will start to re-appear. We suspect that e-mails will also start to be accessible for add-on domains, however, this is still being investigated and will be resolved shortly.
...
3. MySQL databases have been located. We are having a difficult time extracting the databases along with the directory tree structure which is preventing us from restoring them for every customer. This issue has been moved to the background, but still remains a top-priority to recover. We encourage all customers with MySQL-driven web sites to restore from previous backups. If you are not sure how to do this, please submit a ticket with the SQL/MySQL file location (please upload it to the server before submitting a ticket) and we'll help you import them back into your databases. This was not on our centralized storage system, however this type of failure will be rectified in newer versions of our infrastructure.
May 31 , 01:30 AM
We are investigating e-mails related to parked and addon domains & hope to have this resolved shortly.
May 31, 03:16 AM
#5: MySQL Databases. There has been some confusion from our previous e-mail. So I'll take the time to clear it up as best as I can. MySQL is stored on a local system for performance (read/write) purpose as opposed to being stored on our gigabit storage network (all your /home, email files). It is taking us longer to recover MySQL files for this reason. Our technicians are currently performing data recovery on the drives pulled from the server, similar to tasks that the government agencies and data recovery firms under go. We're lucky to have that talent available to us. This process, unfortunately for everyone is time consuming, but we're working as fast as possible.
...
*** IF & WHEN *** we are successful in our attempts to recover the databases from the local drives, we will be performing a mass restoral of MySQL databases for customers. Those that have decided to restore from their own backups will be skipped to prevent new data from being lost. Those customers will be provided with the backup files seperately in their /home directory for your use.
Sunday June 1, 2008 (from email)
That's pretty bold of you to say that we feel no responsibility. Infact for your few measley bucks per month, we are working extremely hard conducting data forensics to recover the data. We do not provide weekly backups or any backups for that matter, and this is clearly mentioned in our terms of service. It's your responsibility to keep backups of your so called "important" data.
There is no ETA because of the fact that it is a complicated process. We've already restored all of your /home files, which is more than what we should've done in terms of backup. You'll have to wait for the e-mail that is sent to let you know whether or not the recovery was successful or not.
I cannot help you further with your issue unless you have a database backup that you've taken yourself.
Please add Inweb Networks to your list of worst web hosts. The customer support is a joke.
You should add LunarPages, aka LoserPages, to your list of Horrible Web Hosts. My site has been down for four days now with only "we are working on it" as a response. Dreadful.
The worst support for any web hosting company is by far Nationwide Internet. I have been trying to get through to them for over one month. I am on hold so long every time that the battery in my phone gives out. The worst ever!!!!!!!
I agree. My websites have been down now all morning. Email was down all weekend. Smarty host not only fail to give feedback on what the problem is at the time, they should post something up on their site so people know why there is a general problem!
They don't phone back, they manage to make sure their website is running okay but have failed to fix up their client's sites. It is now middday and I have had to take my cost per click add off google as no one can get to my website so why pay for clicks. They never even offer any compensation and I feel like suing them for thousands of dollars of lost business.
Sorry to hear that you've had a bad experience with Vistapages. I have been with them for a few years and haven't had much of an issue with them.
Sander,
The reviews are based on the VistaPages reviews listed here:
http://hostjury.com/reviews/VistaPages
All of those reviews are posted by actual clients, so the score isn't something we generate.
Add your own review to help :)
I think you gave VistaPages a too high review score. IMO it's much worse as they are very harsh, it takes more than a month to transfer a domain name registered at VistaPages to another hosting provider, and this list can go on.