Netfirms

Do yourself a favor and STAY AWAY. Before you get suckered into going with Netfirms (the website makes it look like a good deal), check The Rip-Off Report and do a search for NETFIRMS. This should keep you from making the mistake of hosting with them. EXTREMELY SLOW LOAD TIMES & You cannot generate any traffic without problems... The Wordpress, Joomla and Coppermine installs are old versions that won't run any recent plugin or templates, so it's a headache, and they will just respond with a form letter if you email them. Pay more and get a host you will be happy with, in fact for the same price you can go to any number of better hosts (this website is an excellent resource, so check out ALL the companies and reviews). Try HostMonster or BlueHost, or spring for the more expensive, but SOLID service companies like iPowerWeb.

I run a graphic design site, and was with Netfirms for 5 years. They started out good, but over time, their service is terrible! They do not know the meaning of the term. If you have a problem, they will not sort it out, and at best will receive a generic answer in your inbox.

My site went down for 12 hours once, and they wouldn't even admit it to me. Stay away at all costs! Trust me, I've had 5 years of them. Uptime for my main site was 98.1%, and uptime for my blog wnded up at 95.something %. Terrible!

Sure their impressive plans are eye catching but are they really what they seem? No. I got the

Netfirms Basic Hosting plan. I get 25 MB (???) disk space, 1024 MB bandwidth, 2 email accounts, no MSQL databases, and everything else is unavaliable. It was truly a shocking site as the features were so limited for $5.95. After logging into their control panel, I tried to install Wordpress because every blog usually runs on Wordpress do you agree? Shockingly this is is what I discover:

This feature is available only to Plus, Advantage and Business users.

Please upgrade.

The domain was bought and registered at Netfirms, it's the only thing I like. I could not take it any more and bought hosting elsewhere. It took me around 17 minutes to find the page where I could change my nameservers.

My experience with Netfirms is a bad and disappointing one. I'll never buy any domain or hosting from there again.

I've had a bad experience with them. They experienced multiple downtimes (some of them server outages) and their customer support wasn't very friendly nor helpful. Their packages are fairly expensive. The good thing is that the packages comes loaded with features.

This has to be one of the worse web hosts that I have been with. No Support, the site is down more than it is up, and accessing your database will have tons of errors too. I would suggest going somewhere else.

You can't host a site on their setup. Everything is slow and with errors. If you have more than 3 people online on a wordpress blog (that will timeout and give you errors) you will also encounter resource usage erorrs.

Maybe it's ok to register domains with them, just maybe :)

Context: we set up a new, small family memorial website with Netfirms, December 2007.

Signup: easy and fast.

Upload of original site: no particular issues.

Performance of static HTML on site: very good to excellent.

Adding Netfirms-provided one-click WordPress (WP): Unusable.

Support for WP problem: None of any use.

Initially no complaints with Netfirms, recommended by a trusted acquaintance. Problems started when setting up the one-click installation of WordPress provided by Netfirms. It installed, yet could not even be set up without kicking me out with CPU over-use problems. Responses from tech. support, when they came, were canned templates which did not address the issue and were of no help. Replies politely seeking clarification and further help received no response (yes, Netfirms was whitelisted at my end and i checked the spam traps).

Went on for weeks with no resolution, totally blocking family members from using the WP-based guestbook which could not be set up.

Moved to another host (Nearly Free Speech.net) and had no issues setting up WP on my own (no one-click there) and getting "the show on the road".

The only good thing about Netfirms for us was their Billing department is honest and ethical and did (eventually) fully refund all fees, per the 30 day free trial agreement.

Netfirms is not all that reliable. Even when we have one of the most expensive plans they have, they cannot handle the 5,000+ visitors per day very well. If the traffic is at its peak, the host replaces most (if not all) of the images with annoying "CGI Server Limit Reached" images. That just drives traffic away from the website.

Support is not all that great, also. I have a feeling that half the support staff do not know what they are even talking about. And almost half of my support tickets went unanswered.

All in all, there's not much good to say about Netfirms.

I registered with this host, with the intentions of having a picture site. I have some pages with 80 pictures (all under 60K each).

I had error CGI Limit Reached! Try Again. - Support readily pointed out that they cannot support this kind of thing. (and suggested I not put so many pictures, which is not an option to me)

Anyway, Support was very good, Live people were reachable - These make it a plus. I was able to cancel out of the hosting package without a problem.

Sales and Billing Service: Pretty good. Adm Panel: Nice. Support: Not reliable. Uptime: Poor.

The clustered servers run in average way. But my Business Plan fell 3 hours down during 5 months. You know, no mail, no webpage.

Too slow server response and sometimes, even the FTP is down. Everytime I email them for support, it takes a long time before a response will be given and even if they give a response, they'll only ask you to reset your cookies. What a pack of morons as if that wild guess would fix server delay issues.

I had the worst case this November, for a whole week now, I can barely access my database admin in my website. I hate this hosting provider.

Here's a link to my review: http://www.serialblogr.com/2007/11/16/netfirms-a-case-of-bad-hosting/

I used them primarily as a registrar for a few of my domains. The 90-day waiting period ends in 10 and I can't wait. The Netfirms system randomly places a "This page under construction" placeholder where my site should be (this is a frequent, intermittent problem), and tech support doesn't care.

A set of php functions suddenly stopped working - no error messages the page just refused to load.

I created a 12 line script to clearly illustrate the problem.

ZERO response to emails to support reporting this problem.

A ticket set up after a phone call to support.

ZERO response after the high priority ticket had been open for over two weeks!

i give up and will change hosts.

I do not like being led around...and NetFirms has a knack for it. If you do not have a solution or an answer, just say so...do not feed me a line, because I will investigate what you told me!

I do not know what is going on over at NetFirms but over the past year both their support and service has been in decline. When we first began with them, everything seemed fine...until we started having problems ( especially with Email and getting dumped off of the control panel, FTP, and real slow server responses). Their support had nothing to offer and what they did offer was usually incorrect or unhelpful.

Worst experince I had in my life. I tried to upload my family website but the FTP server is so slow that it takes 20 times more compared with Dreamhost.

After a while the website was put offline without ne being consulted about this move.

Waste of time and money

It's pretty reliable from what I've seen. I only host a few small, low-traffic but database-centric sites and the site rarely goes down.

However, it is slower than other hosts (namely dreamhost), and the limit to simultaneous database connections (3) is way too small.

The price was right -- with the coupon code, only $10 for the year!