We have used Netfirms for a number of years. I have the Enterprise 1 package and we have had various issues in the past that are usually resolved within 24hrs. Recently we started seeing major problems with our main site. It started with slow performance, then CGI concurrency limit messages and now the site is more or less offline completely. We reported the problem three days ago and it’s still not resolved. Netfirms initially indentified some issues but have never provided any detailed information on the issue and how it was going to be fixed.

Customer service is an oxymoron to Netfirms. I started to email their support organisation to request a status and ETA on a fix with no success. When I telephoned them to enquire about the status of the problem, they initially refused to acknowledge any issue. When I finally convinced the engineer to review my account in more detail he found a case open on our issues. He then simply mentioned the problem was being worked on but there is no indication on the issue would be fixed. We operate a charity music competition and festival and the problems are occurred during our yearly festival week. This means people cannot check schedules, book tickets, or find out general information. In essence, it’s a catastrophic event for us.

We have tried emailing their customer support manager Pamela Harding, their CEO Thomas Savundra and various other billing and sales divisions with no success. I would suggest to anyone thinking of opening an account with Netfirms to seriously consider an alternative. They may have competitive rates but if you experience technical issues you may find them lacking in the service department.

Netfirms hosting is abysmal. The Netfirms hosting package I upgraded to guarantees that "Your website is always up, always fast - no matter how busy it gets." My website has been down for over 8 hours in a 36 hour period.

If your website gets more than one visitor a day, host it somewhere else. Netfirms Hosting = FAIL = Netfirms Sucks.

Mike P.

I've been with Netfirms since 2006 and I've given them a lot of chances, but I had enough and I decided to go with a dedicated server instead. The hosting package I am subscribed to is Netfirms ADVANTAGE™ Web Hosting.

Here is a list of major problems YOU WILL ENCOUNTER:

=SUPPORT=

* Their support is horrible (assuming it exists). And I don't mean not calling back only - they don't fix jack sh**!!! I called and opened a ticket about being unable to view my mysql DBs (just disappeared from my DBs management page in the control panel) about a week ago and I didn't even get an e-mail confirming that they opened the ticket! The guy on the phone told me that he simply has no idea when they it will be fixed and that he can e-mail me when it's done.

* There hasn't been a month without issues. I have some inside information regarding their practices from a friend worked at a relatively high position at Netfirms Canada - in a nutshell: they just don't give a fu** about their customers anymore and they will even be rude on the phone if you PUSH ON GETTING WHAT YOU PAID FOR.

* A year ago you'd get somebody on the phone right away even during regular business hours. Now, you call at 5am and you wait at least 15 minutes - seems their volume of calls greatly increased!

=UPTIME/RELIABILITY=

* Another, very annoying thing is that they will randomly take your website down without a prior notice and just show a message on your site that it is undergoing maintenance, which puts bad light on your business - especially since you are not doing any maintenance.

* The networks they use might be semi-decent but on average the sites load supers slow - and that's simple HTML files only - with Joomla installed it is even slower.

=ACCOUNT/BILLING=

* They will try to auto-renew your hosting a week or so before it is due, so be careful with leaving your credit card info on file.

* If the prices of the package you use drop down, you won't be notified - you will be billed the same amount you paid last year, unless you call them and say "Hey, don't you think it's a di** move to charge me $150 for something you list now for $125?"

=OBSERVATIONS=

* They have recently introduced design + SEO services (with typos on the page), which in my opinion proves that they are not making enough money with their current services - reason? They suck and more and more people are starting to realize it!!! (I am glad that you're becoming one of them!)

* They spent over a million dollars in 2009 on improving their infrastructure and rolling out the VPS offer, but it seems as if things went down a steep slope in the past 2 years anyway.

* Quite often (once every 2-3 weeks) your e-mail will stop working for a day or so. You will get prompted (in Outlook/Outlook Express) for the password over and over again and although you insert the correct password it is just not accepting it. Then you have to go to webmail (which is very obsolete-looking) and try to respond to e-mails - in my case it is a major headache, since I have to be copying and pasting a lot of addresses and signatures.

=SECURITY=

* Another very big issue I have with them is that they allow maximum 8 characters password on anything!!!! That includes all e-mail accounts, main control panel account, ftp accounts, etc.

* My account got hacked once and ALL OF MY DATA WAS REMOVED. I didn't have a fairly current backup, because I was swamped with work and had created A LOT of content in a form of 4 new, fairly large Joomla websites. So, one day I try to view one of my websites and there is a default Netfirms page showing. I call them and tell them THAT I GOT HACKED, which I was able to prove and the response I get is: well, sorry to hear that, but we can't do anything! So I spend another week or so going through multiple "escalation" trying to talk to different people, including the manager and all I'm being told is that "we don't have backups of particular accounts - we only do entire server backups, so we can't help you". Very frustrated, with 4 months of my 40h/week work being just gone I decided NOT TO GIVE UP. Another week passes, more hours spent on the phone/email and they finally put "enough effort" to get a backup copy for me... from 7 months before!!!!! They said they couldn't restore anything more recent, because their most recent backup of my site contained MALWARE!?!?!?!?! WTF, right? If there really was any malware in my directories, how come it wasn't a problem for them before? Isn't there an antivirus running on the entire server? Interestingly, my databases were restored too and they were very recent. Nevertheless, after 2 weeks of literally begging, 10 packs of smokes, a few fights with people around me I got a 7 month old backup and a week old mysql backup - and that was their fix for an issue that was caused by poor security in their own system.

=ANNOYANCES=

* Something that also became annoying at one point is inability to create your own mysql usernames/passwords, so if you import a website/application with DB configuration hardcoded, you are screwed.

* FTP accounts - forget about setting up your own username/password. If you want to setup an account for John Smith, jsmith for example, you can't. Instead you will get something like yourdomain.1 as the user and a random password.

* Their control panel doesn't work in Chrome - it will randomly freez, show blank errors, etc.

=CONCLUSION=

* I would NOT RECOMMEND this company to anyone - there is many, many more options out there that are a) better b) cheaper c) more customer-care oriented. I am an IT specialist and I've analyzed hundreds of internet businesses and Netfirms places on the bottom of the list, so do yourself a favour and stay away!!!! Netfirms is just horrible - the worst hosting company I used in my life. Not worth your time, money and nerves...

Netfirms is the worst web hosting service provider i ever have encountered in my over 15 years of IT and Web development experience. This company sucks!!!

The reason I am writing a review is because no one at Netfirms will listen. The list of problems with this company is endless. I am surprised they are still in business. Was with them with my first site, did not continue with my second site and with my third my web guy told me Netfirms had improved....he was wrong. It is a sad company that has huge communications issues. Management could care less what your concerns are. The front line people have no answers for you because they are not given any. Do not host with this company. It will only go further down hill.

Please stay away from Netfirms.

What can I say about Netfirms, while they do offer very competitive pricing for hosting, their down time issues are not acceptable. If you are running a reputable business that relies on having 99.9% mail server uptime, good luck. If you are running a mickey mouse web site you should be ok. Over the past 10 months, we've had at least 7 to 10 mail server issues. They always had an excuse, even an excuse for getting all netfirms mail servers black listed by spam blockers for 3 days !!! What got me over the edge was the recent outage, their mail servers went down from 9AM until 4PM, you could not even ping them, they just took them off line. Hello ? Redundancy anyone ? What was even more funny (not) was that they turned off their phones , whever you tried to call them - and I mean not just support - their main general number for sales/service/etc - you got a message "This subscriber is not takin gany calls at this time" or "All available lines are busy , please try later" , there was no notice on their web site, no apology to the customers, nothing. As if the entire company just left for 1/2 day and came back in the evening. I'd rather pay double what they charge , but have a reliable and always up email service. We lost thousands of dollars in web orders, not to mention a tarnished reputation of a company that can't stay online to keep up with the orders (that's the perception our customers got from the down time).

Good for hobbyists given the price

Useless for business looking for reliability

I have used netfirms for about 8 years now, within the last two years I have had all the same problems everyone else has. I am slowly moving my sites over to another host. If you want hosting for a small html website this is good, but I would never host a business website with them again. Time is money and when your site is slow or not reachable you will lose. Once was good but now they are outdated, they need to update their servers and software to meet the demands of the internet today, not 8 years ago. Customer service is poor. They don't care about your problems with their service.

My URL has been down for three days. After numerous phone calls and waiting a total of over 30 minutes for phone support, I finally gat a tech who told me they were having IP problems. That was about 10AM 7/29/09. It is now 3:30 of the third day and still cannot get my URL to respond. All I can say is" It's a good thing that I have another site with aq much better provider localweb.com who is up 100% of the time. I was thinkingof treansferrring to Netfirms, but it's true "you only get what you pay for. When my netfirms expires, I'm going to switch from them!

I buy all my domains through netfirms and I'm very happy with the way the handle DNS and their domain prices.

That is where my happiness ends. I decided to host with them as it would be easy (already have DNS there). First their uptime was 90% if that (my home desktop was up more). You can't run anything other than a static site as they don't support any apache modules (not even mod rewrite). SSH access sucks and no SVN repository.

I'd never recommend anyone use this company ever.

I have been with Netfirms for almost three years now. It was recommended to me by a trusted friend. I run two sites off my Business Netfirms Hosting account. My experience has not been too bad with the company, but definitely not good.

Uptime- For me very reliable. There is rarely a downtime and when there has been it was short.

Support- Not good at all. In all the tickets I have sent for support I have received very few replies that actually helped with the issue. Most just pointed me to their help site which didn't answer my question anyway. All in all getting any support help at all is a very frustrating experience.

Worst issue- I introduced memberships to my largest site and set a Netfirms email account. Well, within half a day my site was frozen and I had an email from Netfirms saying I was under suspicion for sending spam unless I could defend this allegation. So I explained the new memberships and the script that automatically sends an email sending welcoming users and sending their sign up info. Support said okay. A few hours later, BAM, site frozen again. Received email, 'you are under suspicion for sending email spam'. *sigh*

This happened multiple times over a few days until I disabled the sign up email feature. Thing was, less then 2,000 people had signed up over those few days, hardly a flood. Surely on a Business account this should never have happened.

The Control Panel- The inbuilt FTP is a waste of space. I have never been able to upload anything to the site with it, period. Other then that the Control Panel is user friendly but some features just plain don't work.

Packages- You do get some pretty good things included when you sign up for Netfirms. NetObjects for one is a pretty good website building program for the beginner. Although you get an old version of it.

Overall- This company is my first webhosting experience so I was not sure what to expect from the start. It has been incredibly frustrating and yet very reliable in uptime. I am now on my way to check out other hosting companies with more knowledgable support, more flexibility and updated support for other programs and better value for money. I will definitely not be signing on for another year with Netfirms.

Mediocre, non-standard control panel, no imap support, cgi driven php, very slow loading times, no backup system, several php functions turned off, no paper basket function in ftp (accidental deletion very likely), untrained service personal, they ignore support tickets...if you like to show your scrapbook go for out. Serious webmaster or business owner? Stay away!

I am now in Shanghai, China, and I cannot access any of my websites all hosted on netfirms, or get any email that I rely on for business, and it appears that netfirms does not exist. It was working fine. I have been in China for over a month, but for the last two days everything has disappeared. This is very disturbing, and there is nothing I can do. I will not be a customer very long as they donot even have an emergency backup. They have had short outages in the past but 2 days is enough to put someone out of business.

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!