About a year or so ago, I did some host shopping, and after a bit of research, I was pretty confident about my switch to a new host. I knew it was a small, two-man operation, and apart from a few glitches, and slow response to support requests, I was happy with the cost/features. I had even made a point of recommending them to anyone I knew requiring hosting [ed—Something we don’t do often. Good hosting is subjective/relative.]
So this past July was a surprise, when I started to run into problems. The first clue that there was a problem was my site went offline for a few days, though email was still working. After contacting the host, I found out that they were in the midst of a server move, something I hadn’t been notified about, and something I wasn’t completely prepared for as far as backups were concerned. I also found out that they were having a problem, and were working with their new server company, (recently aquired by Hostway), to find a quick solution. The site came back online not long after, so I made a couple of quick backups (not everything), and assumed all was well. Wrong assumption.
In August the site went offline again. This time email was down as well. One day turned into two, into three, and so I contacted them again. This time there was no response. A week passed. Nothing. I waited patiently. I emailed them. I opened a support ticket. Still nothing. I checked the host’s website. Their homepage was changed to a note that they had received hundereds of emails and couldn’t get back to everyone, but that it “should be sorted out in a matter of days”.
By the second week I was signed up with a new host, and getting ready to put things back together. Near the end of the month I’d gotten a message from one of the people I’d recommended the now funked up host to that there were some new people answering questions in the forum, so I poked my head in to see if I could get some answers about the status of my site/data.
First, it was, “We have no record of you on our servers”, then it was, “Sorry, but you should have backed up your data”, and although it was a bit frustrating, the most frustrating part was that this info wasn’t coming from the site owners/admins Aron Nimani, and Jorge Catena, but from Brandon Rivers and Martyn (last name witheld by request) of Southeast Creations, who had recently merged with the troubled HostCulture, and although they were now partnered with HostCulture, were acting as though they were just good samaritans, doing a thankless job by posting DNS settings, and fielding questions from customers wondering what the hell happened to their websites. Their lack of professionalism and experience in customer relations quickly showed, and I became increasingly irate with their detached attitude, and the pretense that they’re only involvment with HostCulture was in a support capacity.
I mean, here’s a company (Southeast Creations), who although they weren’t defending him, had decided it was a good idea to go into business with a kid (Aron) who shirked his responsibility to his customers, and then ditched them when things went bad. You think they’re helping out of the goodness of their heart? Please.
So instead of addressing the concerns of those that lost websites, they simply adopted an attitude of, “Your site’s gone. It’s your fault for not backing it up. What more do you want us to say?” Then when they had enough dealings with irate customers, they closed the thread, directed all support questions to the Southeast Creations forum, and then closed the HostCulture forum. Now they’re having fun playing at being a multi-national corporation complete with a board of directors, which you’ll notice Aron is on. All the pretty Dreamweaving and Photoshopping on the site aside, you’d think a company that professes to be a “global leader in Web Solutions” would know how to to prevent directory indexing on their site.
At the end of it all, I was left extremely upset, most especially over the fact that someone can set up a business, throw up some bogus TOS, forgoing any responsibility or liability, and leaving the consumer without any expectation of warranty for services rendered. What are you supposed to do when faced with entering into a non-negotiable service agreement with an online business? Grin and bear it?