Afrihost windows hosting - not great 1st impressions

[crudler]

Hi,just wondering what others experiences with afrihost are.
i just took out an MSHomeGold account with them.

- Signup was quick and easy

- mail didnt work correctly but their tech support sorted that out in a few hrs. not a train smash

- what i am disappointed about is the tools i have to manage my website (or lack of rather). there is a linux based cpanel to manage my mails (that already seems strange). the website is windows hosted on a different server, but nothing to manage it apart from an ftp. zero visibility on my website, cannot manage my MsSqlServer db. tech support says i must just dump my mdb in the db and they will do the rest. cant do sql queries or meta changes myself. eish

no way to do cron jobs
no way to do backups/restores or my site or my db
no way to password protect folders
cannot configure error pages
no stats or logs
no web file manager

all of this advertised on the signup page
http://www.afrihost.com/site/product...osting?src=nav

website says they support heml.
I email tech for assistance in locating it. tech says no they dont support helm and i must send a screenshot of their website to prove they do
I do that
Tech replies to say only on the old servers. new servers run websitepanel but they dont give end users access because they haven't figured out how to stop users from seeing other ppls domains.

are these probs unique to me. getting worried because they are hosting my .coza and .com and i can see it being a mission to move now

[Saajid]

WebAfrica has really good Windows Hosting accounts. I use them for quite a few of my websites. Not as cheap as Linux hosting thoough, but for obvious resasons.

[froot]

Ouch. Afrihost's Linux hosting is quite decent.

[skimread]

R29pm isn't much. You get what you pay for.

Maybe you should use their cloud hosting package for R290pm where you get your own virtual machine.

[froot]

R29pm isn't much. You get what you pay for.

Maybe you should use their cloud hosting package for R290pm where you get your own virtual machine.

But that runs Linux, not Windows, which they want to host on.

[crudler]

R29pm isn't much. You get what you pay for.

Firstly, its R100 per month.
Secondly is they advertise on the site that for 100bucks I get X Y and Z, but provide me with neither I thinks it is grounds to be ticked off. They are not providing me with more than half of what I subscribed to.
If I wanted a R290 VM I would have bought that. But at the rate they are going, how do I know they will even provide what they say they would. They could say something daft like "yes u do get a vm, but we can't give u access to it"

Get my drift....

[skimread]

OK from their site for the Home Gold product.

Customise your site using the code and database editor within WebMatrix

Are you saying they don't provide a connection to the database? Maybe the support person just doesn't understand the product. They should tell you how to connect from Visual Studio or VS express so you can manage the db.

[crudler]

maybe i must try my luck with someone who works there during the week.
the webmatrix integration is just for publishing the webmatrix products.
not what i am after.
they promise things like helm which they no longer supply.
I have no way of working with IIS on my domain so i cannot configure my site, error pages, etc. no access to the scheduled tasks in order to set up my cron jobs. no setting of folder passwords etc etc
yeah agreed maybe i did pull a bad tech. will try during the work week and see what i get

[Saajid]

And if you don't come right, ask for a refund. Email Gian - gian@afrihost.com

[Xzib1t]

OK from their site for the Home Gold product.

Are you saying they don't provide a connection to the database? Maybe the support person just doesn't understand the product. They should tell you how to connect from Visual Studio or VS express so you can manage the db.

I had to e-mail tech support for my database details and they replied with the database details, and the tech guy put it in a connection string for me, which was an added bonus. I could then connect from within Visual Studio and SQL server manager.

I had this account for personal use (Windows Gold Home) as well and I was quite pleased with it, only downgraded because I didn't use all the features to their fullest.

website says they support heml.
I email tech for assistance in locating it. tech says no they dont support helm and i must send a screenshot of their website to prove they do
I do that
Tech replies to say only on the old servers. new servers run websitepanel but they dont give end users access because they haven't figured out how to stop users from seeing other ppls domains.

Same here.

[grimstoner]

I found it slow. Moved to a dedicated server at Mweb.

[isp-insider]

I found it slow. Moved to a dedicated server at Mweb.

How have you been affected by MWEB's outages?

With regards to helm control panel, I see that server admins offer both Helm 3 and Helm 4 control panels and their prices are cheap

[greggpb]

How have you been affected by MWEB's outages?

With regards to helm control panel, I see that server admins offer both Helm 3 and Helm 4 control panels and their prices are cheap

I have to admit I am a Afrihost fanboi..

I have a windows service hosted with them...
+ latest verion of everything, web matrix , sql server
+ they are a great company to deal with..
+ can beat them on price, but there service is up there no downtime.

- windows help desk support is not as good as thier linux support and the need to sort out thier support ticketing system.. normaly whe you do some suupport you will land up chatting to 3 or 4 people and 2 or three diff ticket numbers.


Bottom line.. I still use them for everything, I have just converted from windows to linux

[isp-insider]

Yeah afrihost's support is good. mweb's support seriously sux and a few of their engineers think that they god gift to technology.

Afrihost's network, whilst not perfect does provide way better uptime in comparison to mweb.