Afrihost going downhill fast

P

pb1711

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I have always been a very big Afrihost home user fan. Always recommended them to my friends, but lately, THEY SUCK!!

I have a 4Mbps capped account, which as far as I knew was not supposed to be shaped, but over the last month it has been absolutely terrible. When I do a speed test the ping is fine, the upload speed is fine but the download speed is sometimes .20Mbps?? It's strange that for the previous 6 months I never had an issue, but now can't even watch a Youtube video on 240p without it buffering very 3 seconds.

To make matters worse, when I call the centre, I hold for 30 mins before someone even answers (and I started as 12th in the queue) and the call ends up being 50 minutes, only for it to only run fine till the next day. Yesterday morning I call again and am #17 in the queue, so I think not again....I decide to use their SMS service and SMS help to them, expecting to get a call back, I receive an SMS saying they they will get back to me as soon as possible, well guess what, I'm still haven't received a call back and it's around 24 hours later.

Absolutely shocking speeds and even worse service. STAY AWAY!! I think they have taken on more clients than they can handle.

Anyway, I will stop ranting now, hope everyone has an awesome Monday!!

Wayne
 
pb1711 said:
Absolutely shocking speeds and even worse service. STAY AWAY!! I think they have taken on more clients than they can handle.
Click to expand...

Or you have a congested exchange like plenty of people have experienced on this forum.
 
Hope that you get sorted.

My Afrihost has been working extremely well, and the support has been good.
 
I have to agree with their service. I have always been happy with their speeds, but their service has been shocking over the past few months and getting far worse. You are lucky to have a 24 hour response to a ticket that you submit (ie, just a reply in 24 hours, not a resolution necessarily).

I waited 2 days before getting a reply to one of my tickets, ABSOLUTELY SHOCKING SERVICE!!!!!!
 
pb1711 said:
I have always been a very big Afrihost home user fan. Always recommended them to my friends, but lately, THEY SUCK!!

I have a 4Mbps capped account, which as far as I knew was not supposed to be shaped, but over the last month it has been absolutely terrible. When I do a speed test the ping is fine, the upload speed is fine but the download speed is sometimes .20Mbps?? It's strange that for the previous 6 months I never had an issue, but now can't even watch a Youtube video on 240p without it buffering very 3 seconds.

To make matters worse, when I call the centre, I hold for 30 mins before someone even answers (and I started as 12th in the queue) and the call ends up being 50 minutes, only for it to only run fine till the next day. Yesterday morning I call again and am #17 in the queue, so I think not again....I decide to use their SMS service and SMS help to them, expecting to get a call back, I receive an SMS saying they they will get back to me as soon as possible, well guess what, I'm still haven't received a call back and it's around 24 hours later.

Absolutely shocking speeds and even worse service. STAY AWAY!! I think they have taken on more clients than they can handle.

Anyway, I will stop ranting now, hope everyone has an awesome Monday!!

Wayne
Click to expand...

What proof do you have that the issue is with Afrihost and not with Telkom? I'd be willing to bet you that the issue is with your exchange which is completely out of Afrihost's control.
 
I must say I am very happy with the service and my products from Afrihost.
 
I received an email from Afrihost oferring R10 000 to me if I could recommend them a support technician that goes on to become a full time employee.

They're definitely trying to improve, even if they are shocking right now.

As for the line speed, you'll have to do a bit more digging to determine whether this is an Afrihost or a Telkom problem. Do a traceroute to saix.net, check the timing of the slowdown etc. Only then can you start coming to conlusions.
 
As what has been mentioned on here before it could be a congested exchange or a fault on the actual line (telkom issue not Afrihost). Maybe get a prepaid account with another ISP and then test it. If the issue remains it is a telkom issue. If you do not have problems with the prepaid account then you know that it is Afrihost
 
Thanks for the feedback. I also thought it was the exchange being congested until an Afrihost call centre employee said that it wasn't that, as my exchange had around 75% open ports.

I really do get that it could very well be a Telkom issue, but I pay Afrihost to manage the line, yet I'm doing all the work by calling telkom myself when I can't get hold of a call centre agent. (never thought I'd ever get through to the Telkom DSL help desk faster than any ISPs) What is frustrating me though is that is was perfect for the previous six months, hell, I never even needed to call the call centre. So what has changed Afrihost??
 
yeah also been battling with speeds over the last few weeks.. torrents never go over 0.5kbps and even on their capped accounts its extremely slow lately
 
Check if your phone line is damaged in anyway, I've seen a full 10Mbps line start to sync at 2Mbps dew to bad connection with in a company and telkom kept on saying that the exchange was fine. I end up recrimp each connection untill I hit the sweet spot. Hay presto it synced at a full 10Mbps again.
 
I have to agree with theservice complaint.

I moved a website from AH to another hosting company.
AH took on average 4 hours for an email response on a new ticket. The 1st automated response, excluded.

My current response time from the new hosting provider, excluding the automated response is about 10 minutes.

Yes, AH has acknowledge they have problems ito staff and are busy with training and that I appreciate.

Not sure why the problem cropped up.
Was it due to lots off people jumping ship from other ISP's suddenly or is it problem that a slow build up and AH did not respond till it was to late?

On the ADSL side, I'm not happy with all the shaping going on, but it does seem it is more likely to happen if you route through Cape Town.

AH once again acknowledged that they have a capacity problem in the South and it should be sorted when the new capacity arrives.

The problem seems to be that delivery date. It does not seem that anybody actually when the new IPC will be delivered.

When I'm unshaped my speeds are 100% on all fronts, as only http and P2P downloads are affected by shaping.
Realtime services seems to run well most of the time.
 
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I also must agree that AH is going downhill. Phone them this morning to ask then something about my account(billing) and the women was all rude.

Once a fantastic company now worse than Telkom
 
It seems the service is a real bit and miss.

I again use AH because I get great service and speeds.

I am in the south and my capped account ran 100%.

13ms ping, 4.53mbps down and 0.450mbps upload. This is to the said server.

There are other factors that influence your line, not just AH.

Call centers? I don't wait longer than 10/15mins.

Also I use the live chat often and ask for Eugene. He is one of the most helpful live chat agents..
 
Okay I like raving DIODE's way of typing, so let me try it.

Fault is not with afrihost.

Fault is with telkom.

Telkom upgrades congested thousands of exchanges.

Afrihost person saying 75% open ports talking absolutely dog crap since telkom will not erect an exchange unless it has a pre-connection rate of 75%.

People don't understand that there are THOUSANDS of people on afrihost, and if its speeds were that horrid - we'd read about it in the news long before it hits us - so come on people, lets start thinking for ourselves.

Blaming ISP's are 90% of the time a case of barking up the wrong tree.
 
Alwynz said:
People don't understand that there are THOUSANDS of people on afrihost, and if its speeds were that horrid - we'd read about it in the news long before it hits us - so come on people, lets start thinking for ourselves.

Blaming ISP's are 90% of the time a case of barking up the wrong tree.
Click to expand...

Blaming Telkom for the OP's biggest complaint (the customer service, or lack thereof from Afrihost support) hardly classifies as thinking for yourself.
 
Alwynz said:
Blaming ISP's are 90% of the time a case of barking up the wrong tree.
Click to expand...

So should I blame Telkom for this too....? Afrihost finally called me back on Monday and I said that I was at the office so couldn't do much about resetting routers, etc at that time. So the consultant kindly assured me that an Afrihost consultant would then call me on Monday evening to try and resolve the issue. I was happy with that and said goodbye. Well It's now Wednesday morning and I am still waiting for that call. I was even off yesterday, so they could have pretty much called anytime yesterday and we would have been able to troubleshoot, but alas here I sit and wait....

Any suggestions for good home use ISP's? 4-10Mbps capped.
 
Frikkenator said:
Blaming Telkom for the OP's biggest complaint (the customer service, or lack thereof from Afrihost support) hardly classifies as thinking for yourself.
Click to expand...

Thank you for pointing that out - since his posts ends with:

"Absolutely shocking speeds and even worse service. STAY AWAY!! I think they have taken on more clients than they can handle."

I'm going to let you figure out which point of his conclusion I addressed, since you're good at figuring things out.

As for the service, I've been getting nothing but great service from Afrihost, so It's going to be hard to relate to the OP basically going bat-**** over his experience with them.
 
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