Well it's been over a year since i posted this and Im still with them so they cant be that bad can they?. It is a real mission to move websites is one reason Im still there and the other is better the devil you know.....
Things that concern me though are the following:
1. There only seems to be 2 people in the entire business. While I'm all for small businesses I am a little uncomfortable having my entire business in the hands of 2 people. If you are peeved there is absolutely no way you can get to speak to any management of any kind. All such requests go ignored or redirected. I assume the 2 in support are the management. Basically what I'm saying is transparency is seriously lacking.
2. Weekend support is very poor in terms of response times. Fortunately I don't need it often.
3. Their Control Panel on Helm 4 is dated, no quick install for wordpress for example. I have to still do it the old time consuming way we did in the dark ages.
4. If you use Touchbase to send out bulk emails for your customers no one who has email hosted on their servers will receive the emails. I tried to get the two companies to talk but Touchbase gave up and reported the following "I've never had to go through such a rigorous process in my life - being asked to send through a very specific template of information but not providing the template or requirements, and only letting me know what's missing when I send it through. It was an odd and frustrating process". Sadly still unresolved.
5. They don't have any resource reporting on their Helm 4 Control Panel such as Bandwidth domains are using. When queried they insist that reporting is not part of the service im paying for, which left me confused and frustrated. They have kindly offered to write a custom script, but the conditions of that is for me to spend unproductive time sifting through hundreds of domains to see which resolve to their servers. After 2 odd years of trying I have given up.
6. Control Panel battles with basic tasks like setting folder permissions, applying redirects. It timesout or throws errors. Support does then step in and do it for you but it is unproductive as you have to wait for them.
7. They tend to say something cant be done and only after you kick up a fuss do they then re look at your request.
8. As you experience I also find wordpress sites a bit slow. Mine are hosted on a windows server so deem their speed to be acceptable. I think I will get a PHP based hosting account and host WP sites on that. I think that is a huge factor in WP speeds IMO. It is also Database related. I had some sites that were really slow and when we moved the database to one of their newer servers the speed improved dramatically. Their DB1 server is crap. Make sure it is on another server.
It's not all doom and gloom
On the pro side
1. Their up time is very good with my sites only being slow to unresponsive in the early ours of the morning, I assume during backups.
2. They are very strict on security issues and spam as all good providers should be. Sometime too strict (see touchbase comment above)
3. Their support is good during the week.
4. Pricing is competitive
Admittedly I am quite possibly over critical
but only a little. This is just my experience I have had with them over the last few years. I think all providers have their pros and cons, you just have to decide what you are prepared to deal with and then live with it. These comments are based purely on their shared hosting reseller service.Would I recommend them? Yes i would but cautiously.
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