WebhostZA - pathetic service

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Mlungu2

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Hello everyone!
Just want to vent my anger about the hosting company WebhostZA.
I signed up with them about 6 months ago. They had this special where you get the first 6 months free and their rates afterward also seemed decent. Initially their service was great and they were VERY quick and helpful in getting things set up.

Then on October 18th I get my first invoice sent to me by email asking me to pay. As I am traveling in Africa (my website was a travel blog) I only got the email several days later (23). I tried to pay my account but could not log in or reset my password as my account had already been disabled. I sent them an email asking them to rectify the problem. Several days passed without any response and me sending several more emails and phoning them. Eventually, on the 26th I get an email telling me that my account had been deleted as I had not payed and telling me to make a new account.

I don't have any backups of my website with me.. and will only be home in about 6 months. So I can't just make a new account and upload the site again. This is extremely frustrating and I have received no communication from them besides one email informing me that I should open a new account if I wanted to continue to use their service. Pathetic! You get what you pay for....
 
Hi,

You should ask them to supply you with one of the server backups. You may just be able to recover your site.
Pretty odd them deleting your entire account, they should have given you a decent window to pay/re-activate. We normally add late fees & hold the data for months locally & remotely for months just in case of clients re-activating.

Possibly someone has access to your place & could email through the backups?
 
I normally use hostgator.com or bluehost.com... unlimited sites, unlimited storage space, unlimited bandwidth less than R50 per month and you can get support on live chat 24/7
 
Thanks for the heads up, dude. It helps to know what to expect from other hosts.
 
At the risk of sounding totally unpatriotic...get all your hosting off shore!

Local hosting companies simply can't compete with the internationals no matter how good thier staff and hardware is, because of the infrastucture they have to work with. We know that bandwidth is super expensive here, so local hosting companies have to pass that expense on to customers. Stolen copper wire, Telkom problems, Seacom cable breaking, Eskom outages... all these are huge problems that the international guys never have to deal with and so they can better concentrate on what is important!

Apart from that, it's also simply a case of demand.. There are a limited number of South Africans who need hosting space - as a result it's very difficult to run a profitable hosting company here without cutting costs on extra staff, server upgrades etc.

A few months ago Hostgator claimed that they host something like 1.5% of the entire internet. That's HUGE! As a result they have a massive support staff and multiple server farms that are constantly being updated.

The only time I host a site locally is if I specifically need to rank highly on Google SA. Local hosting means your site has a local IP so you site may get a boost in some of the local Google rankings.
 
It's one of the factors google uses for local search. For broad terms like "mp3 download" - it doesn't matter, but for certain other terms like "restaurant guide", Google realises that the users are looking for something close to home and so they want to return local sites rather than a guide of restaurants in , say, London or New York.

There are other factors involved such as ccTLD, language etc, but local IP is useful for certain sites if the competition is strong enough to warrant it.
 
Next time I know better. I would have also thought that they have backups and it shouldn't be a problem to restore my website... but like I said.. they just don't respond to my emails.. and phoning them is not easy since I am traveling in Africa and Internet cafes that have Skype are not so common.

Generally I like to support local companies even if their prices are slightly higher but I didn't figure it would mean crappy service like this. :(
cheers
 
An Infernal Spawn of Evil said:
At the risk of sounding totally unpatriotic...get all your hosting off shore!

Local hosting companies simply can't compete with the internationals no matter how good thier staff and hardware is, because of the infrastucture they have to work with. We know that bandwidth is super expensive here, so local hosting companies have to pass that expense on to customers. Stolen copper wire, Telkom problems, Seacom cable breaking, Eskom outages... all these are huge problems that the international guys never have to deal with and so they can better concentrate on what is important!

Apart from that, it's also simply a case of demand.. There are a limited number of South Africans who need hosting space - as a result it's very difficult to run a profitable hosting company here without cutting costs on extra staff, server upgrades etc.

A few months ago Hostgator claimed that they host something like 1.5% of the entire internet. That's HUGE! As a result they have a massive support staff and multiple server farms that are constantly being updated.

The only time I host a site locally is if I specifically need to rank highly on Google SA. Local hosting means your site has a local IP so you site may get a boost in some of the local Google rankings.
Click to expand...

You do realize that you're directly hindering local business. And by taking business away from local companies you also hinder the economy, and for that matter local competition (which could bring down prices a lot).

Do you actually use 143TB of website space, and 5381TB of bandwidth? If not then you should really re-consider support South African companies instead of international ones. I'm not saying this cause I want your business (in fact clients like you is better of with hostgator in anycase) but cause we all live in a country which could have (been?) much better if you started supporting local business.



To the OP: Sadly many companies (hosting as well) have this practice that if they don't get payment well in advance for a service they completely stop ( in your case, delete) the service with the client and force them to pay extra to get back online. I've seen this with USA, EU, AU and ZA companies - there's no real distinction in terms of the country really. So it's always good to read through their TOS completely. Chances are they'll have this in their TOS. IF they don't, then I suggest you print a copy of the TOS, clearly indicating the date when it was last updated (if displayed) and take legal action against them.
Another tip: Always keep a local backup. Even if you use something that could email a backup of the website to a gmail account (which has 7GB storage) if you don't want to pay for a more professional online backup service.
 
Do you actually use 143TB of website space, and 5381TB of bandwidth?
Click to expand...
Not quite - but the amount of space and bandwidth my sites use make it VERY expensive to host locally. It's a no brainer to go for the offshore option when it saves me thousands of bucks! I would like to support local business, but your Platinum reseller package is R3000 per month plus set up fee - and that's for only 10 GB of storage and 20GB of bandwidth. Not a helluva lot to spread of a large number of domains.

I get ten times that for 1/10th the price overseas, with a 100% uptime guarantee - with discrepancies like that - being patriotic can be a business killer!

in fact clients like you is better of with hostgator in anycase
Click to expand...
...you mean clients that expect affordable quality? I host with 5 different international hosts (I've got a lot of sites), everything from cheap shared packages up to VPS and even a dedi for my main money spinners.

At the end of the day, I bring a lot more money INTO the country via my websites than what I spend overseas on hosting and other services. So I am actually doing MORE for the country and local business by spending wisely overseas if you think about it.
 
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