Webspacebar worst experience ever! :( Please recommend hosts :)

The Web Space Bar said:
Good morning.

Please provide me with a ticket reference in PM so I can investigate and advise.

In regards to the error you noted, it was resolved within 15 minutes from it alarming.

In regards to the below, without knowing any background information (which I trust you will PM to me)
1. They change their mail servers without letting me know.
We have never changed any mail servers, your mail server address is and always has been mail.yourdomainname

2. They take away certain stuff from cpanel without informing you.
I take it you are referring to the x3 theme being decommisioned on Cpanel, which is something they announced as the theme is end of life, I am not aware of any other feature no longer showing on Cpanel, we have been using the same Cpanel plugins for several years now. Nothing has changed.

3. They don't answer all the questions you ask them on a ticket, you have to repeat the questions and their answers do not include proper descriptions of how stuff works.

Please do PM me the tickets in this regard and we will gladly advise.
Click to expand...

1. ticket #804153
2. ticket #837018 - see magicspam part
3. ticket #837018

I know I am a noob and still learning, so that is why I expect a decent answer with all the information.
 
The Web Space Bar said:
Hi Thor.
As you can see we communicate when these things happen.
..... did result in a 15 minute outage for which we gladly offer padjakkels a free month hosting to apologize for any inconvenience that may have caused.
Click to expand...

How do you communcate this? Emails? Sms? Announcements on your website? Because I received none of the announcements. Do you send out a newsletter?

Thanks for the offer of a free month, but I am not interested.
 
1. ticket #804153 - you complained that the email server names "changed" but you didnt use mail.domainname on the email client setup. Email client setup instructions are also explained on the faq documentation we sent to you. You used a dedicated server name to set up the email (which is still the same server by the way) but the recommended way to set up email has always been to use the domain name of the account you use. We included the link to the email client setup documentation for you.
2. ticket #837018 - mail getting marked as spam - We use mailchannels as a outbound smarthost. They flagged mail you sent as spam, which is a false positive on their side, which they resolved for you. During that time Magicspam was disabled to confirm that the false positive wasnt affected or caused by MagicSpam (which is wasnt) Magicspam was re-enabled on your account after mailchannels resolved the false positive.

None of these issues points to bad service or careless support.

Not once have we neglected support of any of your queries.

We rely on vendors. This morning's issue was caused by Cpanel which was resolved. Your false positive spam mail issue was caused by Mailchannels' spam algorythm and that too was resolved in record time.

We have never shrugged off any responsibility or ignored any support requests.

We accept our responsibility for each and every incident that may occur, and apply ourselves to resolve it, regardless of who the vendor is or what the problem may be.

Since this morning after the 15 minute outage have you had any difficulties ? We have been trying our best to respond to every query, even now on a public forum, and you are (not interested) in our kind gestures as you feel we have done you wrong in some way.

I apologize for that, we have always done our best for all our customers, that includes yourself.

The offer of a free hosting month is still on the table, even if you want to try us again at a later stage.

None of these issues you have had were caused by human error.

Wishing you all the best.
 
The Web Space Bar said:
1. ticket #804153 - you complained that the email server names "changed" but you didnt use mail.domainname on the email client setup. Email client setup instructions are also explained on the faq documentation we sent to you. You used a dedicated server name to set up the email (which is still the same server by the way) but the recommended way to set up email has always been to use the domain name of the account you use. We included the link to the email client setup documentation for you.
Click to expand...

As I explained in the ticket, I used the settings that CPanel gives you. CPanel gave the dedicated server as the mail server... and then all of a sudden CPanel gives you the domain name of the account you are using for the mail server. Obviously you changed something on your side so that the details in CPanel changed. The faq documentation that you send in the beginning was just for the website that I got with the reseller account, it doesnt mention any other accounts, that is why I used the information on the CPanel.

I can PM the info that CPanel gave me at that stage reflecting the dedicated server as the email server.
 
The Web Space Bar said:
2. ticket #837018 - mail getting marked as spam - We use mailchannels as a outbound smarthost. They flagged mail you sent as spam, which is a false positive on their side, which they resolved for you. During that time Magicspam was disabled to confirm that the false positive wasnt affected or caused by MagicSpam (which is wasnt) Magicspam was re-enabled on your account after mailchannels resolved the false positive.
....
Not once have we neglected support of any of your queries.
....
We have never shrugged off any responsibility or ignored any support requests.
Click to expand...

Magicspam was already switched off when I reported this ticket, see my original ticket. (Switched off without informing me)

Then later on I had to ASK AGAIN (after I confirmed everything is working) that magicspam should be switch on so that I can white list an email address, so I had to ASK that it should be enabled.
 
Looking at the issues especially the mail part it seems Web space bar have not setup cpanel/whm correctly.

I am no expert, but in cases like these I often think to myself, of all 5 companies that I host with Cpanel updated last night and none had the issues you have so some funny setup on Webspacebar's side would be my guess.

{ This is not my field, I can be wrong. }
 
The mail that was being flagged as spam was flagged by mailchannels. Not by magicspam. Regardless of magicspam being enabled the issue was with the spam detection algorithm used by mailchannels and they resolved that for you. If you are saying you had to ask twice for magicspam to be re-enabled on cpanel I appologize for that. Please understand however that this is superfluous, magicspam didn't cause the issue. At the end of the day the plugin was re-enabled.

In regards to our setup, its simple, magicspam is a whm plugin that assists with inbound and outbound spam checks.
Mailchannels is our outbound email smarthost.

So inbound mail goes through magicspam to exim.
Outbound mail goes from exim through magicspam to mailchannels.

There is nothing strange about our setup.
The practice of using mail.domainname to set up an email client relates to dns and nothing else.

This is a normal straight forward whm setup. We use exim and dovecot for email service and the spam checks are as advised above.
 
Thor187 said:
Looking at the issues especially the mail part it seems Web space bar have not setup cpanel/whm correctly.

I am no expert, but in cases like these I often think to myself, of all 5 companies that I host with Cpanel updated last night and none had the issues you have so some funny setup on Webspacebar's side would be my guess.

{ This is not my field, I can be wrong. }
Click to expand...
I did notice that one of the cpanel themes show more options that what is active on my host package. And is probably the end of life one mentioned above.
 
Wow, tough crowd here...

I've never used WSB, but some of these complaints seem a little bit overblown and unnecessary.

An announcement/communication required for 15 minutes of unexpected downtime? If it were a couple hours, I'd completely understand, but 15 minutes...these things do happen. Most web hosts won't send out announcements for such brief bouts of downtime.

Using mail.yourdomain is a bit of a given when setting up your account in a client, but understandable some will not know that. Was this (and other settings) not stated in the email they sent to you when you signed up with them?

All the problems I see mentioned above can and do happen with most hosts. If you expect a perfect experience from a host, you're going to be sorely disappointed at some point. Mistakes happen (from both sides). Computers break. Sh-t goes wrong.
The question is, how often does it happen and whose fault?
But I guess in a highly competitive industry, all it takes is one single f-ck up (no matter who is at fault) for people to jump ship...
 
chopsky said:
I've never used WSB, but some of these complaints seem a little bit overblown and unnecessary.

An announcement/communication required for 15 minutes of unexpected downtime? If it were a couple hours, I'd completely understand, but 15 minutes...these things do happen. Most web hosts won't send out announcements for such brief bouts of downtime.

Using mail.yourdomain is a bit of a given when setting up your account in a client
Click to expand...

Kudos to WSB for responding here as they did.

Much ado about nothing...
 
I can vouch for WebSpaceBar. Professional bunch with a lot of value for money. I think OP/you guys are just being a bit anal for no reason. Keep up the good work!
 
All I see here is a storm in a teacup to tarnish a hosts name. Ive had servers hosted with Afrihost since their first hosting came out and there has been many many many issues on both sides but they are still great. I can tell you now that even if I posted a news article on a forum site about issues I have experienced they will not reply!

Web Space Bar replied here and actually offered excellent answers, which you wont find from other providers in any case, so kudos for that. I haven't heard of them before but will definitely be checking them out as they seem to care about their customers.

If you expect the issues you had to not happen at any of the Major players in hosting, then get your own physical server and line and host it yourself to save some of the frustration you will have with a hosted solution by a hosting company.
 
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