recre8
Senior Member
OK, so I after a month of waiting for a response from Gian Visser after sending the chat transcript to him twice, and no response, I am posting it here for you guys to read.
The short of it: I'm helping a friend who has a small website that is showing some growth find a better host. She is currently with WebAfrica, but WebAfrica's performance was never great to start with, and their servers only started responding to any PHP page request after about 10 seconds. After being unable to resolve the issue with their support I helped her by starting to look for alternative hosts.
So the plan was to sign up for an account at Afrihost and Hetzner, upload her site to each, and load the site and just browse around and check how responsive the site is compared to her current host. Nothing unusual about that? Turns out it is HIGHLY unsual to afrihost.
So I sign up for Hetzner, easy peasy, cPanel gives me a temporary URL and the site's performance is miles better. I do the same for Afrihost. Sign up, select I already have a domain since I won't be using a domain to access the site, I'll just be using the temporary URL anyway, so I just add "test" to the end of her domain, i.e. ****test.co.za, which obviously isn't a registered domain.
Oops, Afrihost can't give you a temporary domain that can serve PHP. OK, no worries, I'll simply change the domain to one of my own and create a CNAME on one of my existing domains. Nope, Afrihost can't change domains. You need to cancel the entire subscription and sign up again. (Its going to be a pretty long day if you are hosting with Afrihost and your company changes its name btw). The technical support at Afrihost tells me to just tell accounts to refund me for the subscription, since I only had it for 20 minutes, and will be signing up again.
Below is the chat transcript of this encouter. And like everyone has their favorite ones in a box of chocolates, my favorite lines are highlighted below. See it as a kind of tl;dr
In short, if you decide to use Afrihost for hosting, woe be unto you.
So there you have it. There is another thread about a Afrihost db admin telling another forum member that they can't access their SQL Server database directly since it is a "security risk"
Food for thought: If you don't know how to do shared hosting, either figure out how, or don't offer it. If a single client can adversely affect other clients on the same hosting environment your hosting isn't property segregated and sandboxed. Either way, you have serious problem and your customers are building their online presence on technological quicksand.
The short of it: I'm helping a friend who has a small website that is showing some growth find a better host. She is currently with WebAfrica, but WebAfrica's performance was never great to start with, and their servers only started responding to any PHP page request after about 10 seconds. After being unable to resolve the issue with their support I helped her by starting to look for alternative hosts.
So the plan was to sign up for an account at Afrihost and Hetzner, upload her site to each, and load the site and just browse around and check how responsive the site is compared to her current host. Nothing unusual about that? Turns out it is HIGHLY unsual to afrihost.
So I sign up for Hetzner, easy peasy, cPanel gives me a temporary URL and the site's performance is miles better. I do the same for Afrihost. Sign up, select I already have a domain since I won't be using a domain to access the site, I'll just be using the temporary URL anyway, so I just add "test" to the end of her domain, i.e. ****test.co.za, which obviously isn't a registered domain.
Oops, Afrihost can't give you a temporary domain that can serve PHP. OK, no worries, I'll simply change the domain to one of my own and create a CNAME on one of my existing domains. Nope, Afrihost can't change domains. You need to cancel the entire subscription and sign up again. (Its going to be a pretty long day if you are hosting with Afrihost and your company changes its name btw). The technical support at Afrihost tells me to just tell accounts to refund me for the subscription, since I only had it for 20 minutes, and will be signing up again.
Below is the chat transcript of this encouter. And like everyone has their favorite ones in a box of chocolates, my favorite lines are highlighted below. See it as a kind of tl;dr
In short, if you decide to use Afrihost for hosting, woe be unto you.
So there you have it. There is another thread about a Afrihost db admin telling another forum member that they can't access their SQL Server database directly since it is a "security risk"
Food for thought: If you don't know how to do shared hosting, either figure out how, or don't offer it. If a single client can adversely affect other clients on the same hosting environment your hosting isn't property segregated and sandboxed. Either way, you have serious problem and your customers are building their online presence on technological quicksand.
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