Problems with my hosting company and why I had to change hosts

Apologies for the recent lack of posting and website presence, the hosting account I have with webhost4life has been ‘migrated’ and this hasn’t been smooth to-say-the-least.

As I said my hosting account with webhost4life was migrated to their new systems on Wednesday 17th I wouldn’t have even been aware of that if I hadn’t sat down to write a post, because when I checked the site it was instantly clear something was wrong. All paths in the site were broken, the css and script files were coming back 404 not found, looking at their paths I realised that the virtual directory that this site uses wasn’t working properly. At first I figured the setting had just been lost so I logged into my control panel and the first thing I noticed was that it was totally different. The interface had changed, not a bad thing because the old interface was not all that great, I discovered at that point that they’d updated their systems which could explain why my settings were not working properly.

Yes I would have liked a bit of warning. Yes I would have liked to confirm things with them before going ahead. Yes all the sites I host there were down and yes I was starting to get phone calls asking where clients sites (and email) were / why they were down. Something new on their website was a 24x7 online chat system, which I thought was a good idea, actually getting someone to look at the problems with me rather than the slow process that is email. I was hopeful this wouldn’t take long and the domains would be back online soon.

However their representative wasn’t able to resolve the problem and had to escalate it to someone else to deal with, given that all this was caused by their migration process I would have thought that their front line support would be fully trained in how to deal with migration issues not simply be another obstacle for me to get over in order to get to someone who could actually sort the problem out. At this stage all my domains were coming back with 403 access denied errors.

More website and email problems

2 days later, and no contact from webhost4life whatsoever and with all of my domains responding but the sites (and email) still not working I opened up another chat to report the problem again. Again I went through their next-to-useless 24x7 chat system with their representative unable to deal with the problem, putting me on hold to go and ask someone else. Then all my sites started returning 403 error messages again! I started another chat with another representative who couldn’t do anything about it, at the end of that chat a support ticket was opened. At this point I was getting quite annoyed, the chat looked like a good idea but it was becoming clear that they had no clue how to fix anything – I was even questioning whether I was talking to a real human or a program because the responses were identical each time.

I emailed their migration address to ask what was happening, asking that someone get in touch with me to let me know what was happening so at least I could go back to my clients with something more professional sounding than “Your sites aren’t working and I’ve no idea when they’ll be working again or what’s wrong – I haven’t changed anything” – the best I got was an update in my support ticket that simply said “Updated Ticked: Work in Progress”. What good is that to the customer? It doesn’t tell me anything except someone has done something. There were a few more of these updates that showed up, but my sites were all broken. I did manage to find, in an email they’d sent after migrating my account the following:

We have performed a comprehensive quality review of your website and email on the new platform. Still, you know your site best; we strongly recommend that you thoroughly test your web pages and email to confirm a successful migration. Click on all the links and fill out all the forms to make sure everything works properly.

So they were claiming to have performed a comprehensive quality review of my website and email, if that’s the case why hadn’t it shown the problems I’d been having? I lost all faith in them at this point, even a basic check would have shown them the sites weren’t working so they were either incompetent or were not telling the truth about having checked the sites.

Migrating away to GoDaddy

After 6 days there had been no progress, my hosts had ‘migrated’ my account and in doing so broken all my domains. No one in their support department could give me any indication of what was going on or when I could expect things to be resolved – not even a ball-park such as within 4 weeks! I couldn’t continue to do nothing to get my domains live again and started looking at other hosting companies, GoDaddy’s Deluxe package (£4.58 pm) was pretty attractive, 2 MS SQL databases, unlimited sub domains and websites plus all the usual stuff, emails  and 150GB disk space. Comparing that with the advanced plan from webhost4life (£6.56 pm) and awful customer service I’d been getting, my loyalty to webhost4life was all gone and I decided to open a new hosting account. Last year it cost me $120 for a years hosting with webhost4life and this (better) package with GoDaddy was coming in at £52.28, less than 1/2 price.

Cancelling my webhost4life account

I opened another chat to webhost4life and asked about cancelling my account. Their response was that I could but it would cost me $35. SERIOUSLY! They wanted to charge me $35 because they couldn’t uphold their end of our agreement – I pay them and they provide hosting, but in this case I’d paid them and they couldn’t host my sites, whatever they’d done by migrating my account had broken my sites. They hadn’t checked things worked before making the change, they hadn’t contacted me (as it said they would do) and they couldn’t give me any indication that they either knew what was wrong or were taking any real steps to fixing the problem! Unfortunately I couldn’t cancel the account on the spot because I needed my clients to get their emails and these were all down, so I had to get all this set up on the new hosting account and then go back to webhost4life to cancel the account and get a refund.

Things got worse when I tried to cancel. Their representative told me they could delete my account but not give me a refund because I paid for my account before they migrated it and they were not the same company as before?! Then just ignored me for 10 minutes, in the end I gave up and opened another chat, unfortunately this opened in the same window and so I lost the transcript from my previous chat, though ‘helpfully’ all my security answers were still in place, good of them to allow the fields to save their values for someone else to use.

This time I managed to get from them that they could delete my account but not give me a refund because they “have not billed for my account in the new platform hence, there is no refund”. I’m sorry but it isn’t obvious to me that I can’t have a refund because they haven’t billed me in the new system, that’s none of my concern – I am the customer and I can’t be expected to know their internal systems. True to form their representative was unable to resolve the issue and it has been “escalated to their billing team”!

Conclusion

webhost4life are incompetent, they have demonstrated a total lack of customer care – I have been ignored, they have failed to communicate anything to me about what they were doing and why. It took far too long for them to fix the domain issues, which wouldn’t have taken more than 30 minutes to resolve in IIS and their first line support team seem to be little more than automatons whose only job seems to be to open support tickets because they cannot resolve anything on their own regardless of which department you have to deal with.

GoDaddy’s support was quick, they gave me a time frame in which to expect a reply and actually replied quite a bit quicker. The information they gave me was really useful and included step by step guides as well as helpful advice on what I might also want to consider. I felt that I was being listened to by someone who knew what I needed to do. Then there’s the better platform, services and price!

It is a shame that it needed to come to this, I had been quite happy with webhost4life for a number of years and had they not stuffed up my account migration I would probably have stayed put with them for years to come. Unfortunately this sorry saga still isn’t finished as I have to wait for their billing team to resolve my refund – I won’t be happy if they try to charge me for the privilege of getting as far away from them as I can and will fight that one too.