Ok, I’ve had my last straw with Siteground hosting service. I have been with them for just over a year at this point and since day 1 it’s been nothing but problems.
The last issue was that I decided I wanted to turn on SpamAssassin. Up till now my Mail app has been handling spam just fine, but recently I’ve been getting too many false positives, etc. So I go to turn on Spam Assassin in the CPanel.
There’s an option there that says. “To simply have the server DELETE and NOT deliver emails that are tagged as spam by SpamAssassin, click here now.”
So logically NOT clicking that link means that your email will be processed through to your email account with the correct ***SPAM*** subject line. Right?
Apparently NO! Apparently they have it setup on the server to just delete it automatically. They claim it’s for “Security” reasons and that being on a shared host it’s the ONLY way to do it. I’m sorry, but as a systems administrator, I’ve setup SpamAssassin on MANY MANY servers in my day. You can EASILY setup PER USER rules for this sort of thing. It’s NOT THAT HARD.
Issue: They moved servers TWICE in one month. They said it was to “upgrade to a newer machine”. I’m sorry, but there should be NO REASON to move servers twice in one month. And secondly EACH TIME there were major problems with the upgrade.
1) They did it in the MIDDLE OF THE DAY!
2) The lost nearly a days worth of my mail.
3) They broke my website by not correctly moving things over.
Issue: They have some idiotic process running that creates a zero bit file in EVERY DIRECTORY in my account EVERY SINGLE DAY!
Issue: They require a php.ini file in EVERY DIRECTORY for wordpress to work correctly. This is ridiculous. Why not set these things at the server level?
Issue: You cannot re-open a ticket if you don’t reply within 2 hours of their last response. Therefor you have to go through the long and annoying process of opening a NEW ticket. They also don’t seem to be able to reference old tickets, so you have to go back through all the same crap you did in the last ticket.
Issue: I can’t send email to Yahoo! And they refuse to do anything about it.
Issue: The support sucks. There are only two ways to contact support. 1) Open a site down ticket or 2) Open a mail down ticket. These ARE NOT the only two issues that can happen in a hosting environment. And the helpdesk people are dumber then shit. I clearly explained each and everyone of these issues to them and they seem to do nothing. It takes three or four support messages back and forth before they seem to be able to understand the problem and actually do anything about it. They seem to work on the “annoy the customer to stop asking for it” theory.
DO NOT USE SITEGROUND HOSTING SERVICES! They SUCK!
Soooo. I will be moving to a new host soon (hopefully this weekend). Any suggestions? I was thinking Bluehost. Anyone use them, how do you like them?
I’ve been using DreamHost since I moved from H4S, and I’ve really been very pleased with their service. It looks comparable to BlueHost. I paid two years in advance, so the price was pretty comparable as well.
Yeah, one of my clients is on dreamhost. They seem to be pretty good.
your blogging is entertaining, yet informative.
10 points.
i use bluehost. support is cool, there’s always a support person you can chat with.. once in a while my site goes down but that happens rarely now.
as you probably know, one problem with bluehost is that they complain of high cpu usage when one of their hosted sites lands on the front page of digg. but hey, for me that’s something i don’t have to worry about. lol.
bluehost just has last storage and b/w than siteground but again it’s not an issue for me.
opps i meant to say “bluehost has less storage and b/w than siteground…”
Siteground is the worst Web provider on the planet. They totally screwed with me too. Check out my story here:
http://www.siteground-sucks.com
I started hosting with hostmonoster.com a few days ago. Guess what night their servers went down. They told me eta is 20 min. Took 3 hours for the servers to be back up. I pinged their servers, and found that the server was actually a bluehost server.
They told me that hostmonster ans bluehost are sister
companies. I call bluehost, and find out their servers
are down too. They share the same tech support team too.
So, I’ll stay away from both bluehost and hostmonster.
Also, stay away from simplehelix, which looks like is a
one man operation run by someone on a pert time basis.
I am in the process of researching another hosting co, and will post my experience a little later.
I highly suggest using dreamhost. I have not had any problems with them and they are always very fast with support. Check out my sidebar for a graphic link you can click to save $15 off hosting!
One of my WordPress-based blogs had about 2700 visitors last Friday (for the first time in its life of two years) which is currently on a Siteground shared hosting plan. I received an ultimatum from them forcing me to switch to a VPS or a dedicated server with the pretext that my PHP scripts are overloading the server CPU, and if I don’t switch, they would suspend my account which I renewed for another year only two months ago.
They don’t even accept my proposal of converting my entire blog into static html pages claiming that would cause too many Apache threads still overloading the server, nor can they give me any concrete measurable figures. I haven’t figured out what good is a 7500 GB monthly bandwidth if they can’t handle several thousand daily visitor traffic.
I’m switching to Dreamhost , but not sure if I would face a similar issue there.
Can anyone tell me the definition of high traffic? and what’s the maximum acceptable daily visitor traffic for a shared hosting? At what point should one really switch to a VPS or a DS ?