When Hosting Plans Go Bad...

Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.  --Euripides

When I started using paid hosting for ASP.NET sites, I started out with CrystalTech and they were very good. Then I found Gate.com and they seemed like they had a pretty good deal going - SQL Server 2005, plenty of bandwidth (200GB), plenty of space, ASP.NET 2.0 and a control panel that would let you create custom subfolder IIS applications, set mime-types in IIS, and even your own custom 404 page - which I instantly turned into a custom UrlRewriting handler. All this for like $9.95 / mo, and a 25% discount on additional sites. Sweet. For an extra $5.00 I could go up to 500GB bandwidth.

Then, about a month ago, I got an email from gate.com promoting how they were going to have a new "improved" control panel page, new features, more this, more that -- you get the idea.

Turns out that they REMOVED features. They blew away my custom 404 handler and removed the ability to specfy "my" page for HTTP 404. They removed my sub applications AND the abiity to create one. The sites have gotten dog - slow, and the tech support is like "lo babayit" (Hebrew slang for "nobody home"). 

It is pretty obvious that for one reason or another, they simply don't care about the customer any longer – and that’s a recipe for disaster for a hosting company (or really, any company that expects to stay in business).

You know what, Gate.com? The minute I can find a better hoster with a good price and the features I need, you bastards are HISTORY.

So, what about you? Got any HCHS's (Hosting Company Horror Stories)?

Comments

  1. Anonymous7:22 AM

    I'm using discountasp.net. They are not cheap but they have never let me down.

    ReplyDelete
  2. peterbromberg8:28 AM

    Yes, I've never heard anything bad about discountasp.net. They advertised on our eggheadcafe.com site for a time. Thanks.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous12:50 PM

    Why would you need a custom 404 page? Gate.com knows better than you.

    "Get over it"...

    :-)

    ReplyDelete
  4. peterbromberg12:54 PM

    Har, har, Miller. You don't have to go to Arizona to find Yuma.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous9:45 AM

    Read Ayende's blog to get another host to NOT give your business to.

    Customer service seems to be a pretty low priority for most hosts!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some observations on Script Callbacks, "AJAX", "ATLAS" "AHAB" and where it's all going.

I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). Now Bertrand Leroy, a Microsoft guy whose work I like , has authored some very interesting ASP.NET 2.0 script callback stuff that he points to on his blog, and he is obviously (at least, to me he is) involved quite heavily in the development of this new ATLAS infrastructure that they'll preview at PDC. Leroy's most recent post brings to the surface what I agree are the major differences between the "AJAX a - la .NET" approach as popularized by Michael Swartz with his AJAX.NET library, and Leroy's RefreshPanel, the ASP.NET 2.0 b
Read more

IE7 - Vista: "Internet Explorer has stopped Working"

Image
This one was a bitch. All of a sudden for no reason at all, out of the blue, I get this dialog "internet Explorer has stopped working". I didn't install any new software, crap- I didn't do anything! So here I am using FIREFART to go on the internet and find out what to do! Damn! Good thing I've got the sucker on the same machine (I'm not "anti-Firefox", i just don't use it that much except to check my page renderings). The Fix The fix (at least for me): 1) Go into Control Panel, and choose "Internet Options". 2) Under the "Advanced" tab, press the "RESET" button at the lower right: Don't ask me why this happens, or why the fix works. That's a BUG, D00D - I don't care how you slice it!
Read more

FIREFOX / IE Word-Wrap, Word-Break, TABLES FIX

One of the most annoying things a developer (who would normally delight in writing code, not futzing with markup) can have is getting rendering issues between different browsers. The two biggest players are of course Internet Exploder and Firefart (as I lovingly like to refer to each). In most cases that's going to take care of 98 percent of your total site traffic. IE has had a proprietary "word-break" style attribute for a long time, and this made it into the CSS 3.0 spec. But that doesn't necessarily help you with Firefox right now. Firefox literally - (and I consider this completely idiotic, since it's been in their bug database for FIVE YEARS) does not have a reliable CSS style element to force table cell content to break in the middle of a word in order to stop the content from expanding your table / div off the page or over other content on the page. Here's a partial fix, which will work for most tables and browsers. The style declaration (I call it m
Read more