2004.12.06 11:51 AM
Goodbye Interland, Hello CrystalTech
I should have moved years ago, but changing web hosts is so not my core competency. Somehow, even with email down multiple days each month, it was never quite bad enough to pull the trigger. Then, finally, a few months ago, it was. So I signed up with CrystalTech in August and switched off Interland last month.
I can't say enough bad things about Interland, so I won't. I considered calling this post "Interland Sucks", but that would have been derivative. This post from Doug Alcorn kind of sums it up for me:
A kitten dies every time Interland gets a new customer. Don't kill the kittens. Find another ISP.
CrystalTech, on the other hand, has been fantastic. Granted, I haven't been with them for the 5 years I was with Interland (I started with Innerhost, before they joined evil forces with Interland), but so far so good. CrystalTech's communication has been great, their prices reasonable, and there's been no down time. Recommended.
Comments
Yup. It is true. interland SUCKS! Webmasters against Interland can be joined at my website. I had a thriving business until Interland.
Ray | 2005.02.25 02:51 PM
Yep, I agree. I used to do development for this guy...we used to spend more time cussing interland than writing code.
budyhead | 2005.03.04 08:15 PM
Guys: Just wait, especially is your email is hosted by Crystaltech... they claim 99.5% uptime, yeah, RIGHT.
That's 40 hours per year, my friends, of downtime. They've exceed that, and what is worse, it's always down during business hours.
Their techs tell you service will be restored in "10 minutes" yet often full days go by before they get it right. It's almost 4 now and the service has been unrelyable since 9am!
Good luck, if my experience is par usual for these gusy, you're gonna need it!
mike | 2005.06.28 03:47 PM
Yikes! Luckily, I haven't experienced any trouble with CrystalTech, at least not so far (about 8 months). In fact, I haven't experienced an email outage at all. I'm interested - what hosting plan have you got? Is that a dedicated or shared mail server? Exchange or SmarterMail?
ewbi.develops | 2005.06.29 01:25 AM
I've had CrystalTech for 4 years now and only was down once. Never had a problem with email either. Their support is awesome. I have recommended them over and over again.
Believe me, with so many hosting provider out there, I've searched for a better alternative. But with price, support, features, and performance, I haven't found anything out there worth moving to.
just my 2 cents.
s rupp | 2005.08.12 11:40 AM
s rupp,
Thanks for sharing your experience. That's how things are going for me, too, though for just less than a year, so far. No complaints.
ewbi.develops | 2005.08.12 11:55 AM
Well, spend some time with Crystalttech, if you choose to use their mail servers you'll find their uptime to be far less than pleasing. Crushed servers, blacklisting out the wazzoo, silly nonsense about not forwarding email to AOL accounts.
We have experienced no problems with their web hosting.
Scott | 2005.12.01 06:14 AM
Web.com and Interland suck crap. it is very tough for me to move my entire online business away from them but now i have to. my database has been failing regularly and the site just goes down for no reason. tech support at web.com is completely useless. honestly they just tell you in a message that it is working again. they have no idea why its working but they just say yep its working and then do no further investigation. so the site just keeps going down. well they cost me lots of business so now it is easier and cheaper to move away from them - i have to. customer service was just as bad as tech support. they dont care. interland sucks and i hate them sooooo much !!
Michael | 2007.02.20 08:42 PM
A kitten dies every time Interland gets a new customer. Don't kill the kittens. Find another ISP.
Wow, that would be really witty and intelligent if Interland/Web.com was an ISP. You know, an INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER.
If you're going to steal a meme at least don't sound like an idiot doing it.
R0b | 2007.03.05 06:37 AM
Crystaltech/Interland ugh!
We've had bad experience with both over a period of five years. We have two websites, one on Interland and one on Crystalech. Interland takes longer to open webmail than any free service -- sometimes 3 - 5 minutes on a desktop with an AMD X2 chip and 1 gig of memory and a 1 tb cable connection. Often it is slower than our own secondary server -- a pentium 3 attached to a cable modem. Crystaltech has cut off our email service twice. Once because we hit our max -- we offered to pay more for more space and they refused, savagely. They kept us up all night downloading email under their threat of erasing our email. The second time they cut us off for no good reason they could explain or we could figure out. The second time, they sent no email notification to us, just let us find out for ouselves.
Each gives us 500 MB of email space with $39.85/month plans, worse than we can get for $19.95/month now from other companies. It is even less space than we get on Google or Hotmail. We're now moving from Interland to 1&1 and looking for a second service to replace Crystaltech. Pray for us.
Cato | 2007.03.05 08:25 AM
In 2004, I ordered a web hosting plan from Wazooweb.com (now web.com) for $6.95/month. I used the automatic billing option with my debit card. On February 26, 2007, my monthly automatic payment at Web.com went from $6.95/month to $16.95. I was not notified of the price increase, which was billed for four months before I noticed it on a bank statement. This unauthorized expense caused my account to overdraw, resulting in 2 $35.00 overdraft fees. I had been hosting with Wazoo Web (which was later bought by Web.com) for four years with no price increase.
When I called to settle this, I was given a variety of excuses, put on hold, told to call other companies, and even hung up on. After much persistence, a representative told me that they had emailed me in February 22, 2007 to inform me of the price increase. I never received the email about a price increase. They were unable to provide me with evidence that it was sent (they couldn't tell me the subject line). Even if it was sent, I didn't receive it. It could have been lost on yahoo's server or sent to a junk mail folder. A mass email is not a bona fide attempt to notify me of a 150 percent price increase. Therefore the price increase is invalid. When I asked them why they didn't notify me by certified mail, they said that since they are an online company, they don't send certified mails.
I was offered a service credit (obviously a concession of wrongdoing). I'm not interested in a service credit because I canceled my service because I don't trust the company. I'm only interested in a refund. At this time of this writing, phone calls to billing manager Justin Peeples and legal department representative Tracy Connor have not been returned.
Adam Brock | 2007.06.08 12:45 PM
I am trying to migrate away from Web.com. They are of course giving me the run around. I'm thinking about filing a lawsuit if they don't give me my files. Anyone else interested in joining in?
Angela | 2008.02.29 10:28 AM
Crystaltech is not the only host on the block. After several issues with them (More than one) We moved our services over to Server Intellect. At first we just happy to have host that answered on the phone. But once we got into the managed servers whoaaa. Support of our server have been outstanding. Glad we moved is all I can say.
Dison C | 2008.06.09 12:59 PM
I'll support those Web.com haters. Today I tried to cancel our hosting account. The phone rep was pleasant, but had limited power to help in my needs. She said the account would be cancelled. However, when I tried to learn the amount I would be refunded for the remainder of my annual hosting package, she could not answer the question and would not transfer me to someone in billing. She said they'd get back to me in 3-5 days. What a load of garbage. Someone there should be able to at least answer that question. As such, I'm glad I cancelled so that I don't have to be subjected to their crummy service.
Brad | 2008.11.11 09:39 AM
I have been hung up on by them 5 times in the last twenty minutes. Am currently on hold. Spent over an hour on the phone with them today. Hahaha you guys talk about the supposed “Upgrade”! Was that ever a joke they broke just about everything we had running on the server- what a WEEK that was. Anyways today we lost ftp access, after fixing ssh access yesterday (don’t know why we didn’t have ssh access when its their ‘preferred’ protocol), they have not been able to restore our ftp access after looking into it for hours today. But in trying to fix it they killed our forums, the most active area of the website. Thanks web.com! Now I am calling just to get them to change some permissions on a folder (chmod) so I can use a web-based file editor (already online but the permissions need changing), and they keep hanging up on me. The forums just magically came back but I keep getting hung up on. It is hard to keep this post clean- lets just say I’m not a happy customer!
Never use web.com!! Unless your idea of support is getting hung up on repeatedly when you need their help, or parts of your website disappearing and breaking at random…
So unhappy right now. Web.com is misery.
Kevin S. | 2009.01.20 10:52 PM
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