Paid Host Reviews - Hostrocket

At the end of August, 2001, it was time to change web hosts. My old host, Addr.com, was fine except their plans topped out at 6gb of bandwidth and 200 mb of storage. I needed more than this. When I asked them for rates for the additional requirements, I received a reply that they would need $10 per additional gigabyte of bandwidth! Since I was paying $14.95 a month for 6gb, this was disappointing, to say the least.

Once the decision was made, I quickly looked around and found a company called Hostrocket. I found their offering very exciting. The had all of the featured that I needed (unlimited autoresponders, CGI, SSI, PHP and sendmail), plus a plan that allowed for 20gb of bandwidth. They also promised 99.5% uptime. Since my site is very important to me, this last number was critical - what good is a web site if no one sees it?

The switch was relatively painless and within a short time my site was up and running. At first I was very happy with the services provided. I had space, bandwidth and most everything else I could want. I even had domain parking, which meant I could finally do something with some of the domain names that I owned.

The first significant problem that I ran into was with autoresponders. I created almost 250 autoresponders, and I found that some worked, some didn't. These are very necessary for my site, as they allow people to get articles for reprint elsewhere.

I asked them to fix the problem. They looked at it, and I soon found out that ALL email to my domain no longer worked! I sent in a frantic trouble ticket, and they claimed they could find nothing wrong. I sent in another, and now they found something. In the meantime, their incorrect fix had propagated throughout the internet, and I had to wait five days before the new change took effect everywhere. During that time I had no email capabilities.

I began to notice my site frequently returned errors. Page not found, forbidden and so on. These lasted only thirty seconds or so, then the site was available again. Not very professional. The site also suffered from occasions of extreme slowdowns. I timed some page loads at greater than 30 seconds - that's on pages that previously took less than a second on my DSL connection.

I checked their forums and found notes indicating they were attempting to solve some of these issues. Because of that, I continued to stick with the company past their guarantee period.

Urgent support requests on these and other issues sometimes took over 24 hours to get a response.

Their support team made continual errors. I parked several domains on my account and asked that the email server for one of the parked domains be changed to bigmailbox. Instead, they changed the primary domain, which resulted in a loss of email capability for several days.

One day I found my site did not work at all! It got a "forbidden" error, I could not access my control panel, FTP or anything else. I sent in a frantic trouble ticket with no response. Over the next 18 hours I sent in three tickets with no response. My site was down, completely down.

I looked through the support forums and found numerous complaints about the response time for trouble tickets, downtime and so on. It appeared that I was not the only one having trouble getting someone to answer their email.

Finally, I decided enough was enough. I found a new host (Site5) and began switching my site over to them. 

After almost an entire day, Hostrocket finally returned my trouble ticket. It seemed that I had a script, 404helper, which was using a large amount of resources on their server. If I promised never to use the script again, they would reenable my account. Since I needed to get my data files, I agreed.

I was so furious that my teeth ground together. These guys shut down my site - okay, I can understand that. But they did not inform me of the reasons and they did not respond to trouble tickets marked urgent for almost 24 hours. This is not acceptable behavior from any host - a simple email was all that was needed. "Hi, we've disabled your site because ..., to reenable you need to ...".

This would have avoided hours of panic and frantic attempts to determine the nature of the problem. I still would have been extremely unhappy (the 404helper routine logs 404 errors, and it was using lots of CPU due to the nimda virus attacks), but at least I would have understood what was going on.

I gathered up my data files, transferred my domain, and now am happily hosting with Site5.com. The ultimate irony - Site5 was recommended by someone in Hostrocket's own forums who also left their services.