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Dark Hedgehog
My decision has been made, and I am planning on moving to another host.
Thanks to Jason, I forgot the member-name here, I have found a nice host to look forward to.

And no, this isn't one of those "this host is better than the other"
Hostony is a GREAT web hosting service. They have great space and bandwidth. That, I have NOT seen anywhere, ESPECIALLY with a killer price that I find no-where else.

My reason for leaving follows:

-poor service
-poor downtime (horrible)
-excessive excuses, which never gets the job done
-continuous run-arounds to make you wait until the staff work on something and just say please wait
-my questions are usually partially answered and mostly never answered
-when it comes to the truth or what really goes on, nothing is answered what-so-ever or we are given a fairy-tale to go by (which some staff appear to say one thing while another say's SO opposite)
-questionable actions taken
-immature staff (seriously, these people are immature)
-continuous lies that never make sense (more than half of what i ask or question usually contradicts most of what is said)
-exagerrated actions which seem to be more than what it really is
-staff claiming to be professional when nothing professional is done, regardless if they do professional work alone
-(not really required, but annoying) excessive typos
-most importantly Hostony's promises fail to be even "promised", and I know, from experience, the promises are truly not kept at all

Incase this topic gets deleted, I have copied all the text typed here so the truth will still remain.

As every customer, you know as they say their company has horrible service and they are fed up. I am actually not fed up but don't call me crazy, I am severely disgusted in these services.
There is not much else I can say though but that I am probably leaving within a few days.

Thank you for hosting me Hostony, I hope you can better your services than they are now and take real care of your customers.
horhey23
Unless there are some major changes to my service, such as not going down every three days, I think I may be doing the same.

I am going on the tail end of my second year with Hostony, which for the most part hasn't been all that bad. However, recently I have had major downtime, and the way I am handled by support has turned me off. Granted, they have fixed the problem each time. However, I get no info on what caused it, what steps were taken to fix/prevent, etc. After the 6th time in 2 weeks, you think they would want to reassure you that they are fixing this permanently. Nope, just a "Your site up now." response.

I have better things to do than to monitor my websites. This is why I pay a hosting company for this service.

So, unless I see some major improvements very soon, I will be leaving Hostony as well.
Dark Hedgehog
I recommend leaving Hostony.
What you explained isn't even half of what disgusts me about Hostony.
ClydeB
Yeah me too, I spend more time sending errors to hostony on msn than I do talking to the rest of the people I talk to on it. And even then I'm mostly explaining to people who use our webmail why its all screwed yet again.

If this was free it'd be a decent service, but to pay for this is just laughable.
iampedro
What was your packages? How long had you been with them?
Dark Hedgehog
Around two years and I had the Linux SuperProfi plan.
Serge
We are aware that we have 3 problematic servers and already have ordered Dell 2850 Dual Xeons with 300Gb SCSIs HDDs .We should get them today in the morning and configure by Monday. Once they are configured we'll be moving customers from server 15, 21 and win4.

We already ordered a new line of servers for VPS hosting. They are Dual Opterons 248 with 8 Gig RAM and 8x 73Gb SCSI drives in RAID10.
The new server will be 2.5 times faster than our current servers config as need servers use all the power of 64bi computing of AMD Opterons and 8 SCSI HDDS in RAID10 will outperform RAID5 3 HDD configs. To the top RAID 10 can survive even when 4 out 8 HDDs fail.

Not only new servers will be added we already get a deal for the colo at A class datacenter in Tampa, FL for building our new infrastructure. All new servers will be located there. The main idea is to build the infrastructure that will allow us to omit problems we had before and to be able to better and faster fix problems that may occur.

All new racks have 2x20 AMP power feeds, all new servers will be connected via power strips that will allow remote hard and soft server reboots all servers will be connected to the KVM switch that itself will be connected to the IP KVM. It will decrease time required to access the box when serious failure occurs and will allow helpdesk support to help onsite techs while they are fixing OS problems and be able to fix more problems themselves.

Also all servers in the rack will be put in the private network and connected via GIG_E feed to the 3.2 TB NAS storage server. Thus we’ll be able to make double backups for user data. Daily backups will be done to the secondary SCSI HDD connected to the server and weekly backups will be done to the local storage server.

The benefits:

1. We’ll be able to do daily backups
2. Daily backups won’t overload the server as we’ll be using rsync program to copy only the files that were updated within last day. And daily backup should take no more 15-30 min. The load will be at around 8, but it should not create many problems because we’ll do daily backups at night when server will be less loaded.
3. GIG_E line to the storage server should increase performance of the weekly backups sufficiently. Now we get a lot of problems when weekly backups occur, because server cannot send them fast enough over 100 Mbit connection and they are cached on local HDD jeopardizing all free space. New 300Gb SCSI HDDs should also help as they are 4 times bigger that 73 Gb SCSIs that we are using now.
4. We have developed cumulative backup system and having plenty of network storage should enable us to keep weekly backups for 4-6 weeks and be able to restore customer’s data in the state they were 3 or 4 weeks ago by request.

New backup system will also improve our recovery plans. When we had OS or HDD failure the most time we had to wait for the data to be copied from the off server backup. For 100 Gb -150 of data over a 100 Mbit connection it may take up to 24 hours just for data to be copied. Having exactly the same SCSI drive with daily backuped data in 90% cases we can start to restore server immediately on the secondary drive without waiting for the customer data to be copied. That’s why we decided not to cut corners and have exactly the same #)) Gb SCSI drives both for the master and secondary drive.

On the other hand in case the server dies because of a hacker, backups on the secondary drive may be lost. That’s why we make offsite backups of the data to the storage server.
So, it should greatly improve our potential to provide good service to our customers as well as faster recovery from the problems. Not many hosts implement something similar.

We are working for almost 5 weeks on the new infrastructure – negotiating, testing, software tweaks, etc. And I don’t want to tell that things will magically change on Monday. I just want you to know that we Do work on solving our problems.

Also I want to assure you that we won’t make hassle by moving everybody to the new infrastructure. Only servers that have repeated problems will be moved. For now just server15, 21 and win4. And there should not be any downtime involved with this as we’ll first copy the date and only then change DNS entries. The exact time for this will be announced later.

Also when the new infrastructure will be built we’ll announce some sweet deals for our customers.
Dark Hedgehog
This is not going to change my mind..and my decision was made long ago.
retroman
win4 has been problematic. I've had more downtimes with win4 in the past 4 months than I've had the previous 16 months when I was on another server (69.x.x.x can't fully remember). Ever since I moved to win4, not a week passes by without at least 30 minutes of downtime.

I think it's usually a MySQL problem since in at least two instances, I've developed table corruption and had to drop and then rebuild such tables (with accompanying loss of data, thank you).

I really liked Hostony very much in the past as they give a really nice deal, and the support was quite good (I usually contact their ICQ-based support). Anyway, I'll be evaluating the next couple of months. I hope the planned moves to the FL co-loc would bear fruit.

I myself manage a huge IT infrastructure at work, and my choice of putting my hobbies on to Hostony was initially a good deal (I can't run it on my servers in the office coz I wrote the policy that prohobits such act, *lol*). Lately, it's becoming a bit of a joke. I exactly know what goes on when there are attacks, downtimes, crashes... but I also know when things are not done properly: improper back-ups restored, errors in configurations, faulty patching: you name it. So please, Hostony staff, do something about the service. I've been in software development and network/infrastructure management for 20+ years and it's just my patience (developed through all those years of firefighting datacenter/IT development ) that makes me stay with you.

BTW, can someone at Hostony please spell out the uptime SLA for your WinSpecial package? A 99.5% uptime guarantee means no more than 44 hours downtime each year. I'm sure I've had more than that just counting from July this year (my sites have been down for about 2+ hours as I am writing this).

mad.gif
Red Blaze
There has been many times in which I wanted to move from one host to another even if the other host was alittle more expensive. But in my case there has only been one major problem, however, I later realized it was my fault.

There are times, though, that hostony won't answer your questions directly and it just gives the customer a suspicious feeling that you're hiding something. That makes the customer insecure of the business and may decide to leave. Hostony, you're not making your customers feel secure of your services and I certainly do not blame most of your customers for leaving. I've been with you guys for more or less, what? 3 years? I, in my part, appreciate that you want to keep us safe and secure from hackers, but at least explain to us in our trouble tickets (or whatever other way people contact you for support) what went wrong. We feel as if you dont have time for us when you just say "Your site is up". We end up with a question mark over our heads wanting to know what happend.
Dark Hedgehog
That is not the only reason I left.
radial
Serge, thanks for the update.
My site www.radialmonster.com has not been down as much in the past month as it had been in the month before. in fact it's been up pretty much non stop this month, far as i know.

That was realy great info you posted, it should be listed somewhere more prominent than this one forum.

also, nice looking new deals!
MartinB
Very Impresive.
but I think they forget to update the "RESELLING PACKAGES" section on http://www.hostony.com/reseller.html

good deals ! I hope it'll not finish in a lot of overselling overloaded servers...
bpgisme
Me and my little Profi account are quite happy! smile.gif Wow! I'll never use this much space.... (Well, at least not for a long while anyway.... laugh.gif)

-Bonnie
Red Blaze


That's a snap shot from my cpanel. I'm using profi plan.

These are the plans:
http://www.hostony.com/hosting.html

When do I get to see those stats in my cpanel? ;-;
bpgisme
Put in a support ticket. smile.gif I do every time they change the plans. smile.gif

-Bonnie
Lehrer
Sure, Red Blaze.
Submit a ticket if you wish your plan to be upgraded.
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