Dedicated … 2 hosting

About a week ago, after a great deal of searching and reading some forums, I decided to get a reseller account for some of my sites. After a fairly involved online chat with HostNine sales person, I decided to sign up.

One of the (2) primary pre-signup issues I had was a requirement for SWISH E on the server.

For some reason, a lot of the hosting companies don’t want to use SWISH E (a very good site search tool configurable in PERL) because it needs to be installed at root to be most efficient. SWISH E is extremely stable, fast to index a site, fast to show site searches and routinely installed on shared servers by some of more mature and premium hosting companies.

So I confirmed this with HostNine sales. The sales person agreed that “they would try to install it” and if they could not, I would be able to get my money back. Their stated policy is within 45 days “for any reason”.

Since they had a 50% off deal going (I used Hostnine coupon code “H9″ and got 50% off of my payment), I signed up for 1 year and paid with PayPal.

I moved 2 of my sites over (actually they support tech moved them for me since it was about a 100 mb transfer). I had a couple of issues that were resolved quickly, then 1 that caused a problem. In short, the tech support guy was great and I was feeling all warm and fuzzy about my decision.

The problem I had - One test site site1.com automatically redirected to my active site1.com while site2.com worked just fine in the test directory. The tech wasn’t sure why.

The signup, moving sites, testing sites, took pretty much all afternoon.

So then I asked about when SWISH E would be installed. (I use it for site search on most of my sites) The tech had no idea what I was talking about, so I reference the chat log with sales.

Then along comes an email from the O.M. that informed me there was no way they would install SWISH E on their server.

My response was, “You told me you would .. but if you won’t, then cancel and refund my money”.

I was directed to go through billing support, so I did so .. jumping through all their hoops immediately.

Next I get an email from the Support Manager saying to the effect, “We will not install this software on a shared server”.

“Okay, I’ve alreay cancelled”, I said.

Then things got very quiet. Over the ensuing week I sent no less than 4 requests for the PayPal charges to be reversed. I got a few oblique comments that never told me when the refund would be made, and actually seemed like red herring stalls.

A more strongly worded email finally got results.

I understand that people make mistakes in judgement and agree to things they can’t / won’t deliver. And although I don’t agree, I can understand wanting to hang onto money for as long as possible.

But what irritated me most .. in none of the emails telling me HostNine would not install the software ..

.. no one apologized for the inconvenience and wasting my entire afternoon.

Reviewed by user Old_Expert.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Service reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.