If you are looking for a reliable, efficient, user-friendly, organized and professional web hosting provider, CI Host is NOT for you. CI Host is a second-rate company with internal problems. It may have a flashy website. It may have press releases and testimonials. It may even have a "virtual tour" of its data center, to lend itself some credibility as a legitimate market leader. But the reality is quite different. Never judge a web hosting company by its website. CI Host is all hype and no substance.

Several years ago, back in the dotcom era, the Dot Com company I worked for was exploring its options for a dedicated server hosting provider. We came across CI Host. The website seemed very professional. The information on the services offered was very thorough and detailed, complete with minute details on pricing. However, we still had some questions about the service. So we decided to call customer service. They transfered me to someone who could answer my questions about CI Host's Dedicated Server hosting options. However, that one person was "out to lunch" and "would be back in a couple of hours"!!!!!!!

How can a company as big as CI Host claims that it is, have only one guy who can answer my questions, and that guy is out to lunch?

After a couple of hours, I finally got a hold of the guy. He was very rude. He was not very courteous. His answers were very terse. He didn't know how to answer my questions and kept directing me to the website. (DUH! I'm calling you BECAUSE the website doesn't clarify a few things!)

Anyway, regardless of the phone call, we decided to go with the company and so we signed up.

The signup wasn't too bad. We were up and running and happy within 24 hours. We had root access to our very own dedicated Linux server on what was supposed to be a very powerful machine, on a very high-bandwidth network.

Within a few days, once development of our website was underway, we started experiencing problems. The server would spontaneously reboot for no reason at all every few hours. We had to call and ask CI Host to reboot the server FOR us. I thought they were MONITORING our servers for us!

A few days later, we noticed that the server just kind of "disappeared" off of the Internet for a few hours. When it finally came back, it was running great, but then we would experience bouts of extremely slow response from time to time. What was going on? At first I thought it was some forgivable glitch, but this persisted for a long time. There were times when we contacted technical support because we needed their assistance with the server, and their technical support guys, while they had rudimentary knowledge to get the job done, couldn't speak our language when we asked for more advanced support with Linux. We felt as though we knew more about Linux than they did, and it is their job to support us!

Eventually, our dot com imploded (like thousands of other companies at the time!) and we went out of business and had to cancel our service.

But you know what? Two years later, one of my former colleagues decided to log onto the old server just for the heck of it to see if it was still out there... and lo and behold... it WAS! Two years after we canceled our service, our old server was STILL there, WITH our old root password!

Apparently their billing department doesn't talk to their technical support document. We could have had a free ride!

As a parallel effort, we had also signed up for their Standard Reseller program... the one that lets you masquerade as a web hosting company, transparently using their technology and their technical support as if it was your own. It seemed like an awesome business model. For just pennies on the dollar, you could own your own turnkey web hosting company.

But if you look at their pricing plans - the WHOLESALE cost of their resellable plans are more expensive than the same plans made available at RETAIL through other websites! Even with a bulk discount, we would not be able to stay competitive in the marketplace!

And their documentation was an insult to our intelligence. It was too simplistic.

Anyway, I would not recommend these guys.

Recommended: No

Monthly fees (US$): Varies - reasonably priced
Platform used: Linux
Hosted on Secure Server: No
Database used: MySQL
Main focus of Web site: Publishing/Content