Worst business mistake we have ever made!
Written: Jul 07 '02 (Updated Jul 07 '02)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Account set-up: |
 |
|
| Web page loading time: |
 |
|
| Quality of customer support: |
|
|
|
Pros: Easy-to-use control panel, web-based email
Cons: Unreliable hosting, No phone support, Unprofessional personnel, Disorganized support department, Slow responses, Rude personnel
The Bottom Line: If you are looking for reliable Web Hosting, look somewhere else! Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns regarding our experience with Infinology.
|
|
|
| mrasmussen's Full Review: Infinology |
Our organization is made up of a team of women that provide guides and resources for anyone interested in starting their own Child Day Care Center. We are a real business and take pride in our product and our Website. Here’s our real review from a real business that really (unfortunately) hosted several Websites with Infinology for 1 year.
Here’s a breakdown of our experience:
Infinology’s servers are consistenly down, so much that 50% of the time we checked our Websites to see if they were online and functioning properly, we received an error message that read “Page cannot be displayed error – Sever cannot be found!”. Not to mention, the secure server was unreliable from the start and frequently dropped packets, resulting in error messages and broken sessions for our shoppers. Anyone involved in ecommerce knows the importance of a reliable host. For those of you that don’t know, an unreliable host results in little or no sales, and that’s exactly what happened to us.
Calling Infinology’s toll-free number 4 or 5 times a day to have them put our Website back online was a daily routine, and once our Websites were finally fixed they would only remain up for a few hours and sometimes only minutes before going down again. Then our staff would have to hop right back on the telephone again or send a support request via email to Infinology to get our Websites back online. This was the case with all 5 of our Infinology hosting plans, so you can imagine that this almost became a full-time job for our staff.
They are always blaming the downtime on their backbone provider, and can give no time estimate for a resolution. They advertise to have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, but the only thing that we have ever received for having our Websites down many days at a time are headaches and no revenue! They have swindled us several times into upgrading our hosting plans to higher more expensive plans only to discover the same problems again. The only reason our company decided to take Infinology up on their offer to upgrade our original hosting plan was because they advertise a "30-day money back guarantee, **full refund**, no questions asked!", but when we decided to cancel just a couple days later (because we were experiencing the same unreliable hosting problems-“Page cannot be displayed error – Sever cannot be found!”), we found that we would be paying a huge non-refundable set-up fee which we were never told about! This was not your ordinary $20 set up fee either, it was a least $50.00, which can hurt when your running a small Internet business. We eventually got our money back after several emails and phone calls telling them we were going to request a charge back from our bank and report them to the Better Business Bureau. Forget about any sort of refund from Infinology without putting up a big fuss!
Most of the time it’s impossible to reach any human being at Infinology by telephone (only the same message recording, "Due to the high volume of calls we are not able to take your call...etc"). Our staff has left them plenty of messages, and never once have we receive a phone call back. The only time that we ever received a phone call from Infinology was to confirm our payment when we signed up with their hosting service. Well they sure got our money!
The Infinology staff is rude and almost always confrontational. They often reply back with unhelpful smart remarks. The online support person will often ignore you when you have a serious technical problem or complaint. Just recently our company emailed the Infinology support team when we couldn't pull up our Website online, and this time they replied back, "Were working on it, please don't email us anymore when your site is not working because we know already!" But whenever we didn't email support regarding this matter, our Website would remain offline for several days and our customers would become frustrated and begin to wonder if we were still in business. We think it's grossly unprofessional that Infinology would know of long periods of server downtime, and not email their customers to let them know.
Just recently Infinology shut down all 5 of our Websites for having a Free Links page on one of our Websites. Our Free Links Page allowed our visitors to post a free link to their Website. In return they were sent an email from us conforming their post. According to Infinology this is "spamming". They pulled the plug on all 5 of our Websites completely without warning or explanation. They still have not provided our company with any proof of the alleged “complaints” they received. Bottom line, they are not willing or able to deliver on the promises in their hosting agreement, and I think they are deliberately trying to get rid of customers that need support or complain when something is wrong with their service. We are currently considering a lawsuit with Infinology and would like to hear from anyone with similar experiences.
If your thinking of using Infinology for any sort of hosting, whether it be a virtual private server, dedicated server or shared hosting plan, you better think again! Avoid Infinology like the plague. They are unprofessional, disorganized, and unreliable, and definitely not trustworthy. We have no idea what the inside of their operation looks like, but we shudder to image it. We work very hard to run a successful Internet business, and just wished they had done the same.
If you truly care about your business, look for another hosting company. Putting our Website in their hands was the worst business mistake we’ve ever made!
Recommended:
No
Monthly fees (US$): $6.95 a month ($133 a year)
Platform used: Linux
Hosted on Secure Server: Yes
Database used: MS-SQL
Main focus of Web site: Sales/E-commerce
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
mrasmussen
|
|
Reviews written: 1
Trusted by: 1 member
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.