Unbelievably unprofessional and unreliable!
Written: Aug 25 '02 (Updated Aug 26 '02)
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Pros: none
Cons: Extremely unprofessional and unresponsive customer service; servers consistently down
The Bottom Line: Their customer service is so bad that if your house was on fire they couldn't be bothered to call 911 (unless you owed them money).
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| sleah's Full Review: Infinology |
I run a content site, and when I launched my site in April '02 I signed up with Infinology for a relatively high price ($20/month) given how many really cheap web hosts are out there, but thought it was worth paying more to avoid some of the hassles that seem to come with many of the discount services online.
Boy, was I wrong! Turns out, I'm just paying more to get exactly the horrible service I was trying to avoid!
It wasn't so bad in the beginning. Then slowly, my site started to go down for a few hours at a time. Now, I appreciate that web hosting is not the easiest job, since it's not always possible to predict everything that might go wrong with servers that rely on so many different kinds of technology (I've worked for several tech companies). So I don't mind a few blips in the system.
But I DO expect companies I am paying to 1) maintain a basic level of uptime, particularly if they are charging me considerably more than the average; and 2) provide a consistently high level of customer service and communication with customers.
Infinology does neither.
In early August, after the second time in two weeks that my site was down due to server problems at Infinology, I wrote their customer service the following email:
"You are showing my "disk quota" as being overlimit again, and consequently my site is down. This is the second time this month that this has happened, and combined with the fact that you suspended my site last week because of some sort of payment problem (which also didn't make any sense given that my bank account had more than sufficient funds to cover your payment), without so much as an email notice giving me at least 24hours to respond first, makes me seriously concerned about your customer service.
The consistent lack of communication by your IT department when your servers are down for many hours is troubling; how difficult is to send out a mass email to all of your accounts notifying them of the problem and giving an estimated time it will be resolved? I work for a large technology company, and I can assure you we would never leave our customers hanging like this and then not even provide an explanation or apology afterwards.
In short:
1) Start notifying your customers when your servers are down; we shouldn't have to find out accidentally when we get email complaints from our users
2) Start notifying your customers ahead of time that there has been a payment problem and give us 24 hours to resolve it before you suspend the site - especially for customers like me who have a good payment history.
I am sure you are working on resolving this particular "disk quota" technical problem right now, but it is disappointing to constantly be in the dark about what is going on at Infinology and to have my site down for multiple hours a month because of your errors.
This is not some kind of $7/month plan - I am paying you significantly more money than I would pay elsewhere precisely to avoid these kinds of problems.
If I don't hear from you some kind of explanation as to how you are going to ensure there aren't so many problems moving forward, I'm going to have to consider taking my business elsewhere.
Thank you for your attention."
A few hours later, I received the following response from Infinology:
Our Network Status page is updated with each major problem that occurs.
Once sentence, that was it. No apology, not explanation, just this statement (which is also erroneous, since their Network Status page is frequently NOT updated). I would be FIRED if I ever treated my customers this way.
Since this email, my site has gone down twice more for several hours at a time. That's four times now in August - and the month isn't even over yet!
The other review of Infinology on Epinions mentioned that they could never get a person on the phone and that has also been my experience - once I called 12 different times in a single day, and every time I got a recording saying they were too busy to answer the phone. Even at 11:30pm on a weekday! Give me a break.
But they weren't too busy to immediately "suspend" my site the moment they had a problem charging my credit card with one of my monthly payments - without so much as an email notification beforehand to alert me that there was a problem. And even worse, when users tried to go to the site while it was "suspended," they actually got a page saying "This site has been suspended!" Not even just a blank or "error" page, which would have been the courteous thing to do. I could understand their lack of consideration (and tact) if I had repeatedly shirked payment, but this was the first time there had been any payment problems at all, and I hadn't even been given a chance to rectify the situation (indeed, I didn't even know about it for a day until I happened to go to my site and found the "suspended" notice!).
If I had an ecommerce site, can you imagine the kind of message "This site has been suspended" would send to my customers?
Needless to say, I am currently shopping for a new Web Host and plan to transition as soon as possible. Everyone else should avoid this company at all costs!
Update: a few hours after I wrote this review, my site went down again, this time for 12 hours (!). I consequently sent two emails last night (one asking yet again what was being done to ensure this doesn't keep happening, and the other asking a question about which Domain Registrar they use) and it's the middle of the next day and I still haven't received a reply.
Recommended:
No
Monthly fees (US$): $20
Platform used: Windows NT
Hosted on Secure Server: Yes
Database used: MSQL
Main focus of Web site: Publishing/Content
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Epinions.com ID:
sleah
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Reviews written: 41
Trusted by: 34 members
About Me:
When I'm not building the New Economy, I'm reading, watching DVD's, or shooting hoops.
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