RCTHost.com - Does 'RCT' stand for 'Really Crooked Twits'?
Written: May 08 '03 (Updated Jan 13 '04)
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Pros: cheap
Cons: poor service; dishonest
The Bottom Line: These guys may be cheap, but they're also dishonest and incompetent.
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| gracef's Full Review: RCTHost.com |
Back in January, when I decided to change my web host, I jokingly compared it to a divorce. I had an OK but not terrific relationship with my previous host, Altaway. There were problems, but I knew what they were and had learned to live with most of them. But I wanted perfection, the ride-off-into-the-sunset kind of happiness that only happens in movies and trashy romances. So I was ready for a change. But would another web host be any better? Or would it just create all new headaches?
Ultimately, my decision to change came down to price. RCTHost.com offers a variety of packages for unbelievably affordable prices. According to their sales literature, they are a "Hosting Assured" company, which means that no outstanding complaints against the company exist at a third party web site that monitors such things, findmyhosting.com. ** From what I could tell, RCTHost.com had a good reputation and had several glowing reviews posted on various sites across the Internet. And they had the right features for the right price. Given that we had just moved households the month before, I was in cheapskate mode. So the hosting plan that offered everything I needed for about a third of what I was paying before looked too good to pass up.
RCTHost.com offers several pricing levels ranging from the Lite "I only need a teeny corner of the Internet" package to the Pro "I'm a programmer and actually want to do something" package. I opted for the Pro package. According to the sales info, this plan includes 50 POP3 accounts, 50 MySQL databases, 50 sub-domains (the ability to have x.mydomain.com where x is the name of some subdirectory under the main domain), 50 add-on domains (the ability to host multiple domains from one account), SMTP access, PHP4.3.1, and a bunch of other things that I really didn't need (web-based email, SpamAssassin, some pre-installed CGI scripts, and more). They also offered support through AIM, which, according to the testimonials on the site, was a great advantage. **** The real clincher was that RCTHost.com offered a 99.9% network uptime guarantee. In their words,
99.9% Network Uptime
Our Data Center has guaranteed 99.9% network uptime to give you peace of mind that your site will be up when you need it.
Having endured several outages with my previous web host (Altaway), I certainly wanted that guarantee! The package did not include shell account access like my Altaway package did, and I would have loved to have been able to have JSP. But I felt I could live without those features, especially given the savings and the uptime guarantee.
Sign me up!
Sign-up was fast and easy and, most important of all, free. According to the RCTHost.com web site, set-up occurs within 12 hours. I think mine took a little longer than that, but because I signed up on the weekend, I wasn't too upset about waiting a few hours longer than I expected.
The one downside of registration is that the user must pay yearly. This made me nervous because, if RCTHost.com was not all I expected, I would be forced to choose between leaving and losing my money or staying and putting up with horrible service. RCTHost.com does include a 14 day money back guarantee, but in order to exercise that, one must do some serious testing on the web site in the first two weeks. I dismissed my concerns though. I knew someone with a site hosted there, so I didn't expect problems that couldn't be detected in two weeks.
When the account is set up, a number of things are already configured for the user. First, the user is provided with cpanel, a utility that is used by a number of web hosts to allow users to quickly and easily administer their web sites without shell access to the host computer. I was quickly able to find everything that I needed and configured my web site and my second "add-on" domain so that I essentially have two web sites using one account. Some CGI scripts were already installed to allow form mail, but I deleted those. The RCTHost.com account setup notification also includes a temporary URL where the user can test the site until the domain has been transferred and/or registered for the account. Unfortunately, I quickly found that I could not test my custom PHP scripts with the temporary setup. Still, I was pretty pleased with my first couple of days with RCTHost.com.
Then something unexpected happened. While in the middle of configuring my new site, I had a family emergency. I left town not even knowing how long I would be gone and with everything up in the air... the site partially configured, one domain pointing to my old Altaway account that was about to expire and email addresses for both my domains not set up completely. I ended up being gone for about a week, and though I logged into the Internet to set up email addresses and change my domain registrations in my absence, I didn't really have time to check anything out until I returned home.
Here comes trouble!
This is when I started seeing the difference in what RCTHost.com advertises and what RCTHost.com delivers.
The first problem that I noticed was with my add-on domain. According to the RCTHost.com documentation and according to what cpanel allows the user to do, I should be able to have mail servers for both of my domains. So I configured user1@mydomain.com and user2@mydomain2.com ***. Then I attempted to use both. No matter what I tried, I was unable to send mail from the second domain. Finally, I filed a trouble ticket through the form provided on the RCTHost.com site. Eight hours later, I received a response:
As far as I can tell from the cpanel forums is that add-on domain email will only forward to the main account email. There seems to be a lot of bugs with add-on domains. We have to wait for a fix to be released from cpanel.
My trouble ticket was then closed... without my consent! I promptly wrote them and complained. I hadn't said that I accepted their response. They did not offer me any alternatives to correct the problem. Their response?
I understand you are upset but like you said we did not create cpanel and do not know when the problem will be fixed. If you want a refund and you are within your guarantee period I would be happy to process it for you if that's what you want. *
The problem here is two-fold. First, I was close to the end of my 14-day evaluation period. There was practically no time to shop around for new hosts and to get everything moved before the trial period expired. Second, they likely knew that! RCTHost.com does, after all, have access to my account information. So I stupidly sucked it up and stayed with them (rather than running as fast and as far as I should have).
I noticed my second problem a couple weeks later. When I attempted to use the "Send->Link by E-mail" feature in Internet Explorer or to forward an email as an attachment from Outlook Express, the email was bounced from my email server with the error:
This message was created automatically by mail delivery software (Exim).
A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:
gracef@yahoo.com
This message has been rejected because it has
a potentially executable attachment "Compare Prices and Read Reviews on Gotcha!: Swindles, Scams, Cons & Rip-Offs at Epinions.com.url"
This form of attachment has been used by
recent viruses or other malware.
If you meant to send this file then please
package it up as a zip file and resend it. *
Again, I filed a trouble ticket. I had checked my system and the page with the link that I was sending and knew that I wasn't trying to do anything illegal or shady. The response I received was snooty at best:
Read the error message, it tells you why it was rejected... *
And again, the ticket was closed without my consent.
Being the grump that I sometimes am, I re-opened the ticket. I explained that I understood the error message, but I did not understand why my mail server was rejecting an email that was free of viruses or damaging executables when I had not configured it to do so. This "feature" was not explained anywhere in the site documentation. I also asked why they kept closing my trouble tickets without my consent. Four days later, I received the response:
It is not saying you are definitely trying to send a virus but what it is saying is that the attachment will not go through because the attachment 'looks' like a possible virus.
Tickets are always closed when we feel the ticket was handled. You are always able to re-open a ticket if you need further help.
I am very sorry for the delay in responding. Perldesk was not showing that this ticket needed to be responded to.
So basically, RCTHost.com is preventing sending of emails with attachments strictly based on the file type of the attachment. Take a virus, put it in a zip file, and send it to someone, and that's ok. Send a URL to a friend, and it's not.
What's more, while I can't forward an email as an attachment, I can still receive emails with all of these "possible virus" attachments. RCTHost.com does not care if MY system is corrupted by malicious emails. They only wish to treat ME like an evil-doer.
The result of this bug raises some rather troubling security issues. Whenever one of the other POP3 users on my account send or automatically forward an email with a link or email attachment, the email bounces. But rather than bouncing to the user that sent the email, it bounces to MY email account! For some reason, RCTHost.com believes that the webmaster deserves to know about the rejection more than the sender of the email. But that's not too secure, as I discovered one day when I received a copy of one of my user's telephone bills in my inbox!
I have also discovered that RCTHost.com has a limit on the number of times the POP servers can be accessed within a one hour time period. According to Ryan, the guy who seems to answer all of the support questions, the limit "is set to 100 per hour which was just raised from 50. I believe it is either per account or per pop3 account but I am not sure. This is a new feature from Cpanel so there is no info on it yet." When I asked how that would affect an account that had all 50 of their POP3 accounts in use, my question was ignored.
An important item to note is reliability or, in my site's case, the lack thereof. Frequently, when I have attempted to get my email, I have received messages that the server was unavailable. This may or may not be related to complete site outages. Sometimes my mail doesn't work when my site does, and sometimes the opposite is true. All of my services have gone down for hours at a time on more than one occasion. On average, my web site is inaccessible for at least an hour a day. The mail server is unavailable even more frequently. Folks who have images and email hosted on my site have been ripping their hair out because of the frequency of the outages.
But it's not MY fault!
When I first started having problems, I looked at the RCTHost.com support forums to see if I was the only one affected. It turned out that I wasn't. It seems that the server on which my site is hosted is a lemon. Many accounts on that server suffer from the same problems: downtime, unreliable mail servers, and slow page loads. People have frequently complained and, to RCTHost.com's credit, they have at least gone through the motions of attempting to correct the problem. All customer interaction seems to be through Ryan (though he recently announced the addition of another support guy who appeared to do absolutely nothing when the server went down over Easter weekend). According to Ryan, all of the problems are due to "compatibility issues" with cpanel.
If you don't have the picture by now, this is the way things work with RCTHost.com. Anything that happens that makes these guys look less than reliable is someone else's fault. Any time anyone asks about the problems on the support problems, if Ryan answers, he replies "We are working on the problem." and "Thank you for your patience!"
In theory, the support forums should be a terrific asset because they allow potential customers to get some idea about what is going on with other customers of RCTHost.com. However, what the potential customer won't see is that posts disappear from the forum, sometimes in large quantities. The page header of the support forum proudly announces that all complaints will be deleted, so the person reading the forum will never get a real picture of the quality of service. Rather, to quote one disgusted user, it looks like "Nothing but happy, happy joy, joy on this here board!!"
A message doesn't even have to be a complaint to disappear on the RCTHost.com support board. Over the weekend of April 26, 2003, a huge number of questions and announcements pertaining to the outages that users have been experiencing (and RCTHost.com's repeated unsuccessful attempts to correct them) disappeared. There was no explanation. One day they were there. The next they weren't.
I've also noticed that there is a tendency for "hard" questions to be ignored. For instance, repeated questions about collecting on the uptime guarantee have been generally ignored. Although the machine on which my site is hosted is down frequently, there has been no mention of refunds for downtime or anything beyond, "Thank you for your patience." And when people ask the same hard question twice ("Why is my server down again?"), other forum users jump on the poor already peeved saps with some rude comment like, "How many times does Ryan have to say they're fixing it for you people to stop flooding the forum?? Get the point, they've been trying to fix it since it started acting up. Just wait." *
My response to that person is that one post or even one post a week does not constitute "flooding". Further, we are paying customers of RCTHost.com, ones that paid for a functional server with a guaranteed amount of uptime that has, to date, NEVER been provided! The server has been "acting up" for me since January. We should not have to wait!
Liar! Liar! Pants on Fire!
So let's talk about the "uptime guarantee" for a minute. One would figure that, with all of the problems that I've had, I should be owed some sort of a refund (as should others who have been equally screwed). Unfortunately, attempts to address the uptime issue on the part of a few brave users have been mostly ignored. And when they haven't been, Ryan has been less than forthcoming.
There was one exception though. Shortly after I started monitoring the support forums, I saw a thread where Ryan was getting pounded about the problems that one of the servers was experiencing. (Happily, I was not the one doing the pounding!) People wanted to know about the uptime guarantee, because the server had certainly not been available 99.9% of the time. Ryan explained that the uptime was based on the performance of all servers and not on the performance of a single server or site. For instance, if server 1, 2, and 4 were operating at 100% and server 3 was operating at 95%, then the average for the network would still exceed the guaranteed amount.
On the morning of April 22, 2003, I noticed something odd. I searched the RCTHost.com site to find the specifics of the guarantee. Guess what? The reference to the guarantee is gone! As was the post where Ryan addressed the uptime guarantee weeks before.
Later that day, Ryan finally addressed the guarantee issue on the support board, claiming
"There is no uptime guarantee and there never has been one."
He made this claim despite the fact that he specifically discussed it once and the fact that the cached version of the standard plan features that could be obtained via a Google search of the site on April 22 showed the guarantee. When called on the discrepancy, he said that the guarantee was for them and not for their users. Basically, they are guaranteed that the facility where they host their servers will be available 99.9% of the time. But there is no guarantee for RCTHost.com's users. Even if I remembered it all wrong (which I'm pretty sure that I haven't) and I am just imagining that post (which I'm sure I'm not), this is shady marketing!
This isn't the worst example of questionable practices at RCTHost.com that I've seen either. On April 15, an announcement appeared on the support forums in which customers were offered a limited time deal. If the customer posted reviews of RCTHost.com at three web hosting review sites, the user would be given a free service upgrade (extra disk space, bandwidth, etc.). The sites were:
FindMyHosting.com
(http://www.findmyhosting.com/showrating.asp?id=5105)
Host Search
(http://www.hostsearch.com/showcomment.asp?Companycode=5282)
Host Pulse
(http://www.hostpulse.com/app/searchf/default.asp?func=ratereview&cid=2156&rate=on#here)
People hopped on this offer left and right, and if you look at those three sites, you will see a number of favorable reviews filed on the dates for which the offer was valid (roughly April 15-17, 2003). On April 17, the call for reviews was modified so that it now appeared to be a general announcement of places where the host can be reviewed. And over the weekend of April 26, 2003, the post disappeared entirely.
This is the main reason I am here, telling you all of this. I have filed reviews on each of those sites that are brief, less informative versions of the problems that I have told you about here. But my reviews (and the reviews of a few other ticked off folks) are out-numbered by favorable reviews that were solicited and paid for by RCTHost.com. If you see a review of the service written around those dates, be wary. You can't know if they're honest or if they were written solely to get a "freebie".
Bottom line... Avoid bottom dwellers!
Some people apparently have had a good experience with RCTHost.com (as I'm told every time I comment on the crappy service on the support forum). I'm not one of them! These guys are dishonest and take no responsibility for their own incompetence.
If you don't believe me, write me, and I'll send you the email addresses of many of my email account holders who, day after day, have to fight to get their email. Hopefully, they will get your email. But remember... with RCTHost.com, there are no guarantees.
* Type-o's in quoted material are not mine! These guys write and type as poorly as they do everything else!
** I will be doing a review on findmyhosting.com later. For now, I'll say to beware of the ratings. They won't tell you everything you need to know.
*** Not my real domains. These are used as examples only.
**** This feature was discontinued unannounced after I signed up.
May 24, 2003
Hurray for Epinions.com!
Ryan from RCTHost.com saw this review and immediately offered a refund on the remainder of my hosting contract. He also said, "I do feel many of your claims on the article are false or absurd fabrications." When I asked him to clarify, he told me the following:
* The problems with forwarding the email is due to the fact that Exim, which is used to direct the mail, rejects it by default.
* The "99% Uptime Guarantee" is that the place where the servers are parked guarantees that their network is up 99% of the time. That doesn't mean that their servers will be up at all.
* The rating sites are perfectly OK with offering rewards for reviews, and since there was no requirement for the reviews to be positive, it was perfectly OK with the rating sites and should therefore be fine with me too.
I have one word for these excuses.
Bull!
The head of the company is responsible for everything! If the tools don't provide the promised functionality, he either needs to pick different tools or do a better job documenting the limitations.
In addition, the mention of the guarantee is still misleading. The promise was "your site will be up when you need it". Mine rarely was!
Finally, I think it's sleazy for the host to offer upgrades for reviews, regardless of what the rating service says. A service upgrade will only be appealing to those who are happy with the service. Why would I want an upgrade if I'm not receiving the service that I purchased? The result will be lots of positive reviews and maybe a few slightly negative reviews. And the people who really think the service stinks won’t bother. Besides, most people likely believed that they wouldn’t really receive the upgrade for filing a negative review. I certainly didn’t!
Whatever.
I now have my refund, and I’m free! I have found a new web host. Despite the fact that my new host uses the same OS, same mail tools, and same control panel, I have not seen any of the limitations that I experienced with RCTHost.com. Go figure.
January 13, 2004
Unbelievable! Today I received an email stating that the credit card that I used to set up the account would be billed for the coming year. I cancelled service EIGHT MONTHS ago!
Recommended:
No
Monthly fees (US$): 8.33
Platform used: Linux
Hosted on Secure Server: No
Database used: MySQL
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Epinions.com ID:
gracef
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Location: Lost in Texas
Reviews written: 206
Trusted by: 312 members
About Me:
Well, bless your heart!
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