HostICan : HostICan Reviews : A nightmare.

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I started using HostICan on the 21st of December, 2007. At first, I was quite pleased with the service. There were a few outages and Internal Server Errors, but they were always explained and dealt with when I sent a support ticket. I was also pleased with the quick responses to these support tickets.

Until the 7th of January. On that day, the first high-load error came. I was quite surprised - traffic on my site had actually dropped by 75% since the first few days that it was up.
I was told that I was allowed to use up to 25% of the system's resources for up to 60 seconds, and I was advised to check my CPU logs to see what was causing the problem.

I found that there were a few scripts that used 0.2 seconds of CPU time every time they were run. At the times the site was taken down, they added up to about 2.5 seconds per minute. I didn't see how this constituted overusing the CPU for more than 60 seconds, but nevertheless I did my best that day to reduce this figure. I turned off gzip compression, as well as the attachment system and search indexing. The attachment system accounted for the majority of the CPU load at the time, according to the logs I was told to access. The total CPU load was cut in half. But the errors kept coming, apparently at random. My site was incapacitated for extended periods of time every day.

I won't bore you with the rest of the details, but suffice it to say that the technical support staff wasn't helpful in the least. I was told to "check the logs" a hundred times over, but these did not shed any light on the issue: the logs clearly said that I was not breaking the resource limit.

After talking to about a dozen tech-support people of varying degrees of incompetence, they started ignoring my support tickets. The ticketing system confirmed that they'd received my messages, but they just didn't respond. I tried their live-support chat, but after staring at "Your chat session will start shortly." for 15 minutes and retrying several times, I gave up.

At this point I decided to check out HostICan's forums. What I found there was not encouraging: there were several dozen other people experiencing the same technical problem, and also being ignored by the support department. The support staff on the forums was pretty much the same as the people I dealt with before: they either ignored you completely, or gave completely unsatisfactory replies, usually telling you that you were abusing their systems and needed to check the logs.

I raised the fact that I was using a barebone phpBB installation with only 5-15 users online when the site was taken down, while the staff on the forum said that the hosting plan I was on should be able to handle over 100 online users on this forum software. They could not explain this, but did maintain that it was my fault and it wasn't their problem.

I also raised the fact that my site could be brought down by something as trivial as creating a database backup from HostICan's own cPanel. I was told that this was not normal behaviour and it would be investigated. Despite asking for updates about the situation several times, I never heard back from them about this.

I further mentioned that the logs confirmed that I had not broken the resource limits. This went ignored.

About 10 other dissatisfied customers joined me in suggesting that there was something wrong with the monitoring software. The response was invariably something along the lines of "There is nothing wrong with our systems" or "You would have these problems at any host".

In the end, the messages of the people who had been complaining (over 350 posts) were deleted from the forum in an obvious attempt to cover this all up before any prospective customers read them.

To summarise:
- My site kept getting taken down multiple times a day for no apparent reason.
- Support staff was very unskilled, both technically and in terms of speaking English.
- Support staff did not listen to my questions. Instead, they kept repeating their unhelpful default response.
- Support staff ignored my support tickets and live-support chat requests.
- Despite a lot of people complaining (almost 30 at my last count before I was banned from the support forums), no action was taken to solve the problem, which was clearly on the host's side, not the customers'.
- Support staff attempts to cover up customers' problems by deleting complaints, while leaving posts that praise the company.

Fortunately, unlike most of the people who were complaining, I was still within my 30-day refund term. After several weeks of frustration, I finally decided to leave HostICan and find a better host. I retrieved a backup, got my refund and transferred my forum to DreamHost.

But my troubles were not yet over: for some reason, after all of the files had been moved over and there was no doubt that people were correctly being pointed to the new host, my visitors were getting the HostICan high-load error. The same one that had caused all of these problems. It appeared 100% of the time, despite the site now being located at DreamHost.

After 6 frustrating hours of trying to find out what was wrong, I found it: an invisible file called .htaccess that redirected every one of my visitors to HostICan's infamous error page. A parting gift from the tech-support people. The file's timestamp in the backup confirmed that they edited it while the backup was in progress, just before they disabled my hosting.

I thought I'd seen the worst of HostICan (bad hosting, bad service, being ignored), but this took the cake: a childish prank. Revenge on their ex-customer.

Since I removed this file, my forum has been running perfectly. Contrary to what HostICan's support people told me would happen, I am not experiencing any kind of resource problem at my new host. In fact, the site is noticeably more responsive, despite the fact that I've re-enabled all of the supposedly resource-intensive features they got me to remove.

Hosting with HostICan has been an absolute nightmare. The service was the worst I have ever experienced from any host, and if you are thinking of using it, I strongly urge you to reconsider.

Unless you enjoy having your site taken down multiple times a day and being ignored by support people, this is not a company you'll want to entrust your money or your website to. A more accurate name for this company would be HostICan't.

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