Inept transition, just horrid

I've been with Webhost4Life for years and have been very satisfied. Little downtime, sites worked, and support, the few times needed, was responsive.

It looks like WH4L sold out to another company, and the operations have moved from CA to MA. I was given notice of the transition and hoped all would be well. My sites are pretty vanilla, with just some dynamic database driven ASP pages here and there.

The transition of my sites was inept and incomplete. My dynamic pages were down for almost two weeks. First, they totally failed to move the databases. Duh! Isn't that a KEY part of a transition! When I brought this to their attention, they told me to log into the old system's control panel and do a data dump BUT COULDN'T TELL ME THE URL TO REACH THE OLD CONTROL PANEL! Then they told me to call the old support number, where I was on hold for 30 minutes before giving up. Finally, I found a reference to something called a transition kiosk where I could go to the old control panel and make my own SQL Server backup. (Don't you think they could have done this.)

So I ftp them the backup to do a restore into the new database. But the dynamic pages still don't work, because the connection string they indicated in their less-than-comprehensive Knowledge Base didn't work. Their tech support took over a week to work out what the correct connection string should be. (It required a named instance, and I even said in one email 'I think the problem is I need to know my named instance'.)

I think part of the issue is that the old WH4L was a heavily Microsoft/.Net shop, and the new WH4L is primarily a php shop, with MS as an afterthought.

Overall, this transition has been a horrid experience, and I only shudder to think about what it's been like for people with complex, heavily database driven sites.

And from WH4L? Not a peep of an apology, or an offer of, say, a month of free hosting. Not that I give a damn about the money, it's just the gesture would be nice.