FeaturePrice BOOOO

I'd like to advise for a second time against using FeaturePrice. I have posted about them once before.

Don't believe me?
Look at their policies:
We guarantee that your website will be up and running at least 99.9% of the time of any 12-month period. Please note that we have no influence on external issues such as Acts of God, Wars, third-party problems, etc and as such, these incidents are not covered by the uptime guarantee. Incidents that are not covered as well include unplanned and planned server maintenance, server reboots as well as outages which are not directly related to our network, such as main core backbone outages or other related service issues which we have no direct influence on.

See, how they try to be shiesty by saying not covered as well. So, unplanned server maintenance would not be covered. For example, my site was down for nearly 4 hours, and it was supposedly planned maintenance, yet I was never notified ahead of time, that tehre would be server maintenance.

Here is a look at the right to cancel:
Featureprice will be to sole arbiter as to what is constituted a sufficient reason for a refund.

So, they can deny your request at their will. It's not spelled out clearly what rights to cancel are, or are not.

The reason I'm writing again is not because I'm out to get them, but because their server is currently being hacked, and if you read the first post I wrote, someone wrote back in their defense that when their server crashed while he was a customer, they were very accomodating. YEAH, I bet they were. A server crashing?

Found this thread while Googl'ing, perhaps several months too late.

There might be worse Web hosting providers, but this one takes the cake for failing to communicate with its customers. As of 1/3/03, they seemed to have made quite a few changes, and as a result, lucky customers now get ONE -- count 'em, uno -- free support e-mails per day, not the 24/7 tech support as promised. It's still as feeble as before, but if you want to purchase it by incident now, they're happy to provide the same feeble service for a one-time charge.

Calling 'em Fisher-Price versus Featureprice would just be insulting to a very reputable toy company in more than one respect: The toys at least work.

And why are you still with them, if I may? Ironically, one of the worst providers out there, cogent, was one of the only few left standing this weekend, so may be this host has some card they haven't played yet as well.

i'm not with them anymore. but i was stuck in a year contract with them. i'm so glad its over. now im at coolfreepages.com, cuz i no longer am working with the business i was and dont need to pay for webspace.
so far so good at coolfreepages.

abskure WONDER

I registered and paid for a 'premium' account 5 days ago. Since then, my new site has been up for a total of 6 hours in my estimation. I have tried contacting customer support through all possible means but either can't connect or am getting no reply to mails I sent 3 days ago. Pinging my IP results in a time out. FTP times out. I can't access my email. I can't log in to myadmin. I can't access mysql. This all cost me a few hundred dollars. What's going on?

dude, looks like you've too been duped. i wish that you'd have read our posts before you got suckered into paying those freaks a hundred and something dollars. well, needless to say, my uptime didnt seem to suffer very much. but customer service sucked, technical knowledge sucked, and the manual sucked. hopefully your uptime will improve. but dont expect much from those guys. just hope your year will go fast.
DUDE another thing that sucks is that their actual business location is overseas. So, good luck in trying to sue these guys or something.

I'll answer why I'm still with them, though that won't be a long-term stance...

1. I'm in the process of shopping around, so I'm more than open to suggestions.
2. While a lot of folks were "down", as you state this weekend -- FP was certainly no exception -- they've continued to be off-and-on long since everyone else recovered. It's become a pattern.
3. They came recommended, so of course based on the recommendation of someone whose technical opinion I trusted and who used them for nearly a year before I signed my one-year contract with them (reason 4), so I still have about 5 months left. Perhaps another month before I want to completely write it off.
5. I'm going to limp along for now because I'm still shopping and haven't totally tuned everything up on my own sites. Switching is a pain, and I also have a lot of customers who have "some" form of e-mail. Outages are one thing, shutting 'em completely off is entirely another.

So there are reasons to complain while one window-shops, so to speak. And anyone who lived through FP's Halloween Massacre (how a hosting company can claim to provide their services without having redundant spare parts is incerdulous, which is what they did when they lost their router to 'An Act of God', ha ha) perhaps has come to realize that it's not a matter of 'some card they haven't played yet'.

Just my $0.02. Probably that of a lot of folks.

A couple of folks here recently ran a guy through the ringer about a web hosting offer. One point that was made by Hero Zzyzzx was the concern over the fellow's nationality. You have to watch out for hosts that are hosting from outside your country, because you'll often find yourself with little or no recourse if / when things fall apart.

This fellow came out of it clean, however, some of the folks that pass through here, and a lot of the folks you'll come across on the web won't. Live and learn is part of it, the other part is doing some heavy research before you commit to anything - especially anything long term. Sorry to hear you got screwed on that deal - hope you can work it out