ACENET.com

Our primary site is 4nclient-translators.co.uk.
We need a reliable hosting service to keep this
site up 24 hours / 7 days a week. We chose
Acenet.com based on price & features. I
require PHP, POP3 mail, SSL, FTP access,
and access to raw log files. Acenet has it all
and at a good price.

After almost two years using Acenet, we have
now decided to renew our subscription. The
technical problem in our accounts department
recently was, as I am now absolutely
convinced, a chance to prove their ability to
deliver outstanding customer services to
loyal customers.

Their response on a Saturday was most
flexible, overall absolutely brilliant.."Please
be aware that our sales hours are from 9am
to 5pm EDT Monday through Friday. This is
why you have not received a response to
ticket IOL-3*** which is currently located
in the sales and billing department. This is
why you will want to submit a ticket to
technical support if you require urgent
assistance during non sales hours. I have
pushed back your hosting package's
renewal date to April 18th. You're all set.
I'm going to post back to your tickets in
the sales and billing departments as well
so that they know this has already been
taken care of. If you have any further
questions or concerns, please let me
know. Sean"

The site has been up everytime I have
checked. I have not had any issues with
down time. I did have one service issue,
on our POP account, in regard to a
problem with downloading emails. I
opened a service request. I was
impressed with the result. I had a very
reasonable response time. They had
drive issues and I was told that their
drive would enter a read-only state
meaning that no accounts could upload
files. Their drive was damaged and
beyond recovery. They replaced the
drive, reloaded the operating system
and re-installed all software and started
the process of restoring the data from
backup. I was given an approximate
time frame of 8-10 hours but.. they
fixed the problem within not even five
hours.

That was twelve months ago.
Meanwhile, Acenet has upgraded their
system, replacing their server with a
brand new server - featuring the latest
and greatest technologies (read on here).
.. and whow a smooth upgrade..
copying several thousand customer date
to the new server.. in just under five days.

Service responses are the primary
reason we have switched providers in
the past. The hosts seem to remain up
and running well for the most part,
however, they do things like upgrade
systems that break scripts (e.g. new
versions of PHP), then have terrible
response times, or clueless support
personal, I get upset and recommend
a move to a new provider.

HOST EXCELLENCE


Our primary site for ALFAS 4N
CLIENT to support our customers with
GoGlobal points is vip-members.net.
We need a reliable hosting service to keep this
site up 24 hours / 7 days a week.

When we found this host, we thought 'wow
that's cheap,' and considering we're in the uk,
with the current exchange rate....even better!
However this is a crock of sh*t. We have
one week ago written to host excellence
and asked what is the problem with our
websites. Both or our domains have been
suspended and visitors see the following
notice when they try to access our website:

"Account for domain www.vip-members.net
has been suspended"

"Account for domain
www.vipbusinessdirectory.com has been
suspended."

This years' renewal charge due date for three
of our websites was five minutes overdue (not
joking, as a webmaster I am used to watch
out for downtimes with our webservers.) and
Host Excellence suspended the accounts
whereas Acenet Inc went out of their way
to help by rolling back the invoice
for another two weeks, no question asked.
Both of our hosting packages became due and
we informed their billing departments about a
technical problem in our accounts department
Couldn't have been worse. Fresh from
preparing the businessplan, ALFAS should
have been gaining and impressing potential
investors.

.....their response.."we have investigated issue
and discovered, that we unfortunately cannot
proceed with postponing of your account's
expiry date. This procedure is possible only
when the account is now suspended yet. You
have placed this ticket on Apr-08-2008 and
your account has been suspended on
Apr-07-2008. Unfortunately you were one
day late. I regret, but we cannot assist you
with this. But though your account is not
active, we will keep all its data within 30
days after account's expiration. Thank you
for your understanding."

I asked their technical support manager to
replace the notice "Account for domain
www.vip.... has been suspended" by a
investor friendly notice which I defined
for them but . ... there was no
reply.

This is not good enough i replied by writing
to the CEO, Mr Fathi Said ...is there any
assistance or even an apology as we
are loosing business because of your lack
of a reasonable customer satisfaction policy?

There was again NO REPLY

My advise to anyone reading this review do
not use Host Excellence. I'm sure you can
find a better hosting company then this one.
We'll be changing soon.

The Webmaster