November 30 2007
TechHosting.com
(6 votes, average: 2.00 out of 5)
Loading ...Techhosting is a new web hosting company, but the people behind it have been a part of the internet ever since Al Gore invented it*.
Features:
- 100 GB storage space
- 1000 GB bandwidth/month
- 7 domains on 1 account
- Unlimited email accounts
- 99.9% uptime
- SSH & SSL
- cPanel & Fantastico scripts
- Cron Job access
- PHP, MySQL, Perl, Ruby (RoR)
- FrontPage Extensions (2000-2003)
- phpMyAdmin
(4.71 out of 5)
Uptime & Reliability – uptime around 97%, which means downtime of nearly 22 hours a month!
Technical Support – when I signed up it was 24/7/365, but now it’s been downgraded to 12/7 (who knows about weekends?). In effect there is not even 10/7 support. Email tickets get you an autoresponder but a real reply can take days; and a solution ? perhaps if you get lucky in a week or five.
The hosting was cheap, and take it from me it Is Cheap. It is worthless. The terms of their contract are so non-commital that I bet nobody ever gets out of the deal. I’m stuck with the plan and am using it for some unimportant testing and may try use it for file storage.
Be warned
TechHosting.com – their name spread quickly after a generous affiliate program had their name on all of the “great deals” and “coupon” websites. The problem is that in my PROFESSIONAL opinion, this place is PROBABLY some kind of a scam.
For 10 years now, I’ve been leasing my own servers and managing them with root access. Finally tired of the maintenance for only ~20 websites, I decided to seek a virtual host, and these guys terms were great, but in all fairness, not “too good to be true”.
Well, the start was bad and it got worse from there.
First off, they include a domain name registration with your pre-payment (which is the only terms of service). After SIX days, my domain name hadn’t been registered my “Spider Sense” told me not to trust my new domain name with these guys and I decided to register it myself with Godaddy rather than through them. Boy am I glad I did. Godaddy had the domain name up and running in less than an HOUR. Let me repeat that – the name was resolving in less than an HOUR. So where was TechHosting for the last 6 days?
Their tech support, as another has noted, is spotty at best. They boast a “1-800 24/7″ Support Line on their webpage. Guess what? It’s a recording to tell you to use their trouble ticket system! The email I sent to them re: “what’s the deal with my free domain?” went unanswered for THREE DAYS. This is in a business where I get sweaty if I don’t get a reply in ONE HOUR… I should say that their chat support DID work the one time I tried it…
Next, I installed 3 of my domains and I have to say that I do like CPanel. But that’s nothing special, but I just wanted to say they got THAT part right…
But then the crap hit the fan. When I “flipped the switch” on one of my domains, the first thing I did was to send out a mailing to a 5,000 member DOUBLE opt-in mailing list (this is NOT spam). The “Fantastico” installed version of PHPList did NOT work out of the box and I had to learn more about that program than I really cared to to finally fix it. PHPList sent out the 5,000 message on a cron job over a period of time. I never had a problem on my own server… BUT…
TechHosting.com uses IP addresses off of the “203.0.0.0″ network which is practically on EVERY spamming IP BLACKLIST there is. MY OWN SERVER (which I still run) even included the 203.x.x.x network as a spammer!! A GIANT chunk of the mailing list went BLACK.
Get that: you will never be able to SEND mail out of a Techhosting.com website to MANY domains due to their (wise) spam protection policies…
But that was just the beginning. It’s not Thursday, ALMOST NOTHING WORKS FOR THE WHOLE DAY. Then it was OK on Friday. Interestingly, the server status shows failures in apache, and mysql AND FTP(?), and SpamD(?), etc., etc., etc! A reverse IP Lookup shows 100′s of other websites sharing my same IP address…
That was Thursday. Friday was OK, actually, but now on Saturday, the server’s been out practically ALL DAY. I’ve used some CRAPPY hosts in my day, etc., and I now realize that the WORST criteria for choosing a host is PRICE….
AVOID TECHHOSTING.COM!!!