Archive for July 3rd, 2009
My Namecheap Hosting Nightmare
Friday, July 3rd, 2009I use Namecheap to host my domains and am very happy with that side of doing business with them. They have a coupon every month, give you a year of private registration with every domain, and I don’t have to worry about my domains being swiped (like I’ve heard of happening with Godaddy).
Just over a year ago, they released a new hosting service that I decided to use to separate some domains from my main server (which I have at Kiosk and their service rocks).
I also used it to host some videos to keep my server from dragging and loading slowly (this was from the days before Amazon S3).
I added a few domains including 3 sales pages and a blog.
Then, the problems started…
First, my sites literally stopped working. The web page and image files were all still there, they just didn’t show or had errors when I would type in the main address. This was all happening during a product release, which I had hosted on my plan with them.
After contacting their support and waiting awhile, they basically said it wasn’t their fault and nothing was wrong.
So, I re-uploaded my files for the main site I had traffic going to and it worked again.
Then, a month later, my hosting plan got suspended.
It turns out that the Wordpress Plugin Podpress has files inside of it with the word “torrent” in them. I was not doing anything wrong and my account hadn’t been hacked. It was just that word being on their server that sent up red flags.
It took over a week to explain to them that I wasn’t doing anything wrong and got my plan reinstated.
I requested compensation for the down time and they replied with a direct “No”.
The final straw came this month. I left every site down a year ago except one. It was also the site that had all of my video files attached to it.
I began getting emails from people that had purchased my Traffic Manifesto that the videos inside were sending them to pages that said my account was suspended for nonpayment.
Now, I can be a touch forgetful at times, so I figured I must have forgotten to pay the bill.
I logged in to their site and tried to pay the bill and it stated that I’d already paid it and was up to date. I went and checked my receipts and they were right.
I immediately transferred all of the domains to my server, uploaded about 4 GB of video files, and switched the DNS there.
I’ve NEVER experienced such rotten service, or a more horrible hosting company in my life. They suck, so don’t ever use them.
As a lesson, don’t sell something if you can’t provide a great product and a solid experience for your customers.
UPDATE - I was contacted by Namecheap’s VP of their hosting and he profusely apologized. He gave me one of their VPS plans for free for a full year to make up for it. That’s the beauty of social media 
customer service namecheap web hosting
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