Hosting. Dedicated and otherwise.

Shared Hosting

I recently found site5's $5 deal which almost convinced me to become one of their customers. When they doubled the bandwidth and storage space I jumped on board. It comes with 110GB of rsync-able storage space and 5TB of bandwidth per month. You can host up to 110 domain names using named virtual hosts. The control panel is wicked powerful while still being easy to understand.

For $120 for two years I was skeptical that they were just selling off as many accounts as possible before going out of business. So far they have been awesome and their email tech support is the dogs bullocks.

Dedicated Hosting

Some of my other bandwidth intensive projects were choking our broadband connection at home so I started looking for a dedicated server a week after site5 temporarily disabled my account. After reading their ToS and a few cordial emails they enabled it again.

The Good
I found a few different providers with different disk sizes and bandwidth offerings but the one that stood out was the $49/mo server from Aplus.net which I decided upon only after initiating an order with iWeb Technologies.

The Bad
iWeb Technologies is a Montreal based company which offers a server with almost double the specs for only $20 more a month. I originally initiated an order with iWeb before I found the $49/mo server from Aplus. I immediately put in a request to cancel my order and then received two different introduction emails from my new account manager. I sent 3 emails requesting that he cancel my order.

Finally 7 days later someone from their billing department sent me an email explaining that I had to send them a photocopy of my credit card and sign some documents for them to issue me a refund. This was not a request that I felt comfortable complying with and I sent a reply to the billing agent and copied my account manager, the founders, and iWeb's lawyer.

9 days later I received an email from my account manager requesting me to sign and fax in contracts before they could provision the server. I responded and CCd every email address I could find for iWeb:

I have just escalated from irate to livid. I have sent you 4 requests
to cancel this order and refund my money. The last request was copied
to the founders and iWeb's lawyer.

I don't want to hear from anyone else from a different department. If
my money is not refunded by Tuesday June 12th of 2007 at the start of
business I will begin the process of disputing the charge with my
credit card company and I will lodge a complaint against iWeb with the
Better Business Bureau of Montreal http://www.bbb-bec.com/ and with
the bank that provides iWeb's merchant account.

Gardner

They encouraged me to dispute the charges if I refused to send in a photocopy of my credit card. A claims officer from my bank will be contacting me shortly to gather details about the dispute.

Long story short: I'm with Aplus. iWeb pissed me off. Site5 kicks ass!