zackisamazing.com

Oh where do I start? To be quite honest, I’m really not all that sure. So I’ll just give a go at it.

I’ve been hosting websites for quite some time. Some have been mine, some have been friends of mine, and others for profit. I wasn’t getting rich by anymeans, but it sure wasn’t hurting my pocketbook. It got to the point where I was hosting more site’s than my little dbwired shared server could handle. After all, when I started hosting sites, it was more just for fun than anything else.

So I started looking. All I knew what that I needed something with quite a bit of power, a semi-decent sized harddrive, and I new that I wanted to go LAMP. I’ve always been more comfortable with Linus hosting my things than Bill. So I started where most people start when they need something. Google.

After Googleing for a few hours I stumbled across a pretty decent, affordable looking company. Enter ValueWeb.

I should have known what I was getting into when the name of the company has “Value” involved, but their hosting plans looked reasonable, they had a 99% uptime guarantee, and their website wasn’t god-awful. So I called them. Right away someone answered the phone. No machines, No press 1 for English, just “Hello, How can I help you?”

Alright, off to a great start. I tell them what I’m looking for, and what I do. I tell them that a few of my friends are webdesigners, and we want to be able to host the sites as part of the service. The salesman assures me that he has exactly the thing for me, and points me to their dedicated servers. “If you’re serious about reselling, you’re going to have to be on a dedicated server,” he told me. I told him I wasn’t sure that I was going to need that much power all to myself, but he kept on insisting that I was going need all that. After around an hour on the phone he sold me the v100 server.

I really didn’t want to spend $100 a month, but since “This is the only way you’ll be able to run php scripts, and host SQL servers,” I went ahead and agreed. I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking, but I was just tired of fighting on the phone with this sales guy, and justified it by telling myself I can always run some slick IRC bot or something on it, if the overcrowded hosting business doesn’t take off.

I get my 3 dozen varying confirmation e-mails and I’m off and hosting. One by one I get the domains and sites transfered to their new home. And things were fine, for a while…

About 6 months in is where things started to go extremely bad. On a June Morning, I went to login to ValueWeb’s (shoddy) control panel, and the server wasn’t responding. I called support and was informed that their DNS servers wern’t responding for somereason, but they “had a tech on it.” Hmm. That’s seems like a reasonable problem. So I waited.. and waited.. and waited, for 24 hours actually, so the next morning I called back, And instead of a friendly “Hello,” I receive a recorded message:

ValueWeb’s DNS servers are currently down. Please call back later. *click*

Interesting. Now I’m starting to wonder how long my server has to be down before my aforementioned 99% uptime guarantee kicked it. So I called the customer service department, and was informed that ValueWeb (now an Affinity company, whatever the hell that is) has changed there policies and that to be eligable for the 99% uptime guarantee to be effective, I must spend an additional $45/mo. on a Value Support Plan. This is also when I found out that I no longer get free technical support like I was originally sold.

About 3 days later and the DNS servers come to life once more. I said, maybe this whole issue was a fluke, and that I can just live happily ever after with a problem-free server. Oh how I was wrong.

About 8 weeks went by problem-free, and then hell started breaking loose on my poor little box. First, connectivity was intermittent. I could sometimes login, sometimes not, sites were up and down, and back and forth and this and that. Finally, I had to call. I told them about the problems and they said I probably just needed a reboot. So they went off to reboot that old server of mine, and low-and-behold, it still didn’t work. So they decided to, WITHOUT MY APPROVAL, charge my creditcard for a $300 “hardware diagnostic.” Which apparently led them to a bad NIC.

Keep in mind I NEVER authorized anything but the reboot.

When they discovered the naughty network interface card, they decided that they would also charge a $900 (gold plated/diamond encrusted?) network card, and a $1500 “server service fee” to my credit card. This is when I go ballistic. I called customer service foaming at the mouth and demanded that I be reimbursed for these charges. I told them I don’t care about company policy, I want my money back, and I was at least getting back this month’s $100.

Finally ValueWeb agreed to give my $2400 back, but they best they could do is reduce my monthly payment to $69 for now on. While I wasn’t not completely satisfied with this strange request, I skeptically approved it. Sure, I’ll have my hundred bucks back in a few months.

At this point I’m sure you’re all wondering why the hell I stayed with ValueWeb this far, and the answer is lazyness. Have you ever tried to move 29 sites from one site to another? Ugh.

When I checked my credit card the next month I was surprised to find that they actually did refund my money, and knock me down to $69/mo. Great I said, now we’ve finally got all that crap behind us, I can get on with servin’ sites.

Nope. It can’t just end like that. About 3 months after this incident, the harddrive in the server died. Again, we went through the same issues as with the NIC. Got it resolved, and I set my sights on moving. But I needed some time, as I’m a full time student, work a full time job, and have a full time girlfriend.

So this brings us up to March 09, 2007. Which is the date that 207.234.224.12 started dying daily. DAILY. Some service of theirs which was required to connect to their ass backwords was crashing, leaving my server, and my customers high and dry. Every day I’d called, give them my member number, and tell them I need a reboot. At least this “reboot service” was free. At least for a week. Each time I called I explained the issue, and ask them if they would help me fix it. They told me since I wasn’t a member of ValueWeb Value Support, that it would cost me $300 for them to look into it. After 2 weeks of a daily reboot, I said fine, I’ll pay the 3 bills, I just need a working server untill I can find a place to move to.

Sure enough they charge my credit card for $1800. $300 “investigation service” and a $1500 “resolution service.” Again, I blew out the microphone on my cell phone screaming at customer services, then the manager (who’s name I never did catch.) Finally the charge was dropped to a lesser evil of $750 dollars, and funny how this was the first month my service fee jumped back to $100. Did I mention that they didn’t fix the issue. It still crashed daily.

This is where the customer service associate informed me that since I was using a dedicated service, I should know how to fix these issues myself, and that I if i didn’t want to “play network admin” I should have gone with a shared server. I reminded him that I tried to get a shared server but their own dumbass sales man told me I had to have the dedicated box.

I’ve since moved to DreamHost and never looked back, but I just needed to inform everyone how terrible and awful of a company ValueWeb has been to work with. I’m still fighting them for almost $1k in unauthorized charges.

I’ll leave you with the last command I ran on 207.234.224.12

Last login: Fri Apr 13 18:32:12 on ttyp1
Welcome to Darwin!
Z4X0Rmacbook:~ Zack$ ssh root@207.234.224.12
root@207.234.224.12’s password:
Last login: Fri Apr 13 15:06:24 2007 from 69.128.52.205
[root@dedicated ~]# cd /
[root@dedicated /]# rm -drf *
[root@dedicated /]# ls
-bash: ls: command not found