Love WordPress, Hate Recommended AN Hosting aka Midphase
What do you do when a vendor you love makes a bad recommendation, and continues to make a bad recommendation despite being notified with evidence that the promotion is no longer warranted?
We TechTalk folk love WordPress. We love its themes. We love its plugins. We love its speed. We love its search engine friendliness. We love the price. We even love the FIRST recommended host on its list.
Sadly, we have to report that #2 on that is exactly that, “number 2″, in all its euphemistic scatological badness (list at right).
We at TechTalk routinely work with websites spread among many hosts. In the case of one set of domains, we thought we’d try AN Hosting, due to it’s being listed second on WordPress’ list of preferred web hosts. (see screen at right)
DISCLAIMER: TechTalk, for the record, is hosted on BlueHost. Our experience with hosts is that they can be great one year and turn bad a year later, so distributing websites among multiple hosts is a precaution that can facilitate restoring
Our experience with AN Hosting (see their banner, corrected by us for accuracy, at right) for the last year has been nothing short of abysmal, and considerably worse since it was taken over by Midphase a few months ago.
The account has 6 domains. An advertising campaign was run on one of them so the traffic spiked from 3,000 to 15,000 visitors a day. Apparently, this exceeded unpublished limits. Instead of charging us a fee to handle the extra traffic, we were greeted on all six domains with a screen stating THIS ACCOUNT HAS BEEN SUSPENDED.
No phone call. We get to work the next morning with an email that the sites have been shut off and as we’re in Los Angeles, that means the east coast hasn’t been able to see ANY of those sites for the better part of half a day. No ability to FTP. Complete shut-down while and advertising campaign is running… pointing people to a dead domain.
A couple more points…
- 24/7 phone/e-mail support. If you believe this, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Kansas to sell you.
- CHAT. AN Hosting’s version of Liveperson crashes both FireFox and MSIE and does some strange things to my keyboard, randomly transposing characters on other tabbed windows.
Got a hosting horror story? Do tell in the comments.
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June 9th, 2007 at 2:24 am
I saw this post and had to jump in. Anhosting.com and Midphase.com have got to be the most incompetent and unprofessional colo company around. We also also hit their bandwidth limits when our shared server site started to grow. They shut our sites down with no forewarning. stupid people. had a chance to upsell us to a bigger server, instead they yanked our chains. gotta hate them. a bunch of russians with no concept of business or professionalism.
if you have a mission critical hosting or colocation need skip midphase and anhosting.
June 11th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
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September 8th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
This is my first post
just saying HI
You guys rock
October 11th, 2007 at 7:44 am
How ironic,
In your attempt to defame anhosting, i see an anhosting google adsense banner. Anyway, I am fed up with them. I just moved my blog from Blogger to Wordpress and UNFORTUNATELY chose anhosting.
First I get charged two times on my credit card! After resolving that issue, I get the wrong dns servers. So, my website was virtually inaccessible for a day or two. And then the FTP doesnt work for no good reason.
And just when I thought I had everything settled, today i get a message on my site saying that my account has been SUSPENDED for no good damn reason. I didnt have any increase in traffic whatsoever. And they didnt even bother to send an email to me with the reason for being suspended!
Stay clear of ANHOSTING. I will move my blog to BLUEHOST soon.