For about a year now my site, including this blog, has been hosted with Weycrest. During that time, their service has really, really sucked.
First, there is the down-time. For months my site would randomly go offline for a few hours and then come back. Messages to tech support via the ticketing system or direct email were always ignored. Things got really bad when I tried to set up automatic backups in WordPress, which would take the site down at the time of the backup for about an hour. Even with backups disabled, a few hours of downtime a week was not uncommon, and it was often during peek times.
Even when the site was up, speeds were pretty poor, especially PHP stuff like the blog.
I have already mentioned that the support staff just tend to ignore you. Eventually I did get a reply, when a misconfiguration caused my mailbox to grow to over 900MB. I don’t actually use the Weycrest mailbox, I just have a re-direct, but it turns out that if you don’t specifically disable the inbox then copies of all re-directed messages end up in it. Eventually they finally responded to an email about this and I was able to fix it. Their response was by no means quick though.
On the subject of configuration, the Plesk control panel they picked is crap. It’s slow, it takes ages to navigate and the layout is far from helpful or logical.
The final straw came when my email was down for a day, as near as I can tell. I send repeated messages to Weycrest, but got no response, so decided to move to kNET Hosting. More on them in a moment. While I was moving all my stuff over, Weycrest finally responded. The email was a bit surprising:
Paul
We will no longer provide support for email forwarding. If it works, fine, it doesn’t well its hard luck I’m afraid.
From now its case of “your mileage will vary” and “use at your own risk” as we cannot guarantee mail delivery to every provider in the world.
This madness has gone on long enough, and its getting kind of ridiculous what we are expected support for £14.99 per year and provide the web hosting as well! We spend more time resolving mail issues than anything else.
It also highly likely that by the time your account comes up for renewal, email will require an additional support package costing at least £15.00 per annum.
Sorry, but as it stands, its just not commercially viable.
Easiest solution for the time being is for you to switch all your email hosting over to Gmail (ie Google apps for your domain) rather than forwarding to it and use your domain with Google. This can be done by adjusting the the DNS settings in Plesk.
Failing that we are happy to cancel on a pro-rata basis, however you have only another month or so left to run.
Best Regards
Paul Lee
Weycrest.Com Limited
So, they basically gave up. What worries me is that the usual way this works is you provide an expensive but reliable service for businesses. You then sell off some excess capacity as cheaper hosting plans, with limits to prevent them ever interfering with your business customer’s service. The cheaper accounts benefit from using the same high reliability services are the business guys, and you get the benefit of extra income and maybe even some early warning of any potential problems (since you have a more diverse set of users, more people looking at things etc). We do something similar with tech support systems where I work, and it’s a good system.
Needless to say I have cancelled my account and am waiting for a refund.
Now, on to kNET. I paid by PayPal (should have used card, PayPal fees are ridiculous, sorry guys, next time) and a human being verified and set up my account within half an hour. I moved everything over, changed the DNS settings and waiting. Small panic when the MX records changed but I was still not getting test emails. kNET responded within 5 minutes, at around 21:30 in the evening. That’s what I call tech support.
The move has gone smoothly. kNET use cPanel, which is a lot better than Plesk. Their server seems fast and reliable. It’s early days, but fingers crossed I have found a good hosting company.
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