Webhosting Reviews

Webhosting Review – SpaceForHost.com
Website: www.spaceforhost.com
Pros:
– Server speed and uptime is excellent (when accessed from the US)
– Really reasonably priced (starts at $8 per year!)
Cons:
– Customer support is almost NIL
– Support tickets are never looked into
– Only way to get in contact with them is via Yahoo messenger
Review:
I have been wanting to write this review for quite some time. But I did not want to write as long our domain was under their control. I have recently managed to transfer the domain name to GoDaddy and so with a sigh of relief, I am writing this review.
The Timeline is given below:
– Feb 2002: Bought SpaceForHost 10mb Windows 2000 webspace ($8) + domain name ($7)
– Feb 2002 to Dec 2002: Site is running great.
– Dec 2002: Site becomes unavailable for about 10 days. No response to my emails to customer support. An email is received a couple of days later with username and password on the new server. The old data is completely gone! It seems they changed their reseller hosting provider. But they did not inform us at all. Luckily I had backed up all the website data a couple of days back.
– Dec 2003: I should have realized by now that it was going to happen again. They have shifted their servers again and this time I had not backed up the data for the past one month :(. Our’s is an alumni database website and so users update frequently. Lost about 15 days of data. Also, I had backed up the database but not the code for the website 🙁 :(. The code I could find right then was about 6 months old. Had a tough time searching my backup CDs for the more recent code.
– Jan 2004: Realized that on the last renewal, they had renewed the domain name but had changed the domain registrant information to theirs!!! Even the admin email was changed to theirs. So I could not transfer the domain even if I wished to!
– Jan 2004 to April 2004: Sent them almost 20 emails, created at least 10 support tickets but absolutely NO response from them. I am not even sure if they check their email properly or not.
– April 2004: Decided to contact them via Yahoo Messenger. This time they responded. But it took about 15 chats (over a period of two and a half months) to get things corrected.
– June 2004: Whois records updated. The first thing I did after that was to transfer the domain from Directi to GoDaddy. Took some time since the domain was a .org one.
Bottom Line:
– The best approach is to register the domain with a registrar (recommended: GoDaddy in USA or Net4Domains in India) and then host with SpaceForHost.
– Back up your entire website at least once every month. SpaceForHost has a bad habit of shifting their servers without moving the data and without informing the customer in advance! Happened to us twice – once in Dec 2002 and again in Dec 2003.
– Don’t expect much customer support from them.