I wanted to chime in on this thread (luckily we're not "featured" in it yet). The worst experience isn't technically possible because it's a superlative term. To have the worst experience would mean to have to try every reseller hosting company out there and then decide. Instead, you can have a "terrible" or "bad" experience.

If you wanted to use the term "worst", it would have to be in the context of several reseller hosting companies that you've tried and found one in particular that was the "worst of the bunch".

The hosting companies featured here are some quite large companies (larger than us, at least) that have several hundred to thousand customers. It gets hard to pay special and personal attention when that happens; you unfortunately become a customer "number" then a customer.

Roj

Yes, Roj, that is technically correct. I really do think that the OP was speaking in the context you mention in your message (worst reseller experience you've had). I think this is a valid topic and many facts about how certain hosts operate can come to light. Any hearsay and nit-picking, or obvious trashing all become apparent anyway.

My worst reseller experience was with DDI Hosting. I had an account just to have multiple accounts for myself and gave some space away to a friend but I'm sure that friend was calling me an enemy for a while hehe. The were the worst! Oops, I mean they were *my* worst experience

P.S. - Roj, you usually get good reviews so I didn't expect to see you featured here so don't get paranoid haha.

Ah DDI...poor Larry.

But yes, it's true that, for the most part, we've had overall good reviews. To be honest, I can already think of a few ex-customers that had their worst experience with us although you could probably chalk it up to miscommunication of some type. I honestly believe that most hosting companies are out there to help and the ones that deserve a "worst" title would be the ones that are just sitting around trying to sit back on a recliner, milk money, and not really care for their customers.

9 out of 10 hosting companies start with the vision but the ones that "get it" are the ones that switch into customer satisfaction mode because they know that's what counts.

Roj

That might not be what people who hosted clients with his company might say. Luckily I was not one of those! Still wouldn't say "poor Larry" - it was always his decision to tank the company.

Anyway, I guess in your case (and most if not all others!) you can't please all the people all the time. There will always be some miscommunication, et al. A lot of it is how you handle the tough issues and that helps you shine. Just saw Gazzin getting beat up on another forum and somebody else (maybe also on here?) remarked how well they were standing up to the "challenge".

Our worst experience was with FastHosts. Their policies are simply unreasonable and they suspend accounts without warning for posting a picture of bart simpson or luke skywalker. Then they ignore you and you are stuch with no explaination for the end user

Sounds like a bad experience. It gets worst! I have some bottom of the barrel experiences to share. But first! Members try and top what I have! :p

sounds like a few of you guys have had some problems, we should get the mods to make a forum listing bad experiences with companies... you could call it the: bad reseller host vault.. or something lol

In the UK it has too be fasthost i hate them i use them but i wont be after this year finishses worst host ive come across so far

did you check in forums before you went ahead and purchased hosting from them?

I was a reseller way to long, but it appeared to be cost effective for my small business, but after my experience last year with (a host in Romania) I decided to become a dedicated host.

Everything was great and the owner was available when everything was working. Then we had a failure, and I mean, wiped out, and he was no where to be found, his phone got shut off.

My partner at the time went and found some more info out as this guy through IM gave him authroization to call the host. He was so far behind in payments and everything that he paid $100 to get ther server turned back on so we could get our data off the servers.

I have been a dedicated host since!

WOW, now thats pretty bad. It is so bad, I feel better about my day Thanks for that!

wow that is the nightmare we all fear. How many people reeeeelly back up as often as they should?

If I could only remember the bad experiences I had reseller wise. As far as dedicated servers are concerned I had a number of bad experiences with ev1. They definitely use the cheapest hardware in there equipment. My server would lock up out of the blue even when the server load was not high! It took them several weeks to finally pay attention to this problem and admit it was the hardware.

Well, if we are going to talk about Dedicated Servers, I got a story for that one as well (and you guys thought my reseller experience was bad.)

I went in on a dedicated server with a collegue of mine shortly after the Reseller Account from Romania went down the toilet. We thought this was the life for us, we had much more control than ever before and it was a really great learning experience. The best part (though there have been many more since) was getting my first cPanel customer who wanted to move to us and I was able to restore the backup on my own and not wait for the host to do it! That was a great time saver on bringing the new client up with a new host.

So, in November everything goes to the dogs. The Dedicated Server company is doing a routine upgrade, we had outages and slow throughput for over 48 hours and they did not update us appropriately. I am sure with the amount of calls they were getting we were getting updated within a good time frame to them, just not to each individual customer.

They made it right by e-mailing the billing dept (results cannot be disclosed due to TOS and AUP), but they made right by there own outage and I felt they explained themselves well.

Then came December 27, 2005! What a day to remember! I take on a new customer who is on a cPanel server, however running a newer version of PHP and his site will not work. I was doing some investigating and that also included contacting the server company about an upgrade of the PHP. Mind you, I asked for info, how long, what will change, any other adverse effects should I be aware of.....No Reply! But MySQL went down!

An hour later I get a reply that the upgrade was done. Well, I thought, OK, if everything is working, great! It's done. So, off to check my clients sites. Not a one was working! I tried to explain it to them, but they said everything was fine......OK, but according to my clients the DB and Usernames for their DBs are empty, and I can confirm they were.

They began working on the server.....not sure how many tiny hits and MySQL dropouts (found that some sites did work).

Finally, 20 hours later they downgraded MySQL and said there was a bug that prevented them from loading it. (Well alrighty, that is OK, with exception I NEVER AKSED THEM TO LOAD IT.)

Then I notice an additional problem, and then so do my clients, no e-mail! I open a ticket....no real results, but they managed to break cPanel as well. No client could log into cPanel! They tell me they escalated to cPanel, this was Dec. 29, 2005.

I called their Toll Free # for support, always answered, but never a solution nor would they call cPanel to check on the status of their tkt. I called the Admin Extenstion three times. Got a VM recording for Judy twice, NO CALLBACK. January 4, 2006, call admin again, get a live voice, explain my woes, transfers me to an extension that has the extenstion # automated in the vm, you know what that means! Nobody sits there. No call back again!

January 5, 2006 - Purchased new dedicated server, moved all accounts! Very Happy with new provider.

Be Aware of AllManaged.com - They provide their clients zero support in their greatest times of need. All calls go through Sago Networks who tell you they will refer it back over to the AM side! Please! This is a real buyer beware!

Quite unfortunate that you have these experiences, but I am sure they definitely taught you a few things about how the hosting industry can be. A number of these companies don't know what they are doing but continue to promise the world to there clients.