Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Never trust 000webhost.com or hosting24.com

I used to post here. After a while, I realized that as a photographer it was better for me to have a photoblog, so I decided to have two sites: a photoblog (www.twistedeye.com.ar) and a blog (www.backinthemood.com.ar).

I've researched a long time, and decided to use Pixelpost as the photoblog software, and Wordpress for the blog. Since I was unsure of my capacity to setup both sites, I decided to go forward with a free web hosting solution, and after a while I decided to go with 000webhost, basically because of their offered capacity.

I've created both sites in a few days, but after some weeks it was clear that I was more into updating my photoblog than my blog.

I was not a regular person, posting every day, but I had my periods, and in one year I posted around 85 pictures. That's a lot of work. In the meantime, I registered my site on photoblogs.org, coolphotoblohs, photos.vfxy.com, etc., so I started to have a lot of visits.

In the last month only I had more than 100 different visitors per day (as per Google Analytics).

In the meantime, I didn't make any decission about my hosting solution. 000webhost seemed to work ok, a little bit slow from time to time, and with lot of downtimes due to a poor SQL hosting service. I was considering going all the way to hosting24.com, their paid site, but then things started to go wrong. Terribly wrong.

Two weeks ago there was a major down time. For almost two days. I don't know what happened, probably one of their servers was down. Two days is a lot of time. There was a text explaining that one of the servers (server27) was down, but that was not the server where my site was hosted (server14), so I went to the help desk service and posted a ticket. The answer was that they knew about the problem and that they were working on it. They took their time, but sometime after almost 2 days the problem was over. In the meantime, my site was down for almost 2 days.

One week ago, again with the same problem. The service was down and my site wasn't working. I went to the help desk again, after 5 hours of my site being absolutely down, and posted a new ticket. The answer was quite fast, letting me know that a disk was broken and that they were working in the problem and in 5 hours everything was going to be ok. They asked me not to ask again because I was making them loose time.

After 12 more hours, nothing was going on. Since I had lot of visits, I know this was really bad for my site. You cannot be 17 hours down, twice in almost a week. So since the original 5 hours were due long ago, I decided to ask what was going on, replying to the ticket that they ask me not to reply. I also told them that I appreciated their service but that was not good enough for my needs, and that I wanted to have access to my files make a backup and probably move to a more trustable hosting service.

Their answer was fast. They cancelled my account. They did it even without telling me the reason. I've lost everything. My work of 1 year in this site, the comments of my visitors, my pictures, the web design, everything. They gave me no access to my site again. Not even to ask them what happened. I keep posting notes on the Contact form, but they don't even bother in reply to me.

Long story short: if you trust them, you know what you get. This is an advice: Your effort is to valuable to put it in the hands of these thieves. Don't trust them. Don't recommend them. Don't use them.


Ariel.