I recently realized that despite the popular demand from my visitors, I’ve never taken the opportunity to blog about my brand spanking new web host. Well, now I’m going to take the opportunity.
You’ll recall that during the month of December, both Webmacster87.info and phpBB Weekly suffered significant downtime, none of which was my fault. After a series of communication feuds, I found out why. My old webhost, Kazix, had merged with this Fat Network group of people, and so the excellent support that I had remembered having with Kazix was reduced to a very poor support desk “maintained” by Fat Network. My cPanel username/password kept changing under their watch, and they moved to new DNS nameservers without warning me (causing me to lose a handful of posts on here), and they were continuously having downtime. But worse, when I reported to them these problems, they would respond as though I had obviously done something to cause the problem. At the end, I got fed up and gave them a reply that I am not a total idiot and that I know what I’m doing here, thus I should know why these errors are coming up, and furthermore giving it to them about their horrible service and brutal customer support. Their reply was a pretty “we’ll look into the problem” response.
So, even though my hosting with them is supposed to continue into April, I got fed up with having to deal with these people and the continuous stress that I had to deal with in December of trying to keep my websites up somewhat. In particular, I was having to deal with a flurry of outcries from the relentless community of phpBB Weekly listeners. I’ve essentially declared my investment in hosting from Kazix to be a case where I was completely suckered.
However, I did have an alternative option. Back in June or July, Caitlyn Imburgo had pointed me out to Web Hosting Buzz, a link which I had remembered, although, looking at the packages they offer, it seemed like a “too good to be true” offer. However, at the end of December, with Kazix flailing out from under me, I went ahead and purchased their cheapest Silver plan.
For $59.40/year (=$4.95/month), this is one awesome plan. They have no setup fees, and the plan comes with 375 GB (that’s right, gigabyptes) of disk space, along with a whopping 2.5 TB (2500 GB) of bandwidth. Just to put that into perspective, right now, I’m only using about 64 MB of disk space (about 0.017% of my total allotment), and have used 4.54 gigabytes of bandwidth (which, although that’s a lot for most other webhosts, again is only 0.178% of my available total).
It gets better, because this plan has everything. If I had chosen to (I didn’t at the time), this plan would have come with one free .com, .net, or .org domain name, and the domain name would be mine (for free) for life as long as I was still a Web Hosting Buzz customer. But even then, the plan allows not only unlimited subdomains, but also unlimited parked and addon domains as well. (Back when I had Kazix, I had to shell out an extra $15/year for each addon domain I wanted!) They also have all of the major support for e-mail, PHP, MySQL, FTP, multimedia support, and a whole bunch of other fun stuff. They run their servers on dual quad-core Xeons with 8 GB of RAM and standard RAID hard drives to protect against data loss. They even support all the fancy stuff like Zend Optimizer, GD, ImageMagick, SSL, and all that jazz.
But the part that I was happiest to see (particularly after my recent debacle) was all the support functionality they offered. As opposed to the phantom e-mail only support of my old host, Web Hosting Buzz not only offers 24/7 e-mail AND online help desk ticket support (they claim that they’re there 24/7 but I haven’t had a reason to find out yet), but they also provide a customer support phone number (9 AM-5 PM M-F), an online wiki for support, and even their own community support forums! (Although nothing is entirely perfect; they use vBulletin.) With all of these support options available, I’m feeling much more secure about being on this webhost. Plus, after my first four weeks of using them, service has been reliable, fast, and perfect, so I haven’t even needed to try their support services yet!
In addition, they guarantee 99.95% uptime, and they even have a section of their website which tracks the uptime of their servers. Their setup was very fast, and I was ready to go with their hosting within a few hours. However, the best part has to be their Price Freeze guarantee, something which I have not seen from any other webhost: they guarantee that they will never raise prices for existing customers. The price you pay when you first sign up, even if you sign up with a discounted coupon code, will be the price you’ll pay to renew for the life of your hosting. Talk about awesome.
Anyway, so far, I’m really satisfied with my new web host. Not only have they been super-reliable, but at an unbeatable price, they’ve opened up so much more stretching room which will make it possible for me to easily expand my online presence should I choose to. If you’re interested, be sure to check them out.
Tags: bandwidth, disk space, features, hosting, Kazix, new, web host, Web Hosting Buzz, website
January 27th, 2008 at 8:48 am
I personally use siteground and really like that.
February 1st, 2008 at 5:54 am
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February 4th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
I’m having similar problems with Kazix right now. My website has been down for the past two days, and this has been happening fairly regularly since November. To their defence, I have to say that when I have had problems before, I have written an e-mail and they’ve sorted it out fairly quickly, but I sent an e-mail yesterday, to which I have still not received a reply. Neither the Kazix website nor the fatnetwork website is working, so I assume everyone is having this problem.
Did you have many problems in making the transition? How easy was it to transfer your files over? The other things I’m worried about being difficult are: moving my blog across, moving my wiki across, reconfiguring my e-mail accounts.
Tim
February 4th, 2008 at 3:25 pm
I recently got an e-mail from Fat Network a few days ago indicating that their core server went offline recently. I can’t tell you how thankful I am that I switched off of their servers. I had the same problem at first of them not responding in over a month–I ended up doing a WHOIS of kazix.com, got a phone number, called it, and the guy got me moved over to the new Fat Network system.
However, that was when their core server wasn’t down, and even then, their service continued to have constant downtime and I kept having to fight with their support desk, which is why I finally moved.
If you have backups of your files and MySQL databases, you should be able to restore them if you move over to a new host. However, if that’s not available, then this latest flub up by Fat Network may mean that, um, well, you’re screwed.
I wish you the best of luck.
February 4th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Just got your message. The server came back up again briefly a couple of hours ago, only to go down again. Next time it comes up I’ll make the backups.
This has cost me a lot of money: I’m a translator, and I sent a translation of mine for third-party revision. I got no reply, so I asked another colleague, then a few others. When the server came back on a couple of hours ago, I received three revisions. This will cost me about €100. Of course, I’ll never know whether a client offering a 12000€ job has tried to click on a link to my website…
Tim
March 1st, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Ditto! I had an Ok time with Kazix in the beginning, but then they merged with Fatnetwork and I started to get treated like an idiot. I’ve read that Kazix is a reseller of Fatnetwork which is a reseller of Wild West Domains (which is part of GoDaddy). I emailed Wild West Domains tonight complaining about my bad experience with Fatnetwork and how it reflects poorly back on them by being associated with such people.
Here is my story that I’ve been posting around review sites.
A year ago I started up a website for me and some friends. By the end of last year ( December ) the website had died and I knew that I ( being a broke college student ) wouldn’t have the funds to pay for a renewal.
I contacted Kazix and told them I was having trouble figuring out how to cancel my account and asked if they could do it for me or inform me how. I received the following email on Dec 18th 2007:
“Sir,
As soon as the hosting is about to end. You will get notice from our billing department.
– Regards, Mark Senior Administrator fatnetwork.net/”
I figured this email would tell me how to cancel my account if I did not wish to renew it. I never received such an email.
I found out Friday that my banking account was over-drawn. I thought this was through my own error, but when I looked closely today, I noticed it was because 2co.com, the third-party billing company used by Kazix/Fatnetwork, had charged me for hosting renewal and had caused my account to go negative.
I sent them an email informing them that I had asked back in December for my account NOT to be renewed and that they had in fact went ahead and renewed it anyways. I requested that they reimburse me the charge of the domain, hosting, and overdraft. I had wrongly thought that my domain name was processed through them as well.
I received an email from billing@fatnetwork.com saying:
“Your domain is not registered by KAZIX – only hosted
See WHOIS by yourself
The respond you got not from us – from GoDaddy – your domain registrant
( Who is removed )
You never requrested a cancellation from us – blame yourself for over drafting, you should know where your account hosting with
I’ll refund the charge of $44.99 and cancel the 2CO subscription as well as your account with KAZIX– that’s all I can do for you”
I wasn’t really expecting them to reimburse my overdraft charges ( really, why should they pay for their mistake that harms others? ). And I fully admit that I did honestly forget that my domain name was registered by my husband and not by Kazix. What did surprise me was the tone of the email. I did use the Kazix’s contact form on their website to request that my hosting be stopped. Why would I contact Go-Daddy if I had completely forgot that they were the ones in charge of my domain? If I hadn’t contacted Kazix, why did Mark send me an email from fatnetwork in response to my request to cancel my account? Yeah. Someone was just being rude and snippy because they didn’t want to admit that they made a mistake.
I sent a reply back to the rude man and informed him that I found his email to be very rude and not a good way to handle customers. I also informed him that I did use the contact page on Kazix’s website and that I fully knew who my hosting was through.
I received this email as a reply:
“I’m sure you have some other things to do Saturday night – not only be rude
I’ve responded you( from home, because billing is working only Mon-Fri )
I’ve refunded your charge immediately
I’m very glad you are not our customer anymore
Have a great weekend
Jacob
Billing Department”
Me and my husband were both floored when we read this. Who would handle customer support this way? I couldn’t believe that he would have the gall to call me rude just for me pointing out his own rudeness. Then of course there is the nice touch of “I’m very glad you are not our customer anymore.” Could you imagine someone in retail or any other face-to-face business practice saying this to you?
You know I didn’t leave Kazix because I found it to be “bad.” I just left it because of my own financial reasons. I had some technical problems with them before and found them to be helpful. If I hadn’t experienced all of this, I probably would have recommended them to others and used them again. Now? I seem them as a shady group of characters who care more about their customer’s money than they do about their actual customers.
As I see it now, they obviously did not want me to cancel my hosting with them and obviously wanted to renew my account for the money. What about my say in not wanting their services anymore and wanting to keep what little money I had left in my checking account? It didn’t matter.
Stay away from Kazix and Fatnetwork. Let my bad experiences be your warning.
March 2nd, 2008 at 7:50 am
Yikes! I hope they don’t try to force a renewal on my dormant account when April comes around…