Hosting Company to avoid

Looking for the ideal hosting company? then AIT.com is one to avoid. Recently we needed some low cost hosting options, primarily as bakups for the servers we have at Webquarry. We made a colossal mistake of choosing AIT.

They took 5 days to set up the machine, when the did, they sent the root password in a plain text email message! And when I logged in, to find that the hard disk in it's entirity had been made into a single partition I immidiately knew that we had made a bad choice.

Then yesterday the worst happened. They actually assigned the IP that was allocated to our server (216.117.163.79) to another machine. This is surely as idiotic as you can get, it would seem that people who have never used the ping command are in charge of system administration at AIT.com

Now one might expect that immidiately after contacting them and informing them of the issue they might resolve it. They did not. They sent me a mail that says:

In reviewing this issue, please provide us with more information pertaining to this issue, like what strange activities you have noticed about your server, and we will look into this issue further.

Those idiots don't even know what an IP conflict is. They have taken every effort to make sure that contacting them for support is as difficult as could be. As with most US companies they have a stupid support ticket system with one way email only, the difference from other organizations is that they have hidden the historically records very cleverly.)

So as a last resort I have got on the phone to them. So far in three attempts the only response I have receieved was something to the effect "All our customer support staff are handling other customers please access our website". And as already mentioned there's precious little support available through the website.

Though they have a toll free number, I am calling from outside the US, as a result each call has cost a few dollars. I wouldn't mind if I didn't have to put up with a 30 second recording that is automatically played when ever the number is dialled. It just says since I am calling from outside the US i will be charged standard IDD rates. So i have to pay extra to listen to that stupid message.

So the bottom line is that the server has been inaccessible for over2 hours now. If you are looking for a hosting company that can give you an appalling service, do everything in their power to make sure that your server stays down, this is the company to choose.

Footnote:

Follow up post added on June 21