I have been very pleased with the outstanding service provided by Host My Site. I have several sites hosted with HMS. This past week, I have had several problems with one of my sites due to the server having problems and being down. Example: The SSL certificate no longer works, not able to set permissions in the control panel, and the site totally down. These issues have been fixed and a few hours or the next day, it no longer works again.

When I make a phone call to support, they have always been very kind and willing to help and they still answer the phone right away. The only problem is the site is still having major issues due to server problems.

I sure hope all the same wonderful people are still working at HMS. It is not like Host My Site to take so long to fix a problem. It has been six days now and still counting. I have loved the service from HMS and would be very worried if anything has changed.

This is not a complaint; I still praise the wonderful staff and service that I have received for the past several years. I pray this economy has not caused them to downsize in staff. It is just not like them to take so long to fix a problem.

UPDATE!

The problems with this site have been fixed. Got the following message:

"Last week, we were experiencing some hardware issues with this web server. As a result, the server has been rebuilt, and the sites were migrated. The outage you were experiencing was due to the upgrades we had to implement on this particular server. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused, and we thank you for you patience."

As always, I am still very pleased with the wonderful service provided by Host My Site.

Although I have been very pleased with the service with HostMySite in the past, lately I have had issues that have taken too long to solve and some are still not solved. I am currently looking at other options. I have talked with Hostek.com to compare their options with HostMySite options. It would be a major job for me to move over 50 websites to a new hosting company. I would rather stay with HostMySite if they can offer me a better solution.

Currently, I am not able to set permissions in the control panel on 3 sites located on the same shared server. Attached is an image, the drop down box is empty.

(alt+p)

This is the same issue that I had back in April with another site. This time, it has been a week with still no solution to the problem.

I am still pleased with the support staff but it appears that they are getting over loaded, they still answer the phone but it is no longer within 3 rings.

Does anyone have an opinion on the “Managed Dedicated Hosting” with HostMySite?

Hello,

In both cases the problem was due to an extreme fix - if a server is compromised rather than attempting to 'ad hoc' patch it we would rather build an entirely new server for the sake of security. In this case some functionality was lost and we're still working to restore it, albeit at a lower priority because it's not mission critical. I'm very sorry for the inconvenience, and have notified our managers about this so we can get it resolved by the end of the week at the most. Until then if you have permissions that need changed please email us the changes or simply call in and we'd be happy to assist you.

Oh, and regarding your earlier question as to who's working here now, I can assure you that no layoffs happened within our Support/Infrastructure as a result of our acquistion of Hosting.com.

Thank you, Jamie, for calling me on the phone and going over other options for my business.

I have also gone over your email explaining the Cloud Enterprise proposal. That looks like the way I need to go. The service with HostMySite has always been excellent but I wanted to find a better solution for my business. Due to the number of clients that I currently have, I feel it would be better for me to go with Cloud Enterprise as explained here: http://www.hostmysite.com/cloudhosting/enterprise/

I will be getting in touch with HostMySite in the next few weeks to get more information. That will give me more time to read up on the Cloud Enterprise service.

Thanks again for your help and personally contacting me. I am still very pleased with the service at HostMySite.

You are not the only one that has noticed support going to crap. Granted most of the techs are excellent, but I get the feeling that they are under staffing the data center. One of my tickets is still not resolved and it has been 8 days. This is what happends when Capital management groups get into the Hosting business. They are too concerned with making large profits for the next quarter instead of maintaining excellent customer support for their customers. All they are doing is pissing off long time customers.

[edit]
This post was considered offensive and has been edited. If you have an issue with one of our technicians specifically please contact a member of the Support management team.

Whitesites,

Can you please email me the ticket number? I believe you have a number of accounts so it wouldn't be easy for me to try and track it down that way.

I don't know offhand which tech you are referring to regarding your difficulty in understanding her, however I can tell you about the training process we use. Before anyone is even allowed on the phone they have to undergo six weeks of training and another week worth of mentoring with other technicians. We don't hire anyone from overseas; HMS techs are all local to the Newark, Delaware area (save for those in Louisville at the new Hosting.com datacenter).

In addition, every ticket resolves automatically generates a Customer Satisfaction Survey (you can see an example of the results on http://www.hostmysite.com/dedicatedservershosting/ at the bottom right) and when those responses are submitted they are reviewed to determine trends in Support. For example, if a specific technician consistently gets low marks in a certain category we review their phone logs to determine the best course of action to resolve the problem going forward. Should you ever have a bad experience with Support I would urge you to use that survey to voice your opinion - it will NOT go unnoticed!

Also in your case I serve as your Account Executive, so should you have any further problems please let me know - you can always email me directly and will get a response that same day!

Jamie,
Just wanted to get back with you and let you know that I have decided to move all my clients (over 50) to a dedicated server located at Netriplex in Arden, NC. This is very close to my business and I have had the opportunity to tour the data center and meet the people there.

I'm having so much trouble with HostMySite with getting connected to sites. The support has always been great but the service is just not what it used to be.

You have been great as far as support. I would highly suggest that if you would ever consider moving to the beautiful mountains of Asheville, NC, to see if you could work at Netriplex. Their support has been wonderful as far as helping me with this huge move. They have spent a lot of time with me getting the server set up.

I would highly recommend you to them. I would also highly recommend Netriplex http://www.netriplex.com/ to anyone looking for a dedicated server.

Christian, Congrats on the Dedicated Box. I actually have setup two of them, and moved a few of my higher traffic clients to them. Thus far its been running perfect. I hope your dedicated host is better than mine ( godaddy ) they play god with port 25 and limit the number of out going emails you are allowed. I am now considering colocating a box locally where I won't have these restrictions. I found a datacenter local here in Houston that would give me a 1U rack space and 500 GB transfer for $80 / month. Unfortunately their ping times are 50 ms and for local that is not very good. Level 3 ( local ) gets about 14-20 ms pings. Before you setup your dedicated box do some ping tests to determine how fast their network is.

Here is a quote from their website:
This dedicated fiber connection will allow Netriplex customers the most competitively priced and fastest bandwidth available to the northeast, just 15 milliseconds and one router hop for either primary or backup server hosting."

http://www.netriplex.com/company/archive/pr-08122009.aspx

I hope the support will improve, I just experienced the same. There was too much time wasted.

I was a fan of HostMySite.com! The quality of services was excelent and the support just fantastic. I used to gave it as an example of how the customer care and support should be.

Well, things have changed dramatically in the past few weeks

First, we were required to move to a VPS cause we had too much traffic on one of our website and seems a shared plan couldn't handle us anymore. I could understand that, and we migrated to a VPS CF+ plan. We were very excited and we were expected at least the same level of support and quality of service. Big mistake! Things started to be worst and worst every day. I have explained the most serious (and hillarious) problems we encountered so far in another post (check the VPS forum).

I don't know if there is any connection between all the issues we are experiencing and the Hosting.com thing but I thing there is. Things started to be critical after they announce the fusion. It's very hard to get somebody on the live chat, especially if you are +7 hrs or if it's weekend. It takes a lot for them to fix the issues or anyhow, longer than before.

Most worrying is that many times seem overwhelmed! I don't know what happened there but I am taking into consideration the drop of service and move to another hosting company. Please, provide some alternatives!

Adrian
I feel your pain.
I also noticed things seemed to change. I am a huge fan of the veteran techs, and Jamie in Sales. But I couldn't take it anymore. I moved some of my clients to a couple dedicated boxes on godaddy ( which came with its own issues ). Now I am building a server and going to colocate it locally. I figure if you want it done right you have to do it yourself.

I am just glad I don't use CF, as I know the licensing fees are not cheap.

That's fairly meaningless; we have two fiber connections so theorhetically our bandwidth would be better - it's a 10 GB network on our end I believe.

At any rate, I know not too long ago someone came to me for help since their new webhosting techs at another host didn't know how to setup RDNS properly on a new dedicated smartermail box so it wouldn't look like a spamming server (fairly simple stuff), and the techs were directed to articles I created here in our support forums. While I don't want to disparage any other host, at the same time disparging HostMySite while simulaneously admitting that we have more technically savvy employees is a bit much.

Generally speaking smaller hosts will sometimes dazzle you with their flexibility and seemingly unbeatable pricing structures, but if they do their job right they'll eventually grow into a mid-sized host and learn that too much flexibility will come back to haunt you one day. If they stay small that may mean good things for you as well as support and flexibility, but then you have problems with financial stability as well. It's no good for you if the webhost is great up until they go under, taking all your data with them, or simply sell you to a larger host (putting you back where you started from, only this time without the benefit of you being able to choose where you're hosted).

I'll say this - the recent merger has brought in a lot of new opportunities on our end, and we're working through them as fast as we can to get a comprehensive product catalog that is both flexible and competitive in the fully managed webhosting market. A lot of balls are being juggled at one time, but we're getting our 'groove' back more and more as each day passes. If possible, I'd suggest waiting it out and working with your most trusted contacts at HMS/HDC to address problems, and if you have a dedicated account make heavy use of your sales rep to ensure that your problems are resolved ASAP.

I guess I need to reply to this since I'm the one moving all my clients to Netriplex. I have moved around 30 clients and have around 30 to go. I am testing the RDNS records using http://mxtoolbox.com. I can check the IP address from my new host and compare with the IP address still located at HostMySite.

The problem is with SmarterMail. It causes the error: "Warning - Reverse DNS does not match SMTP Banner" when testing in mxtoolbox.
Everything else passes and the IP resolves to the domain name at Netriplex.

You can test this at http://mxtoolbox.com by using one of my IP address located at Netriplex: 67.23.186.156

I have tested other IP address of mine still located at HostMySite and get the same warning. You can test your own IP address located at HostMySite and see if you also get the same warning. This warning is caused by SmarterMail.

I have also tested another one of my IP's at HostMySite (208.112.52.239) and get the warning "Reverse DNS FAILED! This is a problem"


I am using SmarterMail Enterprise 6.0, Windows 2008 IIS7 server, and Plesk for my control panel at Netriplex. It took a while but was able to get Plesk to install the Enterprise version as an add-on.

For the most part, the move to the new server has been very smooth. The support has been great to work with.

I do appreciate Jamie for all the help he provided, and as I have already told him, he was the only reason I stayed at HostMySite for as long as I did.

Netriplex is actually near my business so I have been able to tour the data center and meet the people there. It is located in Arden, NC. That makes it very convenient for my business. They do not do shared hosting, so they are not a competition to HostMySite. They only do dedicated hosting and Colocation services.

I am now able to set up my own hosting company. Thanks again, Jamie, for all the help over the past several years. You are truly a very knowledgeable and helpful person.

Ah, something to mention about reverse DNS - it is ONLY needed for servers that actually send outbound mail. On the HostMySite network the mailservers you use, i.e.

mail.yourdomain.com

are only used to house Smartermail; they actually relay all of their outbound mail through another set of servers (our SpamAssassin outbound spam filtering network) in order to prevent our network from getting a bad reputation on the internet for sending spam.

If you have a dedicated web or mailserver that needs to send mail DIRECTLY to external recipients, then RDNS is required. If it's not sending mail, then it's not required (and also due to some server configurations quite impossible to do).