Site5 Has Become a Joke
Because of the increasing number of complaints about inadequate service, suggestions for improvements, and general unhappiness of Site5 customers, Site5 decided to remove the service forums from their message board. The other forums are still there, but if you were posting because your server was down, not responding, adding domains, and other service related questions, you no longer have a place to go. Of course, their official reasoning was because it was creating a problem for support.
Today, in their open discussion forum, a post was made asking what others thought about them closing these forums. Many people responded during the post’s short lifespan, including Site5 staff itself. Obviously, once management (I’m talking about you, Mr. Lightner) found this out, it was deleted. Luckily, another forum member posted a pdf on his site of what was said. You can read it here. Now, call me crazy, but having support forums where the community can support seems like it should reduce trouble tickets for support. I can probably come up with 5 occasions off the top of my head in which I didn’t have to open a ticket because I found the information in the forums. If anything, this new policy will only increase support’s already busy workload. Don’t be fooled by the response times on Site5’s homepage. At one time (when I signed up) they were this low, but they neglect their customers in order to oversell their hosting and try new products to entice people, none of which are actually implemented (think RapifReflex, Webmail 2.0, Flashback). They say they respond in an average of 25 minutes, let’s take a look at some of mine:
Avg. Site5 Resp. Time: 211.5 minutes
Avg. Site5 Resp. Time: 354.6 minutes
Avg. Site5 Resp. Time: 84.5 minutes
And most of the time, they don’t even answer your question, so you have to wait another 100+ minutes for another response.
The thread also stated that management will respond to each and every one of the emails that people send regarding this issue. I find this to be a joke as well. I put in a management review ticket months ago with no response. I emailed Matt Lightner and never got a response. I even had a thread put into the Management Review hidden forum and got no response. And like another customer said, site5 webhosting…the only way to deal with bad pr is to delete it. (by the way, this site is hosted on A Small Orange now.)
EDIT: It seems they have added some forums for “customer-to-customer” support. My faith has still not been restored though. Unless they start listening to their customers, stop overselling, and quit with software promises that never get implamented, they are a sinking ship.
Congrats on the successful move to ASO. Here’s to sticking it to Site5!
Yeah, I got fed up with it too and moved to a dedicated server and we’re in the process of moving to a managed server right now with more power and umph to it. I’ve been quite happy not being on shared hosting anymore.
Hey, sorry to hear about your experience with site5. You might want to check out the web hosting company I am with, they have been pretty good to me, vistapages
The last three months with Site5 have been pure hell. One of my customer’s site that uses an AJAX backend consistently fails due to the high load of the server. Two weeks went by where the site failed throughout the day for the entire two weeks. I’ve also found they are doing something funky: PHP threads are killed after 15 seconds, regardless of php and/or apache settings, which I’m guessing they added to help control the overload. About two months ago, I lost a huge potential customer that was coming with eight of his clients because of a quirk on the server; it took Site5 two weeks to finally acknowlege and fix the problem. And today I awoke to find that all of the email aliases for every one of my customer accounts are gone. Now I have email all of my accounts to explain why their email may be bouncing. That’s what Site5 has become — a huge liability to my business. BEWARE!
Thanks for the heads up guys, Ill be saying away from site5!
I have a transactional, commercial website that is constantly monitored by InterneetSeer and I am constantly getting warnings on timeouts, outages, go to Site 5 suppport (by email only, what a joke) see the server has to be restarted, etc etc etc. On any given day, I can enter in my website in browser every 10 minutes and at least once in every 1/2 hour will be timing out. They suck, plain and simple. You get what you pay for. I do not have a tremendous number of hits on my site – we sell capital goods (copiers) and, being cheap, I figure shared host is good enough. Not anymore – I am sick of the lousy service and support of the ipowwebs and site 5s out there and I am moving to a dedicated server. If that doesn’t work out then f*** them all I will get a T1 and my own server at our office. Site 5 is horrible.