September 21, 2011

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Many cheap hosting providers suck, and you can’t just read a few hate reviews and decide not to use a provider.

The bad news: I have been with A2 for over 6 years, and the last 12-18 months with them has been really bad. They wanted me to move my reseller account to a newer server and promised the transition would be smooth. It was not. Instead, their techs would try to resolve issues before reading the entire support ticket. They missed so many things it wasn’t funny. My websites were down for 3-4 days. My clients were not happy with me. It was not a good situation.

Since then, the “new and better” server has experienced nothing but problems. In fact, just a few months ago my websites were down for over a week! It was so bad that they had to rebuild the entire server and put everyone’s accounts back in place.

What gets me about this is their uptime policy. Read it!

http://www.a2hosting.com/about/guarantee

And it reads:
We will provide a refund in the amount of 5% of paid fee for the month, for every hour that your website is unreachable due to an internal network or equipment failure.

If you do the math, your website has to be down for a minimum of 20 hours before you would reach the maximum refund for that month, which will be no more than 100% of your monthly cost. In other words, if you pay $30/month for hosting, then after 20 hours of downtime they will refund you $30. Ha! If your website were down between 9am-5pm, you would get a $13.50 refund. How much damage could one day of downtime do to your company/clients? Probably a little more than $15-30 worth of damage!

Oh, you lost a client? We’re sorry, here’s $30!

To be fair, A2 is a better host than what I had previously, but things are sliding downhill quickly. And to contrast, I also have a hosting plan with Media Temple. I have had this plan for over 2 years and have yet to have a single issue! Amazing!