My Former Host - IX Web Hosting - BAD

I’ve been promising a post about what went down with my previous hosting provider for a while now, here it is. I’m naming names, because they’re not innocent in this. It’s very clear to me that in an effort to cut support costs, they’ve outsourced their technical support to a completely incompetent group.

In the beginning…

I thought I’d give IX web hosting a try after I had used them with a very quick consulting project a while back. The plans are very reasonably priced and offer a great number of features. I do a lot of development with ColdFusion, and unlike a number of other hosts, IX doesn’t disable tags like CFFILE “in the name of security”.

I did a quick check around the web, and found nothing but glowing reviews and gushing praise (that really should have tipped me off, but I’m a little naive sometimes) and decided to sign up for a year.

Signup was quick and painless. I moved some of my domains over, and kept a few on Bluehost so as to “not put all of my eggs in one basket”. I can honestly say that I was exceedingly happy with the IX web hosting PRODUCT — there was no downtime (that I noticed), my web sites seemed reasonably responsive, and I was able to do the basic stuff I needed.

Then I had to get fancy.

IX has ColdFusion 5 installed on their servers. CF 5 isn’t bad, but it’s quite a few years old, and doesn’t support some of the cool stuff that it’s younger siblings do: most notably for me, XML handling. I’ve started playing quite heavily with APIs and such, and if I can’t parse XML feeds (automatically), I’m hurting in that department. The second hiccup I ran into was with trying to implement OpenID authentication on one web site. There is a great OpenID CFC available for ColdFusion, but it refused to run on the IX servers.

Alright, I can’t fault IX for having an old version of ColdFusion running on their servers, especially since they offer a ColdFusion MX 7 hosting option too. I had nothing to lose (or so I thought), and decided to upgrade my plan. My first year was almost up anyways. That’s when the support nightmare began.

When I requested to upgrade to ColdFusion 7 hosting, I was told that I would have to backup/re-create everything. My databases, my files, e-mail accounts, any other settings. I thought that was a little weird, but not impossible, so I agreed.

It should not take 24+ hours to get a response

IX web hosting offers three options for support. You can call a 1-800 number (if you live in the States, in Canada, no toll-free). You can use live chat, or you can file a support request. I’m an instant-gratification-but-cheap guy, so I opted for live chat as my first choice.

I should back up for one second, the migration wasn’t the first time I had a run in with their support people. A few months prior I had contacted them because I kept receiving database connection errors every 3 minutes (yes, exactly every 3 minutes). After going back and forth with technical staff for a week, I eventually figured out that their MySQL servers are set to flush all inactive connections after 3 minutes. It wouldn’t be a problem, but since ColdFusion uses ODBC, you would get an error if you left your browser idle for 3 minutes.

Technical support refused to do anything about it because it’s a shared database server, and 3 minutes is completely reasonable (while I can sort of see that, throwing ODBC into the mix complicates things). My eventual solution was to set up a cron job on a different server to request a page on my web site that would run a database query every 2 minutes. World-class kludge, but what else could I do?

That was in October 2007. Their response time was slow then, and when I complained I was told that they were hiring additional staff. Apparently a hiring/training cycle at IX web hosting takes 6 months to attain a higher level of technical expertise. Who knew?

Live chat!

I don’t know if the live chat operators are so overloaded, or if they’re just completely stupid, but you would connect, and they wouldn’t say anything for over 10 minutes. My first live chat took me over an hour of sitting and waiting, and all I wanted was help with a Datasource Name (DSN). After that hour was up, my issue still wasn’t resolved and I was told to file a ticket.

I used live chat 3 times, wasted 3 hours of my life, and had to file tickets on all occasions before I realized that the live chat operators didn’t have the ability to resolve even the most basic operations. That’s when my experience with their ticketing system started.

“Troubled” tickets

IX web hosting technical support staff doesn’t work evenings or weekends. I don’t know that for a fact, but it’s the only explanation I can come up with. If you open a ticket Friday night, you won’t get a response (notice I didn’t say resolution) until at least Monday morning. Likewise for evening tickets — forget about hearing back until morning (and more likely late afternoon, or the following day).

Just so you don’t think that I’m slandering poor IX web hosting, here’s screen captures at various time intervals of some of my tickets. Note that once someone replies to a ticket, it resets the timer — so even if they reply with “Duh”, the time elapsed goes back to zero. Without further ado:

Please note that both of the technical issues listed were show-stoppers. My web sites were not displaying because of them. We’re not talking minor “I’ve noticed that my site is taking 300 msec to load instead of the standard 275 msec”. We’re talking “People can’t see the web site”.

While my issue with XML Parsing cleared up, my issue with the OpenID CFC did not. The server tossed a security error. Not the end of the world; but I only managed to squash one of the two issues I was hoping to kill with the upgrade.

My upgrade had another great side-effect. Every now and then, I would get one of these errors on one of my web sites:

I was told by technical support that it was a problem with my code (even thought I hadn’t changed a single line since moving over). That looks, to me, like a problem with the web server or with the web application server, but I wasn’t going to have that fight. After going back and forth for a week on all of my technical issues, I requested a refund.

It took a week because after waiting 24 hours to have someone respond to one of my tickets, they wouldn’t bother to actually read it and address the problem. They would give me a stock answer, that sometimes, had nothing to do with the problem at all. One great example is that with the old ColdFusion 5 hosting, you were able to set up your own DSNs in your control panel. When I was moved to ColdFusion 7, I did the same thing in my new control panel — but the DSNs didn’t work. I filed a ticket and the first response I got was to set them up in the control panel (which I had already done, and said that I had done in the ticket). I was then told that the DSN didn’t exist (yeah, I know, that’s why I’m contacting you). Finally the issue was resolved… 3 days later.

When canceling, and repeatedly “complaining to the CEO” (they have a link where you can supposedly contact the CEO, but I only ever received responses from “team leads”), I was told that they were short-staffed and were in the process of training new technical support people. For starters, that’s hilarious, because their technical support is very clearly outsourced to a Russian company with very poor English. Second, the problem I was having was as much with their training program as with anything else. Technical support staff didn’t have the knowledge, access (or desire) to help customers resolve their problems. No matter how many more people they throw at that problem, it’s not going to get resolved.

A word of warning

If you’re considering IX web hosting, you had better be patient, and reasonably self-sufficient. I’m a pretty technical guy, but there’s just some problems that I couldn’t resolve on my own. Skip their ColdFusion 7 hosting — that weird memory error was sporadic and scary.

Update!

The icing on the cake for this story is an e-mail I just received from IX. Apparently even the CEO is a liar.