raddy

Hey there, I thought of sharing this with you and leaving another post in the void for those who end up searching recommendations for hosting providers.

** this is a TRUE user experience, I'm still living it! **

I'm trying out several different hosting providers - I'm already using godaddy, dreamhost and recently servage. I also wanted to check out Web Air even though I was warned NOT to by a contact who never used them but was afraid of doing so.

I paid exactly $117.41 USD for 12 months of Virtual Hosting.

Here's the extract off my credit card:

20 Jan 2008 WEBAIR INTERNET DEVELOP $-117.41

Not the cheapest... but oh well, got to try it out. Amazingly the signup process worked like a charm and they successfully without much trouble charged me that exact amount.

However, after logging in to my account, here's what I found:

Their control panel doesn't carry the greatest looks, but one thing you learn with time is not to trust looks, but rather trust functionality itself.

So I go ahead and try to add a domain, but find myself in a situation where I GET programming errors that prevent me from doing so. I swear and click on "LIVE SUPPORT" which is one of their buttons in the CP in order to get someone to fix this, and find a message that says "From 2007 we are not having any more live support, please open a ticket" (I go ahead and swear again, why the crap would they keep the LIVE SUPPORT button?!?!) - so I go ahead and open a ticket.

While bored trying to find a solution for the problem myself, I click on several CP options that either provide me with 404 errors, or open an iframe with the entire page (therefore the header of the page is duplicated) with a contact form.

I start getting pissed off... it looks like I did indeed make a mistake when signing up here. I wait 24 hours for the ticket to be responded, and the answer to the ticket is "Can you try adding a new domain now?" as in WTF I'm beta-testing their service?!?

Indeed I can go ahead and add a domain. But wait, when I click on my "FTP Manager" for creating an account, I get another programming error, "the SSL library could not read 4 bytes from ..." so that's when I realize that webair sucks big time. I file another ticket and wait a couple of hours before I get a response (I pushed for an answer)

It's been like 35 hours and I still can't create FTP accounts that work. I'm not getting any e-mails from support today, they may be in a distant timezone. I already sent 2 e-mails to sales requesting a refund, first response was "we appreciate your business. <eom>" 2nd response hasn't arrived.

I don't swear at support, I treat them carefully. I paid everything the way I should have, so it's not me, it's them. I had to write this down so I could feel better, but that's probably going to last a few minutes.

I'm an unhappy customer.

take care,
/R