Webair sucks - discuss
 

Ok first off I use Webair and ok I have a cheap and cheerful plan for the crappy stuff or were I want cheap b/w for a promo...

...but boy do they love their downtime. Its like a lottery clicking on a site and is it there is it not.

Conclusion: Close to sucking big time. A couple of more downtime periods and they are there!:thumbsup

after a couple of rough first days i have noticed no problem with webair.

sig spot....

What's there to discuss? Webair sucks, period.

don't even TRY running an Autoblogger site on Webair. Trust me. It's shit.

I also was screwed with the 'cheap webair downtime' site. I went with them from the rave reviews, and the fact that they were inexpensive for just starting out.

However, the downtime turned to hours, and finally, I was down at least 4 hours every three days.

Mike promised me it would be taken care of, so I gave them another month. Nope. Just more hot air up my ass until he stopped responding to ICQ.

When I moved my sites and asked them to cancel my account, I was slapped in the face with an offer of 'a free month' for my hours upon hours of downtime and much lost traffic.

Tear2 actually found me, bent over for my rather strange needs and desires - and I haven't been happier. I'd kiss them, but, well, Nick's on antibiotics, and Jim's too eager.. ;)

I can't even get them to respond to an email. I didn't have a working server from October 2005-April 2006. Finally, it got "fixed," after months of PLEADING with them to open the box up. Turns out, as I suspected, it was a hardware problem: the CPU fan had EATEN THROUGH some of the wires. Sigh -- couldn't get them to check it for MONTHS. Then, when new problems cropped up, they stopped responding. Completely. No response to any tickets.

I emailed an invoice to them for the wasted money on hosting. If I end up not getting that invoice paid, I'll tack on the business cost, etc. to what I eventually seek.

Mike is a good guy, and Brian Hourigan is good, too, but Jesus ... what the fuck is up with the rest of the shit going on over there?

Oh, and the kicker? When I called to cancel, they killed the box a few days early, fucking me out of migrating all my sites. I lost about 30GB worth of my databases. Had to pay BIG fucking bucks to piece some of that shit back together.

I've never experienced any downtime with Webair... yes i've had many many problems with their mail servers but overall WEBAIR ROCKS!

Bingo. They offered me two months. After downtime since OCTOBER, and no fixes. I lost so much money it isn't even funny.

I asked them to refund all of my hosting costs, because I didn't actually ever GET service that worked, and now it's been a week or more since I've heard a reply.

What the fuck?

I had an account years ago and experienced bad support during off hours. Everyone has different hosting experiences with every host. It is one of the tricky aspects of this online biz...

Hit me up... I have a private hosting offer right now that kicks ass and I need some people to test and get fre hosting...

We run 300+ sites on multiple virtual accounts + 2 dedicated server with WebAir.
If we have problems (it happends on every host) we contact support through live-support, and they take care of it within minutes(sagi rocks)

If you dont give them serious feedback, how can you expect a serious product/service in return.

Exactly what I've come to expect of them.. there's no way in hell I'd colo with them. Sure, shared hosts are shit, but if you fuck them, they'll never turn into colo customers.

If you haven't found anyone yet, I recommend Tear2. Really. I've only found two hosts I love, Tear2 and ICDSoft. (ICDSoft doesn't do porn and has shit bandwidth/disk ratios, but their control panel is pure sex.)

I spoke with not only Mike over ICQ, but the tech support at least twice, three times a week. The shared server would hang for 4 minutes at a time due to a disk problem, Apache would overload, and it would shit. Their fix? They'd eventually reboot it, two hours later.

This was not alleviated over the entire duration of my time with them, even when sending them pictures, statistics (shell account access, not chrooted or anything), and system stats w/ even systat for pretty breakdowns that anyone can discern.

seriously, i have never had any problems with webair....always fast customer support...good stuff :)

Email Tree:

Gerard @ Webair, 05/31/06:

My Follow-Up, after nothing had been resolved AGAIN a month later, 06/20/06:

Gerard's Reply, 06/20/06:

My Reply, 06/20/06:

Gerard's Reply, 06/20/06:

My Reply, 06/20/06:

Gerard's Reply, 06/21/06:

My Reply, 06/21/06:

My Follow-Up, after being fucked by their early temination, 06/29/06:

NO REPLY FROM GERARD

My Follow-Up, after being ignored for almost 2 weeks, 07/10/06:

NO REPLY FROM GERARD

My Follow-Up, after being ignored for ANOTHER WEEK, 07/17/06:

NO REPLY FROM GERARD

So, as you can see, it's been a long road of being fucked. I want my money, like I wanted a working box. Doesn't look like I'll get either.

Yeah, read the email log I just posted to see how much shit I've been through with them. I kept paying my fucking bill every month, right the fuck on time. I'm a fucking sucker.

Tear2's pricing wasn't in line with what I was looking for. I am trying out Yellow Fiber right now, and have had zero issues thusfar. The sites got a HUGE pop from the Webair days, it's kind of scary how much Webair was holding them back. Just MOVING them has increased traffic several times over. But what can you expect? The Webair box was crippled, it couldn't handle load.

Holy shit, I had that problem with them, too. Were you getting Signal 6, or some shit, on Apache? They used to reboot it all the time, that was the solution .. when I asked on the phone what could be done to fix it for good (it only got noticed when I checked a site, so there could be DAYS of downtime), they just chuckled.

It wasn't funny to ME, that's for sure ... :mad:

Well, I started to get a bit uneasy when I saw they were using a -PRERELEASE kernel on production machines (not quite ready for prime time), and this was a global thing. All of their machines were running 'BETA' versions of FreeBSD.. old PHP with known security issues, and, uh, evidently many were with their hardware problems.

Signal 6 is usually bad RAM, or CPU overheating, which it looks like it used to be. Yep, I also got into the 'have to check every couple of hours and wait for minutes to see if it loads' deal. I was miffed, but screwed nowhere nearly as bad as you were.

As a counterpoint, I know Splum's been with them for years, and he's had issues when WebAir's network goes down (did twice while I was with them, which leads me to think that their NOC is three guys, a power strip, and a keg), but his server just works without a hitch.

You must be dumb.

I shit you not, one of the guys who just posted in here that he loves Webair, I was just logged into his box. Here's the uname results:

FreeBSD 5.5-PRERELEASE

... holy shit.

The signal 6 problem is what I was bitching about over and over -- I couldn't get ANYONE to open up the box, until I was almost shouting on the phone. FINALLY, Brian Hourigan came along and actually LISTENED. I stayed for a bit, but when he, too, stopped responding to the constant problems, I had to pack up and leave.

Yeah, I took it up the ass. I LOST SO MUCH FUCKING MONEY BECAUSE OF IT. If Webair stands up and does the right thing, paying the invoice I sent them a while back, I won't pursue it further -- I likely won't even mention it again. But as it stands, I got fucked, and no one there cares. Mike will come along and make this right, I'm thinking -- he's been a stand-up guy in the past. But we'll see. I'm only asking to get back what I paid, because service wasn't rendered. I did *not* bill them for business loss, and losing one of my biggest sites because A) the server died while it was migrating, over and over, and B) they closed the server down three days too early.

Well, that's the thing -- some people's (the majority, I expect) servers work flawlessly. But when something is wrong, the answer is too often, "here, have a free month," instead of "let's really fix this." The "new control panel" has been coming for a year now ... grrr.

I'm one of their more happy customers.. been with them for roughly 8 years and I spent 9 hours with BrianH and Bryan last night fixing some php problems.. top notch support and I haven't noticed any downtime the past years

webair = dog shit.

Even dream host is better LOLZ

You're lucky.

I see threads here all the time complaining about the downtime -- you must be on a different network, or you're using magic cabling and routers.

My downtime was mostly server-related and due to lack of response/attention.

Glad to hear that you got a good server, and everything is working out for you for so long -- it's nice to have a good relationship with your host. You're also lucky to be working with Brian Hourigan -- he's pretty awesome.

phatservers ownz tho ;)

Webair screwed my girlfriend when I was out of town. They shaved my dog and painted it pink.

Let's not go crazy -- that isn't true, and you know it. Mike has built up an impressive network overall, there are just some holes in the support for a handful of clients. I'd bet that the majority of Webair customers have little to no complaints.

I don't know about their virtual servers, but I'm very happy with my dedicated servers, minimal downtime if any.
WG

Given the amount of 'Webair rocks!' posts on here I was not expecting this reaction!

My gut instinct was not to trust Webair with anything that matters and having tried them out with the low grade stuff I am even more inclined to that view.

Equally though and given what I am paying for the low grade stuff am not inclined to move it so I guess the old adage 'you get what you pay for' applies in this case!

But a bit less downtime would be nice!:thumbsup

Yup. Do a 'php -v' and you should see "4.4.0",which is over a year old and has several issues.


When I saw how their support system treated everything "Reboot it, or Ignore it", I figured they might be vengeful and only contacted them AFTER I moved everything (thank god, I had to go back and grab a couple DBs again that became corrupt between saving and scp due to more downtime.)

Yup. When I saw one of their moves was to remove their ICQ contact information from the control panel, and the 'Network Status' flash was never updated, ever, even when I had them admit there 'was a network problem' on the phone, I figured that it was time to cut my time and monitary losses, and try again.

Honestly, I stuck on because I was told that Mike was trustworthy, from people I trusted, who feel chided (not that I hold them responsible.) It's sad to see that he, of all people, just doesn't give a shit. How do you expect to obtain more customers if you screw them, and, forbid, if you're happy with what you have now, and don't want more, do like JoinRightNow and disable the damn signup for some unspecified period of time into the next millenium.

I only had a virtual account with webair about 2 a and a half years ago, after 20 hours of emailing and calling I got a "we have moved you to a new server, hope you backed up your data..."

Wasn't that big a deal, but I was shopping for dedicateds at the time and that lost them my business.

We use webair and they are just great...
we used them on recommendation from a huge site who has used them for years and these guys know their stuff

so back off them guys....

To be fair, 5.5 has been changed to RELEASE for a while now... If there are no published issues with their hardware and the particular kernel build, I see no reason to compile a new one just to appease shell users with access to "uname". I have been running pre-release kernels for 6-8 years as a sysadmin on production systems at hosting companies and ASPs with no problems.

As an admin, you have to admin that most would upgrade the kernel to an official release at the same time you upgrade your http daemon and assorted support code for security purposes at the same time, even if it WAS mostly superficial.

On the other side of the coin: Why wouldn't they stick to 5.4-R, if they're not going to upgrade PHP? What magical features did 5.5-R have that evidently did not cure (many of) their hardware ails?

Secondly, I don't care how competant you are, you do NOT put a beta kernel into production unless there's a damn good reason. "Because it's newer." is not a good enough reason. That's just good admin.

.. but now we're getting off track. :)

I don't have a server there any more, but it ran 4.4.0 when I did, yes.

The problem for me was the machine kept crashing before it could even EXPORT the DB .. and since they took it offline before it was scheduled to end the PREPAID TIME, I got fucked.

The problem for me was they killed my control panel account prematurely, and then refused for some time to make DNS changes without my CP login. I was like "uh, you changed it, and now you're hijacking my sites." It was lame.

I think Mike *does* "give a shit," he's probably just been busy. He's good, Brian Hourigan is good, but some of the others aren't exactly superstars.

Right, exactly, because some people have good experiences, it COMPLETELY INVALIDATES the bad experiences some have had.

Did you even read the email chain I posted? Did you see the lack of replies?

Your logic makes my brain hurt.

Shell users? He's on a dedicated box. Why was a PRE-release installed at ALL? As a sysadmin, you equate a prerelease as a fully stable release? Remind me not to have you admin anything.

I intended this for 'The still at webair guy's server', actually..

Yep. I finally ended up handcrafting a few PHP scripts to exec mysqldump and gzip my database so I could retrieve anything over, say, 100k in size. I just remembered that..

That is incredibly lame. I've gotten into the 'host your own DNS, even if it takes more work, damn it' mode - and always stage, and test the move before I change the nameservers.. so it has a bit of time to propigate. Yeah, hindsight, I know, I know.

I don't know Brian; I'm sure he's a great guy. I'm sure Mike's overworked as well, but to make promises continuously and not deliver - while still taking my money, that's the same as lying. Misappropriation at best, malicious fraud at worst. Glad all's working for ya now.

Really, before WebAir, I just hosted everything with ICDSoft, because I never did an adult venture before. Six years, and 10 minutes downtime once - to move, and they CALLED ME for that.. when they were still based in Hong Kong.

I'm getting back to the point where I expect a hell of a lot for my dollar. It feels good. :)

Yeah, I'm at Yellow Fiber right now -- so far, so good. The P4 3.0 HT boxes over at Yellow Fiber are 4x faster than the Dual Xeon 3.0/2GB RAM boxes I had with Webair ... d'oh.

I have nothing but good things to say about Webair and I can't remember any downtime.