Hostcentric: A Company to Avoid

We were a happy customer from 1997 to 2005. But that ended with the takeover of Hostcentric by the current ownership and management.

Access Media Group, LLC is a communications company specializing in the vision care market. This is the story of our experience with Hostcentric. If you are considering Hostcentric for your web hosting, we hope you'll find this information helpful.

Our Hostcentric experience began in 1997, when we opened an account with a company called Virtualscape. During a string of acquisitions, that company became part of Hostcentric. Despite several changes of ownership for both Virtualscape and Hostcentric, in our experience the quality of hosting and customer service did not waver.

But in 2005 Hostcentric's then-owner, Interland (now called Web.com), decided to spin off the shared hosting business of Hostcentric to a new owner. This new owner has Hostcentric's name and customers, but is an entity that is completely unrelated to the old Hostcentric and Interland. They also appear to operate under names such as BizLand, eHost, Virtual Avenue, Blue Domino, and others.

So, How is the "New" Hostcentric?

In a word, the new Hostcentric is terrible. In fact, as you will learn below, we stopped doing business with Hostcentric after numerous problems, even though they offered us 10 free months of hosting.

Some highlights of our experience include:

• Hostcentric screwed up 74 of our email addresses while migrating us to a new server.
• We were informed by the Support team that it was against Hostcentric's policy to provide the company's address, or any names of management, to a customer.
• When our site became inexplicably password-protected, a Hostcentric Support person actually told us that they were aware of the issue, but were waiting for other customers to call in before bothering to investigate.

Below are the details of our Hostcentric experience, which began with the migration of our site from the old company to the new Hostcentric.

The Hostcentric Timeline of Errors

Here is a chronology of the first few days of the Hostcentric server move:

• Our site was moved on Wednesday, August 3. At one point mid-day, it was obvious that the move was underway, because much of our email functionality disappeared.
• We were unable to log into the control panel of our account, which we assumed to be a temporary result of the transition. Later that evening, in an online chat with Support, it turned out the problem was that our password had reverted to one that we stopped using months ago.
• During the chat, we notified Support that 14 of our mail addresses were missing, and that about 60 forwarding addresses were set up as mailboxes instead of forwards. We explained that these addresses were providing sales leads to our customers, and that proper functionality was imperative. We were assured that functionality would be restored by 8 am Thursday morning.
• By Thursday morning, nothing had been done. We were then told that the problem would be fixed within 24 hours. At the end of the business day on Thursday, we were told by Support that engineers had begun working on the problem at 4 pm.
• Contrary to that report, on Friday morning, still nothing had changed from the initial state of disarray of our email system. At that point we decided to work on the system to change everything ourselves.

It was readily apparent that Hostcentric was working with out-of-date files, because they set up email addresses we had deleted long ago, and failed to add more recent addresses. The same was the case with our web pages.

This episode cost us dearly. As any business knows, an interruption in providing customers with sales leads damages a company's reputation and standing with customers.

Hostcentric: Incompetent and Indifferent

At this point our feeling was that Hostcentric’s incompetence during this episode was bad enough. But the arrogance Hostcentric displayed in not addressing our problems, and continuing to ignore an urgent situation, was infuriating.

I should point out that during each encounter with Hostcentric Support, the Hostcentric personnel were businesslike and seemingly knowledgeable. They each expressed dismay that our problem was not being addressed by Hostcentric technicians. However, they were powerless to do anything about it.

During one of my phone calls to Hostcentric Support, I asked for contact information for Hostcentric management, so that I could write a letter or make a phone call to express my dissatisfaction. I was informed that it was against company policy to provide Hostcentric's address, or the names of any Hostcentric management, to a customer.

My Contact with Hostcentric Management

Through a Google search and a "customer service" email survey, I did obtain the information I needed to FedEx a letter to Hostcentric's Vice President of Support, Mr. Gary Engel.

Mr. Engel had the courtesy to contact me by phone and made a cordial and diligent attempt to repair our relationship. This included an offer of 10 months of free hosting to compensate us for the time that we had spent during the transition, when we were essentially doing Hostcentric's job. We agreed to continue hosting with Hostcentric, but to keep a watchful eye on Hostcentric's performance.

The Last Straw with Hostcentric

Then on August 6, we noticed that our site was inaccessible, because every request for a file was met with a dialogue box requesting a username and password. When we called Hostcentric Support, the representative told us, "We're aware of that issue. We were just waiting for a few more people to call in before thoroughly checking it out."

Doesn't that sound like something we made up? Unfortunately, we didn't.

The Move From Hostcentric

At that point, we knew that a new hosting company was an imminent move for us. We started researching new hosting companies. Then, on August 31, all our ColdFusion mail forms abruptly stopped working. At that point, rather than waste our time with Hostcentric Support, we moved our mail forms to a new host, and moved the rest of our site several days later.

If you have made it to the end of this lengthy documentation, you must be very interested in the performance of Hostcentric. So if we can elaborate at all, please contact us.

Update - October 28, 2005

We've had a number of inquiries from people who want to know which hosting company we switched to. We purposely didn't mention this in the original documentation of our Hostcentric experience, because we didn't yet have a track record with our new host.

At this point, we're happy to unhesitatingly recommend our new host: HostMySite. This company has a referral program, but we haven't joined it. We're recommending them simply because they're excellent.