Jan
2009
My PhilHosting Horror Story
When I started this blog in May of 2008, I entrusted PhilHosting with my site in my foray into the world of self-hosted blogging. I foolishly chose their service because of their affordable rates, neglecting to research customer satisfaction online.
That, in retrospect, was the first mistake I made as a self-hosted blogger. Over the holidays, without prior notice, PhilHosting apparently restored their mySQL databases from ancient backups. That resulted to the loss of all the precious blog posts I had written after December 4, and a whole lot of annoyance and agony.
What’s more, soon after that, a bigger problem followed: the blog became inaccessible from my home Internet connection, making it impossible for me to mitigate the situation. This wasn’t my fault, I was sure, because I couldn’t even publish a post explaining why several of my blog posts had suddenly disappeared.
My first instinct, of course, was to contact their technical support service in the hope that they could at least give me back access to my blog. Well, turns out, these guys like to vacation, too. They announced this on their homepage:
12/23/2008: Philhosting is close on Christmas Holidays. All account and technical inquires/request will be process on January 5, 2009 when regular office day is resume. Thank you and Happy Holidays!
That’s an exact quote, copy-pasted from their homepage (in the bottom-left of the page, under the ‘News & Updates’ heading). Yes, their grammar was bad, albeit not half as stinky as their service.
So I had no choice but to wait for these guys to return from their hiatus before I could open a trouble ticket, which would then take days for them to process thanks to their snail-slow reaction time. With that in mind, I found it a fruitless effort to send a strongly-worded email to them (plus, it would corrode the spirit of the holidays I assumed), so I waited until January 7 to seek assistance from them (just to give them time to transition from vacation mode to help-my-client-with-his-site-problem mode).
They responded about 24 hours later, asking me to “please visit your site no [sic]” and advising me to provide them my cPanel login data so they could “check your back up if disabled”. I’d regained access to the site by this time, by the way. Okay, I thought, and obliged with their request for my login credentials.
I assumed they wanted my login info so they could go into the more technical corners of my cPanel to untick a checkbox that said “disable backup”. Instead, they followed up one day later saying that admin had actually “temporarily disabled the bak up [sic]“. They said that I had to request them to provide me a link with which I could download a full backup of my site. Sounds like a complete reversal of roles, with me having to request something from them, yes? Plus, couldn’t they just have provided me a link to the backup then and there instead of making me beg for it first? What, does their internal bureaucracy prevent them from assisting their customers?
Still, I decided that remaining calm and polite was still the best way to go. On January 9, I opened up a separate trouble ticket requesting for a full backup of my website. I have yet to hear from them. Big surprise.
Sick and fed up with PhailHosting, I decided to go ahead and purchase webspace from Page.Ph, another reputable Pinoy webhost. This blog is now hosted on my Page.Ph virtual server, and while it took them quite some time to process my account, everything’s been going smoothly so far. I hope Page is a better webhost than PhailHosting.
If you Google around, you’ll notice that I’m not the only unsatisfied PhailHosting customer out there. Here’s a short rant from two years ago at Fubar Genre (with what looks like a planted commenter making an appearance). Three days into the New Year, Aaron Roselo posted a rant about PhailHosting, as well. Ed Arevalo plurked his frustration with PhailHosting recently, too. Technogra.ph covered the story, and another rare satisfied PhilHosting customer praised the host in the comments section. (Ironically, I tried to visit said satisfied customer’s website and wasn’t able to access it, LOL.) There’s more where that came from, and hopefully a lot less to come.
So that’s it, my own PhilHosting horror story. *shivers in fear*
UPDATE 1/14
I’m assuming someone over at PhailHosting read this rant, because at noon today I received this message in my inbox. It was a reply to one of my trouble tickets.
You have already stated that you friends can access it.
http://webhosting.info/webhosts/tophosts/country/ph?pi=1&ob=RANK&oo=ASC
If you click through the link, you’ll be taken to a page with a nifty bar graph that ranks PhailHosting as the number one webhost in the country by market share and total domains. I was amused. Obviously, it was their snarky, prideful way of saying “you’re wrong.” Uhm, you might have the biggest market share, but based on my experience, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you give all your clients the best service you can offer. (Sure, you might be accomodating to the big companies that host their sites on your servers, but you leave the little guys out in the cold. Way to go.)
And in response to their nonchalant “You have already stated that you friends can access it”, that’s true—my friends could access it. But I couldn’t. I checked my antivirus and firewall programs, and my website wasn’t blocked on any of them. I’d also been able to access my site for brief periods of time (and when I say brief, I mean three minutes brief). That means it’s most probably a problem on your end. Your unwillingness to fix it or even to give me suggestions on what to do to fix the problem just indicates the crappiness of the service you offer.
PhilHosting. Hosting fail. Customer service and satisfaction fail.
I also had a bad experience with them I did not even enjoyed the website I supposed to have with them. We should ban that webhost hehehehehehe.
LOL. If only we had the power to do so… hehe.
wow…what a nightmare! …next time try to find a webhost that provide 24X7 services.
i "almost" had the same experience like you except that the building where my webhost is located got burned down, it's good thing that i have a backup, and after they restore my account in their new server, they gave me twice the amount of web space that i was using
Well, at least that webhost of yours knows how to make it up to the customer.
that's bad…but when i search philhosting…i get this…
http://webhosting.info/webhosts/tophosts/country/...
why they are no. 1? or you must host your blog to US and pay $
Your guess is as good as mine.
Dreamhost is doing great with me
Yes, I hear the rates there are good, too. *sigh* if only I had a credit card. LOL.
should i be blogg'n my hosting services also? hehehe.. not this time.. patience!
Aside from choosing a reputable host, it also pays to back up your files often. Make a schedule if you have to. At least if the server conks out, you still have your database with you. There's a WP plugin that can send you scheduled back ups. It's called Wordpress Database Backup. Try it if you haven't done it yet.
I hope that helps.
Actually, in the process of writing this post I realized such a plugin did exist and hurriedly downloaded it. Now it sends a backup of database to my email every week. Thanks for the comment.
I see. Good for you.
But your host really did do a bad job at almost every imaginable side of hosting (e.g. replacing databases with old backups, no 24/7 support).
Hope you won't encounter anything disastrous again!
I just moved away two of my sites from Philhosting. I'm with BigBytes now. It's faster, and I can host unlimited domains in one account. Philhosting used to be good, but now.. I don't know what happened to them.
Welcome to the club. I'm one of the early clients of philhosting, way back when it was still a struggling company in the Visayas. Back then, the service was very good and the rate is manageable. The owner is the one managing and providing support services and he even provided me with his cp no. and private email address. Now it's one of the biggest hosting company in the country, has moved to Makati a few years ago and probably has the baddest technical support in the world. I experienced all kinds of problems with this company – billing problems (a few times i had renewed my hosting and domain plan ahead of schedule and still my site expires, unaccounted payments), frequent downtime, late technical support responses, and unannounced upgrades or migration. Just last month, they moved their SQL server in another location and they only announced it in their website which i rarely visit. So my blog lost its databases for a week and i thought my 5 year-old blog was gone for good. Turns out I had to do some script tweaking to reunite my blog with the lost database.
I think my 5 year relationship with philhosting will end this year.
Yes, I was affected by the SQL server migration, too. *apir*
I hope you find a better webhost, dude.
Exactly! Then why they are still in Number 1? That's the question….and by the way….i'm not from philhosting….just one of the sister company……you can express what you want…and we can also share ours….and BTW, many of bloggers hosted in philhosting.net become popular by writing negative reviews from them….. go! go! go!
If you're trying to imply that I'm writing this negative review because I want to be popular, then you're wrong. I'm happy in my little corner of cyberspace, no matter how relatively small my pageview counts are. I wrote this to forewarn other people who might be thinking of hosting with PhilHosting. I don't want them to have to deal with the problems I did.
Exactly again! That's always they reason(writing negative issues to be popular?).That's why still more of the bloggers are getting popular by this. That's why they thank you…. Admin people always instruct us – "Wag nyo ng patulan yan….sila lang naman yung nagrerekalmo e….yung mga nagbabayad ng libo-libo sa'tin buwan-buwan di naman nagrereklamo e mga corporation pa naman….". He he he…..feel free to express…you're very welcome…cheers!
I already left philhosting a year ago because of sever downtimes and unsupportive "support" staff.
Yun na nga– quote, unquote, "support". LOL.
Hi! Disgruntled Philhosting customer here too. In fairness though, they restored my lost posts yesterday. Still, super stress and dinulot nila! Was the move to the new host smooth lang? Mabilis lang po ba?
It took Page.Ph about one day to get my account ready, but aside from that it's been pretty smooth naman. I had a fresh install of WordPress using Fantastico then I used the import/export utility, so 'yun. They've been pretty okay naman so far.
@dean, same experience here! My mistake was that I didn't google comments about their service so I got suckered into getting a hosting plan from them.
@Hades: you've just divulged how people in your sister company treat their clients.
The problem is that they [Philhosting employees] are aware of the many customer complaints blogged in the internet, but they are still doing nothing to improve their services.
Just checked out my website and it is still down today. Checked out the corporate website of Mang Inasal (which I saw from the philhosting.net website as one of their corporate clients) and it' up and running. So ofcourse the big companies don't complain because their website is always up and running while the blog sites/websites of the small unlucky non-corporate subscribers are always down.
Just try to google the phrase "philhosting.net sucks" and the results alone confirms it.
They also gave me that e-mail requesting my login and password for the cpanel. I ddin't give it to them because it sounds fishy. They could access it anyway they want since it's their server so why? And that's the story on how I can still backup from cpanel. However that won't stop me from moving to new hosts this week.
our site's been frequently down in the past few weeks (or months) we're definitely transferring to philwebservices, too bad they don't have add on domains but their customer service is good (as of now hehe)
probably the "best" conversation I had with philhosting.net's phone support:
me: tanong ko lang po kung bakit po down and site namin nang madalas?
secretary: (in a semi-palengkera tone) UP NAMAN E!
HUH?! very professional..
Oh, man. Happy to hear you’re contented with your new webhost. Hope they’re nothing like PhailHosting.
Wow. Just wow.
Glad you decided to move to another webhost. Hope they're nothing like PhailHosting.
[...] Complain about their bad service (as a lot of people have done online), and they send you a link showing that they’re number one in market share. Huh? Full details over at Deantastic. [...]
I myself was a victim of this company, I was duped by this company last year when I decided to transfer my domain registration with them from another domain registrar based in US. Please see the link below regarding my rant on this company.
http://www.normandb.com/2009/03/unreliable-philho...
They didn't even say or feel sorry for their mistake and they don't even have the courtesy to inform their clients on a timely manner that the service we requested from them was unsuccessful, I felt being duped, ripped off or scammed.
As IT professionals, let's put our clients first and above all, always treat them in a professional way. Please read this related story from a blogger http://gogirlcafe.jennyo.net/?p=907