Webfusion Dedicated Hosting - Avoid At All Costs
September 19, 2008 by admin
First a word of warning: if you value your website do not touch Webfusion with a barge pole!
Last weekend our dedicated server which hosts a number of our larger sites suffered an extended outage. Despite supposedly having mirrored disks, these clowns lost all our data and kept us waiting over 2 days before admitting what they’d done.
Firstly, the server was supposed to be monitored, but we had to alert Webfusion the fact it was down. This was followed by 2 days of chasing Webfusion Customer Support for a response, resulting in them offering the unreadable disk for us to arrange data recovery (at our expense, obviously!)
Their solution was to give us a new server, minus all data - and with 2 completely new IP addresses. That’s where their customer service ended. We’ve had to restore almost 5GB worth of data, recreate all our accounts, email addresses, recreate and restore multiple databases and update all our DNS records (with the appropriate delay while DNS propagates around the globe).
Thankfully we had a recent backup to restore from. Had we relied on Webfusion we would have potentially lost over 4 years worth of data, and our online offering would have been no more.
As if this wasn’t bad enough they absolutely refuse to offer any compensation, as in their eyes they have done nothing wrong - “I am sorry for the recent issues experienced on your account, however as we have provided a service in line with our terms of service, we are unable to offer compensation in relation to this” says Catherine Elliott from the ironically named “Customer Solutions” department.
Do yourself a favour and avoid these muppets like the plague. We should have known when earlier this year their equally inept sister company 123-reg.co.uk managed to lose one of our valuable domain names!
Needless to say we are currently on the lookout for a new host.
Update 29/11/2008:
We have now moved hosts and thought we had cancelled our server with Webfusion. However, despite this they still invoiced us, not for 1 server but for 2!!
“We have been unable to debit 1973.72 GBP from the card ending
xxxx which we hold on file for your account. This is because the card has expired.”
Well thank goodness that the card had expired. One week later we are still trying to cancel our account, but it has, as ever, been a painful process. Do not trust Webfusion to do anything correctly.
Hi - do you still have an account with them? If you have a dedicated server could you confirm the access speed of the network card. Could you provide physical evidence to support this as well. The reason I ask is that webfusion have cost me my business through their unreliability and I need to prove that they are lying about the circumstances so I can take it further. i really hope that you can help.
kind regards,
jerome
Hi Jerome,
I’m sorry to hear that you too have had problems with Webfusion. The thing I hate most about them is their “couldn’t care less” approach to customer service.
We still have a server with Webfusion, though the contract expires in November and we’re in the process of migrating to another host. Our Webfusion server is configured at 10Mb/s - see below:
Settings for eth0:
Supported ports: [ TP MII ]
Supported link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
Supports auto-negotiation: Yes
Advertised link modes: 10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full
100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full
Advertised auto-negotiation: No
Speed: 10Mb/s
Duplex: Full
Port: MII
PHYAD: 32
Transceiver: internal
Auto-negotiation: off
Supports Wake-on: pumbg
Wake-on: d
Current message level: 0×00000007 (7)
Link detected: yes
I have to agree!
There was a time when webfusion / gx networks / pipex / dedicated servers were one of the best around.
I’ve used them for some 6 - 7 years with 2 different companies on my recommendation. The support has always been awful, but I get by on my own with root access.
Recently however, we purchased a new server from them. I was a little concerned that they had their own Control Panel, and not a known brand like Plesk, Ensim (I beleive Plesk bought out Ensim?) or cPanel, but had a look at the donhosts control panel demo as webfusion is a rebranded version of it and found it to be sufficient so long as I could get root access.
We got the server, but I needed php-5.2.6 installed, so forked out the extra £100 + VAT for them to do the upgrade. Once they’d done it I requested root access and had a snoop around the obvious places, error_logs and php.ini files etc.
The apache error_log was full of errors coming form suphp.conf and there was no php.ini file actually being loaded! I stopped my snooping there and posted a ticket letting them know.
Two weeks later I had had enough and got on the phone to the muppets. There and then on the phone someone sorted out the missing php.ini file issue, and informed me the suphp.conf errors where a known issue (thanks for telling me).
Super I thought, so I had a snoop around again, only to find half the php libraries, mysql & mysqli included, were generating errors in the log and simply not loading!!!
On the phone again I was telling them these issues had to be resolved by end of play otherwise I wanted a refund on the php upgrade and a server re-image. The twat had the nerve to say that the server re-image would be chargeable @ £100 + VAT. I had a good laugh at him tho, and he soon changed his tone.
Eventually they sorted those errors out, and I managed to get on.
Now however, I’m finding that imap support hasn’t been compiled into php, the qmail configuration is very bizzare the wrong php-mysql library has been installed, there is no maillog file (anywhere), they do have a mail.log file however, which is empty, despite emails going in and out, and I’ve sent some emails which should generate errors. MySQL root user under localhost doesn’t have full privileges, some things in their control panel don’t work (account error logs).
All in all, not a happy chappy. But now they are trying to wriggle out of a refund because I’m in a 12 month contract.
Anyone want a decent alternative, go to http://www.1and1.co.uk my personal dedicated server has been based with them for ages now, with plesk 8 control panel. Support is crap, but still better than webfusion… by far. For the a little less money you can get 2 x 250GB hdds as aposed to 2 x 160’s + 250GB ftp backup facility (very useful as you can set it up automatically under plesk to backup nighly on a cron).