Next on the list was number 13 in May 2010, but now they are number 8 with webhostingstuff.com. The first thing that strikes me is webhostingstuff’s information on omnis,
Site Established: 18 Jan 1996 (14 years and 179 days ago)
Traffic Popularity: #200 of 10,292 companies
Then there is this on omnis.com’s site
Serving over 200,000 accounts since 1999.
I can only take two things from this. First of all what about the time between 1996 – 1999? The second is exactly how many accounts is currently hosted with them. Sure they have served 200,000 accounts since 1999. Its like how many McDonalds telling you how many burgers they sold. While the strategy works for McDonalds as you can see their fast food chain every where. Nothing near that level of visibility with this webhosting company. There is nothing indicating how many accounts / customers / domains are currently hosted with the company.
But that is not really got my attention, what got my attention was that they have an asterisk next to the free domain on the first page.
* Free domain name offer is limited to 12 month or longer hosting packages for the initial year of domain name registration of TLDs priced at $8.95 or less per year.
Its not exactly clear, but I think its safe to say that the domain is only free for the amount of time paid for on the first payment. In other words you buy one year, you get the domain free for the first year. Every year after you are charged for the domain. This has to be the first company that I have seen do that. But there is a real problem with buying a domain with this company:
http://www.omnis.com/dnregistration.php
Domain name registrations do not auto-renew upon expiration. Renewal must be explicitly requested through the current renewal process prior to the expiration date. Domain name registrations will be deleted 30 days after the expiration date. Deleted domain names may enter a Redemption Grace Period status. The Redemption Grace Period provides an opportunity to restore the domain name and retain ownership. Restoration from the Redemption Grace Period requires a fee of $50.00 in addition to the renewal fee and must be paid prior to a domain name being restored from Redemption Grace Period.
This is a rather absurd policy. Its practically begging for a $50 retrieval fee. Perhaps this is where I don’t play customer advocate. But if you don’t want to manage your domain you should not bother with hosting. You might as well be on some obscure directly or sub-domain by some free hosting company that makes its money off of advertising on the content you create. I realize this is not much of a point as I own hundreds of domains. There is not a week that goes by that I don’t pay for a domain. I make it a point to review the domains that will renew in the next 30 days to decided which will be renewed and which will be allowed to expired. Out of most of my business expenses domains are the lowest cost, but most worth keeping on automatic renewal.
This is another company where they create a lengthy multi-segmented terms of service. Frankly I tend to think customers that buy unlimited space hosting are going to pay as much attention to the terms of service as they paid for their hosting account. But here is the part I find funny:
Omnis Network provides no guarantee or assurance to the time in which a new order will be processed.
Located at http://www.omnis.com/policies/hosting.php
I find this absurd, there should be a max amount of time of when to accept an order no matter how cheap it is.
On the same link I also find
Omnis Network uses Network-attached storage devices to store Customer’s files. The nature of this type of storage requires that Omnis Network limit the number of files Customer can store with the hosting service to prevent exhaustion of the total number of files permitted on the storage device. This limit is 81920 files. Customer acknowldeges that this limit exists for all hosting service and can not be adjusted.
There way along with CPU usage another way they use to close accounts down, but I tend to doubt they have ever shut account down for reaching the file limit.
Also here is a reason to maintain your own back ups if you decide to host with them:
A fee of $100.00 may be charged should Customer require any files from system backups. Omnis Network does not guarantee that the files contained in the system backup are the most recent copies for a given site. System backups are available for at most 6 days.
The omnis affiliate program
Is another high payout, at least on the hosting account which they hand out $75. On domains a more reasonable $1 per domain.
This is the first company that I have seen, or perhaps I missed it when reading the terms of service for other companies, but they do not allow you to use their name in search engine marketing strategy:
Affiliates are prohibited in utilizing our protected keyword “OMNIS” or any variation, misspelling or combination of words with our keyword, in advertising and search engine sites.
This means I should not find any sites with does omnis suck? Read my review to find out.
http://www.hostingsthatsuck.com/omnis-sucks/
I know to many hostingsthatsuck.com appears to be a webhosting review site. But underneath the surface they are really an affiliate that is better served by making companies appear in the best positive light. By the domain name I would assume this would be the place to go to find webhosts that do indeed suck. After spending an hour on their site I am having a hard time finding anyone that they don’t approve of. But they are clearly violating the affiliate terms of service by utilizing Omnis in their search engine results.
