Brainhost.com, the next Top host?

The other day while looking over Flippa, I found a recommendation for Brainhost.com.  I wrote the name down but I can’t say I remember where I saw it on flippa.com.  It was a host I had not seen before, so I figured I would look at it when I had the chance. Keep in mind this was not for a blog article, but I wanted a secondary host to fall back on should I become unhappy with Rackspace.com.  After all I figured that Flippa.com would only recommend hosts that are on par with Rackspace.com or better, right? Wrong! I can say that just off the first page of brainhost.com that I am not interested in service with brainhost.com.  I just can’t take any host seriously that has an unlimited package.  Plus the lack of Dedicated and VPS services leaves me disappointed in brainhost.com.

Just to be clear, there is no such thing as an unlimited space or bandwidth package.  Unlimited is nothing more than a marketing gimmick hosts slap on a package to entice buyers . At best it could be called a package that is no more than what you will ever need, and we are not going to tell you the numbers for what a person will need.  When it comes to unlimited bandwidth, well that’s an easy one to do, just put a bottleneck on how much bandwidth can be used.  After all think about it, your internet connection speed is generally limited by what package you purchase with a provider.

What I found interesting is that Flippa.com’s landing page on Brainhost.com has a $4.95 a month; whereas the main page for brainhost.com has it at $7.95. Normally a price that has a mark over it should imply as much value as possible; at least that’s what someone in sales would say.  I figured I would look at Brainhost.com’s webhosting packages.  All three plus the Flippa.com package are unlimited packages, which have the same 8 features, at $6.95, $7.95, and $9.95.  No $4.95 package unless you came through flippa.com (or perhaps another “partner”). There is nothing there to explain the difference between the 4.

So why is Flippa.com “partnered” with Brainhost.com?

First before I go into why I am looking at Brainhost.com, I think it important to examining the relationship between Flippa.com and Brainhost.com.  Flippa.com calls Brainhost.com a Trusted Partner.  Despite having Brainhost.com shows up on https://flippa.com/deals. A page that shows deals is not exactly some place I would put my trusted partners.  The relationship is not clear; in perhaps the only thing that can link them is a possible free hosting deal.

Flippa.com like Brainhost.com is online for one very good reason, and that is to make money. In an attempt to not have to explain myself again, I am not against anyone making money. I do however have a problem when the method to obtain money is not done in an ethical manner.  With that said I find it hard to believe that Flippa.com is directing anyone to Brainhost.com without some form of compensation.

Let’s take for example the free Google Adwords that a lot of hosts offer to their clients.  For any host that offers it, it is an incentive for a customer to sign up.  For Google.com it’s the chance to get new Adwords customers.  Its pretty clear why both host and Google have what I call a win/win situation.  Both parties benefit from this form of a partnership.

So what does Flippa.com get out of this partnership with Brainhost.com? Hosting perhaps?

I have to ask where is Flippa.com hosted?

Since they are an Australian company, I would at first assume they are hosted in Australia.  But Alexa tells me that the U.S. is on top of their traffic. Plus from the whois information for Brainhost.com I can see the owner is in the U.S. The network whois for Flippa.com tells me:

Address:        Amazon Web Services, Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2

Now you can see why I was under the impression that brainhost.com was somehow as good as Rackspace.com based on a recommendation from Flippa.com. Never mind I have avoided Amazon.com as an option because of fear of disappointment in on a website I spend a lot of money on through digital content and that stuff that comes via Fedex, UPS, and USPS. Though that could change.

So is Brainhost.com with Amazon.com as well?

The short of that is no, a network look up shows that they are with singlehop.com.

So why am I interested in Brainhost.com?

I have yet to see this host on any review site but I think that’s going to change with time. Go to their affiliate page and you can see very clearly why I think that:

http://www.brainhost.com/affiliates-portal/

At $175 or more per sign up that is easily a bigger payout then what Hostgator.com pays out.  So how can Flippa.com get a payout when people are getting charge nothing for the first year?

Flippa.com/Brainhost.com free hosting account:

As with any service you apply for it is important to read the terms of service. Terms of Service will tell you all the loop holes a hosting company will use to get out of giving you what you thought you were going to get.

http://www.brainhost.com/terms-of-service/

Free hosting accounts may not include the same standard features and options as paid accounts. For information on what is included in free vs. paid accounts, visit http://www.brainhost.com/help/billing-questions/hostingplans/. Free hosting clients can upgrade to a paid account at any time by contacting client services or logging into their account at http://www.brainhost.com/login/ and selecting the upgrade option.

As for that link to http://www.brainhost.com/help/billing-questions/hostingplans/ to tell you what the differences are between free and paid brainhosting.com accounts is:

 

As you can see they have not even put the page up for that yet. Honestly there seems to be a lot of incomplete work to be a “Trusted Partner”.  I can tell you that they require a credit card for verification purposes.  Plus there are other things to charge you for like Domain Name Privacy, which is preselected for you regardless if you tell them you will change the dns yourself (meaning that you wisely choose to not have your domain name with your hosting provider). I was hoping there were would be an individual terns of service for free accounts. Granted this is just speculation, but I suspect that this limited account is truly $4.95 a month billed under annual terms after the 365 days. There is nothing to state exactly how much you will be billed and when. Keep in mind the furthest I went in the order process was up to the point where I would have to enter my billing and contact information.  If the details for how much you will be billed for the future and when is in the next step, that is one step too far for notification.

Brainhost.com does however have a FTC discloser in their affiliate terms of service:

http://www.brainhost.com/affilliates-terms-and-conditions/

Brain Host expressly requires you to disclose that there is a “material connection” between you and Brain Host any time you offer an endorsement or testimonial on our services, in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission guidance as outlined at http://business.ftc.gov/documents/bus71-ftcs-revised-endorsement-guideswhat-people-are-asking.pdf. Such disclosure should be clear and prominent, meaning close to the endorsement or testimonial.

Perhaps Flippa can disclose its material connection to Brainhost.

PIPA/SOPA – Justice or Tyranny?

Until this weekend I did not have a lot of knowledge of what PIPA/SOPA was. But I had friends sending me links to sign to support stopping it. Then there is this World of Warcraft related comic that I look forward to reading every Sunday:

http://www.darklegacycomics.com/322.html

This is the point where I realize that I really have not been paying attention, and leave it to the world of humor to enlighten me per usual.From an uninformed point of view I would support PIPA/SOPA. After all I am a big believer in copy right, I believe people should be paid for what they create. Those that did not create should not be allowed to profit off someone else’s work. But I also believe Innocent until proven guilty. In short the devil is in the details.

Why I have doubts about PIPA/SOPA

If you came here yesterday between 8 am – 8 pm, you will know that I opposed the bill.  Hosting-reviews-exposed.com was blacked out and redirected to a site where I hope the bulk of my visitors that were from the U.S. sign up to inform their Senators and Congress representatives.  If you are not from my country you should be concerned, especially if you have customers from here.  That is why the banner for Hosting-reviews-exposed.com has changed because of  PIPA/SOPA.  Hopefully Wednesday will encourage a more rational approach to fighting copy right violators. But rarely does a single day result in change.

I could tell you many of my customers own experiences with battling copy right violations, but I think my first personal issue with copy right is short enough to bring my point of concern. My problem was that back in the late 90’s a large company had copied a site I set up to show case my work so I could bring in more design customers. You would think that it would be me raising hell against this company, but I would have had to of known it was stolen.

Out of all the audacity after stealing and butchering my design they chose to send a letter in the mail threatening me with legal action. I had to say I was pretty baffled as all the design was my own personal creation that I had spent weeks on.  I could clearly see their site was a hacked copy of my site. But as I have said many times I am the last person to go after because in short I am rather weird. Hostile results against me will result in strange feedback. It was my overwhelming need to keep every bit of data that I make or get that saved me.  If my data was actually physical items I probably would appear on TV being forced to give up my precious data. I am a data hoarder.

On top of the desire to horde data I had a CD burner and I was sending copies of my work to a friend through the Post Office. It was not exactly practical at the time to do backups online.  It was not for fear of copy right, but fear of data lose that drove me to do this.  So there were 4 copies of my site design of the then current design work with every detail down to raw data sitting in unopened envelopes with post marks that predated their copy of my work. Not to mention the raw data from the first two designs before the one they stole was in another 5 envelopes. The two original designs showed an evolution of similar elements. The only thing not included there was the rough design I did in sketch pads that I also still have.  I presented them with a few samples of what I had of raw data, a photo copy of one of the envelopes letting them know that there was more than one.  Of course the company had no raw production data, so they quickly withdrew their threat against me. The design for their site quickly changed to their own design (at least I can hope), granted I would have sold them the design as I was not attached to it. I did not pursue litigation because ultimately I had a livelihood to work on.

It was one of my many quirks that saved me from a lengthy legal battle.

So I have to ask, would I have been able to keep my site up under PIPA/SOPA?

I hate reading laws like this, they are far less clear then a loan agreement. Laws by politicians that think we should “bring in the nerds”, But from what I have read the bill is supposed to only affect sites that are in other countries.  For that matter I don’t think this would help anyone in this country that does not have a large legal department behind them.  I could go onto to counter arguments against it.  But I think that there are other people that have done a better job than me.

http://gizmodo.com/5877000/what-is-sopa

http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=2741

https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/sopa-pipa/

http://theoatmeal.com/sopa

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/technology/web-protests-piracy-bill-and-2-key-senators-change-course.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

http://sopastrike.com/strike

http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa/

Frankly I am ashamed to say that I did not do start blogging about this last year.

What really bothers me about SOPA/PIPA

The other thing that bothers me is that it does not exactly explain how they will contact, or if they will even contact them at all.  Nor do I see a penalty for a false claim.

For over a decade I have had my own battles with copy right offenders from people that would like to call themselves my customers, to those that were too stupid to realize that when they copied one of my sites, that I might have learned tricks to encoding my work.  Or those too stupid to realize that the scripts they scraped were reporting back to me and my business partners.

Something needs to be done, but not when it affects innocent individuals.

Congress and the Senate need to understand that PIPA/SOPA are bad ideas.

Manashosting.com – Fun and Games by Email

Manashosting.com found its way to my blog because they choose to spam my personal email account back in November 2010. Not because manashosting.com spammed once, but several times through 2010. I was in the middle of writers block when another email came in from manshosting.com.

Manashosting.com was the encouragement for starting posts on companies that spam.

https://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/?p=1040

https://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/?p=1152

I was emailed by someone claiming to be Antony John with Manashosting.com telling me I should have used the unsubscribe link. They asked me to remove my posts about Manashosting.com, and to give my email account, so they could remove me from their list. I made it clear that I would not give my email account as I never gave it to them to begin with. Hence why I labeled manashosting a spammer.

After which the email spam stopped from Manashosting.com.

By October 2011 it seemed Manashosting.com decided to do something that they had done on many other sites to my site and that was to post fake positive feedback. They tried to use a post on a Hostgator.com post to get people to go to Manashosting.com. Frankly I thought It was distasteful to use a negative post I made on a host to try and advertise manashosting.com. For which I made another post about Manashosting.com:

https://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/?p=2706

Manashosting.com choose the wrong person to spam

I have a lot of reasons to hate spam. Being a former hosting provider being the ultimate reason for hating spam. I can’t even begin to speculate the countless hours of money and man hours lost in dealing with spam. The more domains that were put on our servers, the more spam that the servers were forced to endure. On top things like spam assassin ran making it to where we had to put less clients on a server. Then there is all the legitimate email that I lost because of measures to avoid spam.  Some cases this would cost me clients. Then there was the occasional asshole that thought they could use our servers to spam. Sometimes my servers were held hostage by the likes of spamcop to pay what very well may be deemed as black mail to white lists IPs. Don’t get me started on Comcast whose own spam policies costs me hours of man hours to fix. They had adapted a stupid practice of using abandoned email accounts to catch supposed spammers. That is only a small taste of why I cannot stand spammers and I could write novels of what can only amount to a burning rage. But this is about one company that will use illegitimate means to get customers, Manashosting.com.

An email exchange with Manashosting.com

I had to meant to post the email exchange between me and Manashosting back in December 2011. But as I stated super busy with issues such as the loss of a family member, work, and well the holidays.

This email came in again from someone claiming to be Anthony John on December 7, 2001.  The Subject was “ACTION REQUIRED”
“Am writing on behalf of Manashosting.com, on your website there have been several occasion of abuse of service by posting unreliable and false statement about our company which is hampering our business to a greater extent and also its affecting our branding. We from the company have brought this to your notice several times and no action has been taken yet with this regards. Now that there has been a new rule implemented by the Indian government to protect company’s interests and individual interests we request you to remove these folly reviews from your site at the earliest. The rule that is governing is called as Information Technology Act (ITA). If you are unable to remove the folly reviews we recommend that you remove our company from your website completely. All the keywords that are added with our name Manashosting and or Manashosting needs to be removed from your website.

Thanks and regards,

Antony John
Branding Manager
Manashosting
Bangalore, India”

I only received one email from Manashosting.com, from this guy claiming to be Anthony John. This time around I have no idea why he has my email, as I never sent a reply back to him through the hosting-reviews-exposed.com Gmail account. I simply posted his email to the first post, and allowed the blog to email him with a email from the system.

Here is my response to Manashosting.com

“Anthony,

Your company spammed me, hence why I did an article on your company.  Had you not spammed me you would not have found yourself on my site.

As for I where I lied, point out where and I will see if there is an actually correction needed. Otherwise instead of issuing threats you do not understand, I would suggest in your next email you ask me how you can work to resolve this and change your company to a viable option. By that I do not mean a bribe, but following business practices I lay out.  If you do not want to see any more articles stop spamming me and every one else.

I have done reviews on far bigger companies then you, and they are willing to work with me.

Also Anthony, don’t lie your company only contacted me once, as I published your companies last email.

Regards,

Benjamin”

Manashosting.com’s response:

“Hi Benjamin,

Its nice of you to respond with your grievances and we do apologies if we had spammed you earlier, but what we would like to tell you is that due to this review on your site we are losing business to an extent, and more over we had never approached you on this, now since there is a law that is in place in our country where we can approach the site owners and let them know about the hindrance caused to us and we would like to settle the matter in a more amicable manner rather than seeking the justice through law Information technology act (ITA) www.mit.gov.in/content/information-technology-act.

We do also understand that there might have been a mistake from our side by spamming you. At the same time we would like you also to consider the amount of work that is done from our side to bring our company’s branding and there by would like you to take us of your website.

I hope that you would surely consider this request.

Regards,

Antony John
Manager Branding
Manashosting
Bangalore
India”

I did try to dig into their laws, but frankly I doubt even Manashosting.com understands the link they sent me. It’s a pdf file so not exactly easy to search for the exact law they are trying to point to. I could care less about there lose if Manahosting is going to fake their reviews and spam. But in short I get the last word with manashosting.com.

“Anthony,

You spammed a U.S. citizen.  I am not a citizen of your country.  Therefore your law does not apply to me. Spamming is illegal in my country. Which means any severs that you have in my country must comply with U.S. law, not India law.  Never mind my first amendment rights.

But if you want to go after people that have negative things to say about your site, how about  http://www.webhostingreviews.com/manas-hosting-reviews.htm

I also know your spam commenting like you did on my blog my biggest case in point is:

http://www.web-hosting-top.com/review/manashosting.com

If you care to debate it I can make it a point to have that company review the positives.  You have a trend of creating positives (and you’re not good at faking it) every time there are negative comments.

Trying to point me to a law that does not affect me, is not going to help you.  Point to me where you thought there was an actual lie.  I suggest you read each of my posts on your site word for word.  But I know I am not the first to complain about your spam.

http://indian-web-hosting.blogspot.com/2008/09/manas-hosting-spammer.html

Also there is no question about if you spammed me, you did spam me.  I never gave your company  my email nor would I ever give your company my email address.  Which makes the emails your company sent to my private yahoo account spam.  There is no might of about it.  I will not accept a half assed apology.  Simply put I should never have received any of your companies emails.

As for never approaching me on this your full of crap.  I have your previous email from “11/14/10”.

Antony
[email protected]

Message:
Hi,

It looks like we have sent emails to your personal mail id. This could
have been amicably settled because we also give links for DND which we
update on a regular basis. We request you to mail your email id so
that in near future you would not receive any emails from us. And we
also request you to take the content off your site.

I hope that you would surely do the same.

Regards,
Antony John

Sent from (ip address): 117.192.180.91 (117.192.180.91)

Then there is your email from earlier “We from the company have brought this to your notice several times and no action has been taken yet with this regards. “

So yes you have approached me on this.

I have dealt with another host from your country on the same issues.  Unlimitedgb.com, of course they did not try to pull some law on me, they tried to bribe me.  Which did not work out so well from them either.

http://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/?p=2461

Read the blog and actually correct everything I pointed out.  Doing so means I will work with you and update the posts.  The posts will not be removed.

Either way you spam my email, blogs, YouTube account or whatever else I will write up another post.  So before you spam anyone, think twice as I have over 30 email accounts with various sites, 26 blogs, and 5 YouTube accounts.

Once again there was no might have been about the spam.

Regards,

Benjamin

P.S. Spam pisses me off to no end”

Manashosting.com can choose to respond to this post, or learn from their mistakes to avoid having to suffer further consequences.

I hope I do not have to give Manashosting any more lessons in ethics.

Zyma.com – A year later

I think it is safe to say that Zyma.com is proof that review sites like hostingsthatsuck.com are not to be trusted. A year has gone by allowing for real feedback to come in. Not like the arranged positive feedback that was given out in exchange for free hosting.  Not to mention nothing to stop these sites form signing up for “our affiliate program is one of the most attractive schemes around.” which paid out 40%. Granted I would not have used the word scheme. I can’t say I fault Zyma.com for contacting people for reviews to promote their company.

How my review of Zyma.com began

Last year Khuram the owner/marketing director and from what other people tell me the support for zyma.com contacted me to offer me free hosting account in exchange for a review. Not the first host to ask for a review. But like all of them, the owner of Zyma.com did not bother to actually look at this site and see if it’s actually a review site. I told him there was no way I would trust any of my sites on a $10 a year account. Shortly after I find that not only did he contact me he contacted a review site that uses “(hosts name) + sucks” as a marketing strategy in search engines like Google.  That site was hostingsthatsuck.com. The whole premise was this must be a good host because there were no negative reviews about this site. Never mind that before Zyma.com was a U.K. webhosting site, it belonged to some construction company in Spain. The review was disingenuous.

https://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/?p=1618

Khuram of Zyma.com was not happy with me

My review of Hostingsthatsucks.com review had Khuram the owner/marketing director/support and probable sales agent for Zyma.com contact me sharply protesting my review for calling his site a scam. This had to be a record in response time as he contacted me the same day I had posted this blog article. He asked that I remove my review of Zyma.com. I declined removing the post as I will only do that if I am wrong. I also made clear I only quoted one of the other people that he asked to do a review, which was hostingsthatsuck.com.  Hostingsthatsuck.com used words like scam and sucks, everything that someone would not want to hear about their site.  A site that has appeared on my site before and will continue to appear as long as hostingsthatsuck.com continues to use a false negative context while obscuring other negative search engine reviews.

After Khuram finale really read what I had wrote he conceded and claimed to have contacted hostingsthatsuck.com to remove their post, and that he removed their free hosting account and affiliate link:

“which is why we have revoked hostingsthatsuck.com affiliate license with us, as well as removed their website from our servers.”

“With regards to hostingsthatsuck.com, we have requested them to remove the post, however we cannot force anyone to do anything, and so we are limited as to what more we can do.”

Honestly I don’t believe him as the so called review for zyma.com at hostingsthatsuck.com has remained unchanged as you can see from the attached screen shot. I do not believe that the owners of this fake review site would leave a post-up for a site that will not pay them.

But the true gem out of all of this was the discussion on unlimited hosting. I could not get an answer on what normal usage was. It’s the same spill I get from any unlimited hosting advocate.  But in order to know what normal is you have to have number that’s your base line.  At less than $10 a year Zyma.com’s normal is going to be lower than what hostgator.com considers normal usage.

Why the Interest in Zyma.com again?

There are a few factors in why.  Last year I had promised to do a re-review of Zyma.com. I was going to do a re-review.  But with of the big hosts doing FTC compliance the need for a template review became unnecessary. It seemed better to just go after any review site that show cased a host with an FTC compliance requirements in their terms of service. After all my issue is not that affiliates are making money, it is that some affiliates try to label themselves as review sites and do not mention they are biased for the sake of a payment.

Another reason I bring up Zyma.com again is because of this unreal unlimited hosting plan. Not that I think any unlimited plan should be trusted for real hosting needs. Zyma.com offered this so called unlimited hosting plan for less than $10 a year.  I call it unreal because it’s not something done by other providers such as Hostgator.com and Endurance International Group. There are a lot of good reasons behind that. First and foremost it takes money to make money. One thing I am certain of is that Zyma.com does not have the capital and buying power that any of the popular so called unlimited companies have. In short Hostgator.com has the power to buy machines that can handle hundreds of people for far less then Zyma.com would.

Too often I encounter people that think that hosting should make up less than 1% of what they bring in. These are the same people that fall for any cheap solution. To anyone that thinks hosting should always be cheap, it is time to wake up from fairy land. When you buy hosting your data is not stored in another dimension where there is infinite capacity, its stored on a hard drive on a server, which in turn is stored on a rack that is hooked into a router.  This server’s rack is housed in data center that receives utilities such as water, electricity, and perhaps natural gas. Not to mention phone lines, the connection to an upstream provider. Plus if the provider offers backup options such as a gas powered generator and battery backups there are even more expenses.  Plus there are no gnomes working for free in the back ground. A human being in needed to do the maintenance and support for zyma.com, and most preferable more than 1 human being. If these human being are not outsourced from another country like say the Philippines or India and is in Great Britain then the costs go up even further.

Don’t forget that they offer 40% payment to people in their affiliate scheme (once again their choice of words not mine). Though I doubt at less than $4 per sale most review sites would be interested. That and merchants are not exactly allowing you to collect money for free. Which at the time Zyma.com’s only merchant was PayPal.com, that alone could cause less people to sign up as there are a lot of people that are not fans of PayPal.com who has decided to have a 30% retainer on proven participants. Then there are other fees such as business licenses. Running a business is not as simple as snapping your fingers.

The quality of the equipment and human interaction elements to a degree depend on how much is paid for them.  In short don’t expect a Porsche 918 Spyder on a budget that could buy you a 1985 Chevrolet Chevettee.  But while we are on the subject of human interaction back in January 2011 they were only offering 14 – 16 hours of support. This is my own opinion that Khuram was the only person at Zyma.com.

By October 2011 Zyma.com appeared to be falling apart at the seams

While I got a few comments on the down time at Zyma.com, most of the customers that contacted me via email. Per my own policy I do not publish the emails of customers unless they give me permission; sadly none of them contacted me back.  Down time seemed to be as long as 10 days. Review sites like hostingsthatsuck.com had people complaining about down time as well in October.

I contacted Khuram to get his side in regards to people complaining about down time, but I was never contacted back.

So what about the people that promoted Zyma.com?

I have looked at lot of sites that did a so called review based off of the free hosting plan from Zyma.com. One in particular did not have their hosting account continued this year by Zyma.com:

http://www.pingable.org/zyma-com-cheap-webhost-review/

Out of all of the sites that I have found with in the first 2 pages of search engine results on Google, this is the only one I find that retracts their positive feedback.

At the top of the page has been added a notice of:

“We have received a lot of comments saying how bad Zyma have been, constant down time, and poor service. Zyma were meant to provide us with a free account for life, and they did not renew our account after 12 months, so all I can say as I would not trust these guys. Over the space of the year, we found that our site was down more often, and that it was slower to respond. So if you are considering Zyma, I would not go with them as a provider.”

Never mind that was a 2012 update, a far cry from the complaints they also received in October 2011. It seems the only reason that they did an update was because of the removal of free hosting. I did not see anything in the email that was sent to me by zyma.com that stated a free for life account; then again I saw nothing of how long the free hosting would last. I can’t see any affiliate links despite the previous endorsement still intact below this despite a warning to avoid zyma.com.

Is Zyma.com a scam?

It would be safe to say that Zyma.com was a scam if people did not say that their websites had come back up.  But sites have come up. There is a back story that has yet to be told. I can only speculate as to what the cause was. But I personally feel the only way Zyma.com can move forwards is to get some pricing similar to the competitors they try to compete with. It was ok in the beginning, maybe in the first month to bring new customers end. But in the long run it’s a bad idea to not have a package that ensures a company does not struggle.

If anything I think Zyma.com is at worse a company that treads on despite its failures.

thebest10webhosting.com your lesson begins here

Going through my pending and spam comments I found thebest10webhosting.com. I was in the middle of doing some long overdue maintenance. So I figured I would try and check and make sure there was nothing valid in the spam folder.  When a comment came in from this so called review site. At the same time I am trying to answer everyone’s email/comments. Some of which I have trouble answering and/or approving because in some cases like this they choose to do commenting that did not add to the discussion, but rather to their own benefit even it has nothing to do with the topic. This is the first of a few posts I want to do to explain what I deem as inappropriate. In this case web sites trying to advertise their services at my expense.

I will shortly explain why I choose thebest10webhosting.com to be my example.

There is nothing special about thebest10webhosting.com.

thebest10webhosting.com has an Alexa Score of: 5,859,871

Hostingreviews.exposed.com has an Alexa Score of 165,972 (before my server issues I was below 140,000)

Remember when it comes to an Alexa score you want a low number.

Some example of companies with low Alexa scores

Facebook – 2

Amazon.com – 12

Hostgator.com – 245

Bluehost.com – 393

Fatcow.com – 3,095

This high a number generally means visitors are rare. Despite having more Facebook fans then me, they have far less feedback then I would expect from a site with so many Followers on Facebook.  You would think on average they would have more reviews then Facebook fans.

As for being a site with years of experience:

Creation Date: 06-aug-2011

They have not even been online for a year, but from what archive.org shows they did start the site the same month they bought the domain.

http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/thebest10webhosting.com

So why am I even bothering going after thebest10webhosting.com?

In terms of a post that will bring me in traffic this is not one of them. It may very well go down to be my least viewed post. In general I don’t bother with hosts that have an Alexa score above 1,000,000 after having dealt with the hosts that purchased fake positions at webhostingstuff.com. I only did that because I wanted to prove that these hosts were paying for a position in the top 25. For review sites I don’t bother with them unless they are below 500,000. That does not mean just because your Alexa score was too high that I completely forgot about them. For some that I have potential I have on a list for re-review at a later date.

But as I stated I wanted to work on a post that deals with comments; in this case hosts, sites that sell services to websites (Like Mindshark.ca), and review sites that choose to spam in one form or another.

This review site that had the unlucky timing to spam my blog Tuesday is thebest10webhosting.com .

Which happens to come in at a time when I need an example of  what happens when you spam me. At the same time it serves as one of many so called consumer watch dogs or in other words top 10 sites. Though I guess you could have figured that out by the long domain name.

This so called review site tried to chime in on a post I made about inmotion, it did not really add anything to conversation. But they defiantly tried to get their link in there. After all how best to get a big payout then to go to a site that has a post about one of the companies that they are trying to convince people is a good company. Because of this review site I decided to review webhostinghub.com and inmotionhosting.com to see if they had an FTC compliance clause in their Affiliate Agreement.  Turns out every one of the hosts on this top 10 list do.

This post is pretty much to point out why companies should not bother doing fake comments on my site or spam me to promote their own company.  I will make it a point to make my own traffic from their name. Just as I will do with any company that tries to spam me be in via email, YouTube, comments on this blog, or whatever else. Which means I will look for every flaw that I can find about their site.

Another problem is if people look up your site through an internet search they will find my site. So instead of making traffic off my work, I make traffic off thier work.

If any individual needs more of a reason not to spam me or anyone else they need look no further then this list of companies that I can think off the top of my head that spammed me in one form or another. This site appears on the first page of many of their search engine results:

Mindshark.ca https://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/?p=2037

UnlimitedGB.com https://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/?p=1240

Manashosting.com https://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/?p=1040

So here are the flaws with thebest10webhosting.com

They are another of these so called top 10 sites, who allow comments/reviews (maybe).  I have a very good reason for believing that their reviews are fake.  After all how can a site get a review before they were up? Remember the creation date for their domain is August 6, 2011, yet this review as done July 23, 2011.


 

On top of that most of the comments are between September and October 2011 in no particular random order.

So which of the top 10 hosts that appears on the list does thebest10webhosting.com host with?

NONE OF THEM

That’s right, not a single one of these hosts.  They host with Godaddy. Honestly compared to many of the hosts that appear on list I can tell you why. While Godaddy does have an affiliate program it does not payout near as much for the same package as most of these companies.

The interesting thing is thebest10webhosting.com has not gotten the memo that HostClear.com is merging with JustHost.com.

Is thebest10webhosting.com FTC compliant?

Well they do have a disclaimer, which I copied and pasted below.  Please keep in mind that text in italics and red is not my grammar or spelling.  Clearly doing very little to state they get paid by this top 10 list, but they do in great length say they are not liable.

http://thebest10webhosting.com/disclaimer.php

In the interest of the consumer and according to FTC requirements we openly disclose that all the information on this website TheBest10WebHosting.com is for information purposes only. Not trying to provide advise of any kind. Saying that, you as user of this site, should not rely completely on the information found here to provide advise. It is also important to disclose that we receive payments from advertising other companies in this website. 

The scoring system used in this website is at the discretion of the webmaster, as well as the statements, reviews and recommendations. The user must be aware that some reviews could be falsely submitter with exagerated or incorrect statments. We do our best to keep all the information from our advertisers up to date, but we do not provide any warranty of the accuracy of the information provided in this website. It is also necesary to clarify that we are not a web hosting company, we do not own nor are we owned or managed by a hosting company.

Neither TheBest10WebHosting.com, its owners, subsidiaries, affiliates, and employees, nor any person associated with the creation and maintenance of this website shall be responsible or liable in any manner or to any extent for any direct, indirect, special, third party or consequential damages, losses or expenses arising out of the use of this website. We will not be responsible for any detrimental reliance that you may place upon the site or its contents.

You hereby agree and acknowledge that TheBest10WebHosting.com and its affiliates shall not be responsible for any damages you may suffer as a result of the transmission of confidential or sensitive information over the Internet, and that all such communications will be at your own risk.

While thebest10webhosting.com has a page stating that they get paid (very short)  this violates many of the hosts FTC compliance measures.

1. You have to scroll down and click to find and read the disclosure.

2. Its not on the same pages as the endorsements.

3. Its not clear that thebest10webhosting.com is being paid by these “top” hosts.

So that means I will be contacting every Endurance International Group host, Hostgator.com, and other hosting groups that appear on this top 10 to advise them that their affiliate is non-compliant.

 

I will update this post with the responses I get from the following hosts:

Inmotionhosting.com

Webhostinghub.com

Justhost.com

iPage.com

Hostgator.com

Fatcow.com

SuperGreen.com

Bluehost.com

HostMonster.com

JustHost.com

Hopefully I do not add too much traffic to thebest10webhosting.

Webhostinghub.com – Seeks FTC Compliance

This is the first time you will find Webhostinghub.com on Hosting Reviews Exposed. I was reviewing their new affiliate agreement because a so-called “top 10” hosting review site decided to spam comment on this site.  Like the first hosting company, they appear to be following along the same lines as Hostgator.com and Endurance International Group.

Why would anyone want to put webhostinghub.com on a top 10 list?

 

As you can tell from the screen shot, $100 per sale is very enticing.  Which is why I see webhostinghub.com on many so called top 10 site sites.

What I find interesting is that Inmotionhosting.com and webhostinghub.com have the same FTC notice.

https://ref.webhostinghub.com/affiliates/tos.php?page=tos

https://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/?p=2896

Perhaps at a later date I will explore the relationship between these two companies as  I find it hard to believe that Webhostinghub.com would borrow copy from InMotionhosting.com.

So Called Top Host Sites take notice of Webhostinghub.com Affiliate Terms:

As with the other FTC notices, in a nutshell Webhostingpad.com requires its affiliates that do endorsements disclose that they make a commission:

FTC Endorsement Compliance

At Web Hosting Hub, our aim is to care for our customers in a fair manner and to fully abide with all Federal Trade Commissions regulations that relate to advertising. At the same time, we necessitate that our affiliates do so as well. The regulations include, but are not restricted to, Federal Trade Commission 16 CFR Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, which necessitates, along with other criteria, that material connections between advertisers and endorsers be revealed. Therefore, directories, review/rating websites, blogs and other websites, email or collateral that claim to provide an endorsement or assessment of an advertiser (in this case Web Hosting Hub) must clearly state that the fact financial or in-kind compensation is given by the advertiser.

You can get further information and suggestions on complying with these guidelines via the links below. You are advised to search for and acquire your own legal advice on how these rules apply to your website or any promotional activities that you receive compensation for. Web Hosting Hub reserves the right to withhold commission fees and cancel the affiliate relationship with you should we find, at our discretion, that you are not abiding with the previously mentioned guide or other FTC regulations/guides we view as applicable.

The FTC offers a variety of resources to help make it easier for you to comply with the guidelines, including:

 

Webhostinghub.com joins the list of hosts that require review sites to disclose that they make money when people use them to sign up with a host.  If you’re a review site and choose to show case Webhostinghub.com be prepared for a visit from me.

Non-disclosure of getting paid for an endorsement for by Webhostinghub will result in me contacting  them to enforce their policy.

Inmotion – Seeks FTC Compliance

While doing a review on a review site that choose to spam my blog, I decided to review inmotion and other sites that appeared on it to see if they too had a FTC compliance in their Affiliate Terms. Turns out Inmotion does .

This is not the first time I have done a review on Inmotion:

Inmotion was the 6th host that reviewed to appear on webhostingstuff.com’s so called top 25 list.

Are you considering inmotionhosting.com? Caution READ my review before buying!!!

Honestly at the time this was not a site that I had thought was a big host. But I find them in the top 10 of some review sites.  Perhaps this may be the reason why:

http://www.inmotionhosting.com/hosting_affiliate_program.html

No surprise as to why top 10 sites are show casing Inmotion when they get $50 – $100.  Even $50 is not that much

But Inmotion has a catch:

http://www.inmotionhosting.com/hosting_affiliate_program_tos.html

FTC Endoresement Compliance

At InMotion Hosting, our aim is to care for our customers in a fair manner and to fully abide with all Federal Trade Commissions regulations that relate to advertising. At the same time, we necessitate that our affiliates do so as well. The regulations include, but are not restricted to, Federal Trade Commission 16 CFR Part 255: Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, which necessitates, along with other criteria, that material connections between advertisers and endorsers be revealed. Therefore, directories, review/rating websites, blogs and other websites, email or collateral that claim to provide an endorsement or assessment of an advertiser (in this case InMotion Hosting) must clearly state that the fact financial or in-kind compensation is given by the advertiser.

You can get further information and suggestions on complying with these guidelines via the links below. You are advised to search for and acquire your own legal advice on how these rules apply to your website or any promotional activities that you receive compensation for.

InMotion Hosting reserves the right to withhold commission fees and cancel the affiliate relationship with you should we find, at our discretion, that you are not abiding with the previously mentioned guide or other FTC regulations/guides we view as applicable.

The FTC offers a variety of resources to help make it easier for you to comply with the guidelines, including:

Inmotion joins the list of hosts that require review sites to disclose that they make money when people use them to sign up with a host.  If you’re a review site and choose to show case Inmotion be prepared for a visit from me.

Non-disclosure of getting paid for an endorsement for by InMotion will have me contacting  them to enforce their policy.

Goodbye MediaTemple.net – Perhaps we will meet again!

First off let me be clear, Mediatemple.net was not directly responsible for the downtime on hosting-reviews-exposed.com.

Before this, all began I had already entertained in October 2011 the idea of migrating, after all, traffic was up and the site was performing slower.  Not to mention a month earlier another site that shares this account had its database moved by MediaTemple.net. Per usual the tech at MediaTemple did not bother to check their work.  The site was offline for at least 8 hours. This is something that can easily sour me on a company. They simply do something and do not bother to see if what they did fix a site or made it worse.

By mid-December 2011 it became clear that there were some serious problems with Hosting-Reviews-Exposed.com. Pingdom shows that I had 132 outages. Per my last post, I had not had a lot of time to dedicate to this site and the sites that shared the account at MediaTemple as they were not in any shape or form income makers.  Between a death in the family and a rather serious customer trying to regain a nice sized 5 figure a month income. But December 22st would change that. As I would have a 5-hour outage and unlike the other outages this time the server would not recover within a few minutes.

The problem ultimately was with a plug-in that did the fancy color bars that told you what posts were popular that week (personally glad to see it go as I thought it was tacky).  After removing that plugin, the site ran perfectly. MediaTemple.net’s response was to disable every part of my site leaving only bare-bones WordPress.  On top of that, they disable the theme for my site. Though clearly, they realized that was a mistake because 5 minutes after doing so they re-enabled the theme before I could. Keep in mind it was Rackspace that pointed to the exact issue.

MediaTemple wanted to shoot first ask questions later

I am not a telephone person.  I hate my cell phone. You can thank this bank called Bank of America (who stores their money in the Caribbean), they cured me long ago of ever wanting to talk to someone on the phone for customer service. Maybe someday I will go into my gripe with them. About the only thing that will get me on the phone to talk to someone is a site being down.  I made it to a point to put a ticket in first with MediaTemple.  But it was pretty clear I should call them after all Mediatemple has this 20 hour response time up when I post a ticket.  In the cyber universe, an hour is an eternity too long. I grudgingly listen to reggae music while on hold.  Not that I hate reggae music, I truly love it. It just should not sound like it’s going through a broken speaker that puts out a lot of static.  Anytime I was placed on hold I had to bear with this, which is why I requested not to be placed on hold. The first time I was on hold I had to endure 12 minutes of this.  My mood was pretty sour after listening to this tortured music, not like I could have hit mute.  I mean from a business standpoint it would have made sense For MediaTemple to go with something neutral like elevator music unless of course, it has the same static effect that wore my nerves thin.

Keep in mind I am not a programming person, I am a graphics person. I delegate the non-design part to other people.  Perhaps that’s something I should have explained to the person on the other end at MediaTemple. Since my usual webmaster (whose name is on the account with MediaTemple) was busy with the holidays, I figure why not hand this off to Mediatemple. I asked how much it would cost for them to remedy this. I mean seriously, I offered more money to make the problem go away. Next thing the guy on the other end went into a ramble on stuff I could hardly understand.  The part I did understand was the word theory; after all, I am someone that wanted to be in a field of science (biology). The way he used the word theory is that he speculated on what the problem was and that they did not have concrete proof of what the problem was.  It was at this point I had to ask if this meant he had any idea of what was wrong. because it seemed like he didn’t.  He told me that he did know exactly what was going on.  Hence no need for the word theory. But clearly, his conclusions were that it had something to do with my plugins as he disabled all of them and even the theme for my site. After another ramble, I thanked him for bringing the site back up and told him I will have it migrated off to another provider. This is where I notice that he disabled my theme

MediaTemple.net trying for Redemption

Shortly after hanging up I had contacted Rackspace because I wanted to look for another solution. The MediaTemple tech I was on the phone with updated the ticket and wanted to arrange for me to speak with a supervisor to try and retain my account.  They were supposed to call me around noon. At the same time, he had re-enabled the theme to hosting-reviews-exposed.com.

While in contact with Rackspace and telling them about my problem with MediaTemple while trying to re-enabling plugins slowly to see which ones were slowing the site down.  It was Rackspace that pointed to top posts plugin.  Enabling every other plugin but this one, I could see a drastic improvement in service.

Two hours before noon, the MediaTemple supervisor decided to change the time to 3 pm.  Since I had missed the update too late and had a client to deal with I missed it, honestly I saw no point in updating the ticket.  By 5:15 pm he updated the ticket.

Before I go any further, this is a point where he could have changed my mind, he could have pointed to what was the exact problem. But what I got was a very long list of suspects and:

“Please let me know a good time and number to reach you at, I’m available Tuesday – Friday 10am-9PM.”

This was December 23, 2011, Thursday so a total of 3 days where any host has a chance to win me over. Heck, even Virtually and Dialtone had someone to talk to on the 24th and 26th of December.  Keep in mind they were lousy companies that were eventually bought up.  Sure he can celebrate the holidays, and yes I do celebrate Christmas, but it has not been a full day off for me since I became self-employed 13 years ago.

The worst of it was the MediaTemple.net supervisor while not calling on time, had decided that he would list every single plugin that I ran in conjunction with WordPress and how many in quantity that I had on the other sites that shared the server. I can’t say that impressed me. It pretty much pointed the finger at every single one as if they were the problem. This had me believing MediaTemple.net knew less about what was going on than they had led me to believe. They could not point to any particular plugin that was the cause of the problem.  Never mind this is after I disabled the plugin that Rackspace had pointed me to for almost 24 hours, and I had updated the ticket with that information.

After that and up to the time I migrated the site had run better then it had in months. In fact, if it had run this well before I would not have been inclined to migrate off MediaTemple.

I was not beyond being talked out of migrating to another provider. Between the loss of a family member, a new client with a ton of work, the holidays, the cost and time of having someone migrate this site and other sites, and on top of that going from $40 a month to $150 a month I would have loved a reason to not migrate.

But they were unable to do what RackSpace did in a few minutes, and that is point me to a problem.  Another problem that I have not really got into is MediaTemple.net’s in-house control panel.  If it worked that list of plugins would have been shorter. I should have told him that part of the reason that there were so many had to do with the fact that their control panel did not delete sites that I tried to get it to delete. While the control panel says we have 15 sites, you can log in through FTP and see that there are 20. Keep in mind I said I am not a technical person, but I do know how to use FTP, meaning there is a serious issue when I can see this problem. Yeah, I guess I suppose I could have contacted them in the past to fix this.  But I am not here to debug their stuff for them. That is the job of whoever develops the MediaTemple control panel. Another annoying aspect of their control panel is adding a domain to the control panel.  It is not instant like most control panels, it can take up to 15 minutes for their control panel to add a domain (the process relies on a cron).  I figured after a year and a half that MediaTemple.net would have this fine tuned.

Is MediaTemple.net WordPress Friendly?

When you search for “Mediatemple WordPress” you find they have landing pages just for WordPress. But it has been my experience a lot of plugins do not work with their service.  One in particular vital to someone that does not know how to back up their site, case in point is BackUpBuddy. There are some others that I am not mentioning purely because some tricks of the trade are up to the software providers to get out there, and the less that know about them the better off I am. But I found myself constantly having to re-enter my serial numbers in.  At first, I had thought it was the plugin developers favoring cPanel.  After all a very popular control panel, you go where the masses are.  But after relocating for the first time WordPress sites on RackSpace I am more inclined to think it was MediaTemple.net.  BackUpBuddy is working perfectly.  Also, those licensed plugins are not asking me to re-enter my license information. MediaTemple is not as WordPress friendly as they could be.

Final thoughts on MediaTemple.net

MediaTemple.net is capable of great things. I would like to think they are a step above companies like Hostgator.com and Godaddy.com.  But there are things like this that keep me from wanting to list them in the big boys club. They have done what I wanted to do which was to create a control panel. There is defiantly room for a competitor to cPanel.  But it has been an unfinished product in the 1.5 years of my using it.

Then there are things like this:

https://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/?p=723

Is this the point where I tell you that you should avoid MediaTemple.net at all costs? Their control panel while being homegrown, is an unfinished product. At times they seemed understaffed. Don’t even mention outsourced support to them (regardless if it can be done successfully).

Despite these failings MediaTemple is not a company that I will ultimately lump with the likes of Virtualis, DialTone, OChosting, FastServers/Layeredtech), and Burst.Net. They may very well be in the same position as Server Beach. Which honestly after my first dealings with them I would have told you to avoid Server Beach. But before I left the hosting industry I was approached by a company that had bought them out. Frankly, the salesperson they had to contact me had changed my mind, though I had left by the time my previous company started using them. It was because they did what those companies I listed as failures would not do, and that is to seek redemption. MediaTemple did at least try to do some damage control, something I can not say about those I list as failures.

Regardless of how this ended, I can’t say that I would not consider MediaTemple in the future.

Hosting-Reviews-Exposed.com is now Up at Rackspace.com

Rackspace is now the home of Hosting-reviews-exposed.com. Last month I did not get out as many posts as I had wanted.  In part I had more work to do than expected, and I lost a member of my family. On the bright side the work came from someone that was not looking for the cheapest possible solutions. The extra work helped to go through the morning period, and I plan to bring something positive out of this tragedy.  But while this was happening hosting-reviews-exposed.com was going up and down like a roller coaster through the month of December 2011 Hosting-Reviews-Exposed.com had been up and down 164 times.  I have mentioned several times that I had planned to move off Mediatemple.net, but a support call was the final nail in the coffin with this company. More about that in another post.

Honestly there were a few other hosts that I had my eye on, one of which is a solar powered host out of California.  But given how chaotic my schedule has been I wanted to avoid not being able to get a full review of this host, not to mention I am in the progress of actually finding a home.  After all that was another reason I had got out of the hosting industry which was because I wanted time to buy things such as a car and a house. I got the Car back in late September 2010, granted car prices are not in state of change.  But I think now is the time for a new home.

I wanted to go with a true green hosting provider because at heart I am a tree huger. While I have not mentioned this provider by name the solar host out of California it is not hard to Google them and see who they are.

But here is why Rackspace won the handling of Hosting-reviews-exposed.com. There was a problem with databases, and it was that rather annoying looking color bars that told you what was a popular post for that week.  This widget turns out to be what was killing this site.  It was something I was recommended, I grudgingly did it as it looked like an eye sore on this site. I was really looking for a rational reason to remove it other than having to say I disliked how it looked. But I was told that it would help traffic, clearly it did it cut traffic by 80%. Mediatemple did not find it, and frankly I was not happy with them using the word theory to mean fact.  Not to mention they did a hatchet job to my site in the progress.

This is not an Endorsement of Rackspace

I have mentioned in the past that I was not particularly happy with Rackspace.  But I have yet to mention why.  My problems in the past had to do with the sales agents they had given me.  When I contact them to get new service often there was a lot of feet dragging in the progress. The easiest way to sour me on a company is to give me one too many company representatives that take up my time. One of the reasons I hated dealing with sales and billing reps at ThePlanet, as they were not inclined to keep you as a customer.

Granted these days I have not dealt with a sales agent with Rackspace, but I have never had a bad server from Rackspace.  Support is generally good; I do get the occasional bad tech that you will encounter from other companies.  Remember though this is not unlimited $3.99 a month hosting.  The hosting for Hosting-reviews-exposed.com is now costing me $150 a month, from the $40 at Mediatemple, from the $4 I originally spent at Godaddy.

Advice on WordPress for Rackspace Cloud users

The last two days hosting-reviews-espoed.com was only coming up 50% of the time, and would come up after a reload. The first 24 hours I had ignored Pingdom as I was a bit busy and thought that may have been the dns change. This turned out to be a php memory issue that I was able to correct by adjusting the values.

Now to see that Rackspace can earn being the home to Hosting-Reviews-Exposed.

1...567...25Page 6 of 25
© Hosting Reviews Exposed