Review: EastSolid - Beware! - Knowledgebase

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Review: EastSolid - Beware!

Posted by elegant_dirt, 05-15-2006, 11:26 PM
Hi everybody, As I just recently switched hosts, I found this forum very helpful with many reviews that really helped me picked the best host. I want to give back and provide some of my advice. I wanted to make the leap into the reseller world, but I wanted to do it cheaply. I wanted to really just experiment, so I found a company (EastSolid.com) that would let me do this. I figured that they must have been overselling with such dirt-cheap costs, but what the-heck, I was going to experiment a little bit and if worst comes to worse, I would be out $50. It turned out to be a disaster. They recently went down last Wednesday, and they are still not up as of May 15. They blamed the problem on their data-center and kept telling me that it was because of mother day's weekend. This is the most significant downtime that I've had with them, but there have been many more incidents that were only about an half hour, so not enough to complain about. Another problem was that they kept failing to configure the mailserver correctly. I kept getting weird messages, and when I finally asked why it kept occuring (they had "fixed" it multiple times), they told me it was because they had to reconfigure each time they rebooted the server. First off, why are we rebooting the server constantly, and why can't this just be fixed for good? Odd, I know, but it was eventually solved. My last gripe with them is that while their support is responsive and usually friendly, I sometimes felt that they blamed the problem on me when it was obviously their fault. With the email issue, the problem had nothing to do with how I configured my mail client, and they finally just suggested that I use IMAP. I prefer POP3 for reasons that I will not get into right now. They also did not respond in a very professional manner; they often had syntax problems or bad grammar. This is not a huge issue for me, but just adds to the whole dissappointed effect. Other than that, they were quite nice. I may have hit them at a bad time, but I think that more than 1 day of downtime is unacceptable. I let it slide for 5 days. So, my suggestion to everyone out there -- stay away. It's not worth the hassle. To end on a better note, I recently switched to NetworkRedux hosting after reading many nice reviews on this forum. So far I have been very impressed with them, even though I have not given them the test of time. Hopefully I will not need to switch hosts--again! Thanks for all the reviews on hosts, as I think they have helped me and many others! Last edited by elegant_dirt; 05-15-2006 at 11:30 PM.
Posted by KGIII, 05-16-2006, 01:14 AM
I'm amazed you let it go for five. You're a new poster (by the way, welcome to WHT) here but you seem to have a head on your shoulders which makes me wonder why you let it go five days? Either way, thanks for the review. Hopefully it will come in handy and someone will search the forum before asking for reviews. KGIII
Posted by elegant_dirt, 05-16-2006, 01:32 AM
I'm a new poster, yes, but I've been a long-time reader. Just got enough motivation to register an account. :-) I probably tolerated the 5 days because I had not moved anything mission-critical to them yet, and they kept updating their emergency status page. While the messages did not explicitly state one hour to go, I felt they implied it would be up in an hour. The lesson learned here is that tomorrow never comes! BTW, I managed to get a refund for the rest of my term pretty easily, so I think they are heading in the right direction, but just need to work out a few fatal kinks first. Thanks for the compliment. Last edited by elegant_dirt; 05-16-2006 at 01:36 AM.