Good Riddance to Heart Internet 1
Heart Internet in a Nutshell
So yes, another new look and a new opportunity to rant. The rant this time is directed at my old webhost Heart Internet who have displayed some shocking customer service to add to 5 years of very mediocre service and thus finally pushed me to finding a far better host for less money!
So lets take the rants one by one:
- First they insist on billing me for a service that other hosts give for free. The service is what they call a domain mapping service which basically means pointing a second or third domain name to the same hosting account. £22 a year this costs and at the same time is very lacking in functionality (i.e. you can only point the second domain at the root of your hosting account making things very very messy!).
- I don’t even use that service as I don’t own the second domain any more, I let it expire after a project I didn’t have time to work on any more.
- I have cancelled the service by support ticket, email and telephone. You would also think that if anyone was working on any kind of logic they would realise I was not using a domain mapping service for a domain I don’t own!
- Despite all this they insist on me paying the £22, and until I do they block access all the £200 a year services I have paid for!
So in summary they are prepared to lose a £200 a year customer over a £22 bill for a service for a domain name I no longer host, a service I haven’t used, don’t want to use and other webhosts give away for free! They obviously think I am bluffing so I moved on. I am glad I have as for five years they have offered a very mediocre service for a less than mediocre price. But as many will understand the thought of moving several websites, databases etc to a new host is one that makes you look for something less painful to do e.g. self-dentistry armed with only a pair of rusty pliers and a hacksaw.
Now I have moved to MediaTemple and have been nothing less than impressed so far. Their control panel is second to none, the performance is way ahead of the painful deathrolls Heart Internet performed when loading pages, and their support documentation is outstanding! To top it all I am getting better services at a lower price… including the domain mapping for free. The site move was super-painless, and I took the opportunity to upgrade wordpress and some of the scripts and plugins at the same time.
Anyway, if anyone hits any issues, let me know! Good riddance to Heart Internet!
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I’ve just done things in the opposite direction! I found MT remote and impersonal, though obviously good for larger corporates. They had a 25 min outage the other day but said very little about it except that ‘one of their servers came under attack’. Last time I tried to call – a message said the wait time would be about 30 mins … no thanks. They had quite old versions of Wordpress and other plug-ins (last time I looked) whereas Heart appears bang up to date. Heart’s support tickets get an almost instantaneous response, although some of their ‘experts’ don’t always read the queries in detail … that would be my only criticism.