Unease
I continue to have host problems as it’s loading slowly. Globat, my host, are crooks and after 3-weeks of inconsistency, I’ve had enough of them. I’ve talked to them almost daily with no relief. Waiting for a return call from a “supervisor” for some sort of answers today after talking to their “support” for about 15 minutes while getting the run around. I have a feeling he/she will never call. Bastards! For anyone reading this who needs a host, don’t EVER USE GLOBAT you will be shafted!
So who will your next host be?
Pinky June 3rd, 2005 at 9:46 pmWow a comment!??
Still researching it. More likely a local company – Laughing Squid.
John June 3rd, 2005 at 9:51 pmI had a Globat account for a while and suffered many problems. I would strongly encourage anyone considering them to think about another hosting provider. Issues I dealt with:
* A service change that discontinued part of my hosting plan that I was not informed about, may have caused me to lose data, and that I was given no consolation about when I discovered the issue. I have two domains (say, foo.com and bar.com) and I want both to be basically colocated and managed simultaneously (me@foo.com is the same as me@bar.com and the websites are the same). With the account I signed up under, this functionality was fine and freely available. Globat slowly phased in a new, in-house management system for website hosting (more on this below) that replaced Plesk, which they previously offered and with that migration, the website colocation functionality went away. I discovered this after I created some new email address, someone told me “hey, I emailed you at newaddress@bar.com and you’re not replying, what’s up?” and I realized that setting up newaddress@foo.com no longer meant the @bar.com equivalent was there. I contacted Globat customer support, they were dismissive and actually claimed that the real problem was that they hadn’t been able to turn the feature off in the past – not that they a) pulled the plug on me and other customers and b) didn’t tell us. Great.
* Their approach to security is not, in my opinion, practical for webhosting in the 20th century, let alone 2005. With the migration from Plesk to their in-house management system, the account management page serves up, over HTTP, a list of domain accounts with link to their web interface with the username and password contained in the link. The fact that they send a list of all usernames and passwords over HTTP is just crazy. Also, those links are HTTP, too! Something like: http://foo.com/webmail/user=me&password=BoyWouldIBeMadIfIKnewThisPasswordWasExposedForTheWholeWorldToSee. I contacted their support about this issue as well and don’t remember what they said but it was not “you’re absolutely right – this is a huge security problem and we’ll switch to HTTPS for this content and remove the interface that lets people log in using HTTP querystring parameters.” The last time I checked, this system was still in place.
* Their billing policy is also complete bogus. I moved my hosting to dominet.net about 6 months ago but didn’t turn off my globat account because there was still sent email in the webmail interface that I hoped to extract before closing my account (I never found a way to do this) and I wanted to take my time and be sure I would be happy with my new host (I am, but would encourage anyone to shop around). Then on May 19 I got email from Globat indicating my credit card had been billed for the next year of service. I tried to find the interface to cancel my account but was unable so on 5/20 I logged a general support request to have the account closed and asking to be refunded for the auto-billing that I didn’t request for the service I would not use. They did respond promptly but I didn’t act on that email until today, 6/7 and went through their account closure form (https://order.globat.com/cancel/cancel.cgi), again asking to close my account and for a refund. Their response indicated that since I have not been with them for less than thirty days, I am not entitled to a refund (again, for an auto-payment that I evidently opted into and had no choice to refuse: http://support.globat.com/faqs.php?action=sub2&c=10&id=76).
I’m not optimistic about getting refunded, but if they don’t capitulate, I intend to offer them the choice that they can either refund my billing and I’ll just ignore the whole annoying mess or they can not, and I’ll periodically comb feedster for blogs mentioning globat or asking for webhosting advice and talk about the worst aspects of my service, like I’m doing here 🙂
Good luck – sorry you had to deal with a similar experience, too!
Patrick June 7th, 2005 at 12:39 pm