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Date Submitted :
May 14th, 2009
Length of time hosted by this company :
1 - 3 years
Overall Rating :
2 out of 5
Reliability :
1 out of 5
Support :
1 out of 5
Pricing :
3 out of 5
Verdict :
They have a nice looking control panel. If you are new, want to host a html webpage that gets 2 hits a week - Netfirms is acceptable.
If you want to write scripts that require databases - it's easy to set up, but slow as hell, and down way too often for no reason.
I just got off of the phone with the "Retention Manager", named "Matt" and he and "Michelle" are the worst scammers in Web-Hosting history. I purchased the Business Hosting Plan that included "5 Free Domain Names for ONLY 119.00" and after I hit "submit" to authorize the charge to my card, they ended up charging my card for the full price of 175.40! This happened Feb 12, 2009 and even though their website boasts of a 24/7 phone customer service support, there was no phone support available until today (Monday, Feb 16, 2009).
This morning, after acting like he was fixing the problem by cancelling the previous account and charging me for another $119.00, it turned out that he "could not fix the problem". After getting disconnected, I had the pleasure of speaking with the rudest Customer Service reporesentative named "Michelle", who then told me that I could not get reimbursed for the domain names (even though they were "free"). After she finally transferred me to Matt, he informed me that he would have to personally contact the billing department in order to cancel my account and refund me entirely and that he would call me by 4:30pm to resolve.
When Matt called at 4:15pm, he sang a different tune by telling me that he would only cancel the hosting, but that I had to pay for the domains because 48 hrs had passed since the date of orginal sale. I explained to Matt that I no longer trusted his company as a legitimate business because they made an unauthorized charge on my credit card and were unable to honor their Business Hosting Plan that included "5 Free Domain Names for ONLY 119.00" and I asked him if he understood that Netfirms was only authorized to charge my card "$119.00", but he told me that it was not their fault that I pressed the whole button.... WHAT?
This company is CRAZY. And to top it all off, THEY ARE IN ONTARIO CANADA! DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH THESE SCAMMERS! I wish I would've found this website before purchasing. Now, I have to go through my bank to resolve this. It's a good thing I Print-Screen all online purchases before authorizing the charge because that is the only thing that is saving me.
I don't know where these people come from, but I've been with Netfirms since I started online [5 years]. Granted, I have had a couple of incidents where I had to 'prod' their support people to help, but only minor. I have the 'mid category' of their packages and find it more than adequate [presently running 13 domains], at one low price! I've had NO downtime, to speak of, except for my own lack of knowledge. My sites are ranking well and I have all the features necessary to improve. They have more features than I will ever have time to use. I would highly recommend Netfirms to anyone who is serious about doing business on the internet.
The good: Good prices and good feature offers. You will like the amount of space they provide, and the bandwidth. You will like their control panel, it\'s very impressive, intuitive, easy to use, and it comes with basic web stats. So you are getting some value for money.
The OK: The \'dual web server\' solution they implement (Apache and IIS) isn\'t as great as it sounds. Yes, it means you get PHP and ASP and ASP.NET together but if you have a PHP-ASP.NET mixed site or if you want to implement slightly advanced ASP.NET functionality such as URL rewriting or using ASHX/dynamic image handlers, then this just isn\'t for you. They run under medium trust and it is extremely restrictive. It would\'ve been better if they simply had PHP running under IIS as a simple thing like handling 404 pages becomes a pain. But the reason I put this under the \'OK\' section is because of the old adage - you get what you pay for. I chose this host due to the prices and expected too much. My mistake, but let this review be a guide for you. Also, my experience with them has indicated to me that they were originally a Linux host and only recently decided to add Windows hosting support; ASP.NET support shouldn\'t be like this.
The bad - I\'ve been with several hosts over the past 10 years, netfirms has the worst support staff. Think of the worst tech support you have ever had. Well, these are worse. Most replies are in the form of one-liners, spinners or deviations. They are loathe to go into detail about anything. They have a phone line, in Canada I believe, and the support staff there are curt or rude and generally have no technical skills. Further, their technical staff is pretty bad too - they will update server configurations and not inform anyone of what they are doing. When servers go down, there is again no email or intimation anywhere about it. The only way you know a server is down is when your website is unavailable.
The bottom line: If you are an advanced programmer/webmaster, then netfirms is not for you. If you are going to be hosting simple websites with mostly static content or pretemplated software or are not that knowledgeable about things like \'URL rewriting\', \'medium trust\', or \'reliability\', then Netfirms definitely gives you good value for money. Unfortunately, as a programmer, I did not like them and decided that I would stick with them for 2 years before giving my testimonial, as this review is now one based on experience over time rather than \'one bad incident\' that causes other negative reviews.
The good: Good pricing, they also offer ASP.NET and PHP together, plenty of disk space, good bandwidth, good control panel.
The OK: A little downtime once in a while, but it\'s acceptable.
The bad: Rude customer support, technically incompetent customer support, making configuration changes to servers without informing anyone. The last one, about making server changes, is big, though it sounds small. If you do anything \'fancy\' on your site such as URL rewriting, it may suddenly stop working and tech support will not know of what has changed. Also, having Apache+IIS \'dual web hosting\' isn\'t as great as it sounds, don\'t fall for that one. It causes more pain than is worth.
I wouldn't recommend this host to my worst enemy. Very insecure and slow. They actually suspended my website without prior warning, not even a notification e-mail. Only realised after a week, and only after contacting them about it, did they explain the situation. Apparently, the server was infected with a virus and inserted malicious code into every index file; they assumed this was my fault and suspended the site. Thankfully, my site is just a personal non-profit but apart from the security issues with this web host there are other issues. The server is unreliable, mysql is slow, ftp login time-outs are too short (1 minute), the control panel is absolute pants and the staff are incompetent and seem to paste a response from some hand book.
DO NOT GO NEAR THEM
They are scammers basically , they lie about their service and uptime guarantee, the customer service is the worst in the world . I have not dealt with anyone as rude as netfirms customer support. they do not know what they are talking about, the Cpanel is very very very very buggy and it does not do anything. you can not delete database that you have created and there is noway for you to talk to a live person unless you are trying to sign up for one of their packages.You would be much better off running your own server on your own personal PC and trust me it would be much faster than theirs. You have to wait for two days for a reply from their customer support and they do not explain anything in their reply except saying you have to wait and be patient even though you have been waiting for 10 days. You can sign up with much better hosting companies for alot cheaper than them.
Server is usually down. A little pricey for the features (I can get better features from hostmonster in a lesser price). I hate that netfirms is costly and yet there are so many downtimes / intermittent connection
Terrible customer service. Treated me very badly - rude and unprofessional. Their control panel is buggy and tech support non-existent. I switched hosts after 2 days. Don't walk way from this company.... RUN.
This hosting company is the worst that I have ever used. Honestly their customer service sucks. They have very ridgid rules on what you can and cant do to help your site do better. Any technical questions to their customer service are answered with check google or I have never heard of that. Now that I have dropped them I find that my e-mail address is still on the account and I have no way to get it off without contacting the company the website was done for.
