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MK Hosting USA is a relatively new name to me here at TCH but one I am going to become very familiar with in the weeks ahead.

This review is being written after only having signed up for an account a matter of days ago and in that sense it is perhaps too early to speak much about negatives, because in all honesty, I have yet to find any. That’s not to say that there won’t be any problems, ever; this is web hosting after all.  However, I thought it would be good to share my very positive experiences with the company so far and explain a little more about them and how I came to be a customer.

For many years I used Kiosk.ws as my hosting company and I’ve been pretty happy, as regular readers will probably already know. Their bundled web hosting and marketing services were, for many years, pretty hard to beat in terms of service, support, reliability and value.

In recent times Kiosk transformed into GVO and they have invested a great deal of time and money in upgrading and adding to their core services and embarking on a very high profile relaunch after moving from Canada to Texas and a brand new data center. During the course of all the upheaval however, all in the GVO garden was not rosy and after countless issues and problems I felt it was time to start seriously looking for new pastures. To be fair, GVO is not a bad company but like many relationships one party outgrew the other and the changes, whilst essential for one to grow, left the other feeling disillusioned and wanting more from life.

Having built several websites and mailing lists with GVO, as well as earning recurring affiliate commissions with them, it seemed a lot to give up and also a lot to try and replace.

Discovering MKHosting was one of those happy accidents, the circumstances of which are hard to recall. On seeing their website however, I was certain I had found a real contender for my hosting and marketing requirements.

The company are, in many ways, similar to GVO and whilst direct comparison might be unfair to both companies, the similarities are hard to ignore and their target market is indisputably similar. GVO offer a reseller hosting account, unlimited email autoresponders, lead capture templates and systems, video hosting and marketing services, VOIP conference rooms and a multi tier affiliate program paying recurring monthly commissions. The charge for their package is, at the time of writing, $45.00 per month.

MKHosting provide shared hosting with no limits on storage, bandwidth, email accounts, domains, FTP accounts or MySQL databases (no reseller account). For a full list of MKHosting’s web hosting features click here.  They also offer a complete email marketing service with unlimited autoresponders, a multi tier affiliate program paying recurring monthly commissions, a free domain for new customers (.biz) and  around $150 in PPC advertising coupons.  You’ll also get some basic rebrandable lead capture pages that can be easily integrated with your autoresponder service and for those wanting to build a site using templates, the company have teamed up with Hostgator to offer a library of over 4500 quality themes. All this comes in at under $20.00 per month.

The following video gives a brief tour of the company’s website and Service Features and Live Demo Accounts Features (Please turn on annotations when viewing the video below -- see button bottom right of YouTube player)

This was well worth a look for me and I tested the waters, as I recommend all potential new customers of a hosting company should do, by firing off an email enquiring about the services and asking a few questions pertinent to my requirements and situation. I had an answer within twenty minutes (on a Friday afternoon) and it was positive, well written and to the point.

I began a series of questions via this ticket and replies came very promptly and were all from the same support guy who was knowledgeable and very efficient. It seemed that I had found a little gem and although I had decided to think carefully about my decision to move, I was so reassured by the responses that I decided the next day to pay my first month’s fee and initiate the transfer of my sites and domains.

This is always a nail biting time for a webmaster but the smoothness and simplicity of the move was impressive indeed. The fact is that the same support guy I had spoken to from day one, handled the entire move for me. I did not have to do a thing aside from provide him with required login information and the like so that he could access my various sites. All I did was kick back and answer a couple of emails and my sites were seamlessly moved to the new server, the DNS changes taken care of and in the space of a Saturday morning and early afternoon, the job was done.  More to the point it was done with no ill effects whatsoever, nothing was broken and to an outside observer you would never have known anything was happening.

I spent most of the day configuring my new autoresponder and email marketing toys, which, I have to say, may not be quite as user friendly as those at my previous host but are certainly way superior in terms of features. These tools are the best I have used and the statistical information is a match for any third party service. After a day of messing around I had pretty much mastered the system. The company were quite happy to allow me to import all my existing opt-in subscribers and the only reason it took a bit longer than I would have liked was due to the imperfect export facility from my previous autoresponders rather than anything else.

In addition to the autoresponders you also get a proper email marketing set up that provides a large number of templates for your broadcasts or newsletters . They cover countless niches and they are very easy to use.

As far as the hosting goes I have zero complaints so far. cpanel is the control panel of choice and I would not use anything else. All the features of my previous cpanel are there, including Fantastico Deluxe, plus a few new ones I didn’t have at GVO. OK, there is no reseller facility but I gave that game up a long time ago so it’s no loss to me. I have more of everything for less monthly cost.

Aside from the conference rooms and the Easy video Producer tools (Neither of which were important to me personally) MKHosting are providing me with the options to do way more than I could have done at GVO where I paid $25 per month for all services due to grandfather rights as an old Kiosk Platinum customer. However this came with pretty stringent restrictions on storage, bandwidth and things like MySQL databases (that last one is a real pain for a webmaster in 2010).

And so to the affiliate program -- GVO’s much hyped opportunity is a genuine program and does reward active affiliates very well, as well as those who are fortunate enough to join under a big name networking recruiter and benefit from spillover. However, the pay plan with MKHosting is also very good and they actually pay a higher percentage to their affiliates for direct referrals at $6 a head. The earnings potential with both companies is good but in light of all the MLM focus recently over at GVO, I tink it’s become a harder thing to sell in all honesty and when times are tough, even if it does represent good value, close to fifty bucks a month is something a lot of people can’t or won’t commit to. I have sacrificed my monthly Paypal deposit from GVO in the quest for better service and a better user/customer experience. I no longer felt that it was worth holding onto the commissions when the trade of in recent times has been downtime and an indifferent attitude towards me as a customer.

If you would like to know more about all the features and services of an account at MKHosting, the marketer’s package is the sole option. Everything is laid out clearly and neatly for all to see, so you know exactly what your monthly hosting fees will get you. At this price point, you really would be hard pushed to find anything better.

If I have any criticism at all, I would say that the payment options could be explained a little more clearly on the site. You can choose to pay via AlertPay or Paypal but at the moment, Paypal customers have to do things manually and send a purchase receipt to the company to get set up -- it’s no big deal, just a minor inconvenience. AlertPay users will have no problems but the site suggests that you must pay via AlertPay every month (as someone with little experience of the payment processor I found the issue a little confusing, wanting as I did to pay with my debit card). As it turns out of course, this is not a problem, and although the website showed the major credit/debit card logos the insistence on AlertPay was a little disconcerting -- then again maybe I was just having a senior moment Ultimately it is easy enough to set up a free account with AP and you will need it if you want to receive commissions earned as an affiliate.

After a couple of days of exploration everything seems to work just as it should and, it seems to me, my sites’ load times are improved too. The MKHosting servers are located in the US, with the Planet, so in terms of data security and server monitoring etc. there should not be too much to worry about. This was one of my major bug bears with GVO in recent months where security issues were plaguing many customers and causing downtime of varying levels of seriousness. Unfortunately for me I suffered at the extreme end of the scale and whilst much of it was not directly the fault of the host, the responses to the issues were not good at all.  Combine that with very inefficient support and, to be frank, some pretty uncharacteristic bad attitudes from GVO staff in general and it starts to wear on you and your business after a time.

I’m hopeful of a much better experience at my new home and so far, they have certainly not disappointed me.

To sum up, if you want a very well featured shared hosting account along with a superb email marketing system, a great affiliate program and excellent 24/7 customer and tech support, you could do a lot worse than check this company out.

I will report back after a few months have gone by on how the glow of newness as stood up to the rigours of day in day out web hosting but for now, all is good and MKHosting win a big thumbs up and vote of confidence from TheCaymanHost.

Sign Up With MK Hosting USA Here - There are no contracts -pay as you go or pay in advance by arrangement. Your monthly cost with MK Hosting will be just $19.99 and will not increase.

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I have been a customer of GVO for around four years, long before the recent face lift, when my hosting provider was a Canadian based company called Kiosk.ws headed up by an amiable and hands on guy called Joel Therien.

A lot has happened in those four years and you can read my recent post about the resulting changes since the re-branding of the company to GVO, or Global Virtual Opportunities, for a little more on the background.

In this post I wanted to comment on a few more things that I either forgot or didn’t have time or space to mention in my last post. The gradual process of morphing from Kiosk into GVO has been a fairly lengthy one and, to be honest, the way it dragged on got on my nerves a little. There is only so much you can take when it comes to all the rah rah rah of such a relaunch, prelaunch and never ending cheerleading.

I think it is safe to say that most of that is now behind us and I for one am glad. GVO definitely brought in a fair number of some so called “heavy hitters” who have probably cleaned up by getting involved and whilst I do not doubt the experience and marketing power of some of these folks it does not mean you have to like them or their methods even if their involvement has ensured a substantial influx of new customers for GVO. One unfortunate side effect of the sudden growth is the plethora of ads, articles, blog posts and landing pages all selling GVO that are plainly written by people who know very little about web hosting, which is after all the core business of the company. I’m sure if you have studied most of the search results in google you have found very little hard information about the pros and cons of their hosting plans aside from a few brief “it’s great value” or “I’m pretty happy” type sales efforts.

So let’s move on to the GVO services and look at what has changed from the perspective of a Kiosk customer.

GVO still offer three shared hosting plans, although you almost certainly wouldn’t realize that from any recent advertising. The old Silver and Platinum plans still exist, priced at $18.95 and $24.95 respectively. But, and this is a big but, there really are no good reasons to buy either one of them any longer as all incentives to do so have been removed, basically making the Titanium plan at $44.95 the only real shared hosting option on offer. Neither the Platinum or Silver plans include any of the additional services, so they are effectively dead in the water.

GVO’s Titanium bundled marketing and hosting package is really good value, just as many of the “reviewers” are saying but unfortunately at such a price point, many experienced webmasters are going to see a managed VPS as a much more attractive option if they have no need for the autoresponder service, video hosting and conference rooms. This is one of the major stumbling blocks because ultimately, shared hosting is shared hosting and it’s simply not good enough for those with a lot of domains and a lot of traffic. Conversely, for newbies who see only monthly $ signs and who are starting from scratch, a sub $10 shared hosting package with someone like Hostgator or Bluehost for example, is rightly or wrongly, a lot more tempting.

Don’t get me wrong, GVO offer a very competitively priced package, but convincing people of the fact is not always an easy task in view of the aforementioned considerations. I would guess that there might be a fairly substantial attrition rate in the early stages after the relaunch amongst those who joined in the belief that there were easy fortunes to be made through the affiliate program and the promises of spillover. Some will have done well already by signing up under the top recruiters, but many will not see the “money for nothing” they no doubt believed they would get and they will soon tire of paying each month unless they are willing and able to put the excellent tools to good use.

Existing customers, even those on the old Silver and Platinum plans of Kiosk.ws still get to enjoy the marketing tools due to grandfather rights, but for new customers, if you want the whole shebang it’s Titanium or nothing.

Many of the big marketing names associated with GVO and who recently marketed it so aggressively to their lists are obviously not using shared hosting but are on dedicated servers. This distinction is important because whilst Kiosk offered webmasters a pretty flexible set of dedicated server options, including one off custom builds for example, most of those now seem to be gone at GVO. Looking at the site, the only dedicated options at the time of writing are a fully managed Dell box at $299 per month with a one time $99 set up fee or a slightly cheaper box at $199 per month. Not bad, but only for those with deep pockets already.

One more thing worth mentioning on this topic is that if you outgrow a shared reseller hosting account, even one as good as GVO’s, the way things stand at the moment, you would have to either cough up for a costly dedicated server, or change hosting companies as there is currently no VPS plan available. This could be a real headache if you have built your lists and all your web real estate with GVO. Some people would no doubt argue that keeping all your services under one roof is never a good idea but again that will depend entirely on your outlook and your own forecasts of business expectations. As things stand, GVO can definitely save many webmasters a good deal of money with their packaged services.

Moving on to other changes, one of the major ones as been the outsourcing of many areas of support to India. For me, this as been one of the more disappointing aspects of the GVO re-branding. Whilst I appreciate that for the growth of the company to be sustainable there had to be investment in staff, premises and hardware, the end user experience is definitely not what it once was. When the old Kiosk.ws team in Canada were at the helm of tech support you were pretty much guaranteed fast responses, great service and experienced systems administrators. In recent times, whilst support as been available, the quality of that support as deteriorated. That is not to say it is really bad, just that the very high standards of old have slipped. Maybe it will not be permanent and things will settle down but like so many other industries rapid growth invariably results in  the customer experience suffering to a certain degree. This is something GVO must work on if they want to retain webmasters.

There have been several hiccups along the way but in view of the rapid expansion some of those have to be expected and I still feel very comfortable in recommending GVO if what you want is good solid shared hosting and some invaluable business and marketing tools. The new eResponderPro autoresponders are very good although they still lack one or two features offered by the established big names. The service is a massive step up from the previous Kiosk autoresponders and there are no graduated price points dependent upon the size of your list either – you get as many autoresponders as you want or need as a Titanium customer. With other third party services, the more subscribers, the higher the monthly fee.

Promoting GVO itself can be lucrative, but it is going to take work if you want to earn money as an affiliate. The compensation plan is very good but that does not mean you will get rich just by joining. I just think that should be made clear to anyone who is considering signing up with this as their primary motivation. You can learn a great deal about the compensation plan through the GVO Academy presentations and I would recommend these to anyone looking for a great overview of GVO as a whole.

Ultimately, when it comes to your webhosting and online business needs, GVO is either a good fit or it isn’t, just as with most web hosting, it’s not about which company or offer is best, it’s about what is best for you.

I hope that this honest summation will help my visitors in making that decision. What I will say is that Joel Therien has always been, and remains, an honest and trustworthy guy and consequently you can certainly feel comfortable dealing with his company. You will never need to worry about sharp practices as you sometimes do in the world of web hosting.

Overall, I would still recommend them to anyone except maybe those who are reaching the point where a VPS is close on the horizon because your hosting needs might not be best served by GVO at this moment in time. As an affiliate marketer, I would say that the affiliate program for GVO remains one of the best in the industry and will reward those who actively promote it. Resellers will also find GVO a good company to partner up with and a Titanium account with GVO still represents a solid investment for a lot of webmasters and online businesses.

(If you don’t want or need a reseller hosting account and can live without a conference room and video hosting a solid alternative at half the price is MK Hosting USA – we moved to them from GVO and have been very impressed to date, and would say that the email marketing tools are superior and support faster and more knowledgable).

You can try the GVO services for 14 days risk free with your $1 trial membership – no contracts, no catches.  I think you will be impressed with what you find on the inside.

As always I would love to hear what you have to say so please leave your comments below.

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In recent months most marketing and advertising sites have been inundated with the name GVO, the headlines being written becoming more and more fantastic by the day as flocks of hopefuls flooded into the GVO fold hoping to strike it lucky or rich or both.

There is no doubt that Joel Therien’s launch (or, more correctly rebranding and relaunch – more of that later) was a well executed and well supported piece of internet marketing and has without doubt been hugely satisfying for him and his team.

So what’s it all about, why are the network marketing crowd champing at the bit, MLM’ers drooling over the pay plan and newbies foaming at the mouth and authoring copy that they can’t possibly have the knowledge or experience to back up? It is my hope that people reading this post will appreciate that despite some of the crap and awful advertising that has been foisted upon the internet community by the “get rich quickers” and program hoppers out there, that a little bit of honest perspective is exactly what you are looking for.

One thing I personally find a great turn off is things such as comparisons with GDI which are blatantly nonsense – GDI is nothing more than an MLM program selling domains, originally the Western Samoan dot WS! Many people fell for the hype and some did make a lot of money but most probably did not and will not and to suggest that GVO is in any way similar is a fallacy and very misleading – how many decent websites have you seen from GDI users…not many I’ll hazard because they are not a marketing and hosting service provider and they do not enable their customers other than to sell on the domain MLM and throw in a few pathetic static templates to add a “website” to your shiny new domain. OK, got that one off my chest at least

Let’s step back from all the marketing for a moment and remind ourselves that GVO is a rebranding exercise, albeit one that is accompanied by some very real physical changes and improvements to the company previously known as Kiosk.ws

Kiosk.ws has long been touted as the hosting company run by internet marketers, for internet marketers and although its shared hosting plans did not come cheap, they were endowed with a bundle of extra services that made the overall package very good value for money. Not least of these extras were the unlimited autoresponder accounts and the provision in more recent times of live conference room services for members. Add to that the multi-tier affiliate program, ten levels deep and paying recurring monthly commissions and you had a very good package which was married to a very reliable hosting service with excellent support.

However, after many years of operation, it was obviously felt that things had become stagnant and there began a long process of updating and revitalizing the company from the ground up. Customers in 2009 have far higher expectations than those of a decade ago, particularly in relation to technology and Joel began the long and no doubt costly process of overhauling what had, to be honest, become a very dated looking web presence, even if the services underneath remained pretty sound.

For long time customers like myself, watching the whole process unfold has been fascinating and sometimes frustrating. The first real major change was the relocation of the company’s data center from Canada to Texas. Fortunately, this transition was pretty smooth from the customer’s side although it was obviously not a walk in the park for all the folks at Kiosk. Around this time, the first intimations of GVO started to appear – the first time I saw the now well known logo was on a tee shirt worn by Joel on one of his very early video blogs although no mention was made of the name for some time.

The plan slowly unfolded and it became apparent that the thrust of the marketing was going to be on the network marketing aspect of the relaunch – basically there had been some minor tweaks made to the compensation plan for affiliates, but it was nothing really drastic. It just goes to prove how dressing something up in new clothes and giving it a new image is often a very effective tactic – most of the new GVO hordes had never heard of Kiosk.ws and probably would never have considered becoming customers. The relaunch was of course given great impetus by bringing on board many big name marketers with large opt-in lists od get rich quick hopefuls!

Whilst I can see that this was a great way to generate huge amounts of “buzz” I believe it also has a not inconsiderable downside – that being that outside of these network marketing zealots, the image of the company can also be tarnished in the eyes of regular webmasters and bloggers and even affiliate marketers who just want a competent and reliable place to host their sites or to be part of a reputable affiliate program. Rightly or wrongly, there will be some suspicion of promotion with a focus so heavily weighted towards network marketing and that is a shame because GVO has a long and excellent history in providing value and service in its primary business.

Putting all that aside for a moment though, is GVO better than the old Kiosk.ws? In many ways I would have to say yes, but I will also mention a few reservations. It as taken a very long time for everything promised to new customers to materialize. As an old hand, this does not really surprise me, it is the way the company has always been and is really an indication of their thoroughness and desire to get things right for their customers. Unfortunately I suspect that some new customers have been put off by this.

However, the new GVO services are definitely a step up from Kiosk as it was – the autoresponder service has been completely revamped and the new EresponderPro can really now be considered a rival to the big services like GetResponse and Aweber with far more features and user friendliness than the trusty old Supersponders we had at Kiosk. The whole look of the company is far more in tune with the 21st century and for both visitors and customers the website experience is far more pleasant and less frustrating to use.

I have no doubt that many of the eager beavers who signed up, tempted by the siren song of money for nothing will reduce in numbers as the months go by – there will always be this kind of fallout after a big MLM focused launch. Those that came primarily for a good hosting plan with a great suite of marketing tools will appreciate the value and savings and stick around if the service does not fall short.

So, how has the service been amidst all the marketing hoopla of recent months? Well, unfortunately there have been some problems and some of them quite severe, others just annoying. The blame for some of them can be laid firmly at the door of the company but others cannot. A few examples of recent issues experienced by this webmaster are:

1) A DDOS attack on this domain – by no means the fault of the hosting company. However, the new support staff in India were very disappointing and it took three weeks to even get to a tech support person who would acknowledge the problem and do something about it – that was effectively three weeks of downtime simply because nobody would listen to what I was telling them, preferring to insist it was all being caused by my Wordpress installation. This was the first big fail I had ever experienced with the company. It took several more weeks to get things sorted out.

2) A failure of the new cloud technology provided to GVO by Dell led to another spell of downtime for many Kiosk.ws customers but to be fair to GVO, it was totally beyond their control and they worked like madmen to get everything up and running as quickly as they could. Their only real failing during this crisis was a lack of communication with customers – several of us ended up manning the support room ourselves over the weekend!

3) Server security became a burning issue over a period of a few weeks recently with constant hacking of the shared server on which we reside – finally an I-Frame attack exploiting outdated Worpdress blog installations resulted in all sites being moved yet again to a new server. Since then things have been OK.

On this occasion however I was very disappointed once again with the company who moved my domain without any notification beforehand and in doing so lost a fair chunk of data. To make things worse, the cavalier response from support was that it was my responsibility to keep offsite backups (agreed, it is) but worse, their refusal to admit that they had made an error and to apologize for their mistake. I think in all the years I have been with the company, this was a first and I know it would not have been allowed to happen back in the days of the Canadian data center. I was not a happy customer at that point.

However, when all is said and done, and with all my years of experience of hosting companies, you could do a lot lot worse than GVO. Joel is a genuine and honest guy with a team who, for the most part, always have their customers’ interests at heart. They have never refused to enable a server setting for me or to refuse to host a particular script. For the money you pay you get a very comprehensive set of webmaster and marketing tools which would cost you considerably more were you to buy them all separately.

I shall be sticking with GVO for the foreseeable future and if you are looking for a great package in terms of hosting and building a business online, I think they are definitely worthy of serious consideration.

To find out more about the GVO Hosting & Marketing Packages available visit GVO Hosting & Marketing and if you want to learn more about the affiliate compensation plan we recommend attending one of the excellent GVO Academy presentations online.

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We have promoted Globat here on TCH for a fair amount of time but sadly that promotion is now coming to an end.

It seems that globat are just another dishonest company who do not do business in an ethical way. Our complaint is with the affiliate program, but having looked around on the web there seem to be an overly large number of complaints about their hosting as well.

Our involvement with the affiliate program just seems to back up the complaints about unauthorized credit card charges, lack of support and difficulty in canceling accounts. None of these things are good whether you are an affiliate or a paying customer.

We earned commissions with globat prior to them changing their affiliate program software and systems and assumed that we would still be paid for accounts referred under the original program but after some time with no payment forthcoming we submitted a ticket to enquire when we were going to be paid.

Their response was quite astounding, and I quote -

“Dear Customer,

Thank you for contacting support. Commissions on the old platform are no longer being paid out upon. These sales where on the old platform.

Please let us know if you are still experiencing problems, or if we can help you in any other way.

Ken S.
Reseller Technical Support”

So, in short, just because they change their affiliate systems, any money you rightfully earned and is due, is not going to be paid. This is disgusting behavior and dishonest in the extreme. In view of this, our official stance is to advise potential affiliates and customers to go elsewhere. If they are prepared to treat affiliates in this way, it calls their whole operation into question and we will certainly no longer promote their services.

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Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to complete the web hosting survey. It’s not to late to send us your feedback, so please, if you can spare five minutes, leave us your comments on your own host and we will credit you here with a link and a mention.

Hostgator – So far the company are scoring very well with very high ratings from users.

One respondent, the webmaster at squidooaffiliatemarketing.com says:

“Their online support is great and their people know what they are talking about. I would like to see a simpler, more user friendly billing information system – it seems to be on another site. I have multiple accounts and appreciate what I can do because of Hostgator’s features and reliability.”

The overall rating from this webmaster is a 100% 5 out of 5 stars.

Also from www.randallbishop.net down under in Australia another perfect score of five on each question asked who adds:

The webmaster at http://getpaidtowriteonline.com rates the company with 4 out of 5 stars overall and sees no reason to change, giving them top marks for reliability and a good 4 out of 5 for support, value and features.

Vlad over at SageBlogger also give the company a good overall 4 out of 5 and says that the only reason for changing hosts in the future would be that the site is soon going to require a dedicated server, unfortunately not available at Bluehost at present. He says: “I really like BlueHost. The time is near where some of my sites will need to be moved to a dedicated box. But I would stay with BlueHost if they ever decide to provide dedicated hosting.”

LiquidWeb – Josh Spaulding at the excellent EZ-Online Money.com says that Liquidweb are quite simply the best host he has ever dealt with. High praise indeed. Josh runs on a dedicated server but Liquidweb do offer shared hosting plans too. Josh docked the company only one point for price/value giving them an overall score of 5/5.

JustHost have received only one response in our survey resulting in a 1/5 from an unhappy webmaster who has this to say:

“Just host sucks cheap it maybe but you get what you pay for apps don’t work and to cancel and try to get your money is painful 5 emails when they finally answer and point you to their cancel url go through seven screens each one times out 3 or 4 times. and maybe just maybe you will get your money back”

This response was from an anonymous webmaster in the UK who says he will be changing hosts as soon as possible due to service issues.

WingSix.com are a not a host we were familiar with but the webmaster at baldydog.com who has had a shared account with them for over three years rates them only 3 out of 5 overall and claims their downfall is service and customer and technical support, for which reason he would decline to recommend them despite competitive pricing. Another customer who states that he will be changing providers in the near future.

WiredTree another firm unknown to us come highly recommended by a commercial blog owner with over 100,000 monthly visitors who hosts on a VPS with the company and sees no reason to change after a year with the company. An overall rating of 5 with only a couple of rating point dropped overall, one for features and one for reliability.

Those are the results so far and we hope they make for interesting reading.

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D9 Hosting have recently relaunched their website with a much cleaner and more user friendly look, but the changes are not just cosmetic.

D9 Hosting have announced some big changes and the major points are listed below:-

New Hosting Packages From D9 Hosting

The core package now offers all the disk space and bandwidth you will need for your home and small business sites, whilst new reseller accounts allow you to sell hosting services to your own clients, under your own brand. You even get a free domain name reseller account so you have access to domain names at wholesale prices.

For clients that need more power, there are now VPS (virtual Private Servers), Hybrid and Dedicated Plans. So, no matter what your hosting needs are, D9 Hosting can accommodate you and your customers.

New Server Locations

No longer do your sites have to be situated in the US. For customers that need quick response times to Europe, D9 Hosting announce that they can now provide you with VPS, Hybrid, and Dedicated plans located in the UK.

New Customer Rewards (subject to change)

As an existing customer of D9 Hosting a new range of special offers is being introduced and at the time of writing you can now take advantage of the following:-

UK VPS Special – 10 GB extra Disk Space, 50% Extra RAM, 10% Discount

Minisite & Graphic Design – 10% Discount For All Customers

These will be updated every few weeks so it’s important that you keep checking back to make sure you don’t miss anything!

Cheaper Domain Names

This part of the D9 Hosting update process was actually implemented as a test a couple of months ago, and you’ll be pleased to know they are sticking with the new cheaper domain name prices.

You can now register, renew, and transfer domains through D9 Hosting for only £6.99 per year (.com pricing, other TLD’s may vary), this is one of the cheapest prices on the net so you may want to consider using them as your domain registrar.

You can find out all about D9 Hosting’s plans and prices by clicking on the graphic and visiting their new website.

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Please take time to complete the following short survey to help us build a picture of our audience and better tailor the information we provide to the wishes of our visitors.

The survey should not take long and no personal information about you will be collected or stored.

We will publish a link to respondents websites here on the site once the survey findings are complete.

We will publish the findings in a future post here at TheCaymanHost which will hopefully give visitors even more information regarding good or bad hosting and how to choose the right company and plan for their needs.

You Can Check On The Ongoing Results Here – web hosting Survey Results

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Free hosting is always a contentious issue as this post will clearly illustrate.  Recent experiences with a free hosting company clearly illustrate why there are so many tales of why you should think very carefully before considering it as one of your options.  In this post I am dealing with only one free hosting company and am not inferring that they are all the same. However, I strongly recommend that you avoid 000WebHost.com like the plague. 000Webhosting.com are not to be trusted with your websites and are not worth your time as an affiliate. This is free hosting that you will pay a high price for.

Sometimes I get things wrong and this post has come about for that exact reason. Free web hosting with 000.Webhost.com can very possibly cause you nothing but problems, particularly if you complain or refuse to upgrade to a paid hosting account.

A short while ago I wrote a post entitled “Free Hosting With MySQL PHP Cpanel and Fantastico” where I explained how you could set up a Wordpress blog on a free hosting service, either with your own domain or a subdomain provided by 000Webhosting.com. (The post is still live but all links to the company have been removed).

I expressed the view that this would be a far better option than using the free Wordpress.com service, largely because you would have far greater control over what you could display on your site. Wordpress.com does not allow any kind of affiliate marketing content, nor do they permit things like javascript (for security reasons) and it was my contention (and still is) that this is too restrictive for anyone trying to monetize a Wordpress blog.

However, having put my “money” where my mouth is I now admit to having made a rather horrible recommendation. As part of the example I set up a WP blog on the free host and was reasonably impressed with what you got for your free membership. However, time has proved that all in the free hosting garden (certainly in this particular one) is very far from rosy.

I set up monitoring of the site with a free service and very soon noticed rather frequent emails in my inbox notifying me that the site was on error. Sometimes the notification that the site was back up came quite quickly, but others, the downtime was quite extended (hours or even days rather than minutes). Having returned home to Cayman, I decided to do a little more work on the blog as it seemed a shame to waste it. I had even secured the first advertising revenue on the site so I figured that I should pursue its development.

At around the same time the monthly downtime report landed in my inbox. Horror of horrors, 116 hours of it at the tail end of February. Sure enough, I was unable to connect to wp-admin and when I tried to view the site all I got was timeouts, except on one occasion when I got the header and sidebar but no content. As I had made no changes to the blog for about 2 months I was puzzled.

(Click For Full Size Image)

(Click For Full Size Image)

I decided to put the support desk to the test at this point and explained the problem. My conversations with them have been documented through email and screenshots, because here is where things get a little nasty. In their favor, they responded very quickly, but the positives ended there.

The first response was that they could access my site fine and suggested clearing cache, restarting my internet connection (!!)  and if that didn’t work, to try connecting through a proxy server. Not very helpful, particularly to the non technical who probably wouldn’t even know what a proxy is. I did try proxies in both the US and Europe to no avail and without too much surprise.

They then suggested that I use the “fix file permissions” in my cpanel. OK, I tried it, even though the problem was obviously with the server and not my site. It made no difference. The other piece of advice was to use the “cancel/delete account function and recreate the same account again”!! What???

By now I realized I was just getting stock emails from a menu of stock emails being punted out by a non tech support person.  The next one was a killer, advising me that they could not help me with setting up my website and stating “we focus on getting our servers up and running”. Erm, yeah, right. To add insult to injury they then try to upsell me on a paid hosting account. Great marketing tactic (not).

I am sarcastic when I reply, I admit it. I point out that the problem is with their server, not with my site. I tell them that a monitoring service confirms this and that I am not asking for help with my website which was fine and has had no changes made to it in weeks in any case.

In response I am told that they cannot give me a resolution to my ticket as it would take too much administration time. Yep, that’s what they said before trying to sell me a paid hosting plan again. This last mail was badly written by someone for whom English was certainly not a first language. They apologized and thanked me for my understanding. WTF?

I shot back a rather heated email saying that I didn’t understand at all and suggesting that the free service was nothing more than a loss leader (one that they couldn’t even run properly at that)  as a prelude to selling someone a hosting plan. Who in their right mind would pay after seeing these clowns in action I wondered aloud.  They respond…

“The server is working fine, there is problem with your site only. I’m afraid but we do not provide any assistance building website”

Nice. Irrelevant, but really nice. I put it to them that they had said there was no problem with my site and yet now, in a complete reversal they say that there is! I’m laughing now because these people are clueless and obviously assume that their customers, free or otherwise, are clueless too.

I Googled the subdomain in question and sure enough, could not connect to a single site. I told them this and accused them of incompetence if not downright lying. It was, I pointed out, hardly the way to do business or win hearts and minds. I get another totally useless response – “we have opened your site and it shows a blank page, have you tried connecting via proxy?” I want to suggest where they put their fixation with proxies but restrain myself. I’ve had my “fun” but am hugely relieved I don’t rely on 000Webhost.com to provide my real hosting.

Finally they tell me that their data center is blocking access from some countries and that they are looking into it! Blocking access from Nigeria I could understand, but the U.S. and UK? Hardly a believable excuse methinks. Then, they close the ticket, just like that. I’m amazed and no, the site is still not accessible even after another 48 hours. I can’t access my admin area, so I can’t even begin to try and figure out what they screwed up.

I asked my followers in Twitter to try and access the site yesterday – unsurprisingly everyone who tried came up empty. The server was down and connecting to the site from any ISP in any country was impossible.

This morning I received a notification that the site has come off error after over 159 hours of downtime!! Unfortunately the reason for this soon became apparent when I tried to visit my site – redirected to a page saying that the site does not exist. I try to log in to my cpanel to receive the message that “this account has been closed. Please read our terms and conditions”. Now I’m pretty p****d because I failed to notice the section in those terms that specified “do not complain, or, if you do, pay us some money and all will be OK. If we fail to resolve your problem and you continue to request any kind of service we will close your account and delete all your files without having to give any reason whatsoever”. Silly me.

So, I log into my affiliate account and sure enough it is marked as “canceled_abuse”. I have seen many of these inside my affiliate area so here is the next warning to would be affiliates for 000webhosting.com. Don’t bother. You are extremely unlikely to make enough sales to reach their $100 minimum payout because the bottom line is that they really are not interested in providing free hosting and, it would seem,  will find reasons to cancel accounts if they cannot convert free customers to paying ones but I concede that could just be me taking a cynical view. Having said that, reports of sharp business practices are scattered all over the web from disgruntled affiliates if you care to look.

Click To Enlarge Image

By supporting and promoting their services I feel cheated in a multitude of ways. If you are doing the same, or are thinking about participating in their affiliate program, I would urge you to think again. Tarnishing your reputation obviously does not concern them and tarnishing it is a very real possibility. I am deeply apologetic to those I have referred to the services of 000Webhosting.com because it was a bad recommendation. Luckily my site was really only an experiment just to put the service to the test and initially things looked hopeful. Imagine, however ,if it was your site and something you were serious about. You could lose hours and hours, days, of your valuable time, lose money and damage your online reputation by dealing with such a company. It does not matter what kind of site you are running, 000Webhosting.com have clearly demonstrated in this case that they do not offer reliability, service or customer care in any meaningful way.

So, take this as a lesson. Do not rely on 000WebHost.com to provide any kind of reliable service or support. In short, they suck and, in my opinion, the free service is nothing more than a lure to convert users into paying customers by any means necessary. Anyone who gives these people money in the face of such overwhelming evidence of their incompetence would be very foolish indeed, in my humble opinion. Take a look at their terms where they basically say “we can cancel your account at any time for ANY reason”. This should have been a big red flag at the outset and I admit to not paying it the attention I should have.

As one commenter on the original post said, never entrust anything remotely mission critical to a free hosting provider. I made the same recommendation but now, after such a fiasco, I wouldn’t recommend you host anything but a kid’s party with them (the clowns are entertaining). Even a personal website or blog would be hard pushed to survive such terrible uptime and lack of knowledgeable support. It’s a lesson learned and I apologize again to anyone who signed up to the service through my recommendation.

My recommendation to anyone using their services is to back up all your files and find a reliable hosting company to transfer your site to as soon as possible. That’s how strongly I feel about this kind of thing.

Below are the screenshots of my dealings with 000Webhost.com “support”. You can judge for yourself. Click on an image to view full size.

Needless to say I have cancelled my affiliate account and forfeited all earned commissions earned to date. All links to the company will now be redirected or removed from this domain.

Do not be fooled by stories of how great the service is. This review offers genuine proof of what you can expect and is backed with hard evidence. Incidentally, the site in question was a blog on the very innocuous subject of the Cayman Islands and any suggestion that it fell foul of their usage policies in any way shape or form would be false.

The web is becoming littered with disgruntled users and affiliates  regarding 000Webhosting, so don’t just take my word for it. As time passes, I guarantee that these will outnumber those talking the company up.

Luckily, my experiment was purely that, but hopefully this will prevent some potential customers from making what could be a costly mistake.

TCH

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Honest hosting reviews: is there any such thing? There are plenty of people who will have you believe that there is not and some will go as far as discrediting virtually any hosting review website. As a site that obviously falls under that banner I thought I should address the issue here on these pages.

Before I go any further, check out this video. For some this will be an eye opener whilst for others it is probably old news. However, before refuting any claims or arguing the case for web hosting review sites I think it highlights some very important facts.

Interesting huh? But hang on you’re saying to yourself, why would a web hosting directory site want to highlight such alleged rottenness in the hosting review game? Well, I think it is important for people to understand the pitfalls, misdirection and even dishonesty that is sometimes associated with review sites of all kinds. Review is often synonymous with “selling” on the internet and the way some sites go about this, unfortunately reflects badly on some of the decent operators out there.

The video illustrates quite clearly that some sites sell rankings to hosting companies, at at quite a considerable premium. The examples given are quite staggering to a small website owner like myself. $2000 per month for a top spot is a pretty lucrative slice of real estate and proves just how much money and competition exists in the hosting sector. Make no mistake, it is very big business. Is it wrong for the review sites to operate in this way? Some would say emphatically “YES”, others would agree that it is certainly misleading and some would perhaps shrug and say, “that’s business”.

Personally I think that if you profess to be a review site, you should endeavor to provide impartial comments and critiques from people who have had first hand experience as a customer.

The other aspect the video focuses on is affiliate links, and this is where I often find myself taking issue with the anti advertising brigade. If you read my disclosure policy, it is made perfectly clear where I stand on this point. My website is commercial in nature and I see no reason to be ashamed of trying to earn a living. This site is designed to earn affiliate commissions, and it is done openly and honestly but it is also designed to give people a forum for discussing and rating the companies we feature. Comments, both negative and positive are given an airing on this site and it is my hope that these will help others when they are trying to make a purchase decision. Hopefully the service provided will encourage them to buy through one of my links, but that is entirely their choice.

Interestingly, reviews are very thin on the ground to date. We are not one of the big boys with huge budgets to spend on advertising and design, but I do hope that the site provides a platform for people to have their say. I have only ever declined one comment regarding a hosting company as it had obviously been written by a very angry customer and publishing it could have been damaging to all concerned. It is only on occasions such as that when I consider editing or removing feedback.

The producer of the video alleges cases where any positive reviews of competing companies (i.e. those competing with their paying advertisers) were being deleted. This sort of practice is really a thorn in the side of sites that try to offer genuine customer feedback and is sad that it goes on, but I have no doubt that it does, just as I have no doubt that some reviews are posted by representatives of hosting companies as a form of shady marketing.

I suppose I have made this post in defence of my own humble site. I do not have the clout to pull in huge advertising checks from anyone and am like many small time affiliates attempting to make money by providing a useful service and platform for webmasters, bloggers and hosting customers. To this end, there is no table of top hosting companies. I do not believe any hosting company can be in “the top ten” or twenty or whatever, because every person buying hosting has uniquely individual needs.

There are no fake reviews or comments posted here and I am often surprised by the large number of reviews some sites manage to pull in. I’m sure that in some cases the ability to leave a review on a high ranking site is abused by those with an interest in tooting their own horn but then again maybe I’m just a tad too cynical! I myself have only written one review from first hand experience of my own hosting company who, I am pleased to say, have always performed admirably and never given me cause to shop elsewhere.

My recommendation for anyone shopping for hosting is to do your homework. We have links to many of the top forums as well, so you can ask your questions about particular companies and other people’s experiences. Be warned though -- like all forums they can be populated by trolls, snake oil salesmen and cheerleaders and you shouldn’t assume that all advice received in forums is either impartial or sometimes even very accurate.

If you have found this post useful, please leave us your own thoughts and comments, and if you have something to say about any of the companies promoted on our pages, we’d love to hear from you.

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Submit reviews and ratings of your web host. The CaymanHost Hosting Directory was originally established to help people make an informed decision about web hosting and to find the best deal for their needs.

In recent weeks we have made a lot of changes as it was not really easy to submit a review of a hosting company and consequently reviews were always rather thin on the ground.

Now all that has changed and we need your hosting reviews. You can now rate your host’s performance on several key points as well as leave your written reviews of your experiences.

Help others and help yourself by taking a few moments to review any hosting company of which you have experience as a consumer.

Just click on Customer Reviews in the top menu bar and you will find an alphabetical list of hosting companies for which you can read or submit reviews. We will be adding companies as time goes by, providing an excellent point of reference for anyone looking to buy hosting, change hosting companies and register domain names. If there is a company you would particularly like to review please contact us via our helpdesk to request its inclusion and we will do our best to accommodate you as soon as possible.

We probably all wish we knew more about the hosting company we chose before we finally chose them so why not save other people the pain of making the wrong choice or help them find a company that will serve them well?  We will post reviews both good and bad, positive and negative in tone although all reviews are subject to moderation before publication.

So, drop by and tell us all about your hosting company and you web hosting experiences and let’s build a useful reference resource for everyone.

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