It has been a while since I publicly denounced a hosting company. In my defense, I’ve been busy moving a whole lot of sites… from a bad to a good hosting company, obviously. And since the new server is purring like a kitten I’ve got few miserable stories to share.
But there is one story, about Webcreators, 1eurohosting or Be-smart – they’re all one and the same company, really – which I didn’t tell you yet. In this case, you don’t even get what you paid for…
Here’s a story all about how…
On a beautiful day in spring, I was asked to save a client from a Web Developer From Hell (I could start a category about this, too). During said saving, we decided to continue using the client had just paid for. I didn’t insist on moving them; they were already freaking out over the website that had gotten defaced.
Fast forward to a beautiful summer day, where I’m sitting at home, playing on my Xbox 360. I get a call from “The Office”; they tell me a client – the very same as before – is going bananas because their hosting company deleted their site.
The excuse of the hosting company was that “they were using Joomla 1.5.24” and it was “riddled with exploits” and “they didn’t support it anymore. So without a warning the client’s site was no longer reachable. Being bad at prioritizing, I did some research about the hosting company.
Introduce be-smart. Or 1eurohosting. Or Webcreators. A company with many names which is infamous for offering crap solutions and an even worse service (CFR: This post). They try to hide their incompetence by using many different “faces” but the fact remains they’re an incompetent bunch.
I asked Be-smart (let’s use the ironic name) “What exploits are you talking about?” but they never replied. Neither did they reply when our client and my manager tried to contact them. Joomla being EOL can’t possibly the reason, can it? After all, it would make them giant hypocrits for more than one reason:
- They use an EOL version of PHP
- Pretty much every component of their web server was outdated
- They offer Joomla 1.5 and even 1.0 (and Mambo) through their software installer
- They didn’t remove the other site hosted there, a Joomla 1.0 site. Logic need not apply
- 777. No comment
Now that I knew their other aliases, I quickly figured out they are also the incompetent masterminds behind one of the “Dedicated Servers” of one our our clients. Due to a crap job at “converting” a shared hosting package into a “Dedicated server” we… Well, I still haven’t wrapped my head around it, let’s just say things were bad. Real bad.
Another fun fact? No matter which company you send a mail to, the reply you get (three days later) always comes from the same guy. Pretending to be part of a team, where sources indicated it’s just a (poor) one man show.
So, dear readers, if you ever stumble upon an offer for Linux hosting from Be-smart, 1eurohosting or Webcreator that appears too good to be true.. You have been warned. Avoid all of them. Don’t take my word for it, Google and you’ll find out more about their bad reputation online. Just remember that I told you first. 😉