Philhosting.net – a horrible customer experience
Sep 04
I got a few calls from friends this afternoon saying that http://newmedia.com.ph was down. The message was that the domain expired. This got me really frustrated and angry since I was running an ad campaign to drive traffic to the site and I was just plugging New Media in a talk I was giving this afternoon to around 150 people. I called up my host and domain registry – www.philhosting.net to see what was happening. Man… I literally flipped out in anger after talking to their customer support agent. This is by far one of the worst experiences I’ve had with a tech company (save for PLDT). If you will ever get a domain host and registry, don’t go to them for their services. Let me share with you guys what I had to go through after the break.
Here’s what happened:
- Called up their customer hotline around 4PM. No answer.
- Called up their hotline again around 4:10PM, they finally answered. The guy told me that he can’t help me because their billing person went out to go to the bank. Asked me to check back again tomorrow and to file a support ticket. WTFOMGBBQ!? I explained to him that I was literally losing money every second the site was down. Asked him to call their billing and I told him I’ll call back in 30 minutes.
- Called back after 30 minutes, talked to the billing girl. She tells me that she will follow up with their admin about the case. I asked when they can bring the site up again, she tells me that I’ll get feedback the following day. I get even more frustrated and re-explain to her everything.
- I asked for the number of their admin team since apparently it’s in a separate office. She tells me she doesn’t know and they can’t give any number (duh labo). She then tells me that she really can’t do anything since “Utusan” lang daw sila. Tells me that there’s absolutely nothing I can do except to e-mail a certain Ruel.
- Sent the e-mail. Apparently they already activated the site but it’s still propagating so not everyone can view it yet.
To the managers of Philshosting: you guys literally wasted my money with the campaign. I paid for the renewal and you didn’t renew it properly. I regret the day that I decided to enlist your services and I can’t wait for the domain to expire again so I can buy it from another registry that actually VALUES their customer. It’s amazing that you guys say in your front page that you’re “powerful, affordable, and RELIABLE” when in truth you are NOT.
RSS
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
Well just type in “philhosting sucks” on your browser and you will see similar experiences from different bloggers. I have transferred mine to hostingphil.com
I think you should change your hosting service. For me, I am hosted with Hostmonster. And so far, in my 9 months of blogging, I just experienced to be down once.
Sad that you have to undergo this scenario and experience.
With VERTITO, as Philippines’ web hosting, we do not have late payment fees of invoices specially at this point of economy. We make sure we deal with our tickets on time as we provide true 7×24 ticketing support, you can even send us test email at support at vertito dot com to test our email/ticketing responsiveness.
We even provide monthly 10% discount coupons on new sign ups, we even provide free domain, free ssl, free whoisguard on selected plans and billing cycles with 30-days money back guarantee + 99.9% uptime guarantee. Yes, we would pay your domain and your domain renewal just for you to sign up with at at $1.67 USD per month.
Our shared hosting plans start at $1 USD or 50 peso per month (without free domain) giving our client our minimum server resources at 1GB space/10GB traffic with unlimited domain / email hosting.
We may be new to your eyes, but we are never new to this expertise and line of field.
Hi, Carlo! This is such a frustrating incident. I hope you don’t mind if I share this story with my readers on my Customer Relations business blog.
HI Meikah,
Please do.
Cheers!
When it comes to domain registrations, I always recommend going to the top.
Do not buy your registration from your hosting provider. Most are simply resellers.
I am not familiar with com.ph domains, but for .com domains, top registrars like GoDaddy, Enom, Tucows/OpenSRS, and Network-Solutions. I am sure there’s an equivalent for com.ph.
The advantages of this is your domain registration is not tied to your hosting company. If your hosting company is having issues, you can easily move your hosting operations elsewhere.
For large operations, consider further reducing your dependence on a single provider by outsourcing your DNS.
Despite having access to 100+ servers, we outsource our DNS to DNS Made Easy. Why? It works, it is inexpensive, and places our DNS outside of our own networks. This makes our operations more portable.
Lastly, make sure you have off-site/off-vendor backups. I see too many people rely on their hosts for backups. While your host may provide backups for disaster recovery purposes, they likely will not be useful during a customer service dispute.
Did you switch hosts? Who is hosting your site nowadays? I’m pissed at Philhosting. Bad experiences. Missing articles, missing pictures, downtime, etc. I am not a happy customer.
hahahah… i can relate to this bro. although not with philhosting, anong filipino web host, i just wont mention the name na lng…
anyway, i am with philwebservices today, and have been hosted by them for the past 4 months or so. out of the 3 service providers i have been with, philwebservices impressed me with their prompt replies and assistance. an not just during closing of the deal.
So far, i have no complaints with their service, rates are also reasonable since I have also checked around before. my advice? don’t put up with bad service. switch host, you have every right to demand value for your money.
We sometimes overlook something. When registering a domain or hosting we indicate our email address as contact point so their system could remind us 60, 30, 15 days before our subscription ends. Ignoring this reminders tends to end up like this, loosing your domain and site. Why bashing on them when first of all we forgot our own responsibility.
Join the epic failness of Philhosting
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Makati-Philippines/PhilHosting-FailHosting/330149592048