Wednesday, June 02, 2010

WebHost4Lies: incompetence as a business model

WebHost4Life proudly proclaims two outright lies on the front page of their web site. The first is that they provide "99% uptime" by which they mean (presumably) that you can access your web site 99% of the time if they host it. Not so. See my actual measurements below:
Nowhere near 99%. That means that if you tried to visit a page on FishWisePro.com then in some cases you would have waited longer than two minutes for the page. That's when internetsupervision.com logs a "timeout". These measurements are made by an independent company with multiple testing servers around the world.
The second lie is that they are "powered by 100% wind energy". Wrong. They have diesel generators for backup and they get their power from conventional sources. Their "Green Hosting" page states
Since generating wind energy on site isn't feasible, we're offsetting all of our electricity use with wind-generated Renewable Energy Certificates
That's very different from being powered by wind energy. It's a bit like saying "I'm not a racist because I know some darkies who aren't racist."
So from now onwards I am calling them "WebHost4Lies" because that's what they do: they lie, either directly or by omission. It's part of their business model. If you don't like it then they are quite happy if you leave, because they have too many customers anyway, and their tech support staff are too overloaded to bother. They aren't delivering on their promise of "an outstanding customer experience" because they aren't enjoying "an outstanding employee experience".

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