Friday, September 09, 2016

Why EIG is called Endurance International

I have been an Arvixe customer for several years. This time last year my web site(s) went down for several hours because their server was flaky. They moved my sites to a new server, but they have never been able to meet their Service Level Agreement of 99.99% uptime, so every month I have sent them a request for a refund.
Their billing support system is as bad as their servers. There is a note on their support portal dated 16 October 2015 asking for patience because they have a backlog of support tickets. Perhaps they are finally getting to the end of their backlog, I don't know. Today I received a note:
XXT-679-61954 - SLA Credit - December 2015 - $8.00
QYZ-625-38512 - SLA Credit - February 2016 - $8.00
BMK-986-67095 - SLA Credit - March 2016 - $8.00
BQA-176-25134 - SLA Credit - April 2016 - $8.00
KXY-538-81679 - SLA Credit - May 2016 - $8.00
YIK-233-47716 - SLA Credit - June 2016 - $8.00
IYH-117-84843 - SLA Credit - July 2016 - $8.00
CTE-487-27289 - SLA Credit - August 2016 - $8.00
The total credit added to your account today is $64.00 USD
Two years ago Arvixe was bought out by EIG, the Endurance International Group, a company whose business is to buy out web hosting businesses and run them into the ground. I don't know hoe they make any profit, other than relying on the technical ignorance of the customers they retain. My first encounter with them was when they took over WebHostForLife and totally screwed up my ASP.NET site so badly it displayed a blank page for two weeks. I moved to Arvixe and all was well until 6 months after EIG bought them out. Then the rot set in again, although not as badly this time round.
So now it's a war of attrition: my sites are hosted by EIG essentially for free, because they can only manage around 99% uptime per month. Sometimes it has been even lower. I'm having to put up with anything up to 30 minutes of downtime per month. So the "endurance" part is obvious: they want me to give up first. Sorry guys, I'm not going to give up without a fight. And right now that's costing you more money than it costs me.
These are the sites they host:
  • http://www.worship.co.za/ (Classic ASP which takes about 3 minutes to get started when you visit)
  • http://www.fact-reviews.com (standard HTML)
  • http://www.mustang.co.za/ ASP.NET pages
One of these days I'll move them somewhere decent, but right now I'll put up with free hosting with no ads. Thanks to the pingdom.com monitoring service I can keep these sharks accountable.

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