WebHost4Life? Not on your life! They suck

I originally thought they were just plain incompetent, but now I think they are slow, unreliable and incompetent. Which is a polite way of saying that WebHost4Life sucks. Badly.
The graph above shows that they have failed to provide a continuous service on the Fishwisepro.com site for the past month. Then check out the speed in the right hand column:
Now compare this with my new hosting company:
So WebHost4Life is slower. Much slower. When I measured this I also measured the "time to first byte" as 175 seconds, and a total load time of 298 seconds. (The numbers in are in the status bar on this screen shot):
Since 300 seconds is 5 minutes, we are talking about a very slow load time indeed. Most users would have cancelled the page after 10 to 15 seconds, so they would never have seen the page at all. I'm told this was caused by their "migration scripts". The ones that screw up your web site for you.
Maybe I should also add useless to the list. It certainly describes their help system, and their much-vaunted "migration" process. Incidentally, the "new platform" doesn't support multiple web sites. They proved it to me because they couldn't get it to work, although they wouldn't actually admit that it couldn't be done. They are under the false impression that it can be done, but when push comes to shove it doesn't work. How sad is that?
Update: We can add "losers" to the list. According to www.web-hosting-top.com, WebHost4Life's hosted domains grew for 2007-2009 from 62,076 to 70,669 domains. In 2010 the decline has set in, so that by May 17, 2010 they are down to 60,912 domains, a loss of 16% in just 5 months. It boggles the mind that they could throw away 10,000 customers so fast.

Another satisfied WH4L customer (not!)

Mustang waves goodbye to WebHost4Life

The Mustang web site has found a new home, thanks to the technical incompetence and bad planning of the Endurance International Group, the new owners of WebHost4Life. The DNS transfer from WebHost4Life to Arvixe should be completed in the next 24 hours. This blog uses graphics from the Mustang site, so there might be a hiccup or two, but I'm not expecting anything like the fiasco that occurred when WebHost4Life screwed up the FishWisePro web site.
The difference between WebHost4Life and Arvixe is like chalk and cheese. Arvixe sends you an email that explains how to set up everything. Their control panel is easy to use and mostly intuitive. Their database setup is totally straightforward, and even the domain transfer instructions are clear and easy to follow.
Two of my support questions were already answered in the support knowledgebase, and two other questions were answered by a technical support person who actually knew what was going on. Quite a change from the idiotic and nonsensical responses I got from even the most senior people at WebHost4Life.
They automatically created a test domain called http://mustang.co.za.lilac.arvixe.com that allows me to test the setup before changing the DNS settings. I'm a very satisfied customer.
Update Thursday 2pm: The DNS changes have been implemented, and the switchover went completely without hitch. Unlike the balls-up with rate-my.biz (now fixed) and rate-my-biz.com ("cancelled" by WebHost4Life). Why is it that they break everything they touch?

AutoHotKey is Awesome

AutoHotKey is one of those free programs you wonder how you ever did without.
One of my recent uses for it is to paste difficult-to-remember passwords or user names to the clipboard. Here is an example script:
clipboard := "RandoMe20?~"
This pastes the string "RandoMe20?~" to the clipboard, which allows you to use it as a password.
Here is another example. There are numerous connections using a password that always start with "login" and end with "12345". This script asks for the part in the middle, and then types the calculated string into the password dialog box.
; Press Shift-Space to begin
; create password and paste it
;
^space::
InputBox, passw, password, Type in the middle letters of the password press ENTER
Send login%passw%12345
This particular script has become a real time saver for the people who use it. There is a learning curve involved, but there are plenty of examples and the help file is well written. Check it out!

No Defrag Benchmarks

This is just a brief not to say that the planned defrag benchmarks and reviews are cancelled until further notice. I have lent the FRAGG machine to a friend for a month or so, and this makes it impossible to run any publishable benchmarks for a while.
I have not abandoned the idea of doing the benchmarks, but the whole process has got bogged down for a while.

The Cost of Ignorance

South Africa has become a nation of idiots. Take our politicians for example. A Cabinet Minister tells us to save electricity by only switching on the hot water geyser during peak load periods. Municipalities are bankrupt, and/or providing little or no services. Politicians blame all the country's problems on racism. Yeah, right. I guess it's too much to expect a national leader to say "I don't know" in public, but what do you do at a company level?
My biggest customer runs a national call centre. The people who work there are men, mostly young. Many of them have no idea which province half the towns in the country are, and so instead of finding out or checking on a map, they guess. Customers get sent hundreds of km in the wrong direction because the idiot in the call centre is too lazy or stupid to do his job.
Another call centre has had to fire people because they can't spell. We aren't talking about place names (those are bad enough), but traffic-related words like "overtaking" or weather-related words like "raining". There is a limit to how many errors a spell-checker can catch.
Filing a police report can be an exercise in patience. There have been plenty of cases where the complainant has had to fill out the police report because the policeman can hardly write. The same is true of government departments, including the tax department.
How do you fix it? It's difficult to fire people in South Africa, so useless people get passed from one job to another. Many teachers simply shouldn't be teaching because they are nearly illiterate themselves. Many pupils are too lazy and irresponsible to learn, and expect to pass because they are "entitled" to an education.
Many companies, such as the Endurance International Group, are content to employ people who are totally under-qualified to handle "technical support" queries. Other companies, such as Microsoft, refuse to accept or acknowledge bug reports, or are too quick to blame someone or something else as the source of a problem. How do you encourage excellence and literacy in a society that tolerates mediocrity and TV dinners? I wish I knew.

WebHost4Life: why I got so angry

"They're only a hosting company that you pay less than $10 per month. Why get so upset when your site goes down? Why yell and shout on the phone for 30 minutes at the CEO? Have you lost your marbles?"
This thought went through my head many times yesterday, but my answer remains the same: you mess with *MY* web site and I get really pissed off; ignore my support requests for several days, and I go ballistic. *MY* web site represents hours and hours of work, often done after hours or over weekends. For me it is a work of art, a labour of love, and an extension of who I am.
If you mess with that, you're messing with me. You're also betraying my trust. I signed up and paid for service a year in advance. I struggled and tweaked, uploaded and tested, and spent hours and hours getting the damn thing to work. Of course I'll get fed up if something goes wrong, epecially when you deny that anything is wrong and that you broke it.
If I find over a period of time that your service is unreliable or your help system sucks, I weigh the pain of moving with the pain of staying. If there are technical glitches that get sorted out over time, as long as you own up to them, I'll cut you some slack.
But don't send me a hype-laden impersonal email with no signature or name on the bottom and tell me that you are "migrating" my precious baby to a "new platform" without giving me the chance to test this platform. Don't promise to do it in February and then do it 34 days later.
Don't train your "support staff" to lie about their names (there is no-one called Agustin Bates/Perry Peters/Jessy Pratt in Mangalore India) and tell me there is nothing to do until your account is "migrated" when it is precisely the migration that has gone horribly and catastrophically wrong. I was caught between a rock and a hard place by YOUR new system that I don't care about or even understand. You should have explained it up front. You didn't.
Now you have lost 10% of your customer base and you have the arrogance to tell me that only a "tiny fraction" of all the migrations have gone wrong. Are you trying to tell me I'm a "difficult" client because I'm in the "tiny fraction"? Would you rather I just shut up and left? And you expect me to take this rubbish? When you say "... we’re able to move 95%+ of accounts without customer participation ..." what you're actually saying that you are screwing up 1 in 20 sites. And then you sound surprised when I get upset? As Dr Phil would say, "What were you thinking??"
Now you know why I got upset. I don't respond well to bullshit.

WebHost4Life: why I got so angry | About the Endurance International Group (EIG) | WebHost4Life breaks FishWisePro web site for 12 days | WebHost4Life domain registration fiasco

About the Endurance International Group (EIG)

After being stuffed around for weeks by WebHost4Life and the (mis)management team that bought it, I have been reading the Endurance International Group's web site more closely. It has been an interesting read, mainly because of what they don't tell you. Take, for example, the following:

"Acquisitions are a key component of our growth strategy. Using a proprietary methodology, we have completed acquisitions with more than 30 hosting companies and migrated more than half-a-million customers onto our platform since 2001."

They omit to list all these acquisitions. I wonder why? Here is a list I compiled, using Google to search for the fax number used by their legal department. It seems that David C. Bryson, General Counsel, is a busy man with all these clients.

• www.2slick.com
• AccountSupport *
• www.apollohosting.com *
• www.berryinfosysllc.com
• www.bizland.com *
• www.bluedomino.com *
• www.carielweb.com
• www.computersconcepts.net
• www.dollar2host.com
• www.dot5hosting.com *
• DomainHost *
• www.easycgi.com *
• www.ehost.com *
• www.entryhost.com *
• www.fatcow.com *
• www.freeyellow.com *
• www.globat.com *
• www.hostaday.com
• www.hostcentric.com *
• www.hostingbyexcel.com
• www.hostwithmenow.com
• www.hostyoursite.com *
• www.hypermart.net *
• IMOutdoorsHosting *
• www.ipage.com
• www.ipower.com *
• IpowerWeb *
• www.myresellerhome.com
• www.networkshosting.com *
• www.osullivansystems.com
• www.powweb.com *
• www.purehost.com *
• www.readyhosting.co.uk
• www.readyhosting.com *
• www.sabapro.com
• www.southeastweb.com
• www.spry.com *
• www.startlogic.com *
• www.tighthost.com
• www.usanethosting.com *
• www.VirtualAve.net *
• www.vpslink.com *
• www.web2010.com
• www.webdevhosting.com
• www.webhost4life.com *
• WebstrikeSolutions
• www.xeran.com *
• YourWebHosting *
• www.zipitdesigns.com

If my experience is anything to go by, the only way they are going to grow is through acquisitions, and even then they manage to persuade a significant percentage to change hosting providers during the process. According to www.web-hosting-top.com, WebHost4Life's hosted domains grew for 2007-2009 from 62,076 to 70,669 domains. In 2010 the decline has set in, so that by April 19, 2010 they are down to 63,379 domains, a loss of 11.5% in just 4 months. My guess is that most of those 7,290 domains are sites that were screwed up by their "migration" process.
Speaking of migration, here is the "Migration Experience for Customers" spin

Through the migration "wheel" technology, the vast majority of accounts can be moved to the Endurance platform with minimal customer involvement. We don’t just move files, we activate accounts on our system — paying attention to the smallest of details — even changes to settings and scripts are handled automatically.
In fact, we’re able to move 95%+ of accounts without customer participation — and, we offer intuitive tools for assisting the remaining customers in their transitions.

They fail to mention what percentage of those "migrated" web sites actually work after they have been moved. Also, they state that they move 95% of the accounts without customer participation before the move, because most of the customer "participation" happens after they realise their web site is no longer working, the database is corrupt or old, or the settings are completely screwed up.

While we will see an increase in support traffic during this time, the vast majority of contacts are simple customer-education issues that our agents are trained to coach customers through.

What they fail to point out is that the only "help" they actually are capable of providing is "customer-education issues", because they are unable to do any technical changes at the "technical support" desk themselves. They simply log a call and leave it to overworked and incompetent technicians to "fix". Often this takes so long that the customer has already left by the time they get to attend to the problem.
During the "migration" process a number of other changes occur, such as the imposition of a $35 "cancellation fee". Unless you specifically kick up a fuss, this fee is deducted from money you may already have paid, and the remainder is refunded. Spot the ripoff. Now contrast this with the statement

At Endurance, our mission is to "Delight customers and help them succeed by profitably delivering superior solutions and an outstanding customer experience." This holds true for all of our customers, and especially those who go through the migration process.

If this is the case, why does the call centre not have any of the contact details of EIG, such as the name, email address and phone number of the CEO? Because the last thing the CEO wants to do is listen to the complaints of outraged customers whose web sites and data have been destroyed, and whose businesses have been impacted by the callous avarice of EIG.
I checked on the Web Host Directory Awards page and not a single EIG company is listed in their awards. I guess that's no surprise, really.
Update: The Better Business Bureau lists some of the hosting companies shown above. I have marked them with a star (*)

WebHost4Life: why I got so angry | About the Endurance International Group (EIG) | WebHost4Life breaks FishWisePro web site for 12 days | WebHost4Life domain registration fiasco | Why EIG is called Endurance International

Your Copier Could Be Spying On You

CBS ran a story about how many copiers have built-in hard drives that retain digital copies of documents that can later fall into the wrong hands. Great for industrial espionage and crime syndicates. Just wheel in a new copier, take the old one away, and start reading those old copies. I heard about it on Security Now! podcast #245.