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My 1st MD Web Hosting Problem
Uncategorized July 3rd, 2008
Welcome to this Blog. Its a simple blog just to warn any unsuspecting website owners that are contemplating hosting their sites with the Australian Company MD WEB HOSTING PTY. LTD. (ACN) 109 613 194 (ABN) 41 109 613 194. The reasons for the warning you will see in the following posts.
My journey with this so called hosting company began on the 25/11/2007 I was looking for an Australian Hosting company that was cheaper than my current hosting company. I took advantage of MD half price sale and grabbed the Dingo Hosting Package (1 yr, free domain offer) it cost me $59.40 AUD/Year which for what I was paying seemed a reasonable amount. The package seemed decent enough 5gig of Website Storage, 10Gig of monthly data, 20 MySQL Databases, 2 Addon Domains. I had 2 fairly large sites a Font Site around 600meg and Games Site around 1.5gig along with another Smaller Website that I wanted to put on an Aussie IP and keep it off my other aussie IP’s.
So I ended using about 3.3 gig of space and 6 MySQL db’s along with using about 2.5gig of bandwidth per month. So you can see there was nothing startling about the website. Not massive traffic magnets only around 20,000 uniques per month between the 3.
I have around 750 websites allup hosted on different accounts, some are on my own dedicated servers and others are on hosting accounts and reseller accounts. I have the servers in Australia/UK/USA/South Africa mainly to do with traffic from google for the individual websites.
My monthly bill for my servers runs up to around 500 usd per month so I am always on the lookout for cheaper packages while obviously I want to have some reliability as well. If my sites are offline or not working then I am not making money.
So on the MD Web Hosting package I put the 3 sites none of them being monetized yet as I like to build a sites user base up first before scaring people off with adverts. While they were larger sites they were heavy workloads as they were being built up.
My first problem with them come in the way the font script was written I could not run the .htaccess file on the server as part of the code for the mod_rewrite was being blocked by the php parser. Ok I thought well the script runs on other servers I will just have to modify it to work on MD’s package. I did this and while I was doing it I made a few modifications to the script to make it more search engine friendly. So while some could say it was the MD’s fault it could also be argued that it was the scripts fault as well (even though it works on other servers) So my time was also not really lost as I made the script much better in the long run.
RANDOM THOUGHTS, QUOTES & JOKES
I do apologise for all this. But be comforted by the fact that I am probably ripping more of my hair out than any of you are.
Stumble it!
About
I was forced to move 4 sites away from MD Webhosting for all the reasons above.
http://www.equinox-me.no-deposit-home-loan.net.au/content/webhosting-company-avoid
Wes I do know how you feel. I am lucky that the sites I did have on their servers were new and weren’t my main income sites. I only want to warn others about the lack of business etiquette and your story just goes to confirm that I am not alone in this. Many many other people have had problems with them.
MD Webhosting are the most appalling company to use. I have had huge problems with them, all the problems you have mentioned. They kept sending me reminders for a website that was null and void and then deleted my website which campaigns for political prisoners without warning.
Even though it is all in writing they have made a mistake they still just refused to accept responsibility and reinstate the site unless I paid a lot of extra charges which they can stick right up their backsides.
My website was always down and when they transferred servers it was down for almost 2 weeks. In between time I was told various lies about the reasons for the servers being down.
I asked for the name of the Managing Director to be told his name was John but that was all. Apparently nobody in the company knows his surname and they repeatedly refuse to give me his contact details.
The guys in the Australian office are so gutless they cannot deal with the complaints, so you are referred to the call centre abroad where the poor employees are left to take the brunt of things.
Here is some advice, next time you phone the call centre record the conversation. Ask to speak to a Manager and ask for the Managing Directors name and contact details. They will say all they know is that it is John. I am sure Current Affair or Today Tonight would lap it up.
Kate I feel for you after all the problems I have had and continue to have which is the story for the next blog entry. Hopefully your new hosting company is professional and keeps your site up and running.