The Whole Sad Story
Jeff Darcy February 24, 2003 4:50
If you’re seeing this, it means that you’ve reached my site’s new home. Yes, I had to move again; I’ll explain why in a moment. Right now, the status is that I was able to grab all of my data from the old site, and I think I’ve fully restored it here except for some images and sounds that I don’t want to upload from here (“asymmetric” DSL means slow uploads). I’ll try to get that finished when I get in to work tomorrow. As usual, let me know if you find any glitches. Here are the details for those few who are interested in such things.
The story began on Friday, when I noticed that my site had been unreachable practically all day. The occasional glitch I can tolerate, but this had been going on a bit too long. I verified the problem by asking a bunch of friends to check, and by checking some public traceroute servers myself. Then I went to log a trouble ticket with my provider, Featureprice. I immediately made a couple of discoveries:
- They had a new support policy: $25 per incident if you wanted a guaranteed response. Otherwise, you could only send email, once per day, and hope for the best.
- While they were at it, they added a bandwidth cap. The primary reason I’d switched to them was that, at the time, they didn’t have any hard cap; they’d throttle your traffic back if you were being a hog, but there was no particular amount per month over which you’d get charged extra.
Needless to say, they had not even bothered to inform customers of these changes, which apparently happened around the beginning of the year when there was a big management shakeup and they also switched brands of server-management software. The per-incident support seems to be a sham anyway; it asks for a username and password but won’t accept any of the values a customer might have set before the change. Even the forgotten-password helper rejects my email address, which is the only email address that has ever been associated with my account. Anyway, I sent the email at around 4pm. I got an almost instant reply; here’s how it started:
===========ATTENTION!!!================== YOU ARE ALLOWED ONE TICKET PER DAY, YOU MAY ASK AS MANY QUESTIONS AS YOU WOULD LIKE, BUT YOU CAN ONLY HAVE ONE TICKET. BE WISE WITH THE USAGE OF TICKET AND QUESTIONS YOU ASK, THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT AND NEED TO ASK OR HAVE ASSISTANCE IN AND SEND OFF ONE TICKET AS ALL ADDITIONAL TICKETS WILL BE REMOVED FOR THAT DAY.
That little nastygram was all I got until about 9:30pm, at which point I got another email from “Ravindra” telling me that the state on my ticket had been changed to “closed”. I checked, and immediately discovered that my site was still not reachable. So I replied.identifying a half-dozen servers providing evidence that the problem had not been resolved. I got another immediate reply, this time with the subject “Correspondence not recorded” plus a body consisting of “Permission denied” plus the text I’d sent. Nice. This is the point where I started looking for a new hosting provider.
While looking for a new provider, I decided to check what people were saying about Featureprice. It turns out that they are now considered the absolute worst commercial hosting provider, bar none, in the world.
- At review site after review site, Featureprice had the most reviews, and they were all very strongly negative. At yourhostsucks.com they have a whole section devoted to them.
- There are several sites devoted exclusively to horror stories about weeks-long outages, support runarounds, billing problems, domains held hostage, and data deliberately deleted.
- Disgruntled ex customers are everywhere.
- Apparently several of the website-hosting review sites which rate Featureprice highly do so because they’re owned by the same person – Austrian resident Fathi Said – as Featureprice itself.
- The BBB has listed Featureprice as “unacceptable”. The Florida AG’s office and office of consumer affairs have 2500 complaints against Featureprice, and are starting to move. There are several attempts under way to start a class-action lawsuit.
Phew! Pretty ugly, huh? I eventually went back to looking for a good provider instead, and settled on Host Color because they seemed to get good reviews at a great many sites, with no complaints worse than the occasional grouse about performance and occasional downtime – nothing like the Featureprice horror stories. They have the features I need, at a very low price. There’s always a possibility that they won’t work out (they seem to be taking longer than they should about adding pl.atyp.us as an alias of www.platypus.ro) and if that happens I’ll probably try LeHost next. I’ve sort of resigned myself to the idea that no one provider is going to be the solution for ever and ever; even Featureprice managed to do pretty well until the reshuffle in January.
So, you might be wondering, how did I get my data even if my site’s still down? Well, after the third round of Featureprice “resolving” my problem without actually doing squat, and two rounds of legal threats, I noticed that the host was back up. My site had been removed from the Apache config, and I couldn’t get to all of my statistics, but I guess they were too incompetent to shut off FTP or phpMyAdmin. I went in just as quickly as I could, started grabbing my data as fast as I could (in priority order) just in case someone down there finally grew a brain cell, and got the heck out of there. Now I have all the stuff I really need from them and Featureprice can go jump in a lake of flaming monkey turds. I seem to be a lot luckier than most of their customers.
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- Comments(6)
I forgot to mention FP’s absurd AUP, which their cancellation page claims I agreed to (I did not). Here’s the best part:
The sheer nerve of expecting customers to bow and scrape to get support, even for problems that were caused purely by FP’s own incompetence, boggles the mind. Politeness is relative to the situation; if you’re trying to screw them, politeness doesn’t preclude very many of their possible responses.
I got a few email messages from Travis Johnson (Feature Price’s CTO) today. Regular readers know that I generally frown on posting email, but when it’s a lowlife like Travis trying to dish out abuse to the customers he himself has screwed I think an exception is justified. Travis’s text is blockquoted.
This was in response to my mentioning that I had checked connectivity using a variety of public HTTP proxies and traceroute servers. There are two problems with his response:
Pretty weak, I’d say. This is part of a pattern at Feature Price, of focusing on things that aren’t really the problem, and trying to find any excuse – no matter how laughably thin – to pretend that the problem exists only in the customer’s head.
Such a tone, from someone who expects politeness from others! Who’s paying whom here? Who has a right to expect decorum and respect? As I’m sure most people have figured out, the change of address was part of the solution, not part of the problem. The site was equally unreachable by its Feature Price name, or by its IP address, which surely would not be a problem with my name service.
Yes, and it’s quite specifically not what I contracted with Feature Price to provide. In any case, naming was never the problem. When the machine did come (partly) back up, it was at the same address. The account wasn’t moved to another machine; it was broken in place.
I wouldn’t know. I don’t spend all my time sitting on the sofa eating Cheetos and watching HBO. I also don’t derive amusement from screwing and abusing people who pay me.
Yeah, it’s the customers who are moronic. Or liars. All of them, I suppose, and Feature Price is perfect. Riiiight. I mainly included this sentence because it contains the one true statement Travis makes: that they’re overwhelmed by complaints. Of course they are.
OK, enough. Just ask yourself: does the above illustrate the sort of behavior that you would consider appropriate for someone who is (supposedly) providing a contracted service, under any circumstances whatsoever? Does it seem like the right tone for someone who has just been caught failing to provide said service? Does it sound like someone you’d ever want to do business with, or interact with other than to spit on?
After three messages from Travis, I set up an email rule that would reply to anything further with the subject of “Correspondence not recorded” (like they do to responses regarding trouble tickets). The body consists of “Permission denied” plus the “ATTENTION!” text from their own auto-responder.
Don’t have time to register here, but…
If you’d like more information about Feature Price and its fraudulant practices and/or would like to sign up to be a part of the class action lawsuit against Travis Johnson, feel free to visit us at http://www.featureprice-review.com if you haven’t already that is.
Regards,
Michael A. Smith
I’d register but don’t feel like taking the time. I really WANT FeaturePrice.com to terminate my account. There’s absolutely no way to do that, unfortunately. Thank God I bought my domain registration somewhere else and manage it myself. Others are not so lucky. My site was down for days and their helpdesk login form was disabled! All email and phone information was removed from their site! And WE’RE being rude?? Stay away from Feature Price!!!!!!!!
There seems to be sufficient information available from former employees to support a prosecution for "fraudulent scheme", which is a -felony-. This has to come from the -criminal- division at the Attorney General’s office, and of course someone must make the case to the AG’s office and apply some political pressure, but a criminal prosecution is a possibility and should not be discounted.