Help
Having joined up with this forum around 2 years ago and enjoying the cool and relaxed fairly mature community. We all have our moments. It was a nice and clean interface and friendly experience. Members professional, and well rounded.
From memory there were always a few adverts but the prominent affiliation with Heart Internet clearly on display in the header area of the forum.
Turning freelance in 2009, I wanted to get off to a fresh foot and better serve potential UK based customers I had. Prior to this Hostgator in America were my host with very good entry level prices, reseller features but suffering when being routed all the way round the internet. Sites became slow as server side knowledge and traffic grew at different sites. However tech support was always great, accessible via ticketing, live chat AND telephone. Sometimes it's just comforting to know someone is there on the end of the phone if you have no internet access.
So ultimately I signed up to Heart Internet after thinking eXtend control panel (Hearts propriety admin area resellers / single site hosters and possibly managed dedicated server customer receive) eXtend looks very much like cPanel / WHM and without really paying too much attention one can easily assume it's not. Living in a white label World designers may simply think eXtend is white label cPanel. Anyway this fact was discovered after signing up and hosting a few sites.
As the months went on a number of issues came up, being at the computer for the most part it was never a problem submitting support tickets. Support staff are always quick to respond and competent when it comes to solving problems. Kudos and win for how effecient they are with this, however it is no different to the likes of HostGator.
Step back to about 6 months ago a site which experienced 6.5GB of bandwidth usage in a day or so was closed down. The person using this account (a member from here needed some free space to practice) was running a script that was generating traffic through a number of means for him. Heart Internet didn't like this traffic, even if it was legitimate or not and decided to kill the site.
I went through the usual routine of creating a ticket and waiting for a response and was advised that the site in question was putting a demand on the server and was closed, they also advised after my questioning again that 7.5GB was the monthly limit. Apparently the term "unlimited" is subject to fair use, and apparently 7.5gb is deemed reasonable. What if we are video producers and sign up to the site on that basis? Pretty poor on that front.
A number of issues had cropped up throughout the 2 years of service but the main experience was site downtime and slow access. When sites are up you'll think a response time of 25ms is reasonable, but catch them on a slow minute and it will jump up to 300ms.
With the issues in place, and the one site being shut down naturally I want to protect my paying customers so decided to move on. First step was to create a back up of sites and ask Heart to close the account. Unfortunately eXtend is not WHM and you simply can't backup all sites within a few clicks. You have to navigate the horde of different accounts and wait for each site backup to be generated. No file dumps on completion, no mail notifications. Just wait, and wait, and wait... Pretty lame on that front.
When I gave notice Heart had offered a 3 month donation in order to try and keep my custom. I took that, quite happily at £46.99 a month including VAT it was about time a hiatus was given. That's £552.00 per year and £1104.00 over 2 years. Pretty expensive for a host especially when you can get that from some companies for around £200.00.
After the 3 months hiatus I went on to raise the close account ticket again.
All that out the way, Was ready to make the switch after pointing some name servers. Oh and not to mention manually importing all the sql files and files downloaded from eXtend. What an awkward process.
My payment date each month was the 9th by Direct Debit (which is required by Heart Internet), this close account request was given on the 6th or 7th and after it was submitted going on the form of about 5 other hosting companies I had used in the passed there was nothing else required. Maybe a deactivation link, but no more verbal.
The date passed but then I notice charges from my bank, apparently Heart never closed the account and they still have Direct Debit. This part was infuriating as I never expected this to come off and consequently Heart and their unruly demands set me out of even more dosh! Still having a reasonable head on I tried to call Heart Internet as the bank would only refund one charge, and because the request took me over drawn there was 2 bank charges in place. Hopefully Heart would help up a valued customer for 2 years? No, billing or technical support cannot be queried via telephone, only SALES! Talk about not giving a ****.
So back to tickets it was and the issue was raised with no results along the way. I drew a line and said, okie please can you cancel my account what else do you need to do. Bare in mind a few days had passed before I noticed they were still taking money for an account not even being used. Heart ask you to fill out a document making sur e you dot the i's and cross the t's for cancellations. Having looked through a handful of previous tickets that had the word "cancellation" or "close" and "account" in it, I was unable to find a link or download to this document. Which speaks volumes.
Ultimately I changed my bank account to stop Heart getting this money but it was a truely awful experience. In the final month when Heart failed to get their money they stopped access to the account, and the only way I was able to get backups was through a WordPress plugin which is super sharp. "Open Source will save us all" I think was the last thing said to Heart. They had no reason to block access to eXtend as yet, and no notifications were given. So yeah that's my fault, should have prepared a day or so earlier but thank goodness for WordPress.
Bit of a messy post, and hope it reads okie but felt important others should consider this if looking at a host.
*Edit
They also still hold the IPS tag for a couple of my domains, wish me luck on that one.
This post has been edited by a.g.r.c: 20 August 2011 - 04:44 AM
