tsoHost pleads for 'patience and understanding' as sites borked, support sinkholed Brit hosting outfit tsoHost has rendered some websites and bits of the company's all-important client area inaccessible since yesterday. The company's status page begged patience and understanding for "some issues with our client are [sic] which is causing the back-end of your TSO account not to be accessible." At time of …
I found out end of last week that they've done something behind the scenes that broke one of my CMS based web sites. It displays, but I can't post anything new.
I've always found their helpdesk very helpful and obliging, but have had to contact it rather too often for comfort latterly.
It's always the way. When young and hungry, the service is amazing. Then as each time they get bought out, the service gets worse until it is a shadow of its former self (I am talking about Pipex primarily but also tsoHost)
Currently I still have several websites with tso and also my primary email, but for the latter I'm strongly considering a migration to either Office365 or Google, simply for the fact that I can never totally rely on tso's mailservers.
To their credit, though, their ticket support is excellent and they do try very hard.
But as Paul Herber says, websites can be up and down like a tart's knickers sometimes.
Got an email a couple of months back that they are migrating from the "Cloud Hosting" platform back to cPanel... Oh and as result of this complusory change, you'll be paying more and getting less.
Welcome to GoDaddy.
I was with 5quid host who were utterly fatanstic, then they got bought by tso, and the support was average, then they in turn got bought by GD and now its shit.
Ahhh - 5Quid host. The first decent hosting company you find after years of frog-kissing (still looking at you 123!) is a bit like your first proper girl/boy/nonbinary-friend. Whatever happened to those guys? I hope they are enjoying a well-earned retirement after selling up, even though I cursed them for doing so at the time.
But I'll throw in an upvote for Stablepoint, they've been pretty good so far.
<icon is Old Git, definitely NOT Windows User> -------------------------------------------^
this has been my experience too.
they once shut down one of my hosting accounts because of some internal security scan they did. They didn't bother telling me what the issue was, they just disabled the site.
It took well over an hour on livechat to get a list of the "malicious files" - every single one of which was a false positive - legitimate third party libraries like adodb, phpGrid and PDW File Browser. One of the false positives was because there was a "very long line of text" in a file. Still no idea why that was an issue. Just for shits and giggles, here is that long line of text https://pastebin.com/enNLL6iR It's part of some honeypot code from https://www.projecthoneypot.org/
During the livechat they admitted their scan was greater than 0% accurate* but shut down the site anyway. They suggested I hire securi.net to scan and clean up the site. It's just a coincidence securi.net are also owned by godaddy.
When I went to cancel the account I was told that as I'd paid annually I couldn't get a refund on the remaining time.
Thoroughly disreputable and corrupt company imo.
*ok they didn't phrase it like that but if these twats want to spin as "not 100% accurate" I can reverse spin. Seems only fair.
It seems that whenever I find a good host it gets bought up by a bigger and ultimately crappier host. I have a 25year plus history of having to ditch hosts including some of those already mentioned.
I remember Netlink, demon, 123, HEG, 5quid, TSO, Vidahost, Hostdime, fasthosts and there have been a dozen more. It seems that the predators seek out successful smaller hosts and offer them a price too good to refuse.
My policy now works like this:
I have a primary host then one or two on trial for a year or two. When the primary gets gobbled up there's usually an interim period when service is in gradual decline, that gives a year to shift sites away to a host that's performed well in the trial period.
My most recent primary host remains excellent in terms of features, performance, availability and it's not been bought (yet) but their prices have rocketed and front-line support has become script-followers who are very reluctant to escalate anything they can't handle. The response to one simple request relating to their server configuration was "you need to ask an expert" well, as a coder with half a century in IT and 30 years Internet, without wishing to appear arrogant, I think I'm reasonably competent. Also when I call support that IS "asking an expert" or should be...
Influenced by the https://publicbenefit.uk/ I've recently shifted a dozen sites to Krystal (more to follow probably as other accounts expire), and might I point out that many of the biggest hosts including GoDaddy supported the original Nominet management.
Like most people, a few of my bits ended up over there via a long chain of acquisitions. Moved everything important a very long time ago, but I'm not giving godaddy another penny (think these were all last renewed before then), nor any more voting weight on Nominet matters.
I might add something about the last one out turning off the lights, but too many people lap up GD's adverts, and tso seem quite willing and able to switch stuff off without any prompt being necessary.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
