tsoHost ain't what it used to be.
It used to be pretty good back in the day but has steadily deteriorated over the course of several years.
Yes, we had issues and outages but they were never that serious (Apart from them upgrading PHP and not letting us know, and the great 'Domains beginning with B' débâcle which hit us). Also we were on a shared hosting machine (Probably their cheapest, knowing our bean-counters), and I had to keep saying to the MD 'You get what you pay for'.
Like a lot of people, we got caught out by this Gridhost turnoff, and spent about two days with no web presence at all, then another 2 or 3 days with a holding 'Sorry, we've got problems' page before the brand new shiny website we had waiting in the wings came into service....much to the relief of our worldwide customers, some of whom thought we'd ceased trading or something.
We were lucky with the new site. All we had to do with this was advance our plans by a couple of weeks. I know of various colleagues and contacts that have anywhere from 40-odd to 162 sites affected. All of them swear they did not get a single warning email in their working and monitored mailboxes that were registered with tsoHost.
The MD and I have spent the last couple of days updating content and sorting out all the redirected domains and email etc. It's been a bit of a panic, but no too bad as these things go.
People are right about the poor support at tsoHost. The chat que lengths were horrid. We always started out as #160-odd in the que, and it took hours to get to the top. Then you get a canned stock answer, and back you go to the bottom of the que. Actual support tickets were a bit better, but not much. Once we had persuaded them to re-instate FTP access for backing up (Which they managed to get working on the 3rd attempt), we said 'F This' and committed to moving away from them as fast as possible...it was sheer luck we had a replacement site nearly ready to go, with another provider. Professional companies who see support as an obligation rather than a cost centre generally put extra resources in place just in case - especially on and after the 'due date' - something this bunch of tossers didn't.
Had they actually warned us, or any of our colleages/contacts, we would have known in advance and could have dealt with the turnoff more efficiently instead of this un-planned 'sprint'.,.
tsoHost were on our our naughty step anyway (Hence the new site being on another provider), but we've added GoDaddy (And any subsidiaries) to the non-preferred/avoid vendor list now because we don't want the risk any more. Considering GoDaddy are US based where customer service is king, they've really dropped a bollock, service-wise. Not impressed.
tsoHost ain't the only one. We buy hosted exchange from giacom via a reseller, and for the last week or have had out outlook clients frequently asking for the password to {random mailbox}. We bitch at the reseller, they say it's a giacomp issue and are continually chasing them. I'm too far away from this to be sure, but it looks like giacom's authentication synch/replication across their server suite has issues.... Still ongoing with no sign of a 'cure' yet.
Overall, it's been a pretty shitty few days. Still, Vino Rosso helps..