This is a real-life web hosting review of ANHosting (or AN Hosting) and midPhase (Yes, they are the same company…) This is all based on personal experiences, conclusions, and speculations…
Where am I now? I’m hosting multiple WordPress sites with A2Hosting and so far (almost two years now…) they kick butt!
- ANHosting / midPhase web hosting downtime — it’s like an Italian soccer player = frequently down and seemingly dying… And they always scream, whine and cry when you ask them to get up. In fact, it’s easier to measure downtime than uptime with this company. My worst downtime for the first few months of 2007 was almost two days! Even hoping for a 97.0% uptimes is silly if you factor in how often your remote MySQL server won’t be reachable: you will be killing yourself!
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For the web rookies out there… 1 hour a day on average down-time — matters! Being down for 6 hours at a stretch and you are in trouble if you are providing a service or selling anything! Being down for 2 days: you could get damaged to the point where you lose customers, if you are a small business. The sickest part… It all happens monthly — and more often than that!
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If you provide a service where people need to contact you or your site because of medical support reasons — ANHosting and midPhase could get people killed or hurt. Don’t count on a support forum to be there when needed, because it probably won’t be…
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Here’s the beauty of this review — Don’t take my word for it! Try it yourself if you dare! Just make sure that it’s not a critical website. Do also watch the MySQL queries as that’s where they fail/cheat the most when it comes to stats. Yes, and do thank me later!
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When government bodies finally start to properly regulate this field — I hope they go to AN Hosting and midPhase first.
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Review verdict: sucks!
. - ANHosting / midPhase web hosting extra services — You pay extra money to have a static IP address, and they keep changing it! Their explanation: “It’s not stated anywhere in our TOS that we can’t change it” (over and over again). That may perhaps be — except for the actual title of this extra-fee service?
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STATIC: definition: Fixed; stationary… But hey, that’s the English language definition. Perhaps static means something all together different in Russian?
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Review verdict: sucks!
. - ANHosting / midPhase web hosting support language — Rude and Russian only… Take your pick!
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Everyone working for this company seems to have a Russian name. Also, have many goddamned ways can you spell “Alexander”? When you leave them, make sure you cancel your credit card (personal suspicion and tip!) Note that I wrote “when you leave” and not “if you leave”… You can check the Better Business Bureau site and the Web in general for complaints about that one.
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Review verdict: sucks!
. - ANHosting / midPhase web hosting: live chat — it’s almost always automated: “Please submit a written ticket online (that we can ignore)”.
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Getting your support ticket answered is like being 5 years old and waiting for Santa Claus: It takes forever for him to show up, and when he finally does — he never delivers what you asked for. You can also not ask him to correct anything, because as soon as you start asking the question: he disappears up that deep dark place where he came from, and won’t be seen again for an eternity.
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Review verdict: sucks!
. - ANHosting / midPhase web hosting: Their servers are incredibly slow… I suspect that their servers are simply some Nintendo DSs duct-taped together. Ok, you will get used to the fact that your website is incredibly slow… In fact, you will be ecstatic when your website is incredibly slow, because at least it’s up! See #1.
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Review verdict: sucks!
. - ANHosting / midPhase web hosting online reviews: They are number one everywhere because they spend more money than any other web hosting company to be number one on those useless and fraudulent review sites. I do think they allocate all the money from people (like me and you…) that cancel their services to pay for positioning on online review (sponsored result) sites.
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Check out the “real-world” customer testimonials: Same vocabulary and writing as Alexander, Alexey, and Alex in tech support. Planted nonsense? Nahhh… You think?!
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Review verdict: sucks!
. - ANHosting / midPhase web hosting MTBF: When your server completely up and dies again (and do note that I write WHEN and not IF…) it will take them 2-3 days to get a new box installed, and to have the data recovered. This makes me think that they don’t have any technicians what so ever to maintain the hardware they use. I suspect they rely on Dell Home Support, just like any other average grandmother.
Review verdict: sucks!
. - ANHosting / midPhase web hosting redundancy: They only speak Rude or Russian, so the word “redundancy” is as foreign of a word as “customer service”, “backups”, “timely”, “quality”, “sorry”, and “refund”.
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As in the previous point, WHEN your server dies… Don’t rely solely on ANHosting / midPhase to have a recent backup of your data. The last time when the server I was on crashed and burned, the most recent data they could recover was almost two weeks old! Do they perform backups every day? I don’t think so… Do they store the most recent data on same server as the sites themselves Probably!
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Review verdict: sucks!
. - ANHosting / midPhase web hosting plans: they are completely ridiculous… Of course they can offer thousands of GBs in bandwidth because you will never be allowed to use it all! If you ever get to a tenth of that usage — you will be using up server resources to the point where you are breaking their Terms Of Service, and your account will be cancelled and your sorry arse booted out on the street: with no refund!
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The ANHosting / midPhase 30 Day Risk Free Money Back Guarantee is just that… 30 days… The other 335 days of the year you are on your own. They only cover 7%…
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Of course they can offer hundreds of GBs in storage because you will not be able to use it all… Before you get all that data uploaded to their slow servers, it will have crashed again. And as mentioned before — “backups” is just a marketing term to these people — so, you would have to upload it again, again and again…
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Also, why bother spending weeks trying to upload hundreds GB’s of data in the first place? Your site is always down and people can’t access it anyway?
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Review verdict: sucks!
. - ANHosting / midPhase web hosting as a company: History — midPhase was started in 2003 by two college students and less than two thousand dollars. Ok, I admit that it’s pretty impressive that you can go from dorm rooms, to state-of-the-art in locale — in mom’s air-conditioned basement (or where the heck their servers are located now?) What is not as impressive is that four years later the quality of service is the same as two guys running a server in their dorm room…
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Nothing has really changed: they are only screwing people on a much bigger scale.
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Review verdict: sucks!
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My ANHosting and Midphase web hosting review rating: 5 out of 5 sucks.
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Buyer be very aware!
Conclusion: I’m not sure what is more painful — hosting your website with ANHosting / midPhase or bending over to pick up a bar of soap in a prison shower. If you want to find out: sign up with them! Was this review too negative? I don’t think so… In fact, it might be too nice, but I don’t wish to write a novel, or waste more time on these scumbags.
Yes, I do realize that scumbags is plural… Perhaps it’s just one dude named Alexander working for this one “company”? Stay away from Alexander! You have been warned!
Updated January 25, 2008: Now the evil is three! StartLogic has merged with ANHosting and midPhase… Wow! StartLogic is still around! I though they went bankrupt years ago for their pathetic quality and track record of customer support. I feel even more sorry now for customer caught in this pathetic triad.
StartLogic merging with these two is like an evil joke played on humankind. It’s basically a stain in the shorts of our very existance…
Updated November 25, 2008: Some minor clarifications. I also wish to bang my own drum for my prediction of January 25… Yes, it all seems to have turned in to a cesspool. Poor buggers that prepaid at midPhase (et all).
As it’s been a while now since the original review, I can now say with a great level of certainty, you will absolutely love A2Hosting. Check it out! Oh, if you are coming from the midPhase cartel — fear not! The A2Hosing cancellation (money-back guarantee) and customer support actually works…
Try it out and thank me later!
Possibly related pictures
I had very similar problems with MidPhase. I put up with the nonsense for almost 2 years before I finally couldn’t take it anymore. My website was just a small, personal business website. Very little bandwidth. Relatively small amount of disk space needed for all the files.
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By anyone’s standards, it should have been a cakewalk. And yet, every month my site would be down for hours on end. I’d call and get some ridiculous response from TS (it was never their fault — always something else).
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It was like a breath of fresh air when I finally got around to moving it. I went with Pair Networks and it’s been great now. Good luck to anyone having problems with this company.
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Don’t put up with crappy host service. There’s no need. There are better companies out there.
I also got very rude Russian from Alekzandar in support. Midphase sucks!
I signed up with MidPhase and paid a year in advance, but in the end I did not use the service at all.
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They are now holding me liable for a second year because I failed to cancel my service on the due date by clicking through their complicated cancelation procedure. (I was a few days late.) The amount is enormous. It would feed a family of four for a long time in my country.
Up until recently, we had believed and agreed with the so-called positive reviews for MidPhase.
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Now, after they have had an entire server and countless domains DOWN FOR ALMOST AN ENTIRE WEEK, we’ve realized that they’re apparently just another lousy hosting company. One of the worst hosting experiences we’ve encountered out of all the sites and hosts we deal with.
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They have NOT responded to our email inquiries for support, they have NOT posted an update on their so-called status blog for almost two whole days, they’re apparently not answering phone calls since we sit on hold in queue in the exact same place in line for almost an hour, they’re online live chat support is turned off, they’ve even shut down and redirected their customer forums, and we are getting absolutely ZERO SERVICE OR COMMUNICATION!
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Absolutely pathetic hosting service!
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Meanwhile, they’re costing businesses thousands of dollars in lost sales, wasted staff time, and damaged credibility because they can’t even provide basic decent hosting service.
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So, now they’ve used up our patience and made a huge mistake by completely abandoning, ignoring, angering, and failing their paying customers.
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midPhase = Bad hosting!
ANHosting is horrible! Each month I’ve been with them my site has been down. Unfortunately I didn’t cancel withing the 30 days required, so they have my entire year’s payment!
Unfortunately, I’m learning that they (AnHosting) aren’t as great as I thought. The thing is, they are one of the recommended sites on WordPress. I was trying to decide between them and Bluehost and now I’m kicking myself.
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I have 3 sites up with AnHosting, none of them are working right now. There are no updates on why the servers are down. None of the tech support is helpful when you have DB connection errors… I’m so frustrated but I pre-paid for a year!
I have a weblog and my sister has an arts and crafts based business with midPhase. Nobody gets to read my articles as the server is always down, and my sister is devastated over the money she has lost. It is frustrating, infuriating and depressing!
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There is over six months left on our prepaid service but we have decided to leave anyway. Is it possible that the hosting company is some sort of Russian scam? This review is not accurate when it comes to point 1… It is much worse!
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I was a sucker too. No more!
I don’t know what you guys are all mad about? I got an extra service with AN(us) Hosting: a time machine! Yesterday my Cpanel travelled way back to June, when I first put the site up, and didn’ have all those pesky files and crap uploaded.
My hosting account was cancelled because I broke the midPhase Terms Of Service…
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Apparently, I hosted porn (I’m a wedding photographer). Not one of my photos showed even a nipple… but as it looks, a big website linked to one of my portfolios and I ended up using “too many server resources”. What does that mean?
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No warning or nothing! They are not answering my emails.
Our soccer club has used AN Hosting for 14 months and it has been a nightmare keeping the website accessible. We had the same problem as CK = one day our site (and club schedule) simply reverted to a much older, almost 2 months old version! The support ticket still is not answered properly. I think we were scammed.
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It is embarrassing to us all. Many parents have been driving miles to get their kids to games that happened months ago because they missed the date stamp on the schedule.
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We have to change hosts. DreamHost or A2 Hosting? I’m not really nervous as anything must be better than AN Hosting. It cannot get any worse.
Thank you Mr. Klint for your review. It will help many bloggers. I have all my live support logs saved and I can send them to you if you wish. They are very funny (in retrospect). I agree about proper regulation and I have talked to our local state representative and they have promised to investigate.
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The good news is that AN Hosting (midPhase) is no longer a recommended web host on Wordpress.org… Thank you WorPress for listening to us bloggers! It is too late for thousand of people that were scammed but it’s easy enough to leave for those that are still there, just make sure you CANCEL WAY AHEAD OF TIME. I also cancelled my credit card to make sure.
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AN Hosting set me back almost two years. They still hold my domain name hostage but I picked a new one. I don’t give in to terrorists! I was a “web rookie” as you call it. Not sure if I like the description - I’m not a stupid person. I knew I made a mistake after a couple of months but it was too late as I paid for a year. I changed to DreamHost and they are reliable.
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I changed my personal blog to A2 Hosting and they great too! The live support and tickets are better on A2 Hosting but the hosting quality and speed are pretty much the same. I also heard from friends that Laughing Squid is good for basic WordPress blogs (no plugins). The Laughing Squid is also promoted by Wordpress. Hugs Steph.
You are wrong about Wordpress. The hosting companies were kicked out a long time ago. Wordpress no longer endorses AN Hosting or midPhase! I use A2 Hosting because of 43folders recommendations. Yes, your review is as scary as it is true but it is also old news. A2 Hosting and midPhase is an old joke amongst Wordpress bloggers.
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It is informative as a general web hosting review.
This has to be the worst hosting company I have ever dealt with. I was so excited about the speed at first…
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This is my first day with AN Hosting. Around 1pm EST today they blocked my IP address from hitting my server. 10 other test addresses work. All day they have closed my tickets after resetting my password… Then I re-open and submit a traceroute… I show them that their equipment is filtering the traffic. They repeat — close ticket — change password. 4 times — over 3 tickets!
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Again… Worst shared hosting I have yet encountered!
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Two times I called in and was told that there was NO supervisor and that the issue would go to Level 2.
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Well, Level 2 support at AN Hosing seems to think that a Cpanel pasword reset and ticket-close is the best way to deal with a border routing complaint.
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I asked if they had a NOC or network engineers. I was answered by a “George” that. “No, not to my knowledge”.
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They tell me that I have to wait in line but when I get to the register to pay, they tell me the cash register is broken and to wait in line again and restart the queue — four time over! I am obviously irate.
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It’s faster to pull the D&B and call the owner of MidPhase at home than it is to deal with their support infrastructure or lack therof.
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I am obviously irate but AN Hosting could not have made a worst first impression on me!
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I should have known when three of my presales questions went unanswered for over 30 days that this was not a company that cared about customer satisfaction. No doubt the 1 year prepay instead of monthly is probably necessary to keep customers from jumping ship on the first issue.
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Hello Linode! I am coming soon…
I left the review from March 9th about AN Hosting and Midphase.
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I was very irate at the time. A lot of things did go wrong.
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I did have a misconception though. That my noise was not being heard. It was heard apparently long before I started emailing the GM. I wound up in lengthy conversation with the GM of MidPhase and at this point, I am happy again. I did not receive any financial dispensations and I am writing this because I feel like it.
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I get really fast server speeds that I am happy with and they seem willing to most most annoying environment constraints that others just say SORRY OUR POLICY IS.
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It’s a balancing act I guess. The monster hoster who automates everything super well with ultra-mega-high availability but in the end YOUR AN 8 digit customer ID with 2-digit alphanumeric descriptor. Right now with AN, although it may not be in positive light, they know me. Whether good or bad, they recognize the tickets and the email and I get snappy service.
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I had left GoDaddy for them and truthfully I might never be happy in a shared hosting environment. I will always be unhappy about something. Many support centers offer incentives to close tickets which yields hurried reading. People also jump to conclusions and frankly I think most people don’t care to isolate problems thoroughly at all anyway.
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The thing is. GoDaddy never admits mistakes. I think the bulk of service providers never really apologize for failures. It is always nice to have a firm like Midphase / AN apologize when they screw up. GoDaddy remains a heartless monster. At least AN, there are some humans in the scene.
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Admittedly my first 24 hours with the IP blocking was a dousy… I had a few others tickets and a few other headaches. 1 wound up being my fault. Now that the adjustment pains are over, I am very happy with them and hopefully it stays that way.
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I think shared hosting is a rough business to keep people happy in.
They use to be a great company before the acquisition. After months of trouble, I couldn’t bare it any more. I ended up switching hosts. Couldn’t be happier now!
At B: I wish I could have talked the/a GM (whoever that is!?) AN Hosting should add his or her name on the front page of the site or as an option for support tickets! I agree with the World Wide Web, this company sucks royal balls! Just Google it! Or waste your work and try them out for yourself! I have downtime every SINGLE day! EVERY DAY! I am dead serious! I’m leaving for Pair, as they seem to be a real company: they at least have a phone installed that people bother picking up! STAY AWAY from AN Hosting and midPhase!