ANHosting and midPhase sucks - negative web hosting review
This is a real-life web hosting review of ANHosting 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 (couple of months… almost a year 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!
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 damage 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!
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…
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!
When government bodies finally start to properly regulate this field — I hope they go to ANHosting and midPhase first.
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?
STATIC: definition: Fixed; stationary… But hey, that’s the English language definition. Perhaps static means something all together different in Russian?
Review verdict: sucks!
- ANHosting / midPhase web hosting support language — Rude and Russian only… Take your pick! 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 on general for complaints about that one.
Review verdict: sucks!
- ANHosting / midPhase web hosting: live chat — it’s almost always automated: “Please submit a written ticket online (that we can ignore)”. 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.
Review verdict: sucks!
- ANHosting / midPhase web hosting: Their servers are incredibly slow… I suspect that their servers are simply some Nintendo DS’s duct-taped together. Ok, you will get used to the fact that your website is incredibly slow… In fact, you will ecstatic when your website is incredibly slow, because at least it’s up! See #1.
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 imagine that they allocate all the money from people (like me) that cancel their services to pay for positioning on online review (sponsored result) sites.
Check out the “real-world” customer testimonials: Same vocabulary and writing as Akexander, Alexey, and Alex in tech support. Planted nonsense? Nahhh… You think?!
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”.
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!
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!
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%…
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…
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?
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…
Nothing has really changed: they are only screwing people on a bigger scale.
Review verdict: sucks!My ANHosting and Midphase web hosting review rating: 5 out of 5 sucks.
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. Buyer be very beware!
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…
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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.
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).
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.
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. 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.
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.
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!
Absolutely pathetic hosting service!
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.
So, now they’ve used up our patience and made a huge mistake by completely abandoning, ignoring, angering, and failing their paying customers.
MIDPHASE = BAD HOSTING