Questionable Host Alert: JLhost, JLhosts

by Sapphire (June 12, 2006)

One of my sites has been hosted with JLHosts.com or JLhost.com since October 2005, and I was very happy with them. Never more than maybe 5 minutes of downtime, quick response to inquiries, everything good.

My site went down a few days ago, and stayed down. It’s on day 3, currently. When I first went to make a trouble ticket, their site was down as well, so I couldn’t. Last night when I wrote and got a response, they informed me my nameservers were incorrect. Here was their response:

the problem is your nameservers are set to jlhosts.com. They should have been jlhosts1.com

now it is best to set them to jlhost.com, if you set things to ns1.jlhost.com and ns2.jlhost.com things would.

I think they used to have jlhosts.com working for people that made that typo, but the domain is itself now down, so it needs to be set right.

First of all, can you tell what they’re saying the nameservers are supposed to be? I guess “ns1.jlhost.com”, but the sentence ends before stating what “things would” do if I made that change. Second, the final line puts the blame squarely on me, the dumbass customer: I made a typo, obviously, because the customer is always retarded, right?

Give me a break. I made the change and responded to the ticket with a quote from the welcome email I got in October, which clearly told me to use “ns1.jlhosts.com” for the name server, and said I should have a discount for the downtime, since I was never told to change the nameservers. Their responses said that when they bought JLHost, they sent out an email in April telling people to change the nameservers.

Whoa. Again, I got no email telling me to change nameservers. I have every email they’ve sent me. Further, I was never informed the host had been sold - which they claim didn’t matter to users, because the old owner was staying on in some capacity. I disagree - I want to know who’s got access to my website files. Now, they refuse to send me backups of the site or help in any other way, on the basis that I’m so mean for questioning them. How about them accusing me of being too stupid to read an email (I never got) and make a simple change to my site configuration? Be forewarned: if you host with jlhosts.com or jlhost.com or whatever their name is now, and anything goes wrong, it will be your fault because they are incapable of error. They are perfect, and you are stupid, and how dare you question their authority! /rolleyes

So I’m going to move the site to the host I almost put it on originally.

Note to webhosts: if you buy a hosting company, you really need to make sure your customers know what’s going on. That’s confidential information you have on them and their files. They deserve to know if there’s been a change in who has access to it. And if you make a major change like nameservers and rely on email alerts to let people know, maybe you should take the time to actually look at the sites and make sure they’ve made the switch, and try a second time to contact people. If you can’t be bothered to do that, then you can just lose some customers.

Posted in Hosting
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