dotDifficult (doteasy.com is a bad choice for hosting)

Hi, i thought i should inform people the poor quality of service at doteasy.com. i am a web developer with a company in montreal canada, dont ask me why we are even using these guys for a portion of our ecommerce sites but i think its because one of our clients, a medical products development company is very cheap and initially ordered this company's hosting. (we have a dedicated server for our other projects)

anyways when a user submitted a simple product registration form they would get a 500 internal server error. i let doteasy know via the only method they offer, their online form. a 500 error is usually a server side config issue and the form was rock solid on our dev and every other testing setup. eventually i had to make a workaround where the user is sent to another domain on the dedicated server to fill out the form and submit.

doteasy doesnt provide you an email let alone a phone number and about 30 hours later their guy emails me (you cant even respond to his email either you have to go back to the form) his email was simply to ask a few questions which i had already detailed in my original contact submission. the guy didnt even look at the server log because their initial response person most likely has not a clue what a 500 error even is.

so i provide the same info all over again (politely) and then over 24 hours later i get an email notifying me that it is their server and my issue is being forwarded to the next level of tech support and i would hear within another 24 hours. well i am waiting now... this 500 error is 99% chance able to be fixed in less than 2 seconds by someone with more than 2 brain cells. furthermore, i asked for a contact email address to send a formal complaint and i get the address to the same inefficient form that i had been using prior, as if i didnt already know where that is.

i had already had a few run ins with the poor quality at doteasy, when i had to setup databases for our client. i prefer to administrate the database remotely using navicat but unfortunately it isnt possible with these guys because there is no remote database connection allowed. not even with a ssh tunnel (for those who dont know what that means, basically these guys have a very closed hosting system, there no 'extras' as they call them (i call them basics) this means they need less staff and obviously they think it means your tech support only needs to come in twice a week to answer request form submissions for assistance.) the only way to administrate your database with dotcheesy is to use a lame php/html interface.

one of the reasons we hadnt migrated the clients sites a long time ago is we procrastinated as there are about 24 of them and it was thought to be a major hassle. it ends up that getting any support from the company is more of a hassle so now our tech dept is going to switch all those sites over.

bottom line, do not host any project, big or small, with dotdifficult. you will get more intelligence and service from a mcdonald's employee. i never thought i would saythis, but these guys make bell look good.

good luck,
jd