Review vistapages.com
For those who didn’t see this comment (and I didn’t since it was stuck in the moderation queue, which I don’t usually check), I had some word back from vistapages.com. Comment as follows:
Just some facts here, before you go and make VistaPages look like a “horrible†company.
1. Your account was past the 30-day money back guarantee.
2. We do not provide refunds after the 30-day money back guarantee on pre-paid accounts, this is clearly mentioned in our TOS.
3. You were not registered for 2 years, but rather only 1 year.
4. Your domain name was not regsitered through us, or transferred to us and was held by NetFirms. The domain expired with NetFirms. Your web hosting account was active. If you had renewed your domain name with Netfirms, your web site would have popped back up with no problems.If you have any questions, you can direct them directly to me, and I will be more than happy to look into it; but I did some research on your tickets before posting here.
Thank you for your time and best of luck with NetFirms.
My response to that is this:
- I signed up with vistapages.com because they were located in Toronto and were offering what I was looking for with support… that being telephone support.
- Within the first month of my signing up, they stopped offering telephone support – now the only way to ask questions or get support was by submitting a ticket or using their “live assistant” which sometimes didn’t even connect.
- When you could connect to their live assistant, you had to wait in between responses for minutes at a time. Sometimes I didn’t know if I was still connected because it took so long for an answer, and other times I was cut off. A simple phone call would have lasted one-quarter of the time of typing, sitting, waiting for an answer.
- When I asked them about my domain name renewal, not once did anyone tell me that I had to actually change registrars to them – I thought this was done when I changed providers and the dns settings, but my domain expiring could easily have been averted if anyone had answered my question.
- I asked the question 5 days before my domain expired – I think it was 4 days after expiry that they got around to providing an answer.
- The reason I said that I had signed up for two years was because that’s what their customer support told me. I didn’t remember signing up for two years, but it’s not unlike me, so I believed them when they told me that.
- Even if I was only signed up for one year, regardless of their ‘terms of service’, I don’t believe that I should have to pay for shitty customer service and I took my business elsewhere.
- They, of course, are not providing me with my money back. I guess they figure that once they suck you in past the 30-day mark, whatever happens after that is too bad – after all, it’s in their terms of service that you won’t get a refund.
All in all I’m not surprised that they are not providing a refund. Based on their quality of customer support, ripping people off would seem to fit in with their standards.
I do not recommend vistapages.com and would wholly recommend Netfirms Web Hosting to anyone searching for a provider. At the very least you can call them up, ask questions, and get answers and their prices are in line with the other providers. At least you can count on them.
I host 5 domains with Netfirms and have always been happy with their level of support.
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
Thanks for the webhosting comment – I’ve actually just finished moving http://www.cosmogrrl.com over to my old http://www.justjanice.ca hosting. Now in a few days from now when my cosmogrrl hosting expires, I’ll transfer the domain name over as an add-on at justjanice.ca. We’ll have to see how fast my webhosting provider (Hostingplex) updates their nameserver…
Good for you, Victor. They sucked big time and I got away from there as fast as possible. If you want a good provider, look at Netfirms. I have about 7 sites hosted with them and don’t usually have any problems at all… with great customer support on top of that – BY PHONE.
That’s ironic, because I switched from Netfirms to Vistapages, because netfirms sucked big time! I don’t need telephone support, e-mail is much better anyway!
Victor, I don’t know why you’d think that email for support is much better when you end up emailing, getting your autoresponder reply back that says you’ll hear from us in 24 hours, then wait for the email, read the email which is usually some canned response, and then end up without an answer and you have to do it all over again.
I vaguely even remember vistapages now, that post was so long ago, but I do know that Netfirms has always been good for me, and in all the years I’ve hosted sites with them, I think I’ve only ever been down twice.
It’s your choice though. And I can’t remember ever seeing a good review on vistapages. Unfortunately for me, it was after I had problems with them that I looked up reviews on them.
Technical support is good and staff is prompt and so far courteous. Only problem is that their service is very poor. They have been down/slow for hours every week in the last few months. They announced major upgrades in mid-March, then took their servers down for 2 hours on a Saturdy afternoon without notice. (Oh, I should have read their forum. I was posted there.)
However two weeks later their server is still itermitantly slow.
Static pages with few graphics should be OK, but not recommended for dynamic applications or image heavy pages.
Advertised prices may be low but only on 2 year contract and they take the whole thing in advance and don’t seem willing to refund un-used balances if you cancel early.
Buyer beware.
First page on Google for Netfirms reviews:
http://www.hostsearch.com/review/netfirms_inc_review.asp
Not being able to find “positive” reviews mean nothing.
Victor, why do you keep commenting on a post from July 2006? Do you think I give a flying fuck about vistapages any more? I got out of there and I’m happy with Netfirms. I know you must work for them or something, otherwise I see no reason for your obsession.
My issue is with their server uptime. Look what we has to put up with this week. This is the second major system failure this year. My site (and it seems many of their clients’ sites) have been down since Wednesday night.
05-28-2008, 11:35 PM
Hello. At approximately 7:00PM EST, we have detected an issue with Apollo spitting out errors. We have technicians looking into the issue. Further updates will be made as available.
05-29-2008 3:08AM EST,
Our technicians are still working to resolve the service interruption issue with Apollo.
05-30-2008 , 12:22 AM
Hello. The server is now online. The technicians are now working to restore files from our regular snapshot backup files.
05-30-2008 , 05:57 AM
User /home files have been restored. Files are accessible via FTP & SSH.
Mail should also be accessible via POP/IMAP.
Technicians are still working on restoring Apache/HTTP service. Once this is done, customers will be able to access cPanel, Webmail and their web sites.
05-30-2008 , 07:00 AM
[site still down, cPanel not working]
May 31, 2008, 03:16 AM
#5: MySQL Databases. There has been some confusion from our previous e-mail. So I’ll take the time to clear it up as best as I can. MySQL is stored on a local system for performance (read/write) purpose as opposed to being stored on our gigabit storage network (all your /home, email files). It is taking us longer to recover MySQL files for this reason. Our technicians are currently performing data recovery on the drives pulled from the server, similar to tasks that the government agencies and data recovery firms under go. We’re lucky to have that talent available to us. This process, unfortunately for everyone is time consuming, but we’re working as fast as possible.
*** IF & WHEN *** we are successful in our attempts to recover the databases from the local drives, we will be performing a mass restoral of MySQL databases for customers. Those that have decided to restore from their own backups will be skipped to prevent new data from being lost. Those customers will be provided with the backup files seperately in their /home directory for your use.
What about http://www.hostingearth.com... They have 24ht Live help support.
idiotonastick
Minna
Dave Barker
I used Moneris for over two years. I recently terminated due to a merchant compliance requiremen t – Moneris began...
Maria
just another
Female, taken, fire, Sagittarius, Monkey, Toronto, two kids, one grandson, IT.
55
is the new 30. I want the world to close their mouths when they’re eating or chewing gum. If they don’t, I want to elbow them in the face.
You tell the b****rds, J.
I love it when you give ‘em sh*t!