Reviewing Mosso Web Hosting

November 15, 2011 One Wild Tribe Reviews

Originally posted 4/20/2009

Mosso is a Rackspace property focused on “cloud” technology. When a client of mine was researching web hosts, Mosso promised fabulous uptime, the ability to keep resource hogs in their place and an easy method of expansion. I wasn’t thrilled with the $100 a month price tag, but the person who chose it was given the impression that the company would essentially have at least a near-private server.

I went ahead and moved the company site to their Mosso account and the nightmare began. I’ve been on free web hosts from 1999 that ran better. There was frequent downtime, with the site going down on average once a week, sometimes for several hours or longer. The Mosso status blog’s favorite words were: “php degraded.” Numerous phone calls only gave us the same excuse – that other websites were hogging resources and Mosso just had to wait for them to come along and then they’d try to handle them.

Every phone call also gave us another line: that Mosso was implementing procedures to handle all sorts of traffic so php degradation didn’t happen again. I later came across a person who’d been on Mosso and been told the same thing – two years earlier. Through this of course we learned that we weren’t on anything close to even a semi-private server.

After another half day of lost sales I was given permission to move and I did so with gusto.

I’ve tried out a lot of hosts and No Monthly Fees at their early worst was better than Mosso. I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone.

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Reviewing Siteground

November 15, 2011 One Wild Tribe Reviews

Originally posted 4/20/2009

When I started working for a particular company, Siteground was their web host. It didn’t take long for me to find out all I needed to know about that group.

Though not as bad in the uptime department as Mosso, Siteground’s servers did have a very frequent habit of simply going to sleep. The site would go down for hours, the secure server certificate wouldn’t work or email would go down for no reason. Plus they were charging more than they needed to for add-on services.

After I moved my client away, Siteground still had the secure server certificate account. When it came time to renew, the client paid for another year of the cert. Siteground responded by applying the money to someone we’d never heard of and told us that since we didn’t have hosting, we couldn’t get support for any other add-ons, even if they were paid for.

Well that’s moronic so I raised a little hell and Siteground refunded the money, which I used to go directly through Geotrust.

I’m not sure they have any idea what they’re doing. Certainly not recommended.

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Ethics in blogging – one example

November 15, 2011 One Wild Tribe Other Ideas

Everybody is a blogger now it seems. Blogs are great methods of maintaining communication and spreading truth. They are also methods for showcasing some spectacular ethics failures.

As a quick for instance, my thoughts today are dedicated toward those who fancy themselves “journalists” or “public information gatherers.” Sometimes people like this are extremely helpful and break stories the mainstream media won’t or can’t break. They research a car dealer for example and find that the company purposely tinkers with engines to ensure frequent service appointments. I am totally fine with that. It’s the “activists” who don’t know what they’re doing that bother me.

I’ll give one fast example. A Twitter user who purports to be a consumer activist sees a young looking man in a bar drinking a beer. That user immediately posts a Twitter blurb “warning” locals that the bar serves to underage kids.

An uproar results. The bar’s patronage drops and given the rough economy, closes within months.

The problem? The young-looking guy is legitimately 26 years old and the claim is completely false. A writer with ethics would have tried to verfiy the person’s age before slandering the establishment. Instead this “activist” forced a law-abiding company to suffer great harm while the bar across town that really does cater to underage kids keeps enjoying business as usual.

My point to all this is, ask questions. You might see something that puts a beep in your radar, but make sure it’s actually legit before shouting from the rooftops. You’ll have more credibility and serve the public good without harming people who don’t deserve it.

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411 Business/Business 411/Monarch Media Group

November 15, 2011 One Wild Tribe Rip Offs and Scams

These guys gave us a great laugh here in the office. A lady called up saying she was from 411business.us and wanted to know if we wanted to renew our listing on that site. After much haggling, we finally got the price out of her: almost $500 for two years. She must have thought we don’t have an accountant because one quick look proved we’d never done business with them before. Ever.

Here are the reasons I put this company on this page: 1. She lied to us about having paid before. That would be enough. 2. Their site doesn’t rank well in search engines, so chances are no one would find us on their site to begin with. 3. The “listing” they give you is the same information people can find for free in Google, and are more likely to find in Google. 4. The price is obscene to begin with. 5. She said we couldn’t see our listing because it had expired last month. Any company worth anything gets a renewal BEFORE expiration, so red lights were going off everywhere.

Avoid them, and 99% of the other “directory” phone solicitations you’ll get.

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Domain Registry of America

November 15, 2011 One Wild Tribe Rip Offs and Scams

What these people do might not be technically illegal, but it’s certainly not ethical either.  Say you buy a domain name for your business. Some time later you get a very  official looking letter in the mail asking you to renew your domain name with DROA because it’s about to expire. They are counting on you not remembering what company you originally bought the domain from because it most likely wasn’t with DROA. Now say you renew with them. What you actually do is transfer your domain to their service, where you’ll now pay more for less features and bad customer service.

A true life example: had a client who had been taken by these guys. She forgot to renew her domain but after expiration she went ahead and renewed and they allowed it. The Whois information showed she still owned the domain, in her own name, for another two years. I told her to transfer the domain to a more ethical service. DROA would not allow it, saying the domain was locked and ownership had actually moved to another person when the domain expired. She was crushed. I reminded her that she had paid DROA for the renewal and the domain was under her name, address and email. She called DROA and they said they’d “put in a request” but it might take weeks to take care of, and she still might not get the domain she still owned back, despite the fact that she still owned it. I told her to inform them that she would sue and magically the transfer immediately went through. Crazy how that works, isn’t it?

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Welcome to the new website

November 14, 2011 One Wild Tribe General Updates

Those of you who have visited before have noticed a major website overhaul.  We will be adding more features over time, so keep coming back!

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