Does anyone at MWEB really …

So we are definately NOT hosting Broadside at MWEB. Why?

• They don’t seem to know much about hosting.
• They seem to know even less about services.
• They made our lives hell for the last five weeks…. let me tell you this story, but I must warn you, unlike the Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, this story is not widely inaccurate… although I really wish it was. It also reminds me of a certain charatcter in Catch 22: Major Major. You will soon see why.

We developed a web management system/online catalogue for our client. We developed it using PHP and MySQL on one of Hetzner’s shared servers. It worked there… This project took a while to complete: you know how it goes, delays from our side, delays from the client, delays lead to more delays etc. Well finally the day came to actually put the site live and it was much to our horror that the client insisted on it being hosted at MWEB.

I have a friend who worked at MWEB and I have heard so many horror stories about MWEB’s telephonic support services and the way the people there work… the whole escalate it to the next level paradigm. SCARY if you are planning on hosting an actual website for your business because if something goes wrong you want competent people dealing with the issues, apparently MWEB is severely lacking in competent people.

Well, how hard can it be? We tested the site on the Hetzner server, then on my own set up which is just apache2, php5, mysql 5.0 and it worked. So it works with php5 and apache1.3(Hetzner) and on apache 2(me), so it really shouldn’t be too hard to get it working on MWEB’s server right? Since they advertise linux hosting.

WRONG

We get the server details from MWEB, open up ftp client and try and upload. Only the folder is read only…? mmm not very encouraging.

After a phonecall or two and some time waiting the folder is made writable, yay, but something seems a bit off to me, the folder’s parent is called wwwroot? Isn’t that a windows standard? mmm….

Well we uploaded anyway, and what do you know, nothing appears… at all. Seems the DNS went away. So we called MWEB and spoke to a tech support guy, who wonder of wonders, couldnt sort the problem out because he didnt have access to the necessary tools and had to escalate it. That problem got sorted out 3 days later and when going to the site url we could clearly see unstyled content with a few php errors. The cause? Apache didn’t have mod_rewrite enabled. Or so we thought…. Using the developer toolbar in firefox, i viewed the response headers and what do ya know? The MWEB professionals put us on an IIS server. Windows 2000 We were in for another week’s worth of waiting before we would be contacted by MWEB again and be posed the brilliant question: ” Why do you want to be on a Linux server? “… Well they put us on a Linux server finally and now the site either gets sent into an endless loop of redirects or nothing displays at all. This is the same code that I have running on 2 different subdomains on my own Linux computer. Yes..

Learn from our mistakes. Don’t use MWEB for website hosting if you need things like adequate support. We got the ball rolling communicating with MWEB more than a month ago. It took me an hour to set up my own accout with www.webfaction.com, no mess no fuss.

It’s as if the MWEB support staff are not trained to do anything but escalate. What is the POINT people?????!!!