CheapWebHotel.com

NetFirms

NetFirms use their own control panel with very limited features. There are no fantastcico features and it took Netfirms years to allow Wordpress installs even.

There is no index protecion which means every folder on the server that doesn’t have an index file can be browsed by anyone unless you password protect it.

Logging in to the control panel is like gambling, sometimes you can and sometimes you cannot. The same goes for the email servers. If you automatically check send/receive every 5-10 minutes you should count on the mail server not responding at least once per hour. You will get error messages that your username/password is wrong (even when they aren’t) or that the server timed out.

Netfirms seems to have some serious issues with their servers in general. Count on a lot downtime on a daily basis when you websites are not accessible to you nor the public.

At least once per day the web servers seem to be offline for one hour or more, this is specially painful if you are usig database driven websites. Their database server cannot handle a lot of traffic and if a database gets more than 50000 request your server will crash.

You cannot name your own databases so if you are moving from another webhost then prepare to rewrite all config files for all your databases.

The support is anything but great. Up to 6 days to get an answer on a simple support ticket. The staff seem to like to just copy and paste an answer from the FAQ and that is even if the FAQ doesn’t answer your question or solve your problem. We strongly recommend you stay away from NetFirms.

BuyDomain

The BuyDomain support staff take 2-6 days to answer a support ticket no matter how urgent the matter is. Unfortunately the staff doesn’t really read what you write and they copy and paste randomly from their FAQ regardless to whether that answers your inquiry or not.
Login problems are common at BuyDomain and their system requires of you to have your customer number ready. If you don’t have your customer number you need to fill out your street address to retrieve it. This should not have been a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that their system does not recognize the street address and give you an error and the email with the customer number never shows.

The only thing to do then is to write an email to BuyDomain security department and request that they send the customer number to a different email address. This takes a few days. If the email still doesn’t show up you will have to repeat the procedure over and over again and hope that it finally comes through.
The BuyDomain staff consistently refuse to help you manually no matter if you write or call. They always refer to their system and say it should work even when it doesn’t.
During our test we correspondence with BuyDomain for 4 months to try and retrieve our customer number. We had to ask the security department to change our email address 6 times and still we did not get the information. Since the support staff took their average 4 days to respond it means over 30 emails sent back and forth
It wasn’t until we called a lawyer and had him send BuyDomain a letter that we actually got some help. Not that we by then had uploaded both photo ID and utility bill 3 times to BuyDomain to verify our identities.
We strongly recommend to stay away from BuyDomain.com
Note: BuyDomain is not to be confused with BuyDomains ..note the “S” at the end.