Hosting Zoom tech support nightmare

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The review of this web host was started by FaveDave on 2009-02-15 18:47:24:

Hello all. My first post here, and sadly, it’s negative. Apparently Zoom has a lot of spam coming from their servers and it’s affecting the non-criminals like me who use it for hosting.

I have a small business with a simple 4 page web site. Mostly, I just use email to communicate since the domain name is my name.

I’ve been with Zoom for 2 years now, and I’m leaving as soon as I find another host.

Here’s why: once a month, for the last 3 months, emails I send to a Yahoo.com address are bounced because Yahoo is blocking all email from my mail server. When this is finally dealt with, it turns out Yahoo blocks everything coming from Zoom (or my shared server — sorry I’m not technical) because of spam originating there. Now, *I’m* not sending spam, and spam is annoying enough to deal with in my in box, but now other people sending spam are stopping me from sending my little 20-30 emails a day!

Here’s how tech support has worked for me when this problem comes up:

1. I go on and open a chat with support.
2. Someone In India eventually says hello to me.
3. I state my problem.
4. Long wait.
5. Someone In India eventually comes back and says "hello" again.
6. Now I’m pissed. I tell Someone In India what the problem is and give her email headers and tell her to pay attention.
7. Another long wait.
8. This Someone In India gives me an email address at zoom to email directly about this problem.
9. I email TheAddressIWasGiven @ zoom explaining my problem…and THAT EMAIL BOUNCES! Despite the irony of having an email begging for help with bounces get bounced itself, I am not amused.
10. I go to call Tech Support… DOH! They no longer have phone support.
11. I fill out an online support and send it in. I wait No reply. Emails to Yahoo still bouncing.
12. I fill out another one. I wait.
13. I get an email telling me my second support request is being closed since they are working on the first one. Really?!?! First I’ve heard of them working on it.
14. 20 minutes later I get an email saying they’re working on the first request.
15. A day or so later, I get an email telling me it will all be fine in a day.
16. Sometimes it’s fine, sometimes I get another email telling me to go to Yahoo and fill out a form to get them to unblock it.
17. I fill out a form at Yahoo and it gets unblocked within hours.

I am currently suffering from the latest email bouncing and am at step # 14.

Which is what drove me here to find a real host. Something about getting lumped in with spammers is just….icky. Yucky.

Also, they spontaneously took my little web site off line several times because they messed with directories. It took days to get right. My business is not web-based, but it was still annoying.

Anyway, there’s my cautionary tale about Zoom . A few mistakes are forgivable, but this is too much.

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