Precision Effect Review (Feb 2008 to Feb 2010)

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This web hosting review was started by jk079 on 2010-02-24 22:52:17:

I’m going to add my voice to the chorus of recently disenchanted Precision Effect customers, in the hopes that it will help others avoid a similar experience.

Site Description:

I run a small personal website with very modest storage and bandwidth needs. The website primarily is a place to promote my career; it is listed on my resume, linked from my online presences, etc. So my main requirement in a host was reliability and uptime. After reading a lot of reviews here on WHT and getting reviews from friends, I settled on PE. I had the very basic $5.95/mo shared hosting plan.

My Experience:

I signed up for an account in February 2008. This was my first attempt to set up my own domain, and I was and still am very much a newbie at such things. From Feb. 2008 to early Jan. 2010, I submitted a grand total of three tickets–two to clear up a billing weirdness early on, and one with a query rather than an actual problem. Whenever there was maintenance, I was notified in advance by email. It was all smooth sailing.

Last month was when things began to get weird. My control panel’s IP address changed without warning; new people were answering my support tickets. In other words, the ownership change happened, and no one bothered to notify me. I just found a new name on my credit card bill and did my own research.

This month, of course, we had the huge downtime: 24+ hours! I accept that downtimes happens, but they shouldn’t be so long. And they should be better managed: more communication is a plus! When my site went down, for example, I didn’t hear a peep from PE until I submitted a support ticket. Were they just hoping I wouldn’t notice? Meanwhile, the explanations I got had lousy estimates of when services would be restored, and the messages mostly consisted of blaming another vendor. When services began to come up, things had been lost: my email accounts had disappeared, as had my FTP settings. Again, there was no notification from PE on whether these were permanently lost or just temporarily gone due to the restore process: more silence! PE offered customers three free months of service to make up for the downtime…but only if they submitted a ticket.

I was one of the unhappy customers posting to the outage thread, which I apparently do not have enough posts to link to. You can find it if you search the forums, though. It has examples of the underwhelming customer service emails we got during that time.

I’ve now submitted a ticket cancelling my service and requesting a refund of my February payment. Somehow I am not surprised that my ticket is still pending, three days later! I feel this sums up what life has been like under the new ownership. I would strongly discourage anyone from signing up with this company; I don’t think its sterling reputation from before can be applied to this new ownership.

Note to admins & mods: my status as a PE customer was confirmed in the outage thread mentioned above, but please let me know if you would like me confirm my domain again. I have since moved my site to HawkHost, though, where I am hoping for a better hosting experience.

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