The Host Without the Most

Not that I have any illusions about my power on teh internets, but for the love of all that’s holy, avoid using Colorteck.com as your webhost.

I’m not sure what’s happened to them recently – I’ve used them for years for my very quiet personal site and never had an issue. And keep in mind that when I did sign up with them, they had a phone number you could call (which I did sometimes), but otherwise it’s been a good thing.

However, last Friday I discovered that my site was listed as “temporarily suspended”. I never got any kind of email notification about it, and I had just paid for another 6 months of service via paypal the week before. (Which I have the receipt for – and it’s on autodraft so it’s not like I forgot or anything). Odd thing is that the suspended page took me to another host – uswebhosting.com – whom I guess is a reseller to Colorteck, as both their help email addresses are exactly the same.

No phone numbers to call. Live chat is either not online or perpetually “busy.” All contact emails go to exactly the same email address.

So I sent an email/created a ticket. After a few hours I was told it had been pushed up to billing and they would contact me shortly. Six hours later, still no contact, so I sent another email and again was told it had been sent to billing. It’s now WEDNESDAY and I have not heard from billing or tech support. Subsequent emails have been completely ignored.

What does this mean except that Colorteck and UsWebHosting completely SUCK? SUCK! Have I mentioned how much Colorteck and USWebHosting suck? Because Colorteck and UsWebHosting really, really suck.

However, I need the email addresses associated with my site working and functional for business purposes, so I immediately moved my site over to DrakNet. (They are full of win, btw), so I’m up and running for the most part as far as that is concerned, although I cannot ftp into the old site, so I can’t regain any of the files I had stored there. I’m not entirely sure what to do about that, honestly. I should probably contact PayPal and see about getting my money back, but I really need to get this straightened out with the very sucky Colorteck and UsWebHosting service because of the autodraft thing.

All in all, it’s really rather frustrating. I can understand if a mistake was made – it happens, but this complete inability to communicate with a paying customer is inexcusable.