Okay, so I went with the cheap web host. That may not have been a good idea. But $4.95 a month for 1500 GB of storage and 15000 GB of bandwidth sounded pretty good. Unfortunately my experience hasn’t been good so far.

I set up the account on 3/3/08 at around 9 PM. The domain registration and account setup process went fine. Once the account was set up I was able to log into the VDECK control panel. So I took some time to look around the control panel and see what I could do. Lots of standard web site stuff. The control panel seemed a quite slow which concerned me. I tried to access the FileManager which I assumed would let me view my directory structure on the server. FileManager didn’t work. I got a browser error every time I clicked on it. Well, that’s annoying. Okay, I tried FTP. I used my account user name and password but I couldn’t log in. Wonderful, got a new toy and I can’t even upload any files to it. When I browse to my web site I get a 403 permission error on my browser.

Damn-it! I want to see something on this web site. So, now I take a different approach. I go to the App Installer in the control panel and install WordPress. I set up a MySQL database, which actually seemed to work, and installed WordPress. It seemed to work but I can’t view it on the web site. Beautiful! My blood pressure is now rising and it’s getting late. I don’t want to go to bed with a broken web site even if no one else in the world knows it exists! So I decide to try their live chat option. 24/7 support you know. I waited for about 40 minutes seeing the same “Thank you for waiting” message popping up every so often. Okay, now I’m pissed. So I enter a service ticket for my problems and go to bed to dream of a web site that will actually work.

I guess it was too much to ask to have working web site by the time I woke up the next morning. I guess the 24 in 24/7 doesn’t necessarily mean 24 hours in a row. No change in the my support ticket status and no change in my borked web site. So I decided to give the live chat another go. I’ve got all day to watch “Thank you for waiting” scroll by. I don’t know how long it took but it was probably an hour+ before someone got to me on live chat. The conversion went something like this:

Agent: Hi, how are you doing today?
Me: I’m having problem with the web site I created yesterday.
[long pause]
Agent: Okay
[I'm thinking: are you going to ask me what the problem is?"
Me: FileManager doesn't work and I can't log into FTP.
[long pause]
Agent: Okay
[long pause]
Agent: I’m going to review your account and will be back in 2 to 3 minutes.
Me: ok
[2 - 3 minute pause]
Agent: [Asks me for the response for my security question.]
Me: [Responds with security answer.]
[pause]
Agent: I’m going to review your account and will be back in 2 to 3 minutes.
[2 - 3 minute pause]
Agent: What is the username and password of the FTP account you are having problems with?
Me: I give him the username and password.
[long pause]
Agent: I’ve verified the problem and will have to give this issue to the support team to resolve.
Me: ok

So I checked the support incidents on the StartLogic web site to find that he had entered another support ticket to go with the one I had already entered. Great, what a waste of time that was.

So now I’m really pissed. Before I signed up I had searched the net a little for reviews of StartLogic and found lots of good reviews. Today I dug a little deeper and turned up these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StartLogic
http://www.startlogicsucks.com

Crap! How did I miss this last night! I’ll give them a little time to resolve my issues but I’m not going to wait long. It looks like I’m in for some fun phone hold time to get my money back also. My biggest concern is that I’m not going to be able to transfer my domain name to a new hosting provider.