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Surpass Hosting
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Date Submitted :
July 10th, 2010
Length of time hosted by this company :
More than 3 years
Overall Rating :
5 out of 5
Reliability :
5 out of 5
Support :
5 out of 5
Pricing :
5 out of 5
Verdict :
I've been with Surpass since September 2005 and can only say that they have been a wonderful host. I've had host tracker monitor my site and according to them here are my stats through 6/28/2010:
Total uptime:99.99% Downtime:1 hour(s) 23 min(s)
What more can I ask of a host? Not even 2 hours of down time in almost 5 years!!
I have been a Surpass Hosting customer since 2004. I was recommended to them by a friend, and have been a loyal user since. I personally have not been successful in finding a better combination of fantastic prices, so many add-ons and so much value, and high caliber customer service. Of course, they have done so great by me, that I haven't bothered to look in a couple of years, and I have been referring people since.
A lot of my friends and peers generally shy away from the fact that you cannot contact them by phone, however their email support exceeds any customer service phone call I have ever had to make. I hope to stay with these guys for another 6 years.
I am using Surpass on two different servers. I first began using them 4 years ago for a club website. I was pleased so I moved my personal website over onto a different server.
My experience with support has been good. Usually I get a response to a ticket within an hour but the last ticket I submitted I received a reply within minutes.
A big selling point for me is the forum, surmunity.com. A great group always willing to help. A number of Surpass support people also frequent the forum giving their input.
Surpass is horrible. Customer service is non-existant. You can not get a human being on the phone. If you have issues it's hard to get them resolved and the only way to tell if they've been resolved is to wait and see what happens to your website. Our website has gone down several times in the last year. We are switching to another service and would not recommend Surpass to anyone.
I've been with these guys for almost three years now, and you can't go wrong with them. Their prices are low, and their customer service is amazing. I have had a few times where my tickets were misunderstood and a higher up had to come in and clear things up, but things were always fixed very quickly.
I've never had any of my sites down, except one for maintenance.
For personal or small business sites, you can't go wrong with Surpass.
Great Customer Support. Speed could be better if you want to transfer big files a lot. My POP3 e-mail has been out a couple of times over the past 3 years. Never longer than a few hours though.
I have been with surpass for many years. I have several reseller accounts and a couple of shared hosting accounts.
There has been downtime occasionally, but never more than an hour or so.
I've had MANY questions for the support, and I have always got the help I needed. Still, I wish they'd have a 24 live chat.
I cannot share the bad experience others report here... surpass is not perfect, but well worth the money their service costs. I have just recently bought an other reseller package with a different host, and now I know how much hosts can really suck, I canceled the new hosting account 2 months later and got another one at surpass. I actually only came here, because I was googling for a coupon code to register a new account at surpass ;)
I have been with surpass for over 5 years and echo exactly same experience that many others users of surpass have mentioned on these pages.....they were excellent but since 2007 have become terrible. They love to suspend your sites without any warning at all on filmsy grounds. One of their server was oversold so much that it is down every day several times. The solution: Cancel anyone who seems to have an active site on that server. The customer service has become terrible, tech support seems to be outsourced to some company that has no clue how computers work in the first place. They are cheap but Terrible.Stay away.
There's no question, I have had some issues with Surpass. No more than with any other host I've ever had to deal with though.
The big difference between Surpass and others is price. Surpass is hands down the most inexpensive for what you get that I've run across.
As far as Technical Support goes, I've resolved some problems faster with Surpass using email than with other companies using the phone.
In this world you generally get what you pay for (unless it's gasoline) - If you need rock solid performance 100% of the time, look for the guys with the high dollar servers and well paid tech support staff. Also be prepared to pay through the nose. If on the other hand your budget isn't unlimited and the occasional service interuption won't cripple you, Surpass is the way to go.
I wish I had never signed up with Surpass. Some outages last fall cost us DEARLY in lost traffic and revenue. They are CHEAP but you'll pay the price in the long run. I DO NOT RECOMMEND SURPASS.
They were great a few years ago and cheap. Well now you get what you paid for. Overload servers. Constantly losing contact with my sites. Nothing is ever really done but temporary fixes. Prices are good but dont be suckered in to it. Weekend support is iffy at best.
Surpass Hosting and host dime is the worlds wost host according to what I read at, HostDimeSucks.com,
You see, Surpass Hosting and HostDime are the same company operating under separate names in an attempt to avoid their bad reputations!
Anyone thinking of getting Surpass hosting to host their site should not only read reviews for Surpass hosting but should read the reviews for HostDime.com as well!
My personal experience with Surpass hosting was horrible. Down service, lost data and list goes on! - Beware
Terrible service. When something goes wrong, service does a lousy job helping their clients. I was with them for 3 years and they shut down my site because my paypal address changed. I was on a business station abroad and was unable to contact them for a couple weeks but as soon as I came back I found my sites down. I proceeded to email them twice; They didn't bother to reply. Now I can't even recover my sites and have to start all over. This is not the way to treat your customers.
I've used many hosting companies in the past, never have I had such a bad experience that I've taken the time to write a negative review, but you guys asked for it.
I'm sure this will get deleted a few minutes after I post, but hopefully someone will read it before purchasing and steer clear. (I will be reposting this on every host review site I can find).
To start with, last I checked SURPASS DOES NOT HOST THEIR SITE OUT OF THE SAME DATACENTER THEIR CLIENTS SITES (sketchy to say the least).
These guys dont even have phone support, which is reason enough for moving along. But if you do stay, beware that tickets are SOMETIMES answered within an hour or two, but 99% of the time, the guy who answered the ticket never took the time to process your question.
Perfect example of this, when you have 4 or 5 messages back and forth in one ticket, I CONSTANTLY have recieved repeat questions that were answered in the initial ticket question. This is almost NEVER FAIL, guaranteed, 100%. My experience has been that I've actually had to repost all the data in one message (they refuse to look back at other messages), and highlight the important stuff so that they'll get to it.
Next is uptime, reliability, and speed. Recently I had a client download a large file off my website over the phone (~300mb). He told me his computer said the estimated time for download was like 3 hours. I tried downloading the same file on my end and my speed capped out at 5kbps.... That's flat out ridiculous.
When I first signed up to Surpass, I purchased the low end reseller package just to give it a go. Then they had a sale and I purchased a mid package from the sale and canceled my original purchase. With my new package i was all set, and immediately transfered over all my accounts (BIG MISTAKE). The fact that I purchased two packages and canceled the first confused surpass to no end. They ended up taking both packages down, but of course kept the money. It took 3 DAYS of posting tickets and posting all over forums to get them to fix the problem.
They offered me three months free to make up for this, and I took them up on it. I had prepaid 1 year, so 1year + 3 months = 15 months. After the 12 months, I immediately get charged. I submit a ticket asking what's going on, I was promised 3 months free hosting. Of course, my immediate reply is "The 3 month credit was almost a year ago." Sigh. I'm guessing it never crossed his mind to see 1. why I havent paid in almost a year 2. what kind of plan I'm on. Comeon surpass, this is basic business. And I can understand slipping up once, but EVERY ticket has been like pulling teeth to get ANYTHING done.
QUICK SUMMARY
Got a good deal at surpass, transfered all my clients over, immediately all sites went down for days.
Have had nothing but one bad experience after another with support.
Was promised 3 months free hosting for problems caused by surpass, but have not received them.
Essentially lost the money I spent on 1 years prepaid hosting, and have gained nothing but headaches and angry clients complaining about bad hosting.
Have switched back to old host and vow never to deal with surpass again, and warn everyone who ever mentions the word "hosting" against surpass.
My clients and I have been a customers of SurpassHosting.com since 2003. We started with shared/reseller hosting back then. Since then, we upgraded to a VPS, and as of this year have a dedicated server all to ourselves. So, I have experience with practically every type of offering at Surpass Hosting.
SurpassHosting has always done their best to be the best. In my [humble] opinion, their level of service is unmatched for the price. I have tried other companies, and have clients who host elsewhere.
SurpassHosting has some of the highest uptimes. I cannot recall their network ever going down in the last four years, unlike with some other hosting companies and/or data-centers.
SurpassHosting provides responsive phone support for dedicated server customers. Their on-line help-desk could be faster, and on occasion I have had problems with some of their support/techs. However, my experiences elsewhere lead me to the conclusion that my few complaints with SurpassHosting pale in comparison to the grief created by other hosting companies (where I would also be paying more, no doubt). SurpassHosting has always listened to me and done their best to keep me satisfied throughout any complains, which is why I am a loyal customer for years.
With my own experience in mind, I believe that anyone who complains about Surpass Hosting is simply a finger-pointer who cannot manage their own affairs. Such people wouldn't be happy anywhere, and probably didn't know the complexity of what they were getting into - operating your own hosting isn't for everyone! I feel sorry for your mothers who are probably still wiping your butts for you!
Surpass Hosting is not perfect - everyone makes mistakes, myself included (though definitely not in this case). Deal with your issues/problems and move on like I do! Don't turn HostJury.com into HostingCryBabies.com!
Those with negative comments should consider contracting me to manage their hosting (and probably other aspects of their business), considering they obviously weren't able to make a good go of it with the best hosting company out there: SURPASS HOSTING!
I have hosted various websites with Surpass Hosting since 2004 and I have always been impressed by the service they give and the value for money.
Support is great and very quick to help if there is a problem, but I've never had any major problems, just the occasional thing that you would get with any shared hosting environment, the difference with Surpass is that they solve any problems quickly as they have their own datacenter.
The customer forums are such a friendly place, the best I've seen for any webhost, and they are a real plus to the whole experience of hosting with Surpass.
I would definitely recommend Surpass to anyone who is looking for value for money hosting with a webhost they can trust to take care of things quickly.
This is a really good host, especially if it's your first host. Super cheap with, in most cases, more space than you'll even need.
There was one incident where everything was deleted and in return they gave you a month free, which was not exactly making up for it, but that was about 2-3 years ago and I haven’t had a problem since.
They are a little slow with updating your accounts. Every time I noticed something missing from mine or just not updated I had to contact them and they fixed it.
The customer service wasn't bad but it wasn't great. Some of the staff seemed a little rude with their response and not very helpful. And more than once they didn't answer all of my questions I would ask, which was always annoying. But they did get back with you within a fair amount of time.
If anything I would recommend them for their pricing. You practically pay nothing for everything. I haven’t seen a better deal anywhere.
I have been with Surpass for 4 years now. I've had shared hosting, reseller hosting and now a dedicated server.
For the most part, I have had excellent uptime. In a shared hosting environment, one has to remember an unscrupulous or unaware customer can create downtime -- no matter how proactive the support staff.
Shared hosting: My shared account rarely had any downtime.
Reseller: I had three reseller accounts across three servers which contained only reseller accounts. Only one of those servers ever had persistent problems due to other customers and one hardware incident.
Dedicated: Recently, I moved to a dedicated server so I could give my customers the best by moving them all to a machine which was "ours". I also wanted to be able to fix things I knew how to fix, which sometimes could be faster than support could respond. It has been the best move so far.
Their first tier of support can sometimes be a little slow to read and comprehend what you're trying to tell them, but overall, they're not terribly bad. That has been my only complaint. Their upper tiers of support have always been very good and quick to respond to problems. Dedicated server accounts have access to phone support, but I have yet to have to use it.
They have user to user forums which have been a gold-mine of knowledge, and would recommend anyone who has questions about their hosting, web design, or run of the mill conversation should definitely participate in those forums.
I think their feature set and plans have much to offer -- to the beginning to the pro. They've treated me right and I return with loyalty.
I have been a customer of five years with far too few ups and way too many downs using surpasshosting... including the sever being hacked and all data lost, completely miserable customer service, slacker tech support, downtime and now billing problems. Do yourself a favor and avoid the hassle of hosting with them, it's sad when a company becomes too big to even care about their customers or the sites they host.
I've been with three other hosts before switching to Surpass. All previous experiences have been nightmares but after moving to SH, I've finally found a top notch hosting provider that exceeds all my expectations and they continue to do so. I've been with them almost three years and it's been wonderful. I plan on being with them many more. Nothing but praises.
I love Surpass Hosting. I have been with them for about 3 months and my sites have never been down. The prices are good,too and they have awesome customer service.
I recently cancelled my Surpass account (jesus@pico). Right after I first joined back in 2003, they lost all of my data. It wasn't a huge issue, since I hadnt stored much anyway at the time.
Later on, I bought more storage and bandwidth. I ran into all kinds of issues running my Gallery software. I sent tickets, they would claim they were fixed when they obviously werent, and the process would repeat itself until SOMEONE FINALLY took care of it.
While I was out of the country on vacation, they again lost all of my data, about ten gigabytes of it. I was offered a pathetic month of service for free. I complained and got a year refunded. My data is still missing.
FrontPage access was horribly slow and unreliable. The rest of the tools were quite nice and performance was excellent. Downtime was unfortunately frequent: a few times a week for 15-60 minutes.
Even after refunding me for a year, they still denied responsibility for losing the data.
I've recommended Surpass to all my friends because of their reliable service and MEGA CHEAP prices! This is my second website to have hosted on Surpass and I've never really had any major problems. Though my current site was hacked, Surpass has been hard at work on it for the past few days gathering all the information they can get so I can have evidence to give to the authorities! I think that as far as support issues are concerned, people expect their support issues to be handled right then and there but when you own a HUGE site with thousands of customers, with hundreds of them needing support at the exact same time, its just not possible to get to all of them at once! Patience is a virtue. At least with Surpass I know the problem will get fixed correctly the FIRST time even if it takes a little longer than WHAT I THINK it should. :) Great job, Surpass. Don't change a thing! Your services are amazing.
I'm a designer and one of the things I work on are websites. Through the years I have dealt with lots of hosts and I can honestly say that I have never experienced one like Surpass before.
I've been a Surpass customer since late 2003 and I don't see myself switching to any other host ever if things remain like they are now. The service at Surpass has always been incredible. Sure there are times that your site might be down but not only can you quickly see the server status on their site, they also have a forum where dedicated employees and customers share their experiences and knowledge.
Customer service has never taken longer than 4-6 hrs to respond to my problems and have always looked for a way to solve things. I'm proud to say that I've never had any major problems and in these 3 years I might've contacted customer service 4 times or so.
Bottom line is for me there's no better host. Their prices are extremely low IMO, their service is great and their team is dedicated.
I came to Surpass after years of changing hosts because of downtime/payment/support issues that ran the gambit from having my website go down for a week with no notice or explanation, to being billed for hosting 6 months after I cancelled the account (and in the end having to put a freeze on my credit card). I was a bit wary when I first signed up because the prices were so incredibly low for the services they were offering, but after reading countless hosting reviews and spending some time on their Surmunity forums, I decided to take the plunge. BEST DECISION EVER! I've had absolutely no problems with missing files or the like, customer support responds within 24-48hours on average and all my (few) problems have been solved immediately. Surpass is incredible.
I'm rating Surpass Hosting a 5 out of 5 becuase I'm comfortable with them, and I don't think that anyone else could do better.
I have had several accounts with surpass including: shared, reseller and dedicated. Dedicated is definately the way to go (for me it is atleast). The Support is great and has alway answered my questions or made a huge effort to solve a problem within 0-3 hours of my ticket submission. One of the greatest things about Surpass is it's community; Surmunity.com. Most of your questions can be answered there even before you submit a ticket.It's also a fun place to waste time while at work.
There is no alternative to Surpass they are in a League of their own. If you are thinking of getting Surpass, then get it otherwise you'll be missing out big time.
I highly recommend them to anyone. They're creamier than the cream of the crop(cheesy but true).
Great webhost. I had very bad experiences with some other hosts (one taking the money, then running away). I like their quick responses and the follow up with tickets to the support department. Of course things can always be better
I have been with Surpass for a good amount of time. I tried many others, but found my home here. Every host has times where something goes wrong and I have experienced them here, however staff (for me) have been on the ball in virtually all cases. They have worked with me on many fronts. They have impressed me by keep their word on arrangements made outside of the norm and have never gone back on their word (Thanks, Kayla!).
Speaking for Surpass resellers, the one complaint I would have with Surpass is they give no warning on cases where a site under a reseller is to be suspended. It would be nice to have an e-mail sent to the hosting reseller of an account that one of their sites is causing issues/going aginst TOS, etc. as well as the reason so the reseller can take care of it rather than have the reseller in the dark thus causing causing hardship on reseller. That is the only reason for the 4 in customer support, but for me this has NEVER been an issue.
Surpass is my home on the web. So far, I have seen no better for my sites.
Kudos to all the staff for their hard work, particularly Kayla.
I had one major & a couple minor downtime issues a while back, but they were due to others on the server causing problems. Surpass eventually got it sorted out, but while that was happening, I had intermittent outages, sometimes lasting for hours, for about a week or two.
Support is pretty much a mixed bag. I've had some issues with response times (once waited several hours for a response to a ticket about my site being down), other times they have responded within minutes. When they respond, the support personnel are mostly knowledgeable & helpful (I had one person who totally missed the point of my ticket, but someone else got it sorted out fairly quickly).
Very few companies are able to offer anything close to what Surpass does at a comparable price and as far as I know, the companies that do come close don't own their data center & equipment like Surpass does.
The bottom line: definately some reliability & support issues, but they're not bad enough for me to recommend people look eleswhere. In fact, I think the issues I've encountered are more than offset by the low price I'm paying. If you're looking for a cheap host that is fairly reliable & helpful and isn't massively overselling, I'd reccomend Surpass.
I have been with Surpass now for about 8 months. I started out with a reseller plan then moved to a VPS and I'm now running a dedicated server with them so I have a fairly good overview of their capabilities.
Overall, Surpass is the best hosting company I have used (I've used 3 others in the past). Support has been timely and competent and my moves were painless and quick as I moved to the different platforms. One of the best aspects of Surpass is the user community. They have a very active user-to-user support forum and the support given by users there is surprisingly helpful and friendly.
I hope as they continut to grow, they stay true to their roots - so far, the trip has been great and can honestly reccomend Surpass to others as a "best in class".
Although I've only started with this host not too long ago, I have already encountered a few problems. But it was on my side, and the problem's not the point. The point is that their surpass was remarkable, or should I say superfluous? On the weekeneds they're busy, but during the weekdays, it's a whole other story. My support ticket was replied within half an hour, I was amazed. Each and everything I requested a ticket, the reply was quick and the job was done. Other than great support, reliability is another great trait of surpass. My site has not been down once.
Surpass has been a very reliable host for my website.
Tickets are generally responded too and answered within 30 minutes or less. The only exception is if they get escalated and then it might be a little bit of a wait.
I have not noticed any downtime in the year that my site has been there, and it loads fast.
I am not one who normally writes reviews on products. In fact, this is only my second time in many years. A couple of years ago I came to Web Hosting Jury in total frustration over a webhost I had been dealing with at that time. They were the WORST! So bad that I wanted to tell as many people as possible how badly they treat their customers and how terrible their service was. I came, I wrote, I got it off my chest.
I had just started with Surpass Hosting at the time I had written that review and was already impressed by their prices and the features they had to offer. I am still with them today and have had NO problems whatsoever. I've had barely mentionable downtime with them and I am in awe of their customer support team. The trouble tickets that I submitted to them were mostly asking if they could change a setting here or there and they were all answered within minutes (usually in the time it took me to refill my coffee or take a bathroom break). No joke!
I am planning on upgrading to a dedicated server in the near future and I'm confident that Surpass will continue to provide excellent service. I wouldn't even consider looking for another webhost.
I believe what drives a lot of people to write reviews on sites like Web Hosting Jury is the same thing that brought me here a few years ago; Frustration, anger, and the need to warn others about a bad company. Not nearly as often do people go out of their way to post about a company with whom they are happy. There are quite a few enthusiastically positive comments about Surpass on this site and that says a lot. For a company to impress me enough to write this review when I could be doing a million other things says a lot too. Good job, Surpass and thank you.
Surpass is awesome. I might be going to a new host, though, because they charged me $15 too much! I have yet to recieve a response from Surpass about this in a ticket I posted days ago.
Their support is usually helpful other than that. Their reliability is awesome - hardly any downtime. If there's a bug, they'll fix it. Support could be faster at times.
Great pricing. I started with their cheapest shared plan, and now I am on the Bronze reseller which I got during their 2 for 1 promotion.
After having a terrible time with my previous two hosts, being hosted by Surpass has been a dream!
Their sysadmins appear to reside in India and actually are very competant, and even check in early morning and late at night their time. I am impressed with their timeliness and skill.
So far in the hosting of my site I have not noticed any downtime whatsoever.
Surpass is ok. The support is absolutely horrible. You first submit a ticket and get a response like, "We are forwarding this to XYZ." Then a day later you get another one from XYZ saying, "We are going to forward this to WXYZ." It goes on like this until you get to an Administrator and in the mean time you had to wait so long you just changed everything all together since you never could get a decent response. They must outsource to the Middle East or something because all the low level support people have strange names and don’t have a good handle on the English language.
I also hate how Surpass denies any downtime. I have about 5 uptime monitors hitting my site every few minutes. When they all said there was downtime during a 20 minute period I asked Surpass what the problem was and they said there wasn’t any downtime. That really makes me mad when a host won’t admit there was a problem.
The server (pass38) that I am on is pretty reliable, I only get about 30 minutes of downtime a month (non consecutive.) Surpass denies any but I know for a fact there is downtime.
If it weren’t for the horrid support Surpass would be A+ material.
I started reseller hosting with Surpass in June 04. From the very beginning communicating with them was obtuse, but my site(s) were running and I thought I got what I paid for so didn't complain.
It got progressively worse. Downtime would be 2-3 times a month for hours each time which is unacceptable. Help came in the form of terse emails which took days for little issues.
One time they changed servers without notifying me and my sites/emails were down for a week. I went on their "Surmunnity" form to see if anyone else had this problem. Many, many customers were infuriated. Instead of apologizing, they said it was my fault for not reading the TOS that stated announcemts would only be only made on their forms and I needed so "subscribe" to the form with my server name. I didn't even know my server had a name! It took HOURS to find this out through a help ticket. What's with a hosting company that can't send out bulk email to customers notifying them they need to change DNS numbers or be hosed?
What I found even more disturbing is their "loyal" customers' attitude toward those who complain. Read for yourself [www.surmunity.com] - it's always the same people. Almost seems like it's rigged.
I'm SO not with Surpass anymore. There is a lot of competition out there with better prices, features, and most importantly, service.
When my friend and I joined surpasshosting back after the Cyberpixel drama, we were thrilled. Surpass, back in the day, had amazing hosting. But near the end of our account with them, their service when extremely downhill. Their support used to be amazing, but now it seems that it has been outsourced to India, judging by the names of the people who took my requests. These people seemed knowledgable, but not in the areas in which they were working. My questions were often met with confusion, when they were sometimes outrightly simple ones.
On our domain, our main feature was an in progress wiki. This wiki was broken numerous times by new and unannounced script pushes, and the last time, no matter how much was explained, regardless of how detailed, the support staff would not understand what was wrong. They insisted they had fixed it, when their idea of 'fixed' was where the wiki displayed nothing but blank pages and did not allow for creation of new pages nor editing of their old ones. They had said it was looping, though the looping was caused by their original editing of the wiki to make it work the former times it had gone down.
All the editing basically had caused the wiki to cease proper function.
Other problems surfaced during the last year of our hosting, specifically in the last few months. Many of their scripts that I had used fantastico to install would randomly be broken by script pushes, and I would have to work with their uncooperative support staff to get them fixed. Many times the support staff acted haughty with me, as well. Sometimes they'd outright ignore my questions to them about whether or not something was fixed, and at times right down to ignoring my entire requests until I would reopen them and further question why I had not been given any sort of response.
Othertimes I would struggle with them for sometimes weeks, due to their inability to correct issues made with surpass' script pushes. I would have to take screencaps and point on my specific problems and sometimes even then they wouldn't get it. Honestly, it was extremely frustrating.
The final straw was when a few of our scripts were disabled without being told, even though if I had been I would have gone and upgraded to safer versions or alternatives. I understand the need to have a secure server, but what I don't understand is the need to just disable (and I heard with other people, suspend their hosting), but I don't sympathsize as strongly as I (and it seems others also), were not informed. There should have been a bulk email discussing the need and importance to change over to a new script or to upgrade to the safe alternative.
Also, their service seemed to move along at the speed of a turtle sometimes, but I never complained.
After all these support hassles, and the last straw of our scripts being disabled after all the support problems, we just shacked up to being hosted by a friend. I hold nothing against surpass, but unless their support improves, I would probably not go back. If you're not doing a lot of script work, Surpass would probably be fine for you. Otherwise, double check and make sure Surpass is right for you.
The first two years were amazing though, so thank you for those, Surpass.
Canceled hosting within a month or two of use... Still being automatically billed for another year?? Really bad management. Would not recommend to anyone.
They are pressing to the customers to buy his dedicated service. Im usin g a reseller account and since last year /05 they sendme a invitation to uprade to dedicated server. I dont need it. My site does not use to much resources, but since january/05 they put down frecuently my site because
"too much bandwith", "too much concurrent connections", etc.. and recomend me to upgrade to their dedicated service. I checked the logs and im really into my account limits, actually almost 1/4 of the resources account.
We have been with Surpass for almost 2 years. I was surprised to learn how inexpensive web hosting was. The site was down maybe 20 or 30 minutes per month, but otherwise worked great. 2 months ago, I would have rated Surpass 5 out of 5. I was especially impressed with their responsiveness. Up until now, I have always recommended the company.
That all changed last month when our site mysteriously went down. Our site crashed because the shared server we were on ran out of disc space. I notified Surpass of the problem and they "fixed" it. A server should never run out of disc space. If it does, the hosting service should fix the problem immediately and not wait for an alert from a CUSTOMER!
As part of the "fix", Surpass deleted 5 of our largest SQL tables and also deleted the previous back ups of the server (or never maintained them in the first place).
For 3 days, Surpass insisted that the site was working fine. This was despite my vocal protestations and the fact that ANYONE could see CLEARLY that the site was not working, just by clicking on ANY page. Finally, Surpass acknowledged that the tables weren't there and weren't on the back up either.
We are a small not-for-profit museum. We have now engaged an expensive consultant to recontruct our tables from the backups we maintain (but with limited success so far due to lack of responsiveness from Surpass).
My strong advice to Surpass is to create an enhanced escalation procedure for problems that YOU create. These issues should not be processed under the standard tech support ticketing procedure. You may want to consider offering some development recovery assistance to customers whose sites YOU wreck.
For a while they weren't so bad. Actually for the first year their reliability was really crappy. Only took them SIX MONTHS to take off the site that was causing problems.
Then they sent me a bill after *they* renewed my subscription!! (I thought my PayPal subscription had taken care of it, but apparently I cancelled it the same day I got the account). Now they want $170 AFTER *THEY* renewed the account!!
I got NO BILL, NO RENEWAL NOTICE, until a whole year after?! Now they're going to a collection agency if I don't pay. I'll pay it since legally that's what I'm supposed to do, but really.... ANY COMPANY THAT RENEWS YOUR SUBSCRIPTION WITHOUT TELLING YOU IS A BAD COMPANY!
Had a long look at various other hosting sites before choosing Surpasshosting, and I haven't regreted my choice at any point. Who can argue with the price??? And the best thing is the customer service - so quick to answer all problems, no matter how small (or big). If only other companies provided a service like that (*ahem*pcworld take notes*ahem*).
I've even had a look recently to see if anyone's offering anything to compete with this service - there isn't!!
A few things a want to say about Surpass. I've been with them for a little over 2 years now and going on to my 3rd account. I can't say that the beginning wasn't bumpy. I had to bare with a lot of downtime back then, but now it looks like it’s becoming a thing of the past. The support on the other hand has never let me down. After submitting my ticket I was gotten back to within 10 minutes and was stayed with until my problem got resolved.
I've been recently asked to find a hosting service for a friend and before recommending Surpass right away I wanted to see what else was out there (price wise) and what other services people were offering. I was surprised to see that all these "popular service" had horrible presentation on their home pages. I remember years ago hosting site sported pictures of beefy servers and business people in suits for that "professional" looking effect. I'm horrified to see that it’s still being done today. I mean now days it’s hard to take sites like that seriously. That is why the simple route taken by Surpass Hosing seems the most inviting and effective at attracting the Mac/iPod age students and professionals.
So with their array of easy to use tools, features, and the (OMG what’s the catch???) prices, you can’t go wrong.
I have been with surpass for a while - up until a few months ago.
I started out there with my site (now multiple sites) that i run with my friend, and it was a hobby back then. We started out on the shared hosting, and kept increasing in package size as our site grew.
We were quickly into dedicated, and requiring more hardware and bandwith.
They were great to use when we were shared, we thought they were an excellent host, our proior experiences were horrible with other companys.
Then soon after we were on dedicated, things started going downhill.
We were getting overages, servers unplugged, the support responses were much slower - sometimes non-existent until they heard what they wanted.
We were making sure we were polite in our requests and responses to support, but he started getting nasty towards us, almost bragging about a mistake they made that allowed us to exceede our bandwith/Mbps limit - as we asked it to be capped, that he didnt charge us and overage for.
As i look at my experience with this host over the entire duration -
Id have to say it was better than average. While some practices i would not agree with, thier services for the bulk of our time spent there were better than previous companys we have dealt with.
We would reccomend this host for smaller applications, but based on our experience, would not reccomend for high-traffic applications.
I also do not host with this company anymore.
Thanks for the service you provided to us while we were with you surpass - it was great up until the last few months. We are less than pleased that we were forced to switch to a more adequet company that could provide better services to us.
I've been with Surpass for the last 4 months, and they're the best webhost I've found so far. Their pricing for dedicated servers is quite reasonable and the level of support you get is exceptional.
Ever problem I've had from the minor to the site crippling has been looked at and taken care of.
To be honest, for $6/month I wouldn't expect much of anything, yet I'm getting 3GBs of space and 50GBs of transfer. Additionally, I wouldn't expect any customer support for what I pay, yet it's there. I've had two problems in 13 months, and neither was Surpass's fault. One was that my computer wouldn't load the domain. Turned out I needed to flush my DNS cache. They responded within hours and told me exactly what to do. The other was when I went to renew and change credit cards, I ended up adding a second subscription rather than renewing the previous. Surpass deleted the new one and updated the billing information on the old one within a day. You can't beat the service. I've also had NO downtime, that I'm aware of, in the time I've been hosted by them. Owned.
my service with the billing company was cancelled by surpass hosting for some reason. i was not actually notified at my primary email address, which surpass provides for me. so here i am with no way to contact a business in order to procure their somewhat shady service. ok so i use another email address and send not less than 20 emails to the payments@surpasshosting.com & billing@surpasshosting.com adressess. yeah sure....10 minutes....right. so that was about 5 or 6 days ago when my service was cancelled. i expected some sort of phone call from someone at your stupid company, but the support is perhaps the worst ive ever seen. it is a system set up for failure, and is absolutely the worst model for running a hosting business. i would like my service back with you, but if i dont speak with someone via email or telephone within a matter of days. you will no longer have my desire to seek you companys services. here is another email address. bryantaylorrobinson@hotmail.com. i would expect that someone may see this and respond. but im not hopeful of it.
A couple of weeks ago, I found out that my site was down, and I couldn't figure out why it had gone down since Surpass is always really great about sending email notifications about payments that are due. Apparently my domain itself, though, was under a different email address, and one that was defunct long ago, so I didn't get the notification. The people in tech support gave me fast, clear responses so that I could get my site back online quickly. They're great!
Excellent community, up time is excellent (more than 99% so far), and they know their stuff. Excellent support, only problem I've had is with mySQL going down once and they responded in under 5 minutes. We'll be sticking with them as long as we can.
Well I've been with Surpass for a year now, which says something in itself. I decided to start my own online business and I knew I would need my own dedicated machine to handle it. Browsing through sites for Dedicated Servers I stumbled upon Surpass. After comparing their rates with the rates of several other companies, I was drawn to Surpass. Not only were their rates much cheaper than most, but they specified managed services as included. I didn't have much experience with Linux and I figured I'd need more assistance, and not costly assistance. I'm technical, and though they include Cpanel/WHM for an extra $30, which I do use, I wanted to tinker with the machine, and it was comforting to know I had support available if I messed things up.
I placed my order, and in a couple days everything was set up. I opened my site on a Monday night. By the Friday, I knew I'd need a much more capable machine. I upgraded from a Celeron to a Xeon. The actual downtime for the server was maybe about an hour on a Sunday night. Over the months I would order incremental memory to the system, and that was done in a timely manner as well. When I ordered additional servers and requested a VLAN, they helped me get everything set up. They've helped me find solutions to issues and helped to increase my knowledge of the underlying system.
Though I do not contact support frequently as I did in the first few months, I do believe they have gotten slightly slower. When I first started, usually I'd get an initial response within 10 to 30 minutes. Now sometimes I have to wait 1 hour plus, but I'll excuse that to an increasing user base.
Regarding their network, it's been near perfect. There was one major outage, which was a problem with a bandwidth provider, which affected many companies and not just Surpass, so I wouldn't say that counts. There was another issue one Saturday night, but they cleared it up Sunday morning.
Would I recommend Surpass? Well I was recommending Surpass before I even signed up, and I still point people in their direction. I don't think I would have been able to establish my business to where it is now if not for Surpass' low cost and managed services.
I have been with Surpass for all of 2006 so far, and was shocked at the service from day one. Coming from a barnyard bargain host that simply did not provide any support at all, all these people dedicated to helping me took a little getting used to.
My first really great experience was when I signed up for the silver reseller package on New Years Eve, and was up and running less than an hour later. Connections were blazing [probably because everyone was out partying it up :P], and everything went off without a hitch. None of my clients even noticed the move.
The first couple days there were some small issues with the DNS. I was told I had custom nameservers setup, and I guess they weren't. After submitting a ticket at 2:33pm, I recieved a response from RyanGu at 2:38pm. All issues were resolved, and I was a happy camper.
There have only been other very minor issues with Surpass. And for the most part, I myself really didn't need any more support tickets. The other three tickets that I submitted were due to requests from my clients for things to be changed, or things that I was unsure about.
Since then, I have upgraded to a dedicated server, and I am continuing to expand my client base. Once again, only very minor issues have arisen since the switch to the dedicated server, but I am happy to say that I have had an overall 9/10 experince with Surpass.
My uptime can speak for itself http://www.siteuptime.com/statistics.php?Id=17865&&UserId=22028
Surpass hosting... my my. They were my first and domain host and will probably my last. I think it's been about two years since I've joined their lovely team and everytime I made a big, moronic slip they've been there to catch my fall (even if I'd forgotten to put the support ticket in "high" priority). No seriously, when I had a "low" priority problem that needed fixing, I can count more than two occasions where they've answered me within 5-10 minutes.
They never seem pretentious in their reply e-mails even though my screwups were umm... fixable by a monkey's standards. I swear they're gifted with like, supernatural patience or something. I've had problems with my bank accounts and I've still managed to keep my account.
It's hard not to get personal with these people since they seem so nice whilst keeping up the professional appeal.
LOL I KNOW this seems comment gives major "BIG SUCK" appeal but it's true. You can even e-mail me if you have any questions. Go ahead. It's xcentricpyro(at)msn(dot)com
As long as you're clear on what your support question is, I'm sure they'll get back to you in a diligent manner.
Anyway, I'm tired and I haven't had sleep in a couple of days so I hope this all makes sense. I hope it helps.
Surpass has been willing, and able, to meet every need I've encountered over the past two years with them. Their customer support is AMAZING! They've rebuilt PHP specifically for me multiple times, just from a request. Although I have had some downtime, never was it in regard to my HTTP server, but rather, my Subversion Repository, and other Server Applications.
I switched from Spymac Hosting (horrible host - downtime all of the time, lousy tech support, slow response times) to Surpass Hosting and Surpass has been great! While there was a bit of an issue in setting up my account due to my credit card being flagged for one reason or another, Surpass walked me through the process of getting the billing straightened out (within the day) and assured me that my account would be active shortly.
Setup time was about 2 days with the billing/credit card issue, but that's still not bad and I don't blame them for that. Tech Support has been pretty good as most of my tickets have been responded to within the hour. They are clear and definitely willing to help out (even on holidays)!
In addition, you can't beat the price for what you get. I was on the Power plan but decided to upgrade to the OC5 plan as it was cheaper and offered more. I've been a happy customer since I signed up with them almost a year ago and would recommend to anyone looking for cheap hosting with all of the features!
We have been associated with Surpass for 4 years now with a shared server. Surpass was great when we first started except with issues on the annual renewal. They could never seem to get the pricing right, but finally this year, they got it right the first time.
Organizations like us depend on the services of professional hosting companies because we don't have the technical resources to 'talk turkey' with their tech support. We depend on their install services to work correctly the first time (Fantastico). We've tried to use some of their cms services and find once installed, a certain portion won't work right, so we just remove it.
I also work with a reseller of Surpass and the site I manage through that service have products available on their servers (Joomla) that I don't have access to for this website. I'm not sure why that is, but I would like to see some continuity in products between shared servers.
I have posted a few questions on their site and have never had them delete any, although I'm sure it happens. They're selling a service and need to keep their record as clean as they can.
Kayla, we will probably stay with Surpass, but from the comments seen here, you need to address customer service issues internally and communicate to the world the steps you're taking to upgrade that service. You will do more for your company this way than being defensive when the company is critisized.
Best of luck and I'll update here if I hear or see positive progress.
i had been hosting with surpass for a while. Anyways, it seems to melike surpass now has enought customers because their customer service has gone from an 8 to a 0. The worst part about it is thier staff are very rude, insultive and arrogant. They have a community forum where you can post comments but guess what? They delete negative comments, lock threads that do not favor them and have their rude staff come on board trying to make you look stupid. They also do not have telephone support so you spend hours waiting at their mercy if you should develop a problem. Surpass is only good if you WILL NOT develop a problem and this is impossible. I absolutely DO NOT recommend them unless they fix their customer service and get some telephone support. I give them n overal rating of 3/10. There are better hosts out there with better plans. I do regret hosting with them because now I have to deal with the stress of moving my site somewhere else.
I have been a Surpass customer since early 2004. I have had no problems at all with the hosting other than occasional downtimes. I'm a reseller. I plan to shut down my business by the end of the year. I'm transferring my customers to another company as their web space expires.
For one of my clients I decided to try Surpass Domains, an Enom reseller. This was the biggest mistake I have ever made. I set up an account February 2005 with one domain. I had not gone into the account until last month. Meanwhile in November 2005 I had a domain account with another Enom company for another customer. Somehow the account was transferred from that company without my intervention into Surpass Domains. I would have never transferred from a company charging $10/yr to one that charged $16/yr, especially in the middle of the year and without the permission of my customer. I immediately transferred the domains to GoDaddy without any problems. I had forgotten about this until it was time to work with my account that I actually opened last year.
To my horror when I went into my account last month I saw that I had three domains. Two of them were transfer attempts from another Enom account that I never made. They failed because I had those domains locked. I went into my account and removed the domain locking on the domain well before it was to expire. It never unlocked. The domain expired. When I tried to contact Surpass they said that they had never had any problems with the software. I was basically accused of making unsupported claims. I was forced to renew the domain with Surpass because my customer's site was down. I have been trying the past two weeks to get this resolved. The domain was reactivated this past Saturday with the manage page saying it was unlocked. Guess what? It still shows that it is locked. The customer no-service department sends me a WHOIS link that no one would have ever come up with stating that the domain was unlocked. I checked several WHOIS links INCLUDING the one on their web page. It says the domain is locked. I had told them that I have never seen it more than 48 hours to update WHOIS. Again I'm being accused of making unsupported claims since "no one else is having these problems".
I'm still in an email fight trying to get them to fix the problem. I submitted the transfer to another company on Saturday. It is still waiting for them to give approval. I have demanded that they give permission immediately and stated there was no reason for them to hold this up. I'm convinced that they are doing these things on purpose. They stated that I was the only one complaining about this. I highly doubt it at this point.
I have not had the problems with the hosting side of things but it sounds like the problems I have had with the domain registration are similar to those that are complaining about their hosting issues. I plan to report them to the FL Better Business Bureau. It is not worth it to me to try and take them to court for $15.99. You may be interested to know that they have an unsatisfactory rating with the Orlando BBB. BEWARE!!!!
After reading the reviews from all the other customers of surpass, I'm confident that I have been a loyal customer to surpass for a very long time, almost from when they first began.
I first purchased shared hosting from Surpass in late 2001 to host a gaming information website. They were inexpensive, and the reliability and customer support was perfect, especially since I had no use for it since nothing was wrong. After hosting for 2 years I called it quits, and quit hosting for a couple months.
In February I again turned to Surpass to host my new company, homsarmedia.net. It was a webdesign firm and obviously needed some space on the web, and since I've had a great history with surpass I decided to once again go with them. Thing's were great while I was still a shared host. After a couple months, I began to think about expanding into a hosting network as well. I checked out the reseller plans, and since they were so cheap decided to do it. I hooked up a few clients and was happy with that, focusing on my web design more. This is where things started to go bad. I was hosted on pass5, and after almost 3 years had experienced little to no downtime nor problems of any sort. Then the DDOS attacks began. The server would be down for hours, and for a week it was down for 2 days. 2 days in the world of webhosting is absolutely pathetic, and I lost almost my entire customer base due to it even being told that they were fixing it. Then the funny responses started coming back instead of we are fixing it. I requested to be transferred servers. Surpass said no, how about you purchase a dedicated server instead. How can this even be considered a solution? Their network is insecure and I have to pay $100 more a month to fix it? I was steaming mad, but I eventually was talked into purchasing the dedicated server for a lower fee. Now I'm running a dedicated server with a full client base, and what can I say. No problems, except for a few errors when they switched me over to the new server which I resolved myself.
Overall Suggestions:
Shared Hosting
Have a small website, not a bandwidth eating monster. The less attention you get the better, it seems to make things run smoother.
Reseller Hosting
Would not recommend, since as soon as the **** hits the fan, the customer service drops to an abysmal rate.
Dedicated Server
A++ Amazing reliability for the price, you are free to do pretty much whatever you want. Need more bandwidth / space? Simply email them, they will link you to a pay link and it'll be done. They are also WHM Autopilot licensee and can set you up with eNom domain registration.
Overall, with surpass you either go big or not at all. I feel that over the last year they have gone down hill in customer support / reliabilily, but that's because they have expanded so quickly. I give them props for the work they have done, and Kayla has been nothing but excellent to me. Over the years I've had many questions, and all I had to do was send a private message on the forums and it would be done.
I recommend this host if your looking to host a large client base, or host a small time website.
I submitted a review a few months ago, since then my site had no problems, not once it was off-line, support was very good, although I did not have any serious issues to fix - only routine.
This company is a joke... If you use there tech support you can expect overbillings from my expierience. Im not just saying that because it happend once... Ive expierienced hostile attitudes from them and there parent companies (hostdime/dimenoc) and threats to discontinue my service for resource abuse(which they apparently determine what that is as they see fit instead of knowing exactly what is to much resources. Isnt that why you sell certian packages with certain resources? Surpass's solution was to triple my bill and try to move me off onto a dedicated server. I had sites taken down with no notification. I can go on and on. I was blacklisted by surpass's service provider even though I have NEVER sent a spam email in my life, then I recieve a mail containing foul language and a generaly abusive attitude.
The good points for surpass, they have been more reliable over the last 6 months as far as sites not going down or mail not working but still over charged me when I used tech support ( 4 X $25 in one month!) I have a hard time thinking it was an accident because I havent been overbilled since the last time i used tech support almost 8 months ago probably.
We are very happy with Surpass. We started off with a basic reseller plan and we now have two dedicated servers and run a very successful small hosting business with them (www.bigwetfish.co.uk).
We always find their technical support very responsive and any problems are rectified quickly and efficiently. I am therefore surprised by some of the negative comments below!
I wanted to transfer my reseller account to surpass as they offered a heck of a lot more space and bandwidth but the way in which they have managed this has been absolutely awful.
It made me laugh to read above that they answer all tickets in 10 minutes or less... TRY 10 HOURS OR MORE!!!!
Uncommunicative, unresponsive, couldn't manage the transfer of my accounts and when I complained about this got aggro with me... huh?
Find a big stick, hold it up, and don't even worry about poking them with it... just use it to beat them away!
Their tech support is horrible. I inquied about them to monitor my servers and they told me to do it myself. Hmm I don't have shell access so how could I do that... I have a reseller plan, which is clearly outlined that it supports streaming audio and video, they say I'm on a shared server (which I'm not) and they can't install streaming media. I am still waiting for an email back from them regarding this from about 18 hours ago. I would not recommend these people to anyone. Use rackspace or somoene else, not these people. Horrible web host.
I have to say, my best experience with this host was the day we cancelled.
Their customer service was horrible, we approached them several times with security concerns, not only for our site, but for their server in general, and they didn't do anything about it.... I was forwarded to a tech support person who didn't understand or speak english. We were submitted to multiple attacks due to holes they didn't close, and their inability to run a secure PHP setup. They kept telling us there was no problem, even though there clearly was as our site continually got hacked.
Their hosting was frequently down for no apparent reason, with what appeared to be their whole datacenter as there was no way to contact them. They frequently fell victim to DOS attacks, and it could take hours to recover from.
We were lured in by their prices, and for simple questions, their support was fine, but if you asked them anything beyond the basics, you're in trouble.
My absolute BIGGEST beef is with their forums. Their forums (surmunity.com) was probably the best place to get help, as the community seemed to know more than tech support (and was much more responsive). Anyway, they have a testimonials board, filled with fantastic things, great reviews, and satisfied customers, so I tried to be original, and post a not so good review... They have moderated posting on that board :)! Which means, only good reviews are posted... great business practice if you want to look better than you are, lousy when people find out you delete negative opinions. Overall, I think they are cheating, lying, and incompetent. You would be better off hosting your website on a toaster than with them. AVOID THEM AT ALL COSTS, because the frustration that could come from it is not worth it
Excellent email capability, easy to use and setup. Easily add more than one domain per account. I am running 3 different domains off my account. Excellent ftp capability. I am very very pleased with this company and I have never had down time or loss of data.
I was using nothing but fantastico-installed scripts and using my account very lightly. Ended up with account suspension for MySQL abuse. The real crime here is that it took Surpass 5 days to respond to my emails. By that time, I successfully rebuilt everything they froze on a new account with a new host.
Ok for the casual hobbyist. Not recommended for hosting or service you need on a day-to-day basis.
As inexpensive as Surpass Hosting was, it was not worth the money. I'm paying more now for my new host, but hopefully they will be more reliable and have less attitude.
Jason
PS: If you check their testimonials on their site, please realize that they do not allow anyone to post any criticism or negative comments, even when posted constructively. I'm glad that an impartial site such as webhostingjury.com exists.
Surpass offers a reliable, cheap and easy to use hosting package. Whilst when I first joined I noticed downtime, in the past few months, I haven't seen anything at all!
The customer support is responsive and helpful, giving clear feedback to queries. I've seen some bad feedback to surpass, but I honestly don't know what they are talking about!
I have a small website hosted on one of their shared servers. One day the site got suspended without any warning at all. I sent several emails to try to resolve the problem. Because 38 hrs had past without any response I posted a polite message (asking how long I still had to wait) in their forum. Now they were really fast with removing my post. Apparently they censor their forum and allow only messages they like. Anyways it took 4 days before I could use my site again, no credits would be issued for the down time. They wanted me to upgrade to a dedicated server because of the 30% load on their cpu.
I thought it was very rude of them to shut me out of my account/ website like this. They could have emailed me beforehand, so I could do something about the site to lessen the load. After all I am a paying for the time my site was shut down. Also the message displaying the site was suspended is highly unprofessional. And the response time is really out of whack, for something that is not a difficult technical matter.
Surpass is a very good host, the people that complain about downtime usually run a buisness and that is understandable since you lose money w/ downtime... but compared to other hosts, Surpass downtime is VERY minimal if at all. Anyway I have been happy with this host, would def. reccomend to others especially if you run a personal site.
I didn't quite understand all the reliability complaints. My service through Surpass is just a few months short of a year, and I have noticed downtime MAYBE 4 times, the longest disruption only lasting maybe 10 minutes.
Normally I hate email support (waiting overnight for a response), but theirs was fast; all questions answered within 15-20 minutes, max (though I miss the IM tech support).
we have been with surpass for a while now, we have had minimal downtime, a few issues i have include: old outdated unpatched software on there fantastico installer. occasional outages, i would say uptime is about 99.8%, and the lack of telephone support. the price is great, they tend to oversell some of there servers though, so cross your fingers you get on one with minimal load.
So Far So Good!
I selected Surpass Hosting to start my first website. I had some beginner questions that were easily answered in their FAQs pages and have never had a problem that required tech support. Actually, I've never had a problem period. I appreciate that they can make information available to even the novice webmaster. I don't ever feel embarassed to contact them with fairly simple questions.
My site has had some minor down time but still meets the standards Surpass outlines in their guarantee.
In my opinion, this is a very good value for not a lot of money. I'm currently hosting 2 sites through Surpass Hosting and as long as things continue to go well, I will stay.
My experience has been all bad, especially as it concerns their customer service. Last year, I changed my account e-mail address. I advised Surpass, 2scheckout, everyone. Eric L. from Surpass assured me he had reset my username/password and that everything was in order.
Since then I have been receiving receipts of charges and other correspondence to this new e-mail address. Yesterday I go into CPanel X to start uploading my website files. Guess what?! Neither the username nor the password work. I e-mailed the support desk and Eric L. (again) tells me that he can't do anything because the e-mail address they have on file is my old one.
This shouldn't be my problem as obviously he is the one who dropped the ball. How come they have my current e-mail address to charge me but they don't have it to allow me access to my account????
However, I want to get my website up, etc. So they tell me that the update my e-mail address for the second time they need me to fax them a copy of and ID + passport, voter's card, or certified mail addressed to me! So I don't have a passport and I'm not registered to vote. According to them, I would have to sit here until I receive a piece of certified mail. This is beyong ridiculous.!!! Also, the responses to my e-mails are sporadic. It seems they are not in the business of solving the problems they create.
I guess I am going to have to process a chargeback to fix this now. They are absolutely the worst in customer service and if you want to save yourself some headaches, stay away from them.
I was hosted by Surpass for 6 months starting back in August of 2004, had no problems from them, customer support was immediate and very helpful, only had typical downtime twice, but I forgot to mention this was during a time when my website was not as frequented because the subject of it was not very active. Soon in early March when my site was starting to gain heavy traffic because the subject was active again, all of a sudden one day, I opened my FTP to find that my files had deleted. I had no clue how, I had not touched it in probably 2 days. I emailed to ask about it and they could explain to me what happened or why. After sometime, I had to attempt and reupload all of my files again and then eventually they emailed me and offer to restore the backup so I wouldnt have to do so. My site is a big bandwidth hog but my hosting package gave me 200 gigs of bandwidth. I had only used up to 140. Suddenly my account was suspended with no explanation what-so-ever or no warning and when I emailed about it, I received no answer...I was being ignored because usually they'll email me back within minutes but on something this urgent and serious, they would not contact me. Finally when I got an answer about 4 hours later and they said my account was suspended because I was using up too many resources and my bandwidth was too high. I repeated to them that my bandwidth limit was 200 and I'd only used 140 and the only way you can accuse me of bandwidth issues was if it went over 200 and by then my site would have been taken offline with bandwidth limit. They then told me that they could move me to a dedicated server by myself and I'd have to start paying 50 dollars for that. I was already paying only 25 dollars for what I was getting, why would I want to pay 25 more bucks when I used up anything....total rip off and I wouldnt recommend anybody with a large site to go there. They'll start off great but then screw you over later.
This company is a sham. Packages start out with great pricing, but if its too good to be true, it usually is. Our newspaper web site was hosted with them for over a year with usual down periods known by other Surpass Customers. They suspended our site with a nasty message for all of our readers to view. It gave the impression that we had not paid our bills! We were current with a perfect billing history on record with our bank. After multiple emails (over 20) they finally responded saying our site used to many resources and that if we wanted to continue as a customer, we would have to upgrade from $25.00 per month to $90.00 per month. That would have been easier to handle had they given us some prior notice. THEY DIDN'T and it cost us weeks of downtime and was embarassing to have our readers presented with a "This Site Suspended" page. We have switched to another company and will make it known that simply, Surpass Hosting Sucks. They run half operational servers, and when there is a problem, such as with MySQL resources, they blame you with nasty screw you type emails.
It's cheap, but so must be their hardware. It is difficult to believe they can run a business so badly. Their prime resposibility is SERVING websites to users, but my sites constantly down.
I've been with Surpass for over a year now both with a reseller account and as a customer of another reseller. Can't find anything to really complain about. Their help desk is fast and efficient. I'm often surprised with how quick they answer my questions & their patience & politeness.
In the past year I've only had my site down 3 times and each time is was for a very short amount of time. Never any problems with any of my email accounts.
I recommend Surpass to all of my friends and plan to be with them for a very long time.
Porting to a new host is a huge task, but I've had enough: Surpass Hosting is slowly driving me crazy. I have a reseller account with them and the hate mail from my clients is steadily increasing. I cannot blame them because the downtime is enormous. I lost 2 clients.
Sure, Surpass has quick and friendly support. They reply promptly when I inform them that one of my sites is down (again)... Usually they inform me that there is nothing wrong and that the site is running perfectly. After repeated emails to them they finally admit that they are having a problem with the server and they're dealing with it. Sorry, but I don't think I should have to submit multiple emails to report a problem.
When I first signed up with Surpass I was impressed by their open forum (something they themselves bragged about) - anyone could read through user messages and assess customer satisfaction. But there are now so many customer complaints that Surpass has limited the forum to members only. This alone speaks volumes.
What is good about them? They are cheap and they offer a lot of space (theoretically). I have a 2 GB account with them, but after using only 50 MB I received error messages informing me that the server was full and that I could no longer upload files. Hmm, should that be happening?
My assessment of Surpass: they have taken on too many clients and they are unable to deal with the server load. Hence, the service they provide is a shadow of what it once was. Shame on you Surpass.
We've used Surpass Hosting as our primary host for sometime now. Across multiple projects and websites, Surpass has consistantly beaten all expectations. There were some difficulties due to the hurricanes in 2004 (they are located in Florida) but that aside, down time is infrequent and support is superb. (Lack of phone support gives them a 4) Surpass is an island among a sea of sharks (fly by night hosts). They'be been doing it right for years, and we look forward to staying with them a long time.
They offer great services. As long as you don't mind having your server being down 50% of the time and having to constantly monitor your site and report it to customer service when it goes down, then you'll love them.
Another great thing about them is if you say anything negative about them in thier web forums, it promptly gets deleted.
This host has a reliability rating of close to zero in my book. I've had configurations for my subdomains literally disappear twice. I've had an entire server crash only to be told they did not have a recent backup (2 months old), so we'd be responsible for uploading on our own. The refund for that, by the way, took over 2 months to be resolved. My e-mail constantly goes down, the web pages repeatedly aren't browsable...
The bottom line is, despite the fact the tech support usually is helpful and quick, I shouldn't have to constantly monitor my pages to ensure they're up. At least 50% of the time that I've browsed my own pages, they're down. This company isn't worth the time or effort, and I will be cancelling ASAP.
I've been on this host for about 3 months... since I moved I haven't been able to see ANY downtime. Support was VERY quick. About 10 minutes after submitting a trouble ticket they responded and everything was fine.
I have used this host since around September of 2004 and have had very reliable service and excellent support. I have almost never had to file any support tickets, and when I have, it was always something I just didn't know how to use, and was dealt with within 20 minutes of when I submitted it. The only problems that I see some people are having with their support ticket system is their own fault, they use an email on the account that they are having a problem with. When you submit a ticket to the support desk or use an external email, there will be no ticket problems. My uptime has been insanely awesome, I have noticed once when it acted a little weird for about 5 minutes, other than that, it has been perfect. I give them a 5 out of 5 on everything, and I highly recommend Surpass Hosting to anybody who is looking for affordable, reliable hosting. And on top of Surpass Hosting support, the forums are an excellent source for information on anything doing with web design and servers.
We used to be with Surpass Hosting for our email system (no website) of a sub-branch. The system we were on was so over-loaded that we had trouble accessing our email - both on POP3 and webmail.
Our server/host was frequently totally unavailable - some times for so long that emails sent to us bounced (>48 hours).
My experience is that the administrators and network operators disregard all performance complaints and says system is OK even though it can not be reached.
We always got quick response from support, but never any follow-up from the administrators.
When we complained politely, they answered so it seemed they felt we should be thankful and grateful that they allowed us to be customers with them, which is IMHO very unprofessional.
We now host our email system with our DNS registrar and have not had downtime since we changed. I warn everyone to stay away from Surpass Hosting based on their arrogance, lack of support and heavy over-selling of services.
We changed to surpass hosting about a year ago due to their low prices and found their services to be a rollercoaster experience. When functioning it's great - part of their technical support is quick and good, and their prices are unbeatable.
However, these prices come at a high cost. Their service appears to be heavily over-sold with frequent crashes and outages, weeklong response-times for cases not resolvable by 1st level support, and systematic cencorship of their online forum.
We gave them every possible chance until it became too much downtime in December, and now pay 2 dollars more per month for the same bandwidth/diskspace, but a professional and customer-satisfaction oriented management and administration team.
I am posting here because I feel the service we received has in no way reflected what was promised when we signed up, and I have learned a very valuable lesson that there are more important items than price to consider when chosing a reliable hosting provider.
Well, I got the answer that we had no communication as they couldn't reach me at my e-mail where surpass hosting are my provider. Why they can't reach me is because my e-mailaccount doesn't work. I have asked them to repair my e-mailaccount but they haven't could help me since December 13, 2004. I can't use my e-mailaccount because i don't recieve any mails there. They don't understand my problems and I have now one more host for my websites.
I was leary of an e-mail only support host. But, the Surpass Hosting tech dept is very fast. And unlike a major host that I have another site with. The Surpass tech boys are compotent and actually have fixed, nearly immediately, all issuses I have brought to them. Again, unlike my other host... :(
I did experience some weirdness a time or two hence the 4 of 5 in reliability. But, for the price. You can't ask for perfection. However they are real close to it.
I'm a very happy camper with Surpass, I'll be dropping iP****Web real soon to move my other domain to Surpass.
Hello., I seriously want to say good things about this company, but can't. I have been a customer for 3 months. I am totally thrilled with the features, Scipta, Fantastico, Reseller proogram, etc. They have an awesome setup.
But...
Email breaks down several times a week on average. You can't send or receive. Messages that are sent are just plain LOST and people send you messages that just never get to you. They person sending does not get any error message or anything. How many emails do you want to lose per week?
The websites go down every couple of weeks, although that has gotten better lately.
Their technical support (by email only) is fast and VERY responsive, but your never get anything but a one sentence reply. They never tell you what the problem is, how they are going to make sure it doesn't happen again, if the problem is only on your account or not. They just give a one sentence "Oh, it's all set kind of reply.", but then the problem happens again a few days later.
and with respect to the "Server Status" pages on their website -- www.surpasshosting.com? They are absolute nonsense based on my experience...I have had domains down and no email for hours and hours or days and if you surf over to their site, you see 100% green lights indicating that all is OKAY.
If someone knows of another company that offers all the features, go with them...
Surpass, I have been patient and loyal for three months, but seriously, the reliability stinks.
And what would one want to have a web host company for other than reliability?
Great host. Only downside is there is no phone support (reason for the 4 out of 5) but their help desk and email support times make up for it, and some. I pay yearly with all of my accounts (I have three, two personal and one for a business I work at) and haven't had a problem with anything. 90-day money back is an added bonus if you are unsure.
Surpass was the second hosting company that I've used. I'll be completely honest. They've done all they've could in any situation to make sure that not only my site was operational, but everyone elses was operational too. On their Support Forums I often see some people being quite rude about getting a lack of service, but they seem to never follow the proper procedure. If you do things the way you're supposed to, you'll have a response very quickly and usually the problem is fixed within minutes of that.
Not only that, but the staff is professional and they respect the customers. They've treated me as if I'm the only client sometimes to make sure I'm happy.
Very nice host. Before I had actual hosting with them, I was hosted on a friend's account, and it was nice. There was some problems due to hurricaines and them being located in Florida, but they were minor, and it was fixed quickly.
Over the time I have been with Surpass, I have overall been very pleased with their Shared Hosting Plan. I have added a reseller account, so I'll be testing that out shortly. There have been few outages. In my experience, during the first few months I was with Surpass, support was a tad slow, but over the past 8 months, they've sped it up tremendously. I've recommended them to others. I will still recommend them to others.
Not that long time ago, all was simple, a quick email to Emmanuel or one of the then few and things got resolved simply and quickly.
Now we have a ticket system, eventually, someone may reply, usually not with a fix but with a comment as seen in earlier posts.
The ticket system at this time does not work, I am waiting on three tickets .... and accoring to the system, none exist for the email address....
Currently a major reseller server [D21] is STILL either down on mail services or introducing a 12+ hr delay on forwarding or handling, no doubt they have replied to my mails and used the email address of their screwed server...rather than the one supplied on the form.
I tried using their internal forum to contact them but, I can only read the tales of woe of the same problem rolling through all the servers for the past few weeks, I would post but, I cannot confirm my forum use as the email they send to is on the down server....DOH!
It is a great pity but, this host appears to be allowing itself to either stagnate or die, either there are too many faults or not enough skilled people.
Tickets, despite what they say, are not continuous, they are not open till closed, they close them asap whether fixed or not!
6 months ago, I was supposed to have had my storage space increased to the same as all the others [why it was not done with the others, only they know, how many others are the same ....] still, despite an email from them saying it is done [and them closing the ticket] it is NOT DONE.
Perhaps, thoughts of grandeur have taken over and they do not need customers...it is a shame.
I await a curt reply, then I shall dissect it, and reply.
Generally very impressed with Surpass. The price was the original attraction (helped by the weak dollar!). Setup was fairly straight forward and the helpdesk have been pretty quick and effective thus far. There were occasional outages a few months ago (without warning), but 99% of the time the hosting is reliable and quick.
Support is hot and cold, recently cold. No replies to open tickets after first reply from them. They recently disconnected their phone number. My sites have been down for over a week and I can't get a response. Email to support@.... goes unanswered.
It seems strange that most of the great reviews were all posted on the same day, huh? Someone stuffing the ballot box?
This company is related to HostDime & Surpass Domains, so expect similar results.
I had a bit of trouble setting up, and some of the links in the automated emails were dead, which left me even more frustrated. But once I contacted the support team, they were extremely attentive. The girl I dealt with, Sulema, emailed me several times the same day within the hour. She explained to me in laymans talk exactly how to set up on the Linux platform, which I found some what intimidating initially, and answered all my questions. Since then I have had no problems. I would highly reccommend this company to anyone.
How stupid can people be at a supportdesk ? I have never had a communication that am so bad as surpass hosting have. Once I told them that my e-mailaccount didn't get any mails so I wanted them to send me their answer on a free e-mailaccount like I have given to you but still they send the answer on my e-mailaccount that have error, it's like telling someone that can't open their computer to check out their website for to repair the error. I have always had to write them many messages before they understand what I am talking about. I am on my way to change host even if I have paid for one year.
Surpass has a terrific low price, and doesn't take away all of the extras. However, my web site has been down on and off (I assume as they might be upgrading) and my e-mail to customer support, about my account, was never answered and it's been 3 months. Still, they are 5 times better than my last 2 hosts.
I was so impressed with Surpass Hosting and its Tech Support that I ordered two more domains and web plans from them! I would completely recommend them as the best webhosting site available on the Net.
Surpass is the best webhosting i've ever hosted Realiable and affordable.
Great support, fast server and they also have this great and wonderful community .
I have been with over five hosting companies and I've finally been able to settle down with Surpass Hosting. I've been with surpass for 1-1/2 years (which is a very long time in the hosting world!). My sites uptime is excellent and if there is ever an issue all it takes is an email to support to have everything back on track. I've paid a lot more and received a lot less in service and uptime compared to Surpass Hosting. They also have an active forum for information on servers and to get to know other clients. I'm not one to give companies testimonials but in an ocean of sub par hosts it makes me want to let everyone know of surpass hosting.
It's a great hosting, very fast, hosting packages are unbeatable, take my word for it, i been hosted with so many companies before, and i probably stay with Surpass whenever i am still hosting my domain.
i've experienced this hosting with shared packages and a dedicated server (they also have reseller accounts). First, they have great plans with good space, lots of transfer and very affordable plans, they also include Scripta, that easily let's you install boards, galleries, portals and many things more. About the dedicated, they have similar prices than those of other companies, BUT they offer MANAGED servers, and believe me, if you aren't experienced enough to manage a full server by yourself, try not to mess around with companies that offer "silver" management (or whatever is named its basic management)because that's limited to reboot your server and charge you extra for everything, and with this full management, they help you if you have any trouble with your sites there and put their best effort so you can have peace of mind. Customer support is fast and friendly (yes, that exists!!! and you'll feel much more comfortable with that). Seriously, i've tried many companies and so far, this has been the BEST and i don't plan to move away as far as they continue with this great service (hopefully for many many years):D GO SURPASS!
