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Date Submitted :
June 22nd, 2009
Length of time hosted by this company :
More than 3 years
Overall Rating :
2 out of 5
Reliability :
2 out of 5
Support :
2 out of 5
Pricing :
3 out of 5
Verdict :
I hosted four different sites with thinkhost over the course of several years. I was a very early customer, when they were hungry and excited about the business. However, I get the feeling now that it's just more trouble than it's worth to them. Their downtime has gotten worse even as customer service has gotten ever more snarky. I don't know now if I'll ever get the domains I registered with them transferred elsewhere, as they do not respond to my requests for the authorization codes.
If this year is 2000, I recommend them highly. But in 2009 there are a lot of better options.
Downtime for thinkhost servers is too high. Although I experienced good service for the first year, the last six months, and particularly the last month, was horrible. I received notices from website monitoring services on a daily basis notifying me that the websites were not available. Although I notified Thinkhost, nothing was done to improve it. I received complaints from customers about returned emails and website not available, or pages too slow to load. While they didn't do anything to improve that, thus deteriorating their image, they caused me to look unprofessional towards my clients. This is unacceptable and showing lack of professionalism, tarnishing the image of green web providers.
In the approximately 9 months that we hosted with ThinkHost, they could never get our site stable. It would be inaccessible a minimum of 10 minutes a day and suffered severe (over four hours) outages at least 5 times. For an ecommerce site this makes the hosting worthless.
Tech support that we could contact could rarely provide any response other than escalating the request to a "senior" administrator. All the senior team seemed to do was triage which produced no improvement in performance or up-time.
Finally, the MySQL database became corrupt. I opened the case at 1PM. The site came back briefly at about 3PM before tech support provided anything but a "we'll get back to you" and "your site looks fine to us". By 5PM the site was completely inaccessible, so I followed up on the case to note this. At 5:45PM tech support finally responded with "sorry for the inconvenience". I followed up again at 7:30PM (having heard nothing from them). They asked for my MySQL credentials 45 minutes later. I provided them immediately. At 9:30PM they finally responded with "we're looking into your problem". The issue was never resolved to my satisfaction. Some pages loaded and some did not, so they declared it "fixed".
Add to this that the performance of ThinkHost.com servers is the slowest of over a dozen web hosts I've worked with in the last 20 years. Seriously.
I signed up for the free trial to see if Thinkhost would be suitable for the site of one of my clients which they were, however when it came to cancel the trial, I followed their cancellation procedures and got completely ignored. No matter what I tried, they didn't cancel the service. I had to cancel my card to stop them taking the payments (and then only after two months of them taking payments!)
I'm planning on taking this up with the BBB and making my complaint known everywhere. Beware!
Overall I have been happy with the technical aspects of Thinkhost. Good servers, good network connectivity (not great bandwidth, but reliable). I really like the way they layout the file structure for your hosted sites and the control panel is adequate. They allow SSH access. The tech support team is responsive, although responses usually take between 6-24 hours. My complaint with Thinkhost is that they recently changed to a single hosting plan "The Plan". They drastically lowered their price, increased BW and disk storage, but would not allow existing customers to move to this plan. I was told I had to close my account and open a new one to take advantage of the new plan. Now this was not a limited offer, but an overall reduction in pricing of their only hosting plan. Bizarre! To boot, when I called to talk with the sales team, they charged me $5 and claimed it was a support call.
In fairness, they finally relented and agreed to migrate my account to the new plan, but it is too late. The damage is done. Very poor business decisions have convinced me to move on.
I've used thinkhost for many years now and must say that they offer an outstanding service. Their customer service is superb, and there servers never go down. TH gets an A++ in my books.
