X-Gravity Review, User Reviews of X-Gravity

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Date Submitted :

January 30th, 2005

Length of time hosted by this company :

1 - 6 months

Overall Rating :

4 out of 5

Reliability :

4 out of 5

Support :

4 out of 5

Pricing :

4 out of 5

Verdict :

Regarding the Hercules disaster:

My name's Andrew Montalenti and I am the fourth technician that Andy hired to work on his server (Hercules) before it was declared dead.

I want to give everyone the clean, real story since it seems a lot of misinformation has gone around.

Basically, when I got to the server, three technicians had already worked on it. Andy actually had a main drive and a backup HD on Hercules, with data duplicated on the second drive (web and mysql files, plus some configuration files, which were rsync'ed in a cron job).

The problem is, when I got there, the second (backup) drive had a fresh Fedora Core install, and the primary drive was inaccessible (bad partition table).

At first I tried using Linux tools to see where the data on the drives was... dd, grep, etc. Nothing turned up. I was getting all zeros everywhere on the first drive, and lots of zeros beyond the FC2 install on the second. So I decided there was nothing I could do there, and I brought it home. For one full day I didn't sleep and I ran disk recovery tools, but nothing worked. All the tools saw were zeros in the hex editor.

I needed accountability, so I called the three techs who touched the drive before, and realized the first one who touched it, in conversation admitted that he had essentially formatted the backup drive to install a fresh FC2 and had essentially wiped out the partition table on the first drive in an attempt of recovery. He clearly did not know what the fuck he was doing.

Partition table or not, there should still be data, right? But there wasn't. He wouldn't admit to it, and neither would any of the other techs, but I am sure someone actually did a full format of that drive. There's no other way zero could have gotten written to every byte.

I told Andy to sue the company those techs worked for, but unfortunately because so many people pulled out on him, he didn't have the money to pursue a legal battle against a big corporation, especially when the techs hardly wanted to take the blame and risk losing their jobs.

So, that's the story of how Hercules died. I spent two days of my life dealing with it. Why did I care? I'm an old friend of Andy's, and one of my clients (I'm a web developer by day) was on that machine.

Andy isn't guilty of anything but bad luck. Not two months later, his other server (loutro) was rooted and the root fs ("/") was unlinked. Luckily, for that drive I spent two full days of my life and I was able to recovery 100% of the data. But I tell you, being a web host is by no means a glorious job. To get data in working order I had to code custom programs--about ten of them--that recreated the permissions of the filesystem, synched up databases, recreated DNS zones, reconstructed an httpd.conf file, etc. I had to piecemeal restore data into cpanel's proprietary data storage to get the system configuration working. It was miraculous I got the server working as well as it did. Not to toot my own horn, but I am convinced if most other "papertechs" who work in this industry were given the drive I was given to restore, they would have told Andy and his customers that they were fucked. Even linux developers told me "recovering an ext3 filesystem from scratch after it's unlinked is simply impossible." Despite all my efforts, I still screened support requests coming in where customers told me that we were the worst hosting company on Earth for the website to be down for two days. Well, guess what buddy: your server was rooted! You're lucky it was only two days, and you're lucky you have your data. Andy's a web hosting provider, but that doesn't mean he can protect against acts of God's like hackers using any of the 900 documented Linux exploits to gain root access. We use firewalls, we use security patches, but that's not even enough sometimes.

If anything this says how much Andy needs to start offering backup service, even to his ungrateful and cheap reseller clients, who don't realize how little money he makes on that part of his business.

Anyway, the ultimate solution is for clients to backup their own data regularly. I know no one does, because everyone is lazy, but that's what could have saved everyone a lot of headaches/trouble.

Submitted By :

Andrew

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

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Date Submitted :

January 28th, 2005

Length of time hosted by this company :

6 - 12 months

Overall Rating :

2 out of 5

Reliability :

1 out of 5

Support :

2 out of 5

Pricing :

5 out of 5

Verdict :

Ahhh....hey, ex-XG'ers, have you read that top post that gives XG 5 out of 5 stars? Doesn't that writing style and certain kinds of grammar mistakes look awfully familiar to you? You can't blame him for trying, ha ha.

Anyway, my experience with XG. Well let me first start off right now by saying for the past two days X-Gravity.net hasn't even had a website up. That's right folks, it just goes to a blank page. Wow! Sign me up right now! Oh wait, there's nothing to click on, no email to contact, no phone number to call. Yeah, "jackie", they TOTALLY deserve our business!

Basically, XG started out by a college guy from New York (or he at least lives in that area now) with the best intentions. Having started the company after leaving a rather large hosting company, I was woo'd in by his promise to be better than the other company (who I was with but didn't like much) in pricing, uptime, et al.

So I went with it and all was well for the first few months; uptime was great, customer support was EXCELLENT (emails usually answered within an hour, regardless of the time of day), and I was happy.

Then Hercules, the server everyone keeps talking about, started getting overwhelmed. Outages became more frequent during the summer and by early fall I was so fed up I asked to be moved to a different server. He honored the request and moved me to a much quieter server (usage wise) and even bumped me up in space/bandwidth.

I was happy again. But I started to notice, both in the user forums and in emails sent out, a degrading level of professionalism and a turn towards curt answers. He gets upset or frustrated pretty fast when someone says something he doesn't like, and he's even been known to take his boards offline when it gets really bad. It was sort of amusing, but at the same time, this was the guy running things, so I was concerned.

Then the big crash of Hercules happened around the holidays. Luckily I wasn't a part of that fiasco but I realized a few things:

1. TOS or no TOS, the way it was handled was abominable. Very brief emails sent out, that would often conflict each other ("sorry hard drive is lost, no way to recover data, good luck with your new host, all accounts are cancelled" to "we are flying someone in from florida to look into this" - um, you couldn't hire someone local? so you're saying you can't do anything, then you are saying you paid someone to fly from Florida to New York, and even then all you got were a few email logs?

Oh, and around this time the website went down, then blank, then to Dedicated Servers only, then back to a design that was used early last year. I've never seen anything like it.

So, sure, we were responsible for our own data backups, ok. No problem there. But I think the way it was handled was beyond unprofessional and actually just very suspect. Changing to dedicated servers only just days after this crash? Then sending us all emails saying you'll offer backups for x amount of money a month? Funny, most customers at that point didn't have anything left to backup.

2. If it could happen to Hercules, it could happen to the server I was on. The configs and/or guy that set them up were likely to be the same, so I had to make a decision... do I stay with a host that has given me more space than I ever could get at the price I was paying, or do I rest peacefully at night with a host I can actually trust and rely on?

Well, I emailed him and he replied back saying he's here to stay, no problem with my account or me not being a dedicated client, etc etc. Ok, small vote of confidence there.

But it was the fact that the site kept changing, the phone number never really worked (I wasn't able to get him or a voicemail that sounded like it was for XG since early summer, honestly), and the forums were disabled. It didn't feel right to me.

So I switched to a much more reliable provider. Guess what? Everytime I call their phone, I GET A HUMAN! And their emails to me are detailed, professional, and timely. They have RAID 5, daily backups, and forums that actually STAY OPEN! Novel concepts, I know. ;-)

Well, just a couple days after I completed my transfers, what happens? The other XG server goes down. I couldn't ping it for two days, then I could ping but couldn't get any sites. Finally, on day three, I was able to see my old sites on there, but interestingly enough, my passwords weren't working. All I needed was some webstats I forgot to grab, nothing huge, but I found it funny that my sites were back, yet my passwords weren't taking. I emailed him about it that night but the next day, my sites weren't there any more. I figured why bother trying to see if I could get my stats, and I cancelled my account.

I briefly told him why, and he said that I "jumped the gun" on leaving, lol. This coming from a company with NO WEBSITE. Quite the opposite, I should have left a long time ago.

So that's that. My personal theory is he started out with the best intentions but his business got too big too fast and he wasn't delegating tasks, hiring people, making sure servers were properly maintained, etc., to prevent all the misery you see posted about here. He probably also got fed up with shared/reseller clients and only wanted to deal with dedicated folks....but then he pulls down his dedicated only page and puts up the old site...then puts up a new site with no shared but reseller and dedicated. Oh, and this entire site was done in images! That's right, no text! Oh, and the site had no phone number, support or contact page. But it had plenty of "buy now" buttons. ;-)

So to wrap - kudos if you made it this far - XG started great, but ended terribly, at least for me and everyone else posting here except for "jackie" who magically must have been hosted on some secret XG server no one else was that never went down. Hey Jackie, why not post your great experiences in the XG Forums too? Oh wait....

Good luck everyone. Hope you ex-XG'rs find reliable hosting that treats you right.

Submitted By :

mike

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

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Date Submitted :

January 22nd, 2005

Length of time hosted by this company :

1 - 3 years

Overall Rating :

5 out of 5

Reliability :

5 out of 5

Support :

5 out of 5

Pricing :

5 out of 5

Verdict :

My experience with X-Gravity has been nothing but excellent. Granted there was a disaster with one of their servers but that has nothing to do with their quality of customer service. They have sent numerous emails to let clients know what is going on. From what I read, they cancelled the subscriptions so clients would not be billed due to the downtime. They offered to set up your account again if you wanted.

You guys agreed to the T.O.S which stated that the client is responsible for making their own backups and that they are not responsible for hardware failures. You all agreed to it upon signup and should have known what you were agreeing to.

They are still in business and still doing well. We will continue to host with them.

Computers crash, hardware fails, its all part of life. I think they did a fine job trying to rectify the situation depsite all the rude comments made about them here and in various forums.

I give them an A+, 5/5 score.

Submitted By :

jackie

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

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Date Submitted :

January 16th, 2005

Length of time hosted by this company :

6 - 12 months

Overall Rating :

1 out of 5

Reliability :

2 out of 5

Support :

2 out of 5

Pricing :

3 out of 5

Verdict :

As everybody else has stated, on January 1st the server all our sites sit on died and the responses were poor. We've all got that down. But to add a twist to it...

Near the end of December, I had sent a Private Message through the boards to andy regarding payment. I had attempted to send emails to him through the support panel but recieved no response. My message was regarding an upcoming payment. I pay via money order, and because his support panel was not working, I could not see when my next payment was due.
The response I recieved noted that my payment was not due until late January, and also noted that there were new prices. Now, just a few days before this all happened another customer of X-Gravity had asked publically about the price changes and if they would affect the current customers. Andy stated that no, these prices would not affect current customers, yet in my private message he says they do affect me, somebody who had been there a long time before the person that posted out in the open?
I responded, making him aware of his public post. I continually checked to see if there was a new message, and despite Andy being on the board at the same time, recieved no response. A day or two later the board went offline, and not long after that everybody's sites had disappeared.

A little fishy? I think so!

Please be careful should you choose to host with this company. Better yet, don't host with this company. Stop looking for the best price out there. find yourself somebody reliable, with good reviews from LONGTIME customers. And if any part of you feels uncomfortable with a company keep looking, your gut is probably right.

Submitted By :

Tanya

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

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Date Submitted :

January 10th, 2005

Length of time hosted by this company :

6 - 12 months

Overall Rating :

1 out of 5

Reliability :

1 out of 5

Support :

1 out of 5

Pricing :

5 out of 5

Verdict :

I have been hosting with these guys for at least the last year. Then on new years day, everything just stopped working. Email, web sites... EVERYTHING. Having experienced short outages before, I waited it out for a day before sending an email. When I finally did, No response! I saw that the Hercules server was down and some lame message about a hard drive failure. Two days, three days... still down. More email was sent without a response. I checked their site ofter for details, but nothing changed and certain parts of the site were no longer working. Long story short, these guys suck! I have stuck with them through a couple rough spots in the past, but this is THE worst customer service I have ever experienced from any company. After 1 week, I purchased hosting with GoDaddy so I could get my car clubs web site back online. I still have not heard a word from XG and my mail and web site will probably not just come back onlin. If you like want a good hosting company, do some reseach but don't include X-Gravity in your selection.

Submitted By :

tcerami

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

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Date Submitted :

January 8th, 2005

Length of time hosted by this company :

1 - 6 months

Overall Rating :

3 out of 5

Reliability :

2 out of 5

Support :

4 out of 5

Pricing :

4 out of 5

Verdict :

Ok, if you're reading this you're most likely an x-gravity current customer looking for answers on what the heck is going on, much like I was. I gotta say it up front, I've been completely shafted by hosting companies before making all sorts of big promises and then turning around and saying they never said such things. So when I got that first e-mail about the hard drive situation I was instantly worried. It always starts with an excuse. The datacenter they were using shafted them, and in turn they had to pass the costs on, or a hard drive was installed incorrectly and there were no backups made. It's been a tense couple of days. The following e-mails were not much more comforting. First they were flying somebody in, then they were shipping the drive off for recovery, and then nothing but a billing e-mail coming in letting me know my account was going to be charged on the 12th. Ironic. Ok, so they now had a timeline to get their rears in gear if they were going to get my next payment. Then a ray of hope, I get the email stating if you would like your account reinstated just reply and they would get it taken care of. Not a lot of info supplied, so after I sent my reply I got a response back just asking for my primary domain name to which I promptly replied and actually apologized for not thinking ahead enough to at least include some identifying account info, they're probably up their eyeballs in angry peeps shouting all sorts of colorful phrases. Didn't hear anything back for a while, called it a night, and woke up today to find a reply that my account was live again and gave me the ip and sure enough, I'm back into cpanel. Good. Account type: Mini7. Hmm. Not good. Need to fix that, let's try WHM. No dice. Reply to the message that cpanel was working fine, and I'm hoping this was just a temporary fix to get everybody back up and running with at least their primary domains, and sure enough I get a reply back within 5 minutes stating yes it was a temporary fix, he would have my reseller status back on within 5 minutes, and give it another shot. Well, 5 minutes came and went, logged into WHM again, and this time got right through.

Now I probably will not be recommending anybody else to host with them, their reputation is still a little tattered and it's going to take some time to patch that up, but if you were with them already, rest assured they're still trying like crazy to get everything working. I really don't agree with their phrasing of the e-mails, seems to me they let some 13 year old take over customer relations while they were pulling their hair out trying to get the server workin' again. So hold on. Be nice to them when you talk to the support team. Yeah, you're pissed. But they're definitely not completely giving us the boot. If you haven't received any replies to your e-mails, perhaps you should pull them up out of your sent items folder and see if you would reply to the same e-mail sent to you.

Yeah, this is a book. But this is my experience with x-gravity. My ratings are a bit skewed due to this recent catasrophy, but they really did leave us hanging there for a while. Up until this fiasco communication had always been excellent.

I actually received a half a dozen or so e-mails every time they sent one, mainly because I keep all of my primary contacts for a webhost set to a host on a different server precisely so I don't end up in the predicament several other people have found themselves in. Been burned a few too many times to let that happen again.

I may be able to refer people to them again if the right thing is a done, I still have yet to see an apology in regards to the manner, other than one kind of thrown in as they were telling you to bend over and grab your ankles if you didn't already have your own backups.

Submitted By :

silentbob420

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

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Date Submitted :

January 7th, 2005

Length of time hosted by this company :

6 - 12 months

Overall Rating :

1 out of 5

Reliability :

1 out of 5

Support :

1 out of 5

Pricing :

1 out of 5

Verdict :

Just like the others posting before me, just thought Id chime in to warn people about this company. Everything was great with them for close to a year, and then their server goes down. My problem that the email address that was registered to their site, was from the same domain they were hosting. So when the server went down, I was never able to get any emails they may have sent explaining what had happened.

I went to their site, and wasnt able to log in. I checked their "status" page, and it showed that the server Hercules was down. Since the service had been fine up until this point, I decided to just wait for them to fix it instead of bothering them. By the 4th day, I decided to email them. Still havent gotten a response. And as of last night, if you go to their main page, it is blank. I really hope they go out of business after reading the posts before mine. That is horrible customer service. I advise everyone to stay away from these guys.

Submitted By :

Troy H

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

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Date Submitted :

January 6th, 2005

Length of time hosted by this company :

6 - 12 months

Overall Rating :

1 out of 5

Reliability :

1 out of 5

Support :

1 out of 5

Pricing :

3 out of 5

Verdict :

I was handed a free hosting account by one of the X-Gravity employees. After a few months, the owner of X-Gravity shut down my site as well as the web site of his employee, stating that my free account was an act ov thievery. I decided to give in and start paying for the service, but that was a major mistake. The server went down repeatedly, and finally on December 31, 2004, Hercules went down entirely, and the X-Gravity homepage now states that they are for dedicated hosting only. All of the shared accounts have been wiped, there is no way to get a backup of my data, and it seems I can not get a refund. I emailed X-Gravity and have not heard back, and I also called X-Gravity's phone number but got a restaraunt instead. My experience with them has been hell, and I pity anyone that was once an XG customer.

Submitted By :

ComPro

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

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Date Submitted :

January 5th, 2005

Length of time hosted by this company :

6 - 12 months

Overall Rating :

1 out of 5

Reliability :

3 out of 5

Support :

3 out of 5

Pricing :

3 out of 5

Verdict :

Speed, service, and reliability was great, had them for a year, service down once for only a couple hours, that I know of, and was notified every time when upgrades were made that might jeopardize server uptime. Had a great experience with them, until the new year.

Their servers HDD fried like a mozarrella stick. Went down 12/31/04 and I was billed for Jan 1st, even though the server had crashed, and they let me know that all my data is gone and cancelled my subscription Jan 2nd. The email went something like, "Our sincerest apologies, the hard drive is gone because it was set up the wrong IDE controller and has been irreversibly corrupted. There is nothing we can do, we are cancelling your account, good luck with new hosting. Do not reply to us because your emails will go nowhere." I haven't been offered a refund or a new accound or upgrade, yet they sent me another email saying they are supposedly sending the drive out to a Data Recovery Lab, and that they have offered other clients new accounts on another server. Wow, that's cool. Wheres mine? I don't think this situation is being handled professionally at all, and have since found new hosting. After this, I would really question their integrity.

Submitted By :

Amesfanclub.com

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

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Date Submitted :

January 3rd, 2005

Length of time hosted by this company :

1 - 3 years

Overall Rating :

1 out of 5

Reliability :

1 out of 5

Support :

1 out of 5

Pricing :

4 out of 5

Verdict :

As did other people leaving comments on this website I have lost all my websites at x-gravity.net. Unlike some posters i did not even recieve an email that the hard drive was lost and theres nothing they can do about it...I sent about 10 emails to support to find out what was going on and never recieved a response it was not untill I came to Webhostingjury.com (this website) through a google search and read from other users what happened. This is the 2nd time this has happened to me the last time was at symplexity.net and they did the same thing sent out sorry emails and washed their hands of us. These two times have taught me the lesson that cheap hosting is not allways good and you get what you pay for. Allways make sure the support is the best and that the hosting company is established.
Henry Weismann

Submitted By :

hcamelion

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

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Date Submitted :

January 3rd, 2005

Length of time hosted by this company :

1 - 3 years

Overall Rating :

1 out of 5

Reliability :

2 out of 5

Support :

1 out of 5

Pricing :

5 out of 5

Verdict :

i switched from another host that i was with for about 3 years to x-gravity because they had about a month of bad downtime. 1 month in 3 years. ive been with x-gravity for about a year now or so. ive moved all of my sites to x-gravity. they had about a 91% uptime. the customer support is decent. but shady. someone else wrote about the email they got after the harddrive crashed because THEY CAN NOT SET UP A COMPUTER PROPERLY. yes. i got that same email. and yes.. i lost all the data on all of my sites. as soon as that happened, they turned off the support forums. coincidence? no.

DO NOT GO TO X-GRAVITY.NET

Submitted By :

eric

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

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Date Submitted :

January 2nd, 2005

Length of time hosted by this company :

1 - 6 months

Overall Rating :

1 out of 5

Reliability :

1 out of 5

Support :

1 out of 5

Pricing :

5 out of 5

Verdict :

Due to inept management and maintenance, both my husband and I lost websites hosted on X-Gravity. We received this brush-off e-mail.

"To whom it may concern:

Over the last 15 hours we have been trying to recover data on Hercules(69.90.174.130) from a hard drive gone bad to no avail. Due to the way the server itself was put together, the hard drives were on the wrong IDE controllers causing errors that eventually led to it being rendered useless. We are very sorry that this happened but no files were able to be recovered.

We are not able to get backups as they were on the server as well. We will be cancelling all subscriptions for those that were on hercules. As there is nothing we can do anymore, we wish you the best of luck with your new host.

Please do not reply to this email as it will go nowhere.

XG"

Any website with such shoddy maintenance practices and customer service does not deserve to be in business.

Submitted By :

Georgy

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

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Date Submitted :

June 18th, 2004

Length of time hosted by this company :

Less than 1 month

Overall Rating :

4 out of 5

Reliability :

5 out of 5

Support :

5 out of 5

Pricing :

4 out of 5

Verdict :

Just signed up a few weeks ago, but they seem pretty reliable. Pricing seems a bit high, but overall excellent serivce!

Submitted By :

compwizard

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

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Date Submitted :

November 8th, 2003

Length of time hosted by this company :

1 - 6 months

Overall Rating :

5 out of 5

Reliability :

5 out of 5

Support :

5 out of 5

Pricing :

5 out of 5

Verdict :

Customer Support is great and my website has not had a problem at all.

Submitted By :

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