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Date Submitted :
January 13th, 2009
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 :
1 out of 5
Verdict :
I have never used there services. I never hosted a Website with this company or any other and all of a sudden I get a bill from Escallate the debt collector for charges from CI Host. They said I have a contract with CI host. I never signed a contract. When I requested evidence they failed to provide me the copy of the contract, or the credit card number that I 'supposedly' signed up with. I believe it is a big fraud, where they get information about people and extact money.
I bought a dedicated server with cihost and this was the worst decision I made for my business because now they are causing me to loose clients because of the poor service and technology they have.
Their control panel is not user friendly, their servers are not reliable, their billing department sucks and they don't give you your money back for client losses because of their downtime. They don't give you your money back for downtimes either.
Stay away. Stay far, far away. CI Host is impossible to get in contact with -- you'll be waiting on the line for tech support for HOURS. Don't try to use their callback feature -- they never will! Emailing is futile.
This is a horrid business. I have had nothing but problems. Take a look at all of the other reviews..... STAY FAR AWAY!!!!!
They will OK at the beginning. Their service is getting worse and worse. For example: Once I found out that my site was down and kept calling and calling, because my account was gone I can not sent a ticket. And they did not apologize for the down time, but charge me as new customer. How odd is that !! One more example: about two years ago. One of my client change their domain name, so I ask to switch it. Is that a simple task? But my account is still not set-up correctly.
The ski club had been with CI Host for a number of years.
We had no problems with them until we started upgrading the site. We needed much better eMail list support than they had available and javascript support for photo gallery's.
Their tech support staff was clueless regarding javascript support.
They do have policy of escalating support tickets to "the president" after 2nd level support fails to resolve the problem. The same person is probably doing 3rd level support. He was equally clueless.
This company is incompetent and ran by crooks!!! Stay away!!! This company is all hype and false advertising to get you to sign up. Once they get you, watch out because your nightmare begins!!! A year after we canceled their very poor hosting service, we got a mail from a collection agency,Fidelity Credit Management, about an unpaid balance on our account. CI Host did nothing to settle or check their records before turning us in to the collection agency. Our online account info shows a balance of 0. Yet their billing dept. insist on us paying a balance. All attempts to settle with CI Host billing dept. were met with hostility. Emails were not return. This is the worst experience we ever had with any hosting company. Others have similar experience. Read more on:
In the past year, I have called CIHOST perhaps 10 times because my site has been down, 4 of those in the last 6 weeks. On all 4 occasions, I identified that the site was down, not CIHOST. This begs the question: How many times has the site been down and I did not notice?
It is hosted in Los Angeles on a Linux server. It usually takes a few minutes to get thru on the phone, and a few minutes after that the site is back up. In addition, I have noticed very slow service at times.
Though I am able to get thru on the phone, their technical support staff is combative, under duress, sarcastic, have an excuse for everything, have obviously been trained to be evasive, change the subject, etc. It is clear the staff has been trained to shovel BS… they are combative and well practiced. It is almost like talking to a used car salesman.
I have approximately 9 websites and 3 hosting companies. I have never experienced this type of problems with any other hosting company, from the very small to the very large. Unfortunately my primary url is hosted with CIHOST, and that will change as soon as I find the time to move to another company.
I am reluctant to name my url… for fear of retribution from this terrible host and wish I personally read online reviews prior to allowing my former IT person moving our main site to this bad company.
More Below:
I was instructed by CIHOST technical support to send an email to customerservice@hostingsupport.com which I did. Below is the email and response:
I have called CIHOST 4 times in the last 4 to 6 weeks because my site has been down. On all 4 occasions, I identified that the site was down, not CIHOST. This begs the question: How many times has the site been down and I did not notice?
I look forward to a reply.
Your ticket has not been accepted into the system. You are required to register at the following URL to submit any issues via Email: https://www.hostingsupport.com/
Once registered, you will be able to submit any issues directly by sending us Email. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused.
They have taken my site(s) down with no prior notice. Once, I had a site down for 2 weeks; they admitted to DELETING MY CONTENT. This was due to a billing error on their side. They also wanted to charge me for retrieving my data from backup!
They've double-billed me for an entire year's server costs.
I've received invalid collection notices (even filed a complaint with the FCC and Better Business Bureau).
Most recently, one of my credit cards was stolen, so I called them to give a new number. Not only could they NOT find my account, but they ended up removing the domain I was hosting from their servers! Luckily, due to past experience, I was only down for a day because I had moved the entire website application to a "real" host.
DO NOT USE CI HOST. CHECK OUT THEIR HISTORY AT BBBOnline.com before you use them!!!!! They are consistently horrible at hosting and billing!!!
More than 4 years ago I helped a small company set up a website using CI Host as the web hosting provider. CI Host's service was extremely poor - lots of downtime and horrible customer service. Before the contract was due for renewal, I moved the website to another hosting provider and canceled the account via phone.
After not hearing from CI Host in 4 years, on May 25th 2007, I received a debt collection notice claiming I owed CI Host over $525. Close to $400.00 of this was for one year of hosting, and over $125.00 was accrued interest. This supposed year of hosting never occurred - I never received any service for the year of hosting they are claiming I owe them for.
Do not use CI HOST!! Their service and support are horrible, and then they try to come after you years later for non-existent debt.
I hosted several websites with Cihost from 2002-2005. All of them were on the low cost shared server linux plans. Their uptime was spotty, with some very large outages, one I recall over the winter holidays for 3 days straight.
CIHOST is terrible when it comes to customer service. Below is what I experienced as their client.
They hired an employee in 2005 who ended up stealing my credit card on file, buying thousands of dollars of computer equipment online, and shipping it to a border town just north of Mexico. When I found this out, I confronted CIHOST who insisted their systems are secure and it "could not have happened". When I discovered the actual name of the employee (who stupidly bought a plane ticket on my credit card), I confronted CIHOST again, at which point a VP called me back and expressed her regrets.
This would have been a fine resolution for me as they apologized and I got my money back, except recently in May 2007 I received a credit collections notice from Fidelity saying I owe them for a portion of the charges this employee of CIHOST had stolen. When I called CIHOST (this week) they refused to talk to me in any way on this issue, insisting I only talk to the credit collections agency. The credit agency will look over the police reports I have on file, but are under no obligation apparently to not try to collect on this.
This issue is still being resolved. Needless to say, I would not recommend them to anyone.
This was the worst co-locator I can imagine. I've gone down a total of 36 hours in one month, and am down at least 5 hours per month. They promise level three techs always on site, but once they didn't have a tech there for seven days because everyone quit. Of course, that's when my server went down, and there was no one to hear me scream....
We have 2 dedicated servers at COHOST, really feeling bad for signing up with this company. there customer service is horrible. we are going through problems
the bandwidth we are getting for deicated server is much slower than a dsl connection. always hangs when a users try's to work with an application onserver. always gets stalled. they know about the problems at there bedford datacenter, received an email from Michael calmes( chief network architect), saying will be fixed same day end of business. that was 2 weeks ago still we do have problems, tried to send emails no response.
now they say we are on contract and we tried to lookup on the contract any where have they mentioned about the bandwidth's guaranteed, they have'nt mentioned that means we have to live up with what ever we get. Damn.
our servers are extremely good intel dual xeon 32. ghz with raid 140 GB. 2 numbers and now e feel terrible. it is really bad.
I please insist everyone if you decide to go with this company make sure to have them write all the details on contract.
please do not signup with this company.
you can email me in case you need any more info to prove we do have servers.
This company has the worst customer service ever. Clueless staff, no return calls. They make promises that they don't and refuse to keep even though records of the arrangement are in your account. Pricing is outrageous - uptime is pitiful. AVOID AT ALL COSTS
These people ARE MORONS!!!
They use Vonage for thier phone system which means most time you will be disconnected or not even able to call in. Their staff acts like they are in a prison. Good luck if you get a hold of someone when something important needs to be handled. They have "scheduled" maintenace ALL the time with less then 24 hour notice. Most times the staff will hangup on you or "trasfer" you then you get hung up on.
For personal use, you're safe. For business go ahead and file for bankruptcy now.
I can't BELIEVE they have stayed in business this long.
I have read some of the reviews here and I totally agree. Epinions.com also has some detailed reviews that are about 90% negative. I would have never decided on C I Host if I had read these reviews. I never made it past 5 days in the trial period. My problems started when I was using their online chat with their sales person Jason Brice. After a slow response from him which I understand happens with online chat, he asked me to hold on. I waited about 15 minutes. I finally go sick of waiting so I called. They must be a smaller company then they state since Mr. Brice answered the phone. I identified myself and he stated that he lost the connection. To my surprise, I would think any good salesman would at least contact me via email stating they lost the connection since he had my email address. All was forgiven when he did help me out and get me setup but then the problems started.
After receiving my test account, and I am very glad I setup a test account instead of moving my domain over since I work of a large government organization, I found out I received the wrong “template email” as they stated. After another hour on the online chat I found out that the company is full of incompetence. I tried to attach my chat session but the system would not allow it. But I was passed around between a windows tech to a UNIX tech then back to a windows tech. They would point me to documentation that was wrong on the website. I guess I should have know something was wrong when even their sales material has wrong data like the version of ASP they are using. They may be certified with SAS 70 type II but even with that certification, the support is not worth the time.
Overall, after 3 requests for callbacks, One Mr. Brice requested, one I used their call back feature on the website and the last was an actual voice mail with their accounting department. I never received one back. Even canceling the account is a pain. I emailed Jason Brice again for a call back, I received a read receipt and over a week later I did not hear a word. Again, poor customer service. I am surprised a company that states “Bigger Network, Better Service” is still in business.
I could go on and on but I just wanted to put my 2 cents in as to why not to go with this company for web hosting.
My webmaster recommended this company to me 3 yrs ago. The first year was great, but after that it has been a deluge of problems. Right now I am holding for tech support (33 minutes already and it is 3:46 am) for the 2nd time in the last days because my email is not working AGAIN. I have had constant email problems. When I tried to get some kind of credit, all I got was the runaround. The tech guys used to be great, now it is a crap shoot. The only thing about them is that their tech support does speak english. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to deal with so many issues, so my rec. would be to STAY AWAY.
I am looking for somewhere new- any suggestions? joe@joesgrille.com
CI Host used to be a great company. I referred all my customers to CI Host.
Now it's a different story. I've had 4 outages just this year. Two of the outages were 72+ hours.
Their tech support is young, rude, inexperienced. Their admins are worthless. Usually if there is a problem I have to tell them how to fix it. They're too busy playing xbox games to help customers.
They completely lost all of the data on an 80 gig partition, and then told me that I should have purchased their backup service (which I was told was part of my contract).
Recently I discovered that the hardware they hosted me on is not the hardware that I contracted for.
All in all, I have experienced around 420 hours of downtime this year.
Over the past year I have been very dissapointed with CIHOST. As a reseller, many of my clients have been complaining that they are not getting their mail, or if they do it takes anywhere from 2-24 hours before getting it.
I have called tech support, and all I ever get is "ITS NOT US, ITS THE ISP". When I explain that I have 5 different clients all screaming at me about the same problem and they are have different ISP, I ask point out the only common denominator is CIHOST. Again all they say is "ITS NOT US". I have lost 4 cleints so far and now forced to consider changing, which having over 30 clients is a NIGHTMARE to think about.
Phone Tech Support used to be less than 5 minute wait, but this past 6 months I have waited on average 30+ minutes.
I had to call CI Host tech support all the time because I couldn't get my email to this account, as well as to another account I had with CI Host. Emails would arrive hours or days late, or not at all.
I would get various excuses for the email delays/failures, but the most common is that the queue is full because of too much traffic on the server. This has happened on three different servers, over and over again.
In my opinion, they are overfilling their shared servers, resulting in traffic overloads.
The hold time for their tech support is pretty long, too. Sometimes 15 minutes or more. Which is unpleasant when you have to call them several times a month just to get your email.
Their technicians were always friendly and helpful, but not able to solve my problems.
This company was good years ago, but they have totally fallen apart in the last 6-12 months.
The only phone that will ever be answered is sales. Tech support is an absolute nightmare! The phone rings and rings; no answer, even on the emergency line. Tickets opened on their automated ticketmonster are often closed without a resolution or return contact. The only way we have found to obtain any type of response is to write direct e-mails to the CEO. Customer service is not in their vocabulary. We had a recent service outage that was bad. The electrical infrastructure in the CI Host Bedford TX site was damaged and our server was offline for an extended period of time. When it was brought back online, it randomly crashed. Only thru CEO intervention and a painful week was tech support really working the problem. I cannot truly think of a single postive attribute.
We have been hosting with this company over 3 years. They have been getting worse and worse. Forget technical support - forget opening tickets - billing is a nightmare. You are on hold forever for everything except sales. That's not the worst though.
We hired a security company to audit our website to be compliant with credit card guidelines. CIHOST didn't pass. We told them what needs to be done and sent them reports from the security company. No action was taken. Finally we sent an email (in our fury) requesting action or we would need to talk to credit card companies about this. They immediately terminated our account without notice - they hung up on us when we called time after time saying "you threatened us and there is nothing to talk about". They wouldn't even listen.
We are very glad it happened - we finally moved and our new hosting company is far better.
I've used CI Host since 1999 and have had 10-15 websites on their shared Unix servers at any given time and must say their hosting and reseller plans seem quite the bang for the buck, but CI's customer service is sorely lacking to say the least.
The Sales department does not respond to email; at least not to the sort of routine questions you may have that the tech support department can't answer (so tech support passes you -- and the buck -- to the Sales team who doesn't reply).
Tech support (via email) is reasonably fast to respond these days, but it's clear they don't take the time to read and investigate trouble tickets. After myriad server glitches throughout the years with various CI-hosted websites, I've learned that their stock response is "your site seems to be working now." It's only until a trouble ticket is re-opened again and again that tech support might get around to addressing the issue; and when they finally do, there is indeed a problem with the server in question.
The Billing department, which must consist of only one or two people, doesn't respond to email.
That CI hasn't been on the receiving end of a class-action lawsuit for their billing practices is amazing. Every few months or so, they'll assess a "card declined" fee of $1; this has happened many, many times to me and I finally got them to reluctantly admit a couple of years ago that they've got a billing problem in their system. Still, I have to do battle with their unresponsive billing department quite often to get those charges reversed. One has to wonder how many of their customers just don't mess with getting those $1 charges reversed, it's a huge waste of valuable time. And this is not just happening with my company credit card; I know of an ad agency who has the same billing issues with CI and they are in the process of transferring all their resold hosting accounts away from CI. I'm about to do the same and I'm kicking myself for sticking with them as long as I have.
And don't just take my word for it; go to the BBB site and find the report on CI Host in Bedford, TX.
I've been using CI Host for 6 years, but the mounting problems have now caused me to move to another service. CI Host's billing department is completely incompetent, and their technical support staff would rather not be bothered by you. Overall, a terrible hosting service -- avoid at all costs.
Site needed to be restored from backup, which was included in our hosting plan. The backup failed, and after 2 months, they refused to give us any refunds or anything. The servers were slow too.
I've stuck around with CIHost for far too long not wanting the hassle of a switchover. But it's time to go. The final straw was them moving me to a different server without telling me. Once the problems started they clued me in. Each problem ticket is not done or checked thoroughly. Mail redirects break frequently causing loss of email. Webmail is horrible. Very limited on features for the price. Only good thing is there was never a catastrophic failure they didn't recover from.
This host has great customer service (via phone). Briefly they used offshore service (India I believe), but they gave up on that after too many people complained. The good thing is, they learned their lesson. They have always rapidly solved problems and are not banned by any search engines that I know of.
We should have known this company was a loser when our dedicated server had to be rebuilt the second month after we subscribed. We should have cut our loses right then and there and booted them.
We stayed on another year until during a service call the technician completely deleted our whole site. And then tried to blame it on me while I was on hold, not even connected to a computer! No sorry or anything.
Their horrible track record can be seen by the myriad of complaints, the poor reviews, and hundreds of negative comments on the BBB. Personally the lost our entire website of the company, took over 2 weeks to get back up. In that time we recreated and launched off our own servers. Pathetic.
I've been with CI Host for a year and just signed up for a second year. We have a really incredible price for a dedicated FreeBSD server ($79/mo) with >1GB/month of transfer. I can regularly get 1MB/s transfers from my dedicated server to other well connected systems.
In the 13 months I've been with them, I've never had a significant server outage (I had one incident what had downtime of about an hour). My server had been up for about 300 days when it was shutdown to add a second drive.
My one issue with them was that they originally promised us backups, but they never happened. This came about because the original salesman mixed up plans and promised us something that wasn't supposed to come with the server. CI Host would not set us up free backup, BUT they did install a second, identically sized disk drive, for which I was able to do my own backups to. I prefer this over off-system backup anyway, since I can manage the resource in any way I wish. I am most worried about the loss of a single disk causing downtime and lost data, and now I know that won't happen.
I just went on a walk-thru of this hosting company, and was I ever shocked. They are located in Bedford, Texas, just north of Dallas. They occupy a 10 to 15 year old 3-story building except for one half of one floor where a bank resides.
When I walked in, I was greeted with shag (yes, SHAG) carpet and chrome in their lobby... seemed very odd for a tech company. When they escorted me into their "facility", I was stunned to see garbage on the floor, computer parts everywhere, fans (yes, fans) as cooling equipment, and some of the worst equipment I've every seen.
Power tools were strewn everywhere and the place was just filthy. it's clear they have no air filtration in the facility and they had no colocation facilities, which they knew I was coming up to see.
In general, I felt like I had just visited a boiler room (not the basement of a building, but rather the shady mobile stock pump-and-dumps you find in New York) and had a scum all over me.. NOT a good feeling at all.
These guys are the least professional hosting facility I've ever seen... Don't walk, RUN far and fast from these guys.
CIHost falsely accused us of being a spammer and pulled the plug on our colo server. When faced with convincing evidence that we were not behind the spam, they ignored the evidence and stuck to their decision. They did not give us advance notice of the decision. CIHost refused all requests to take actions that would minimize the damage to our business of their action - actions that would not have exposed them to any risk.
CIHost accused us of being a spammer, because spammers included a link to an inactive domain hosted on our colo server at CIHost.
CIHost sent us a warning email stating that it appeared like spam was coming from our site. Unfortunately we could't tell that the email came from CIHost because CIHost was mentioned nowhere in the email. The email came from a generic address like "hostingsupport.com". We had no idea it came from CIHOst. The email also didn't say that our server was at risk of being pulled.
We responded to the email saying the spammers were spoofing our address, and received a reply that it looked like the problem had been taken care of. So we thought no more about it.
Then several days later, the plug on our server was pulled without notice.
When we called support to ask why our server was dead, it took them a while to figure it out themselves. We asked them for an example of the problem spam that they said came from the server. After repeated promises from several people at CIHost over many days to send us examples of the spam, we have never received a single copy of the problem spam from CIHost.
We later learned that spammers had included several links to random domains in their spams, usually in very tiny or disguised fonts, to throw off Anti-spam filters. The spams included links to our domains, as well as to the San Diego YMCA and other random sites.
CIHost concluded from this that we were partners with the spammers, even though it was obvious that our web sites had no relation to the spam, since it was just a generic parked page and you couldn't buy the advertised vitamin supplement from our site. The link to the true spam site was clearly seen in the spam email, and it was also clear that some random links to unrelated domains had been tacked on to the spam.
But CIHost didn't care and didn't listen. They were arbitrary and rigid with no concern for the damage to our business, who was their paying customer. We were caught in the crossfire from the Spam battles, killed not by the spammers but by "friendly fire" from our own hosting company.
They pulled the plug on our legitimate Internet business which provides the livelihood for our employees. They also pulled the plug on our hosting customers including local retailers, civic associations and non-profits.
When we asked them to plug in our server but with the web service and the email service turned off, just so that we can pull a current backup of our files, they wouldn't even let us plug the server back in even though it would have been no risk to them and would have greatly lessened the damage to our business. This was after we gave them all the evidence that we weren't behind the spam, so they should have at least had some doubts that perhaps they were pulling the plug on a legitimate business. They still wouldn't take a simple step to mitigate the damage to what they now probably realized was likely an innocent business.
To add insult to injury, several months later we received a "Happy Anniversary" email from them and shortly thereafter a bill for another year of hosting.
After pulling the plug on our service, CIHost hadn't bothered to cancel our account, so now we were billed for another year of service.
We're trying to get a refund now, but they're making us jump through hoops and are telling us it might be a problem since we didn't fax them a cancellation notice 30 days before our annual term expired.
CIHost offers low prices. Their strategy seems to be quantity not quality. They don't care about treating their customers well or doing right by them, or losing customers, because they know new customers will show up to replace them attracted by the low rates.
*Beware* Horrific network conditions. Prepay a year and get locked into connectivity problems. Do yourself a favor. Go read reviews instead of making the mistake we did. We have lost everything because of C I Host.
So far, I have paid them around $5000 for a dedicated server and to setup our e-mail. Through three rebuilds, we still have very sketchy e-mail reliability, have to reboot continuously, and have been down for weeks at time. Yesterday, I just found out that they blew away all of our e-mail during the last rebuild. Their response: "Dedicated servers are not backed up by default, so we have nothing to restore, to get your dedicated server backed up please contact sales"
CI Host has been very reliable and responsive with support. I only had one billing issue early on and they resolved it quickly. Its been smooth sailing from there. They have nice web interface and tools to take care of your site. Recommended.
