The personal writings and photos of Jonathan Smith.

One of my clients uses HostOnce to host their web site. Recently, something happened on the server that causes a username and password dialog box to appear when you pull up my client’s web site in a browser. This is unacceptable. So I go to the HostOnce web site (I’m not even going to give them the favor or linking to them) to try to contact them. I create an account and submit a help desk ticket. They do not have a phone number listed to contact them. A week goes by and they still have not responded.

Yesterday I was testing the site again and found the my client’s site was completely down. So I go back to the HostOnce site and to my surprise their site was down as well. This is just not acceptable. Even if my client does not raise concern with this, I will. My client is a private school and the new school year begins in just two seeks. This is not a good time for their site to be down because returning students and potential new students could be trying to access the site for important information.

I took the initiative and referred my client to GoDaddy for new hosting. I have other clients that use GoDaddy and they have excellent customer service, great pricing, and awesome features on their hosting plans. Plus I had them pay for a domain transfer so that GoDaddy will have control of the domain and to point it to the GoDaddy DNS servers.

Now I just need to wait for HostOnce to respond to the domain transfer request. I hope they do this faster than they respond to the help desk tickets.

I have no problems giving credit to businesses which I deal with that offer great services. But if I’m not happy with dealing with a company, I will let many more people know about the bad experience.

Host once seems to be an Australian company. Their address that is listed on Network Solutions is:

HostOnce
PO Box 8016
Oakleigh East, Vic 3166
Australia