And it doesn't seem like I'm the only one who thinks so. Fortunately I moved Brokedown Palace to a completely different service, because as of right now Dot5 is down. Yes, I have started the process of transferring my domain, but that takes 7-10 days to take effect -- with Dot5 down in the meantime that means no redirect from the old blog address (blog.phishvt.com) and no e-mail for me or the few other people that use that server.
I'm not talking a small few-hour outage here, either. Not that it would be acceptable if it was, but as a network professional I know that things do happen. I noticed it at first this morning when I woke up and tried to check my e-mail at 6:00am. "Host Not Found" error. I dismissed it at that point and went back to bed, as I really don't feel too well today and had decided to stay home from work. My first thoughts were that Dot5 had finally cancelled my account, after battling them about it for almost a week now; but then I remembered, web hosting is a subscription, so to speak. Just because I cancel now doesn't mean I loose my service -- only when the subscription runs out will my service be ceased.
After some consideration I decided that I wanted to complain to Dot5 again, not that any complaining had done any good in the past week. Their live support is a joke, always telling me to write e-mail to their support department. Support e-mails are ignored and never answered, and if they were they were form letters that didn't even address the issues. Anyway, I go to Dot5hosting.com to harass their live support a bit and guess what? Dot5's own website is down, too.
I did some poking around online and found that Dot5 has been down since sometime last night. The last e-mail I got was at 9:50pm, so it must have been after that. What I found in my pokings about Dot5 blew my mind. I don't think I was unable to find a single good review.
Below are links to a few of the reviews I found:
Web Hosting Jury - dot5hosting.com review
Web Hosting Ratings - dot5hosting.com review
Host-Dir - dot5hosting.com review
WebHostingTalk Forums - "Another disgruntled Dot5 customer"
There are more, but if you read any of those you'll get a good idea of how things are going. The funny thing is, and I'll back this up too, it seems that many people didn't have any problems with Dot5 until the last six months. It's sad how something can go to shit so quickly.
All and all I'm glad I'm taking my service somewhere else. I just wish I had my e-mail in the meantime.
