Complaint Review: Featureprice.com Hosting-Network - Ft Meyers Florida

I signed up for Internet hosting with FeaturePrice in December of 2001. They collect a full year's fees up-front, which seemed acceptable at the time, but after numerous problems with their service over the course of 3 months, I moved all my sites to another hosting service and requested FeaturePrice (FP) to refund my money and cancel my account.

They refused, citing their online 'contract', which contains clauses that are clearly punitive in nature -- and should be unenforceable. Essentially, the only 'reason' for a refund would be a technical issue they could not resolve.

Their method of determining whether or not there is a valid technical problem is unknown and FP is the only one 'qualified' to determine if there is a valid reason for refund. Therefore, it is unlikely you, or anyone else you know, will ever receive a refund from FP, as nearly as I can tell.

In leaving, I cited numerous reasons:

1: When I experienced several days of not being able to email a client using their servers, one of their technicians deleted ALL my mailboxes and inserted one of his own to test the results. I found out about this the next morning, when I could not receive or send mail from one of my commercial sites. Any non-technical client would have been S.O.L. Fortunately, I was able to reconstruct all my mailboxes and only lose whatever mail was 'bounced' overnight. This is completely unacceptable and FP has never responded to this issue.

2: Their Front Page response time is excruciatingly SLOW. I regularly update my sites and the speed of their servers is roughly 20% of what it would be on any other provider's servers. This is completely unacceptable with my volume of updates. They have never addressed this issue. They don't even respond to the topic.

3: In February of 2002 they were hit with a DOS attack which rendered all my websites off-line for more than 36 hours. This amounted to two full business days with no email and non-existent websites. At the time, several other commercial hosting companies were also attacked, but were back online in a matter of 2-4 hours (typical response time for a competent hosting service).

Obviously, FP does not have the expertise in security to host commercial sites. During this time I could not send or receive email on any of my sites -- and customers (and potential customers) attempting to reach my sites received error 404 - page not found messages. This is the 'kiss of death' for an Internet-oriented business such as mine.

I would like to point out that during the DOS attack, Featurprice's site was never down. When queried about this, the representative said their site was on a different server. What does this tell you? It tells me they don't trust their own hosting for their own commercial site.

4: Their mechanism for handling customer service issues is an arcane web-based interface. It is not possible to simply email them with requests. To find out what has happened with an issue, one must log back on to their Customer Service system, attempt to navigate it and search for the results. As soon as they 'reply' to a trouble ticket, it is marked as 'closed' and the client is responsible for 're-opening' the issue if it is not resolved (mine rarely were).

This is unacceptable. In trying to document my correspondence with FP for my credit card company, I found all records of my Incident Tickets erased - not a single transaction remains. In other words, they can cover their tracks when they want to avoid refunds. Since they will not communicate via standard email, the client has no local records to fall back on when documentation is necessary. This is very sleazy.

FP no longer responds to my emails. They refuse to communicate with myself or my other clients who have requested refunds on their contracts ( names withheld ) and have moved their sites to new providers. Both of my clients continue to do battle with FP in an attempt to have their fees returned. Even though FP has re-billed my credit card company (CapitolONE) and received their funds back, two of the IP addresses I paid for in advance are still blocked.

Given my experience with FeaturePrice, I suggest anyone considering cheap web-hosting to avoid them like the plague.

If you have had a negative experience with Featureprice web hosting, I suggest you file a complaint with the FTC (www.ftc.gov) and the Florida Attorney General's Office.

To date, Featureprice has failed to respond to the Florida AG requests to resolve this issue, but if enough people file complaints, perhaps some of us will get our money back.

I have also filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau (bbbonline.com)and FP has yet to respond.

Warren

Plano, Texas
U.S.A.

STOP! ..before you think about using the Better Business Bureau (BBB)... CLICK HERE to see how other consumers were victimized by the BBB's false or misleading information. Don't be fooled! It has been reported, when there are thousands of complaints and other investigations underway by authorities, the BBB has no choice but to finally give an UNsatisfactory rating to a BBB member business that is paying the BBB big membership fees every year. When a business is reported that is NOT a BBB member, BBB files WILL more likely show an UNsatisfactory rating, then reportedly shake down that company to become a member of the BBB. One positive thing about the BBB is, either way, if a business has an unsatisfactory rating with the BBB, you can be sure, the business is bad. But what about all those BBB member businesses that had complaints filed against them? Consumers never get to hear about them. What about the BBB advertising to the public? Is this a false and misleading perception they are giving about consumer confidence when dealing with a business? Click here to understand more of what consumers and business alike are saying about the BBB. You decide. ..Remember. The BBB membership is not earned, its paid for!