Mydomain sucks!

No, it’s not my domain that sucks, it’s mydomain.com sucks, a web-hosting company.

Last June I chose mydomain.com to move my website to, as they had a special offer for a domain transfer and webhosting. Since my needs for my Website were specific, I gladly accepted the offer.

Since then, the service was good; I did not have to bother them as everything was working ok and I could find my way with installing software on my site.

It was a Sunday near the end of April that when I tried to access my site, I found that I exceeded my monthly quota. Due to this, my Website gets blocked and any access was replaced with a generic “Blocked” page. This page has ads and makes money over my expense (the referenced links gain from the popularity of my Website when GoogleBot visits).

In one respect it is a compliment to have your Website become popular and exceed its bandwidth. However, before buying more bandwidth, I wanted to make sure when the new month starts and the bandwith is set to zero. Surprisingly, this information was not on the notification. By the way, notifications are not sent to you by e-mail; they are stored on the Web hosting administration pages, so if you do not visit that page you aremore than likely to miss it. At this point I noticed something strange; since my website was blocked, there was additional traffic arriving which was strange. No, the block page was a HTTP redirect to another web server so any traffic would be minimal (200 bytes per hit?). Due to my website being blocked, I was unable to connect with FTP to access my files either.

“No, we use a rolling 30-day period to calculate your monthly bandwidth. Therefore, there is no day after which your bandwith is set to zero”, I was told by the customer support. A rolling 30-day period simply means that every morning your bandwidth for the last 30 days is calculated. If it is under the limit, you get access today, else you are blocked. “So, this means that my 30-day bandwidth total will be smaller tomorrow and I may get access?”, I recounted. “No, it is actually possible that the bandwidth may increase and you will still be blocked”, he explained. “Can you tell me the daily bandwidth consumption for the last few days?”, I insisted. “No, we do not keep daily bandwidth consumption.”, he fired back. I don’t want to be pushy here, as a web hosting company you need to keep daily bandwidth consumption if you want to use the rolling 30-day period system; you need to know the bandwidth of the oldest day so that you take it off when a new day gets completed.
The following days had this pattern; I would see in the administrative pages of mydomain that the “Bandwidth Used this month” was increasing steadily. I would call the customer support and try to explain that this rolling 30-day period is not working. And no, I do not want to upgrade my bandwidth because something is wrong with your systems.

It is quite funny how ridiculous the situation became. The customer support would not accept that there is a problem with their system. They tried to be polite and professional but it did not work well. I got the “Oh, it’s you again” attitude and at some point I heard laughter in the background. Imagine this family conversation at bedtime, “Darling, how was job today?” “We had this crazy customer telling us we don’t know how to do our job”.

The customer support telephone number is 360-253-2210 which is in Vancouver, WA (US). And it was not outsourced to another country. The customer support explained that the web hosting business is in the same building as well.
Eventually they realised that I might have a point and they promised to investigate. They would send an e-mail to me about it. The next day comes and there was no e-mail (I never received an e-mail). However, my website was up and running. The administrative pages showed that I was given some extra bandwidth. On the other hand, the 30-day bandwidth value never decreased but kept increasing steadily. The access to my website was really good for me as I managed to back up every single bit of my files (and mysql database!). In addition, I grabbed a copy of the log files (the log files of the last 30 days, each day as an individual file).
I enjoyed the extra bandwidth bonanza for a while and when I was blocked again, I got back on the phone. “Bandwidth keeps increasing very quickly, and btw, I wrote a script that parses the log files and shows a substantial discrepancy between MY values and YOUR values”, I started. “Sir, you need to upgrade your bandwidth or change hosting plan” he repeated. Somehow I was not suggested this time to wait for my bandwidth to drop.

Eventually I managed to get them to admit that the system that checks the bandwidth is faulty,

“There does seem to be an issue with the bandwidth meter that is being looked into. Unfortuantely we do not have an eta (sic) as to when it will be fixed. We can go ahead and give you another 100mb of disk (sic) space at no charge, or you are more then welcome to upgrade to oen (sic) of our new hosting packages. Please let us know what you would like us to do. Thank you.”

As a customer I am not happy with this resolution. My monthly bandwidth is below the hosting plan limit so I should get full service. However, MyDomain does not acknowledge that.

I was quite happy to get the initial offer for a domain name and web hosting bundle last year. I would not mind to keep my webhosting there for the next year. However, this attitude is unacceptable.
We are in May now and I have already moved to a new webhosting company. This is a small company and there is a person behind it that you can contact and have a conversation. The Web hosting features are much more advanced and I have full access to all the features. I’ll write about this in a few weeks (if I encountered a problem or all are well). If you are on the technical side, you can find which company it is.

I just checked the mydomain bandwidth quota. Obviously it is not increasing anymore (I moved away from them) but it did not drop a tiny bit.
The customer support number 360-253-2210 corresponds to several companies, namely Dotster, Hostlane, 000domains, SignatureDomains, and NameZero, to name a few. That is, it looks that all these companies are the same with different fronts so that they capture more customers. Therefore, be prepared when calling their customer support number.

Permanent link to this article: https://blog.simos.info/mydomain-sucks/

16 comments

Skip to comment form

  1. Simos, I also had problems with a web hosting company some years ago. A cheap one. I wasn’t really running any serious web site, it was just for fun.

    The worst thing in my case was that it had been only 2-3 months sicne I had renewed my yearly subscription and one day I discovered that the company was gone. Actually, it did not happen in one day. I had problems accessing my web site for over a week, but the company’s one was working, so I had thought they might be upgrading or something. Well, soon their web site went down too, their email or phone did not work etc.

    After one year or two (do not really know), they re-opened the company! With the same domain! I won’t disclose it though because I do not know if the new company is being run by the same 2 guys. And I do not need to know this info either… 🙂

    Many of these companies totally suck. I hope things are better with your new host. 🙂

  2. Thanks Raoul.

    I believe that making your grievances known and justifying them is the only course of action. Otherwise they will continue with the same practices.

  3. You are right. This is exactly what I believe too. But, the situation I described above happened about 3 years ago or maybe more, so I think it’s not good to start talking about it again now. Perhaps they are better organized right now or maybe there are other persons involved.

    Anyway…

  4. For MyDomain customers: A script that calculates your real monthly bandwidth is available on request. Contact me through the Shoutbox or by e-mail (http://simos.info/).

  5. This is nothing new, Mydomain has been spiraling downhill over the last several years that Ive had domains hosted by them. I have been moving my business accounts away from them, but I stupidly kept about 30 hobby sites with MD (didn’t have time to move them while running my business). I finally have time, and am working on geting things out of mydomain.com .

    They’ve been promising fixes for years, yet nothing is improving. You can’t get a tech support person who knows anything on the phone or email, they’ve been blacklisted so many times it’s crazy, have billing problems that their “automation team” can’t fix, constant email latency issues, DNS problems on a routing basis, etc, etc.

    Not worth the small savings you get when registering a domain with them, as you’ll regularly burn up whatever you save in lost traffic and downtime.

    Run, don’t walk, away from mydomain.com as fast as you can.

  6. Hello,

    I am sorry to hear your troubles, however, having some kind of insider knowledge (I run a domaining blog AND own a hosting company), I can say you one thing: NEVER EVER buy domain from hosting companies and hosting from registrars! Usually this leads to quite big trouble. Your case wasn’t the worst I’ve heard…

    Good luck!

    Stan

  7. Hi Stan,
    Even for the registrar part of work, I feel the mydomain.com lacks quite a bit.
    When I was moving my domain away from “mydomain.com”, I did the process as required (autherisation code, etc). However, “mydomain.com” were not releasing the domain so that the new registrar takes hold of it. I had to call them up and tell them to release the domain.

    My understanding is that there is a final step for the domain transaction, where the old registrar has to accept the transfer. If the old registrar does not do something, there is a 5-7 day expiration if no explicit release happens. As this task makes no money, it appears to be left to the expiration process. If your Website is live (it’s not domain parking), this issue affects you.

  8. Hello Simos (aka u4eahost),

    Perhaps you should tell people the WHOLE story? It was basically not understanding how the things are working from your side that have lead to all this. There are 2 threads at webhostingtalk which clearly illustrate this:

    http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=417828
    http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=511599

    Good luck.

    Stan

    • Richard Bergis on June 7, 2006 at 06:09
    • Reply

    I think maybe you should actually invest in some real hosting, rather than expecting the occasional “special” to start a website.

    BTW, MyDomain has some new hosting offerings, and if you run out of bandwidth on the new plans, you’re about due for a dedicated server.

  9. Stan: Indeed, people can see the full discussion at the URLs you provide.

    Richard: My issue with MyDomain is their customer support. They are so arrogant to admit an issue that requires basic mathematics to figure out; when they admit the problem they blatantly say they’ll do nothing about it. I am not bothered about the money, it’s their attitude that stinks. It’s not one only person that I talked with; they were several over the course of about 10 days.

    • Ashley on September 15, 2006 at 16:48
    • Reply

    Yeah this hosting place is hopless
    I just did a google search to see how many bad reviews and good reviews they have seems only bad lol I should of done this befor my experence please dont sign up to mydomain.com aka doteasy.com (there the same)
    Please dont waste your time
    LOL

  10. I just typed in MyDomain sucks… and I see you are in agreement with my statement. I too transfered a website about a year ago and I had numerous unauthorized charges to my credit card… and basically got no website development for that $$$- also they lure customer in with the promise of bring up website fast— but they forgot the $499.00 per hour charges—
    The database is seldom correct and just wait until you try to transfer.
    No speediness there.
    No negative (on the web) about this company when I switched!!!

    • C-Sharp on October 29, 2007 at 23:56
    • Reply

    My friend was with Mydomain.com and she said they sucked big time. I highly recommend you avoid this awful site. The support is horrible and customer service is non-existent.

    This site is a scam, fake, crap, garbage, waste of time and waste of money.

    • Pissed Off on February 13, 2008 at 18:32
    • Reply

    I would also like to say I am in agreement with all of this. I have been a webmaster for several years and I have to say that mydomain.com is by far the worst host I have ever seen. I hope they eventually get sued and become non-existent.

    They are scam artists and have no knowledge of running a server properly. Steer clear of this one unless you like being burnt.

  11. I bought a MyDomain monthly hosting plan a little over 2 months ago to try it out. I got my WordPress install running without problems and I haven’t had any downtime. For the price, MyDomain hosting is pretty sweet. Plus the domains are cheap!

    Last year I tried 1and1 hosting and their Support sucked bigtime. I also have a GoDaddy account. Their hosting is pretty mediocre…well, actually, GoDaddy sucks!

    MyDomain is my host now until they screw up.

    • John Smith on July 5, 2009 at 23:51
    • Reply

    Yes mydomain.com sucks…. They say I’ve exceeded my bandwidth, okay but their site will not allow me to purchase more, nor will it allow me to change hosting packages.

    I was billed 3 days ago for the next month, but my site is still not restored.

    Everytime I email their tech support with DETAILS, they give some stock answer about how my site has exceeded it’s bandwith…

    Which is impossible of course since my site has been down for the 3 days since they billed me for another month.

Leave a Reply to SusanCancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.