KaySquirrel’s Blog Thingy

Spymac Hosting Loses Yet Another Client!

Here’a a very disppointing bit of information about Spymac website hosting. A former customer of Spymac’s paid webhosting service decided to document the many difficulties they encountered while dealing with with Spymac at http://classic.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=184083&curr=0

The 5 page thread had been archived in PDF format here: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5

The way Spymac “technical support” responds to a paying customer’s questions is appalling. What kind of company treats their clients that way?!

I posted the below in the Hosting support forum. Most links in the post point to other threads in the hosting forum. If you already are a hosting customer and have access, the links will work. If not, you’ll just have to believe me that I’m not making up things. It’s just FYI, make of it whatever you want.

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I have suffered through a whole year of incompetence now, which unfortunately I had paid in advance for. I am more than happy to leave Spymac behind and never look back.

Please unlock my domain [removed] for domain and hosting transfer to another provider immediately.

Throughout the year, Spymac has provided an unparalleled service level - no other company I’ve dealt with has ever performed so badly. Continued unannounced hosting outages, an absolutely inadequate or rather non-existent communication policy, server setup problems, lost access stats, email delivery problems both incoming and outgoing, “accidentially” deleted user emails, a control panel and webmail interface whose horrible design is only rivaled by the number of broken promises for improvement, topped off by false advertisement about server redundancy and “virtually no down time”… The list goes on and on.

Certainly, the most important feature for any hosting provider is to actually provide the hosting. Here’s what I find in the recent few pages of the support forum:
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=183655
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=183547
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=182588
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=177076
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=169690
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=169321
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=167639
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=160514
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=154927
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=150173
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=150112
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=148768
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=146524
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=144772
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=143005
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=136956
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=137227
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=136974
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=133599
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=130859
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=130391
Keep in mind these are by far not all failures; only those where someone bothered posting here.

In it’s TOS, Spymac is boasting a 99.5% uptime guarantee. Sounds quite impressive, right? When you do the math though, this translates to over 7 minutes downtime every single day. Can you imagine the Apple website being down 7 minutes every day? Or, for that matter, Spymac’s own website? Suddenly 99.5% aren’t all that great anymore.

To make matters worse, Spymac doesn’t even keep it’s own “guaranteed” service level, not even by their own calculation!
http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=146691&c=7#post3255144

All these outages may not matter much if you’re running a personal homepage that only you and your grandma visit once a week. Some of us here, however, depend on a reliable website for a living. How many of our customers have been lost due to dead websites? Usually, some sort of maintenance is offered as an excuse for downtime. http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=148768 http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=160514 How is this possible with “Redundancy is built into Spymac’s server cluster, allowing for fast, reliable services with virtually no down time.”? For me, “redundancy” means that if one server fails or is being worked on, another one will keep the service up and running. But apparently, the word has a different meaning in Germany where Spymac’s servers are located. http://www.spymac.com/hosting/

And if you do have to take your customers websites down, the very least I expect is sufficient advance notice per email! This http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=148768 is completely unacceptable. Or do you expect me to to have nothing else to do but to check the Spymac Hosting Support Forum every half hour to see if perhaps a notice for the next 30 minutes has been posted??

I also wonder how often support staff actually visits the support forum. SOMETIMES replies are posted quickly. But more often than not, replies need days and several reminders and “bumps” from unhappy customers; often there’s simply no reply at all. I get the impression, whenever it gets inconvenient, staff first tries to see if the issue just goes away by itself. And often it does. But not because the customer has been satisfied but because s/he has given up.

Spymac’s incompetence goes so far that they aren’t even able to set up an IMAP server correctly and rather blame everything on the client software. http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=179506 Nice excuse, except that the client software is the most wide-spread on Macs (Spymac IS a Mac site, isn’t it?) - Apple’s own Mail. Mail has undergone several major updates since the setup problem was first reported over a year ago, yet the problem remains. Mail works flawlessly with other IMAP servers. Mail even works fine with Spymac’s own Wheel IMAP accounts. No issues of IMAP incompatibility are reported on Apple’s support forum. But sure, for Spymac Hosting, it’s all Mail’s fault. Yeah right.

The permanent problems with the access stats have been widely reported here. I could do the same as above and compile a list with complaint threads, but I’ll save myself the hassle. I’m sure everyone here, who works with stats, knows.

The same goes for email traffic - an area that’s especially important to me. Spymac gets blacklisted by anti-spam companies, the servers can’t handle the load http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?ppp=10&c=4&threadid=96799#post1378166
mail is delayed by days and then arrives all at once, sent mail seems to go out but nerver reaches the recipient. There are several threads about email around here as well.

One of the worst things that Spymac ever did to me though was to erase all my most important mails from the IMAP server - those I had filed in their own folders. http://www.spymac.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=164107 Obviously, the moment I went online my Mac synched with the server as is normal with IMAP, and the local copies were gone as well. The only thing I heard from Spymac about this, was “We appologize for the inconvenience” - a statement that’s been used so often here by support staff, I’m sure they just use an auto-text template for it. “Inconvenience” for deleting my email records is of course a VAST understatement. This is a MAJOR f…n screw-up that threw me back weeks and made me look like a complete fool in the face of my partners. A promise of compensation remained just that - an empty promise that Spymac, like all its other promises, OF COURSE did not keep.

I don’t want to spend too much time rambling about the sorry state of webmail and control panel. I mean, the regular Spymac webmail is bad enough and that’s for the free accounts. To offer something even worse for the paying customers is actually an accomplishment in itself.

Throughout this year I’ve tried to remain optimistic. I WANTED to believe all these promises that everything will be better very soon. No, really very soon. Just a few minor fixes, you know. I’ve heard that ever since I signed up for hosting over a year ago. Nothing changed. Instead, Spymac is busy preparing Spymac 4 - the next major change of its website. More features, more glamor. It will be wonderful, it will solve all the problems we ever had here. Just like Spymac 3 solved all the problems of Spymac 2, right?

My patience has been over-stretched long enough. Please unlock my domain for transfer. This is your chance to get rid of one of your most vocal critics!

Unlike Spymac, my new host will actually use Macs (nice Xserves) to host my site. (Oh, you didn’t know? No, Spymac is NOT running on Macs! http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://spymac.com ) And, most important, from what I read in various forums, my new service is reliable and communicates well.

I can only encourage all other Spymac hosting customers to evaluate for themselves whether they are happy here or if they would be better off somewhere else!

Bye bye

Dude

While I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who has had problems getting assistance with technical issues, I have to wonder why things have been allowed to get this bad!

I’d only been monitoring the uptime of my own site over the past few weeks — and the downtime had surprised me! As my own site is just a small personal website, I didn’t bother to complain. (It wouldn’t have done any good anyway, as I see from all the links to various forum threads asking for help!)

The fact that other people have been monitoring their site’s uptime for so much longer, and have seen for themselves how unreliable the hosting is makes me really glad I moved my domain to a different host!

I had thought that the main issue was that the tech support department ignored emails sent to them. Now I see that not only is this true, but that there have been ongoing uptime issues, too!

I am so glad I won’t have to be dealing with this anymore!!

Update - June 24 2006: It’s been a little over a year since I cancelled my Spymac paid hosting account, and I’ve never been happier.

I came across this post the other day. The whole thing seems very, very shady, and I’m glad to be rid of Spymac!