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Please note that this form is only for web host company's representatives. Responses from others will not
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You are responding to the following review:
| Prompt but ineffective - Review by
Kurt Amesbury submitted on April 26, 2003 |
| Customer's web site: N/A |
| Length of time hosted by this company: less than a month |
| Date when last hosted by this company (as of April 26, 2003): Less than 3 months ago |
| Plan used: They only have one plan that I know of. |
| Customer service rating: 4 out of 10 |
| Technical quality rating: 9 out of 10 |
| Cost rating: 6 out of 10 |
| Overall rating: 3 out of 10 |
I signed up for ICD based on the recommendations I read on this site and spent 8 days struggling with one frustration after another. I estimate that more than 50% of my development time over that interval was spent trying to compensate for "missing pieces" of their system.
To begin with, there's no telnet or ssh, so lots of debugging tools are just not available. This was especially problematic since the site that worked flawlessly on the local development machine, failed completely on their machine. It was a bit of a struggle to get access to my error log (it was not available as a default) - and utlimately required writing another script to process the file. As soon as I DID get a look at the log, I saw an immediate permissions problem. Since the first line tech staff apparently doesn't really know anything about perl scripting, they made a couple of erroneous responses before they kicked the question upstairs. Unfortunately, their second tier tech support is in Europe and not available 24/7, which means a day's delay, and they didn't bother to tell me it would take that long for a response. (10 minute response time is really outstanding - except when you wind up waiting 12 hours for it.)
When I got the answer back, they initially blamed my code. I wasted more time going through the code and finally put together a very short, detailed example that demonstrated the problem was theirs.
Turns out they weren't supporting the FindBin module.
So sorry. Just as with ssh and telnet, FindBin is not available because it's a possible "security" problem.
Likewise with Cwd.
By this point I had spent nearly 4 days stepping on "land mines" - chasing problems that cropped up because they had disabled various aspects of *nix/perl as I know it. I'd asked repeatedly for a list of ALL disabled modules. (Nothing is more frustrating than to write code that works perfectly, only to find that the standard modules you had counted on don't exist on the target machine.) The folks at ICD pointed me at their marketing "features" list and effectively said, "You can find out what we support here." But that's a little too much like going to a car dealership, having the dealer tell you to look at the sticker to see the car's features, but letting you find out while trying to drive the car home that the he has removed the crankshaft, the pistons and the distributor. I do not mean to imply any dishonesty on ICD's part. I think they were trying very hard to be helpful - it's just that they seemed more interested in a "secure" system than one that could be used for functions beyond serving basic web sites.
By this point, I'd had enough and requested a refund - which they agreed to. They claim they have issued a credit. (It's too early to tell whether they actually have, but I don't anticipate a problem.)
My summary assessment of ICD is that if you don't have anything that's very complicated, or out of the ordinary, they are probably a pretty good service. Their tech support was always prompt on the first iteration (even if they were wrong several times) and turn-around at the second tier was usually less than a full day (though they could make a greater effort to provide *correct* information. Getting an incorrect response at record speed isn't all that helpful.) The control panel is a good one - but there's no facility for reporting execution errors in cgi scripts.
Got a basic web site you want to host? These folks are probably a great choice. For anything more complex, I cannot recommend them.
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