|
|
Please note that this form is only for web host company's representatives. Responses from others will not
be posted. Customers should submit new reviews or email the original reviewer instead.
You are responding to the following review:
| Support not that impressive - Review by
submitted on July 27, 2003 |
| Customer's web site: www.Posen-L.com |
| Length of time hosted by this company: less than a month |
| Date when last hosted by this company (as of July 27, 2003): Current customer |
| Plan used: Standard |
| Customer service rating: 5 out of 10 |
| Technical quality rating: 9 out of 10 |
| Cost rating: 9 out of 10 |
| Overall rating: 7 out of 10 |
I chose LunarPages because of this ratings site. I wanted a cheap host, that offered good support and was impressed by how fast the sites loaded, whose links I found in the reviews. I also checked the DNS entries and most reviewers were still with LP after several months.
My experience in moving my sites from my brother-in-law's server was pretty frustrating for the few days. Whether I called or e-mailed support, all I got was wasted time, it seemed like no one really read my problem description. Without going into lots of excrutiating detail (i.e. ranting), I'll summarize. Note that my site is dynamic, using php/mySQL, but though I'm a programmer/IT pro, I only know enough php & mySQL to do what the basic things I need my site to do.
Biggest problem I faced, was that LP upgraded their ControlPanel, but it doesn't work with phpMyAdmin, so I couldn't use phpMyAdmin to troubleshoot why none of my php/mySQL worked after the move.
I had to solve most of the problems myself, and did so after stumbling on these solutions:
1) don't open the Control panel using their links. You have to manually enter the URL and add a nonstandard port command, to use port 2082 (e.g servername.lunarpages.com:2082). Alternatively, you can have them set your ControlPanel to the "X" theme. If you don't do this, phpMySQL may or may not load, and if it does, no part of it will work.
2) Even then, only part of phpMySQL works. You can't run any maual queries. However, if you open the phpMySQL "in a new window" and get it out of the ControlPanel frames, it works fine. The "X" theme solves this issue also.
3) I didn't know how to best transfer the files from the old host. After several phone calls and e-mails, I finally got someone who knew anything about phpMySQL and even then I got the information I needed when something he said led me to the truth. I had only had experience uploading data from .csv files, and had never downloaded data. Turns out that the .sql files that you can export, are contrary to intuition, not binaries, but are text files, and they contain SQL statements to rebuild a database and INSERT the data. So uploading is just a matter of telling phpMySQL to run the queries found in the exported .sql file.
4) But my php/mySQL still wouldn't work. After two days, I finally was able to get phpMySQL to run, so I started debugging. I got lucky and stumbled on the solution in a clue left by a user comment in the php documentation online. Turns out when I downloaded the files to my Windows station and then uploaded them to LP, using wsFTP client, that the Unix line endings (n) were replaced with Windows line endings CR>LF>. php doesn't like code with Windows line endings and acts erratically, in this case, the queries don't work.
5) The other major problem was caused by not knowing how the mechanics of the add-on domains worked until after I used the feature. (For $2.50/mo/domain, you can ?two? additional websites with their own domain names, from the one LP account). When you activate this feature using the ControlPanel, the script creates folders/directories in the public-html directory, named the same as the domain names you specify. Unfortunately, I had already uploaded my files from the other site, which happened to include directories with these same names, and in the same place, *BUT* the case was different, so geek-brained Linux created a separate set of directories. However, my ftp client would only see the ones that I uploaded, and the server wouldn't let my ftp client delete those, confusing them with the system directories for the add-on domains. Only took a day to get support to clue me in to a FileManager function on the ControlPanel that did allow me to see both sets and to delete the ones I uploaded.
6) I also thought that my mail() function in the php code wasn't working, but my first test was flawed.
Despite these frustrations, I intend to stick out the first three months. Support is no worse than the average tech company (in other words, usually an exercise in futility: still waiting for cBeyond and Cingular to explain why voice calls to Finland and AT&T cell phones don't handshake, neither side can hear the other, even though the call goes through). Here is how to get the best results:
Use all three options: 1)call, 2)start a ticket in the online support, and 3) post to the forums. When calling, if you don't get a tech who is helpful, hang up and call back. When calling, response time has varied from about 12 min. to 0 min. Online support and forums can be anything from half an hour to all day or none at all. Expect the tech to not listen carefully, and to give you any answer that they think will get rid of you. For example, when I complained that the phpMyAdmin pages were opening so slowly that the browser timed out, but that the plain HTML files in my account loaded very quickly, I got "we had network problems earilier, but they are fixed now" and "run a tracert to your server or domain" (I hadn't changed the DNS settings yet, so the domain tracert wouldn't have worked). After I discovered that the problem was their ControlPanel, then all the techs that were still talking to me suddenly knew all about the javascript bugs in the new ControlPanel. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and chalk that up to the fact that they had just discovered it at the end of my problem resolution. It would be interesting to call in and see if the front line techs would handle the same problem correctly this time.
|
This page is not connected with the company. These reviews and ratings are only the opinion of
the poster, are no substitute for your own research, and should not be relied upon for any purpose.
|