Heart Internet suffer from a lot of things, mainly connectivity and being black listed by most mail services, ie Hotmail, AOl
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, Gmail etc.
Downtime is sporadic and mostly a rare thing, but when it happend they will LIE to you. Currently I have been suffering downtime for the last 3 weeks. Each time their support staff lie. They point to the problemt being my sites. I have been sent links to the sort of SEO report pages you get that showed my site had large images, a total load of 6mb which was a red flag, and they gave that as the reson the server was down. They also said that I had too many sql connections, when the site has done well under the same conditions for 8 years, but when I also couldn't ftp in they lied again and said that they had been a glitch with the ftp. THey then said that they could not keep rebooting the server everytime I got too many sql connections. However, I checked other sites on the same IP and THEY WERE ALL DOWN TOO. Essentially the support staff lie. I imagine that they have been trained to lie in as much as they dont want to admit outages and so the staff just have to point at anything that might cause it. However, when they are dealing with a person like me that has been working the internet for 20 years, it doesn't cut the mustard. I videos a form taking 35 seconds to load, and that was just a random form, ie I did a video that ran for an hour that was plagued by slowness and that was a random bit of slowlness and I am sure some processes took over a minute to do. Then said it was my code and it was very php heavy on the cpu and they could not do anything about it. I transfered my site to another host and the same form took less than a second, it was instant. THe sinsiter issue though is that they lie and I am convinced they are trained to lie and obfuscate the issues. Most people will not be able to see through their lies. In one support ticket they advised that I speak to my developer. Essentially, Heart intenet should be struck off. I personally think that they are trying to drive people away and then sell out or change. They were brought out by Go Daddy and maybe Go Daddy wants to shut it down so that people move to other more centralised hosts. THe thing is though, that this LYING has been going on for years. I remember being forced to buy a VPS because my site had 50 hits a day. They said that it was a victim of its own success. THe VPS was expensive and they refused to support it or provide help. The issue with hosts like Heart Internet is sinister because there is no control. If BT lied, you could contact the regulator, but Heart Internet can lie as much as they want and there is no complaints procedure. I tried. THey don't prosecute themselves. I would like to say avoid Heart Internet, but I think the truth is darker than it appears. For example, I was once asked if O2 was a good phone company, and my responce, as I had had a very bad time with them was that I had had a bad time, but I dount everyone did. What I mean is that these things are often targetted or isolated, or in my case with O2, from memory, down to the person that I was dealing with and a personality clash. I guess lots of people with Heart wont notice, but if you are a web designer like me, you don't want constant called complaining about one server or another, black listed emails and worst of all, support agents that suggest your code is bad. I mean, suggesting your code is really bad, bad enough to drag a server down. Its not.
When you consider that Heart Internet is not cheap, I would advise everyone to go elsewhere, you won't get a service any worse. You might have similar issues, but it won't be much worse. Much worse would be that a site was permanently down all the time.
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