MochaHost: Subpar service and support

In exploring alternatives for low-cost hosting providers, I did some research and decided to give MochaHost a shot. They seemed to offer reasonably-priced plans with a solid set of features and a 30-day money backguarantee — can’t go wrong there.

After getting the confirmation e-mail that my account was set up, I went in, created a subdomain, and tried configuring it for ASP.Net — when I got an error from the control panel. OK, maybe the hosting account wasn’t fully configured yet. It was a Friday, and I decided to wait until the next week.

A few days later (this past Tuesday), I go back in to see if I can configure an ASP.Net directory — still no luck, same error. I submit a ticket to their support staff, and was told that problem would be fixed (this was on 10/28 at 10AM).

I went in to the control panel again today, tried to configure ASP.Net, and got the same error. Instead of going back to support, I went to the billing department and requested my account be canceled and that a full refund be issued.

Here’s the email I sent to them.

I would like to cancel my account. I am in the 30-day money back guarantee window, so I am requesting a full refund credited to my charge card.

Why am I canceling? Since signing up, I have yet to be able to create an ASP.Net application just to test your service. The problem was there on my account on day 1. On Tuesday Oct 28 I was told the problem was to be fixed; two days later it still isn’t. If this is the service you give you new customers, then you don’t want me as a customer.

Please cancel my account and issue a full refund. Thank you.

Poor service (just didn’t work out of the box) and poor support (they didn’t fix it in a timely manner). What a way to retain new customers!

Eight cores, four gigs, ten raids, oh my!

Last week, I dealt with an outage of my “business-grade” Internet connection for the last time. The solution? A managed server, courtesy of SoftLayer.

For a pretty darn good price, I get full access to a dual quad-core server with 4 gigs of RAM and 500GB of usable disk space in a RAID10 array. Add in an awesome web-based control panel, an excellent sales staff (thanks, Michael!), and provisioning in less than two hours, it seems like the right decision so far.

It’ll take some time before I migrate completely to this new rig, but until then, I can enjoy the following scenery.

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