[Nengwe2]

For 2 years I was a happy ASO customer and used to recommend them to all my friends and online contacts across a wide range of forums. The customer service was excellent, the best I had ever seen. I was also never aware of any outages.

Over the last few months that has changed.

ASO now SUCKS big time.

My sites are hosted on Pickett and almost every day I am coming home from work to emails from my regular visitors, asking why my sites are down again. I'm sitting here, losing my temper, as yet again Pickett is down.

What is going on??????

How could you be perfect for 2 years and then, suddenly, atrocious?

Please get it fixed as I would hate to have to leave. However, my traffic stats show me losing up to 1,000 visitors a day sometimes - this cannot continue.

Please go back to being the hosting company I loved to tell everyone about, and please do it quickly!

[InvestMoneyGuide]

hope Tim see this post~

[ukdmbfan]

Have you spoken to support about this? It's likely they're aware of the problem if it's occurring this frequently, but if you ask you should be able to move servers onto something more stable. There's no good asking here for ASO to fix it, as they don't frequent every thread on the forums. Support is your friend, that's why we all love ASO

[Verve]

I have this same problem on Adama. I've spoken with support at least five times now and they offer no real solution. Adama used to be Rho and it magically has the same exact problems Rho had, almost as if though it's the same exact server. I'm quickly losing my patience with this company, which is sad because much like the original poster, I was completely happy with the service up until the last 3 months or so. My visitors are also becoming very annoyed and I'm going to be forced to change hosts soon.

[billzo]

I, too, have had my issues with ASO as of late. I even spent a few hours checking out other hosts. Moving everything would probably be more time consuming and troublesome than dealing with the problems, though, so I decided to stick it out. The first 3 months were great, but October was one problem after another. October was not a good month for my server Adam.

I don't care if ASO has to raise their prices $1 a month or what, I want a hassle-free hosting experience. If they need to ratchet up the price a notch or so to keep everything operating smoothly, then they should do it.

As a customer of a webhosting company, I don't expect perfection. But I do expect smooth sailing the vast majority of the time. I don't want to have to contact support--ever! I don't want to have to recode my site(s) because something isn't working right. I don't want to have to email support because PHP5 is down yet again and never receive a response. As a hosting customer, I expect the server to be up most of the time and all the standard features (MySQL, PHP, Perl, etc.) to function as they should.

Quality is more important to me than price. I want to join a webhost and stay with that webhost for years, upgrading plans as our sites grow. I don't want to jump from host to host to host. I want to find a home and stay there.

I'll bet there are other webmasters who feel the same way.

[Sir]

What can i say? I have been with ASO for a very long time.. coming to 3 years now i believe. I loved ASO, but i really dont want to bad mouth them as they have done wonders over the past few years. ASO is trying its best im sure and things do go wrong, if i was to moan about ASO and the problems ive had i could literally write a book about it.

I was very close to moving hosts and i am still considering another host but then again i thought their support was excellent and they attend to you when you need them the most. Hence i am still with them, as i write this post i have already opened up a ticket regarding my website being down.. and not only my website but my resellers too. So there is more than one party being affected not only is it giving ASO a bad name but also myself and my friends and colleagues who host with me.

I'll take a stab in the dark and take my chances, i believe ASO is growing and they've had a lot of sign up's i believe. I dont think they know yet how to maintain a lot of customers and a growing company hence the service quality is going down somewhat. But i am still for ASO just sympathising with you nengwe2.

I really thought ASO was for those who want to host vbulletin, but i am thinking otherwise now. Maybe its now for those people who want to host small basic html websites.

*Sigh*

[Mudcrutch]

Remember when they closed new accounts to ensure quality? Maybe they should do that again.

[billzo]

as i write this post i have already opened up a ticket regarding my website being down.. and not only my website but my resellers too. So there is more than one party being affected not only is it giving ASO a bad name but also myself and my friends and colleagues who host with me.

See, we don't make any money off of our sites (yet). But I've read horror stories from people with other webhosts who have lost hundreds or thousands of dollars in revenue because of server outages.

I don't know what kind of performance monitoring ASO does, but I think they should be doing more. Certainly, you'd think that a webhost could set up accounts on all of their servers to be accessed at regular intervals like every minute or so by a central program that will notify them of outages so they can act quickly to rectify the situation. Something using PHP5, PHP4, MySQL, Perl, and whatever else could be accessed and thus be tested for proper operation.

I had PHP5 go down twice on my server in October. The second time it was down for something like 7 hours. That shouldn't happen. The server and PHP4 were fully operational, just PHP5 resulted in a 500 error. All systems on all servers should be checked at regular intervals to avoid such situations.

I mean, I could write a script to access a PHP4 and PHP5 file at regular intervals on my domain and if it fails, I'd know there is something wrong. So ASO should be able to do that. Right?

[Nengwe2]

Since making the original post things seem to be getting worse. Checking the uptime for Pickett, I don't recall seeing the server as being up for more than 24 hours at a time!

My sites are incredibly slow to access and I have contacted support twice and not even got a reply

Can anyone recommend another host, one with good uptime, one that cares about their customers?

[intellivision]

Brutal slowness and timeouts here too... I host about 6 sites with ASO.

I had high hopes coming to ASO from DreamHost.

I'm using
http://www.siteuptim.../quickcheck.php
http://www.dotcom-mo...t_test.asp?id=1
http://host-tracker.com

when my site is slow and sending the screenshots of the results to ASO. So far the response has been pretty much "our monitoring system does not correlate with your findings."

Meh. Still working at it ... I'd hate to have to switch hosts. But I've done it recently, and I'll do it again.

[billzo]

I just thought I'd mention that I experienced some inability to access my sites today, too. In fact, just about 1/2 hour ago this occurred. What I did was access my site through a proxy server and it accessed it just fine. This was my first access today, so I don't know if the site was down and magically came up just as I accessed it via the proxy server. But shortly after accessing it via a proxy I could access it directly again.

At the same time I was unable to access some other sites, none of which are hosted at ASO. One affiliate site loaded so slowly, I just gave up.

I don't know if this an ASO-specific issue or an issue with the internet network. I do know that in the past when I was on Go Daddy that I absolutely could not access any of our sites, only to find that I could access them via proxy server just fine.

So that kind of stuff does happen.

Next time you can't access your sites, try going to a proxy server and accessing them that way. Just search your favorite search engine for HTML proxies and you'll find some you can use to do this test.

[-ASO- BJ]

One bad script on the server can cause problems for everyone and it's difficult to track down exactly what caused it unless you catch it in the act. I'd say 90% of the server problems are caused by bad scripts driving up the load and causing the crashes. We have a very small window in which to catch them before the server becomes completely unresponsive and we have to reboot it. If you're having problems with your server you can always request to be moved to another one, we'll do that no problem. There is no guarantee the problems won't come up again on the new server but we can see the history of issues and move you to a more stable one. We have been growing but we still do not overload the servers. I monitor that daily and send out notices to those that are causing problems. We're still in the process of moving all of the servers from ThePlanet over to AtlantaNap to reduce the problems seen on the older servers.

If you are having site problems, let us know. If you want to be moved to a different server, let us know. We know there have been stability issues with some servers (and we're working on finding the cause) but we won't know we need to do something specific for you unless you tell us.

[TwisterMc]

I'm starting to feel bad for all the times I email in about Adama. I hope the issue is found and fixed soon.

[IBBoard]

I'm starting to feel bad for all the times I email in about Adama.

I wouldn't - I've got three or four pages worth of support tickets about little niggling things from the past two years. Every time there's even a short downtime of 5 minutes I tend to ask support what happened, just so I know what is happening with the server and whether it is going to get bad. No-one has yet told me to stop being so awkward for pestering them

[TwisterMc]

I'm starting to feel bad for all the times I email in about Adama.

I wouldn't - I've got three or four pages worth of support tickets about little niggling things from the past two years. Every time there's even a short downtime of 5 minutes I tend to ask support what happened, just so I know what is happening with the server and whether it is going to get bad. No-one has yet told me to stop being so awkward for pestering them

Very true IBBoard. Support has never made me feel bad about submitting any question. They are pretty cool and the support is one big reason I stick around.

[Bart]

Hopefully my hosting doesn't go down. I switched a fast growing forum onto ASO.

[IBBoard]

To be perfectly frank, you're on shared hosting. If you don't get some small amount of downtime on shared hosting then you're either (somehow) sharing with one other low-usage customer, or you've got a miracle server! Part of the reason people eventually migrate to VPS (Virtual Private Server) at any host is that you're then in complete control of the server and other people's website won't impact on the performance of yours.

[Mr Spoon]

I am sorry to say the same thing as the title of the post.

Okay, A Small Orange aren't that bad, but where has support gone? My site was moved from MU server to another one, but I didn't get an email telling me so? As two of my sites were just display sites, I never really used to check them as they were ifne running alone, but now (i presume in the server move) all my email forwarders have gone, my addon domains had gone and to make things even better, my admin panel re-direct from my website wasn't working. I didn't get a new email with the correct settings in it, and even now, I am trying to add both addon domains again, but it keeps telling me: "Error from park wrapper: wizzyworld.com is already configured." I don't understand, it isn't anywhere?
I don't know how long this has been like it but perhaps it would be good for ASO to provide a script that can email the site owner when one of the servers is down?

Quite annoyed to be honest, not the standard they used to be?

[-ASO- Anthony]

I am sorry to say the same thing as the title of the post.

Okay, A Small Orange aren't that bad, but where has support gone? My site was moved from MU server to another one, but I didn't get an email telling me so? As two of my sites were just display sites, I never really used to check them as they were ifne running alone, but now (i presume in the server move) all my email forwarders have gone, my addon domains had gone and to make things even better, my admin panel re-direct from my website wasn't working. I didn't get a new email with the correct settings in it, and even now, I am trying to add both addon domains again, but it keeps telling me: "Error from park wrapper: wizzyworld.com is already configured." I don't understand, it isn't anywhere?
I don't know how long this has been like it but perhaps it would be good for ASO to provide a script that can email the site owner when one of the servers is down?

Quite annoyed to be honest, not the standard they used to be?

An e-mail is sent to the e-mail address we have on file for the account when we have planned server moves. We're currently moving all servers located at our old data center to our primary data center. Essentially, all servers with Greek letter names will be transitioned. If your e-mail address with us isn't current, that is the reason why you didn't receive notification. If your address with us is current, I can only assume that the notification fell victim to SPAM filtering.

There's a period of time where we keep the old server online to remedy any problems that took place during the move. The "Mu" server move took place some time ago, thus we wouldn't be able to retrieve any settings from the old server. For this I do apologize. As for your problem adding back add-on domains, please submit a ticket to help@asmallorange.com.

[NGDesign]

I have to echo a lot of the complaints mentioned, particularly the one about downtime.

BUT... and let me emphasize the word BUT I also have to agree with B.J's response, which states that one bad script on a site could knock the server out for everyone.

It's really true, and you're going to run into that with ANY shared hosting, in any company. The only way to get true uptime is to have a dedicated server, and that costs much more money.

Think of it this way... let's say we're tenants living in a building, and we pay $5 per month for rent (which is what we do when we share a server). Let's say one tenant decides to behave badly, and they cause a problem in the building. It won't just affect the one tenant, it will affect ALL of us.

If we wanted to pay more money, we could move out and buy a house. But as long as we are renting tenants, sharing a building (i.e. a server), we just to have to be patient when something bad happens.

The important thing is to try and keep your cool. Writing posts that say "ASO Sucks" probably aren't going to help your situation any. Try to remember you're talking about real people here, and I don't think that unnecessary cruelty ever helps.

Whenever my site is down, I open a ticket and write a very polite message that simply states the problem. I am not rude, nor foul, nor angry. No matter what time of day it is, one of the team members ALWAYS responds and the site is usually back up within minutes.

All in all, that's pretty good if you ask me. I feel like I know every ASO employee by name, and it's kind of comforting.