Micfo Web Hosting Nightmare

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MICFO WEB HOSTING NIGHTMARE
Reviewed by Cartoonist Jeff Swenson

You expect to have problems with your web hoster if you've been running several sites for awhile, but never do you expect it to take up most of your time and deal with such bad customer service and no refund.

Many hosting companies use stock photography to make themselves look professional when in fact they are outsourcing their customer service or hiring low wage tech support with poor customer service skills.

I have been waiting to write this assault on the worst web hosting company I have ever experienced. But as usual, with my busy schedule, it has taken some time to get to the verbal retribution that Micfo Hosting deserves. Most likely there are numerous Micfos out there within the new crop of mega-hosting service companies who are poorly staffed--I can't tackle them all--but at least I can save a webmaster or two from signing up with this "to hell with the customer" company.

A cartoon I drew that was directly influenced by Micfo Tech Support.

NOTE: This article is long and meant for other webmasters, however if you're trying to decide on webhosting services and you're a newbie, the short of it is that MICFO HOSTING may sound good with their offers but their tech support and customer service in general is horrible--and I never was able to get a refund after paying a year in advance. You may wonder if this is a fair assessment and I do believe it is because in 7 years I have experienced bad customer service on other hosters but nothing to this level. I also have a high tolerance for bad customer service when I pay low prices for services because I realize I'm getting a deal and that they cut costs in staffing to get that deal. If you want a good webhoster my recommendation is HostGator, so far they've been honest and their service has been good for the price. And no, I do not receive a commission to recommend them.

You can also skip to the screen captures of the tech support responses which may amuse you. They're at the very bottom of this page.

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This website, Swensonfunnies.com, was originally hosted on Micfo for at least two years without too many problems. Yes, there was downtime but I've been doing this for 7 years now and I expect downtime--it's a given. And getting a straight answer out of customer service on minor questions was still hard to do through their trouble ticket system, but again I expect low wage tech support unless I'm willing to pay higher prices. Micfo was a good deal, almost too good, and with that I know expenses are usually slashed in the staffing budget.

The only major problem I had with Micfo before the big problems set in is that they did some moving about with their servers and one of my other sites I was hosting on the same account just disappeared. The folders were still there but the site went down. That site was The-Cynic.com which is a spin off from Swenson Funnies and features my comic strip The Cynic. I didn't discover that my Cynic site was gone until 2 weeks later because at the time I was more focused on several deadlines for projects than I was on my sites. I'm much more proactive now and check my sites daily. So I asked Micfo tech support what happened to my site and they returned with: "We don't really know, something we may have done when we moved accounts around to new servers, so you'll have to rebuild that site." Which means I had to go in and redo my domain setup and replace all of the files. Not the end of the world, however, I had never had that happened before with any other hoster. And having one of my sites down without my knowledge was extremely annoying. We're talking downtime of about 2 weeks. There should have been a big apology with a discount instead of the flippant response.

Now you're asking, yeah some glitches, what's the big deal? Then we come to Mr. Swenson adding Gamescript from gamescript.net onto his site--a flash arcade setup. Here's the thing. The mega-web hosting sites which offer enormous amounts of space and bandwidth for cheap--more than you often need-- can only truly be tested when your site grows and you add some complexity to it instead of just basic html. If you have a small business promo site with text and some graphics then you may not have too many problems. When you start running PHP scripts and they result in more traffic and more regular visitors, then you get to see if you're getting your money's worth. And note that Gamescript, the php script in question, is not a game server; it simply organizes flash games and serves them up as html pages. I already know that gameservers are limited in traffic because they can easily crash when you're playing high-end games like Quake. Flash games are designed for the web, very low-end for the most part.

During the summer of last year 2006 I started experiencing more than the usual downtime. It came to the point where I did start to complain to tech support. And of course the answer I normally got was a belated: "Your site seems to be working fine now. Please let us know if you have any further problems." Which is a BS answer since they send you that after 2 or 3 hours and the problem has resolved itself. No specific reason was given for the downtime or increased downtime. I was happy with how my new arcade was doing. People were helping to build up my ad impressions and generally making it their hangout during a work or school break. Plus once they were done playing a game they would go read some comics or articles or go visit one of my other sites. This makes a webmaster happy...

Then Micfo suspended my account just after I paid in advance for the next year--all my sites going down at once including my syndicated daily comics which are spread out across thousands of sites across the web. If you don't already know, as a cartoonist I let other webmasters place my comics on their sites or blogs-- see here -- with a little html code and the images are all hosted on Swensonfunnies.com. So if Swensonfunnies goes down, all of the comics go down too on any site that posted them. This has been a rare occurrence in the past and I try to make sure it doesn't happen for more than an hour.

Even at this point Swensonfunnies was a small site, I was using 3 percent of my bandwidth with about 10,000 unique visitors, 20,000 visits and up to 80,000 pageviews. Originally Swensonfunnies was just a promo site for my cartooning and used for the purposes of self-syndicating my webcomics to other webmasters (where they now get 300,000 views or more a month). I was never interested in building Swensonfunnies into a content site until recently in the last year or so. This kind of site should have been low maintenance, even with an arcade running on it.

Why did Micfo suspend my account? The fact of the matter is I didn't even know my account was suspended, I thought it was more downtime. I didn't receive any email alert telling me I was in trouble. Finally when I got a response to my trouble ticket they told me I was using too much CPU. A CPU usage problem was something I was unfamiliar with and had to learn about on my own. The more I learned on my own, the more it didn't make sense. For a CPU usage problem to occur the gaming php script has to literally hang or stall while more and more people log onto the site until it crashes the server. I realize it's not a bandwidth issue but still you would think that I was doing a heavy volume of traffic in order to achieve this. Nope. I was averaging 600 visitors a day to Swensonfunnies at the time it happened (up now around 2000) and the amount of players logged onto the arcade was usually not more than 20-30 at a time. As I asked around I realized that this should not be enough to crash a shared server unless that server was jammed so heavily with accounts that there was no breathing room (which is what a lot of mega-hosting services do).

This is where I have to say I don't ultimately know what the problem was. Remember, I'm a cartoonist first and foremost. All I've learned about webhosting has been out of necessity to work as a cartoonist. Was Gamescript overloading the CPU? Not according to them. I received an email from them in response to my questions on their script and CPU. They said sites that were doing 20,000 unique a day on a shared server weren't having any problems. It had to be my hoster. So that's their word against Micfo and because of the poor tech support at Micfo I lean towards believing Gamescript.

Was the script installed properly? As far as I know it was and Micfo tech support finally admitted to being clueless concerning the script itself. The guy who installed the original script is now working with me on running another arcade on his server with his own arcade script and thus far things are fine. Every project he's done for me has been competent. His opinion was that with the low amount of players I had using the PHP script that it would be near to impossible to crash a shared server; either it was Micfo's fault or Gamescript's fault. Since he's always been competent at what he does, site design and programming, again I lean towards believing him over Micfo.

In the end, it wasn't the technical problem that is causing me to write this review of Micfo Web Hosting Services; it was their response. I realize technical expertise varies but their responses never made much sense. I didn't know who or what to believe and I keep coming back to the fact that I was a small site--why am I dealing with a big site problem such as crashing the CPU? I know it's not a bandwidth issue but crashing a CPU still shouldn't be that easy to do with 20-30 players and possibly 50 players on a good day. Here's some of my customer service complaints laid out:

1. My account was suspended without notice or warning. It took the entire rest of the day to get my account up again. Normally I expect if my site is exceeding bandwidth or storage that I would get an alert--why not with a CPU usage problem? Obviously the previous downtimes were a result of a CPU Usage issue and not one tech support person brought it up when we were dealing with downtime on their trouble ticket system.

2. Slow response time. It took hours sometimes even days before I would get a response to a filed ticket. And this is concerning an issue of my account being down and not working properly. I had to make sure I suspended any PPC advertising because I didn't know if my sites would be down or up.

3. Varied and confusing answers from tech support and customer service in general. I was stressed out at the time and pissed off at the slow response time so I filed several trouble tickets on the same issue so as to get Micfo's attention. This is something you're not supposed to do with trouble tickets, however the results were very revealing. Every tech support person gave me a different answer--I'm not kidding! And they acted like they knew what they were talking about so that if I had gotten one response I would have assumed it to be correct. In the end none of them could nail down the problem except that it was possibly the gamescript--and even that was hard to get a definite answer on because they kept sending me logs showing that my image files were causing problems--say what? Why would my gif animated ads on the homepage cause a problem?

4. No solutions except for a bad recommendation to upgrade. The one thing I hated about the answers I was getting is that no one gave me any solutions. I had to ask repeatedly what I could do to fix the problem. One tech would tell me there was no solution unless I could fix Gamescript--a script that seems to be working just fine for other webmasters. Another service rep tried to sell me more bandwidth when it was a CPU usage problem. And several tech support guys recommended upgrading but not one of them agreed on what to upgrade to: I was giving the choice of a reseller package, premium hosting and even dedicated hosting.

5. When the upgrade didn't fix the problem, no apologies. I finally decided to upgrade on the recommendation of two tech guys who suggested premium hosting for high traffic sites. It cost 50 bucks more a month and I figured what the hell, I didn't have much to lose since I was having trouble pinpointing the problem. Of course, the account crashed again after 2 weeks. At this point I moved my sites to a backup hoster.

6. Impossible to get a refund. This is what really infuriates me. I paid in advance for the year in October, right before my account was suspended and the big problems began. Then I upgraded and paid 50 bucks more. After I canceled my account I deducted one month from what I paid and asked for a refund. They agreed. Never saw it. I asked again. Oh, it's being put through. Never saw it. I asked again. Here's a transaction ID. Never posted to my bank account. I asked again. Oh, we'll check the payment gateway (whatever that is). And still I am without a refund for year's worth of hosting. My last email to them on the refund was that I would be writing this review of their crappy and dishonest services. The first time I was told I would get a refund was in November of 2006. I just recently got another email in February of 2007 that they were looking into the situation. Unbelievable.

So whatever you do, do not host with Micfo Web Hosting. It's a big tip off when a hosting company makes offers too good to be true. These guys offer Lifetime Hosting for one payment. That makes no sense whatsoever. Why would you ever buy lifetime hosting? You would have no recourse if the service went bad and ultimately all they are going to do is charge you for upgrades when you will inevitably need them.

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Untitled Document

TECH SUPPORT RESPONSES
I started saving the tech support responses in order to prove my point. I didn't originally know it would go so far as that I would have to cancel my account so I'm glad I did this. And one last thing, I realize that tech support overseas might have some spelling errors but I don't think most of these responses are from outsourced support. I think these are American individuals. I'm not trying to be a spelling snob but the way these email responses are sloppily written I think can also tell you something about a company and how they want to present themselves.
suspended account

SWENSON NOTE: Not a bandwidth issue. I was using not more than 3 percent if anyone bothered to check. It was a CPU usage issue.

SWENSON NOTE: I asked them twice to confirm this was true.

SWENSON NOTE: See, I confirmed it.

SWENSON NOTE: In subsequent emails I came to the conclusion that this guy never had a clue. Why would I get a reseller package for Swensonfunnies?

SWENSON NOTE: This was the only support person with a brain except that the script should work fine according to Gamescript. They have their script working on shared servers where a site gets 20,000 unique visitors a day. I was only doing 10-15,000 unique for the month. The only possible explanation is if the script was installed wrong but I'm not sure how that's possible and the guy who did it has always been reliable, plus he's running a new arcade with his own PHP arcade style script just fine. I will allow for the possibility that something was wrong on my end because I'm not a technical person, I'm a friggin' cartoonist. Like I said, this article of complaint is mainly about the customer service and no refund given--remember I paid a year in advance and got to use maybe 1 month and a half where my site was continuously crashing. Any reasonable company would have given me a full refund whether it was their fault or not. Or at least refunded the remainder amount for the months not used. BTW, it says email forwarder does not work. I discovered this later and had to file yet another trouble ticket until they went in and fixed my account on that issue too. This leads me to guess that the gamescript installation could have been corrupted after installation by Micfo. Remember also that my Cynic site had to be rebuilt because they did something on their end and didn't tell me until I noticed the site was down.

SWENSON NOTE: This idiot sent me a response after my site went down on their server and went to a back up hosting account I set up. I did this because of all the problems. If their server had kept my site up then the domain would not have gone to the next available hosting account that was second in line.

SWENSON NOTE: I guess I should give Jason kudos for finally admitting that they didn't know what the problem was. If they had said this from the start I would never have upgraded and possibly I would have tried switching gamescript to a different hoster to see if it worked elsewhere. Honesty is the best policy but I think most tech support people have trouble admitting when they don't know what's up and throw out guesses. After all, it's not their site that's down, why should they care.