Guillaume has not had a good experience with HostWay, here is what s/he had to say:
I've had a dedicated server there for almost 10 years and the service has been excellent until recently.
Now some time in August I asked to upgrade php from 4 to 5. Which they did. I asked if they could upgrade MySQL at least from 3.23 to 4.xx so as to handle character sets, I received a reply telling me only MySQL 3.23 was stable and compatible with their servers. Which sounded pretty odd to me in 2008. Knowing that it's never the same person who replies to support e-mails I tried again a few days later, you know, just asking. I was told that it was no problem and that it could be done whenever I wanted. So on August 22 I asked for the upgrade. I had no answer to my repeated e-mails until around September 20 when I asked a friend in the US - I'm in Europe - to call and yell at them. There were 2 requests in my original e-mails but as usual they only do one thing and as the other was not important I decided to forget about it.
Then I discovered that they didn't upgrade php from 4 to 5 on all the web sites on the dedicated server as i had requested but only on the one i was working on at the time. I asked them to do it on the other web sites, it took 3 or 4 days, each time forgetting a domain or another. Then I realized that I didn't have the root access to MySQL anymore which i used to have. They told me I shouldn't have had it in the first place. OK. So now I had to go through their admin panel to work on the databases, which was a bit more annoying than the way I was doing it before but not a huge deal.
Except I then realized that in the process of upgrading MySQL, 4 of my databases had disappeared, effectively bringing down 4 of my web sites. So I wrote an e-mail 3 days ago, asking to repair that asap, I don't know but having web sites totally paralyzed seems to me a pretty urgent matter but then that's just me. I'm still waiting for an answer. I called but the guy told me he was very sorry but couldn't do anything for me at the moment! Obviously the call center has been outsourced and the poor guy had no clue but then what am I supposed to do now? Well I'm waiting. Trying to figure out if I'm their customer or their captive or something.
