marteydodoo.com

# At 1:52 on January 25, 2006, Zak wrote:

Hi there,

I came across your post, and you seemed to be confused as to why we refunded Ryan without stipulations, as we were not willing to do so with Jason. Admittingly, we were in the wrong with Ryan Duff. We support some 40,000+ customers, and unfortionately these things do happen. When I was directed to his blog post, I contacted him about it, and issued a refund. We were hoping that the issue was close was noted after a refund was issued, and we did ask that Ryan post that he was rebimbursed, or remove the post entirely- he ended up posting the reimbursement email.

As with Jason Scott, he was slashdotted, using over 10% of the servers resourcesy, which put him in violation of our TOS. We rarely suspend sites for CPU usage, and we do our best to work with the customer, but there are certainly cases that a site is just receiving entirely too many simultaneous visitors. I don't particularly like how we handled the bandwidth issue, in charging him for extra bandwidth, but the simple fact of life (and customer service!) is that miscommunications happen. We aren't a fraudulent company, and refunded the charges for the bandwidth when that came to our attention.

Thanks,

Zak

# At 20:01 on January 25, 2006, Zak wrote:

Martey,

You're making a lot of assumptions here. In particular, you're assuming that all that we do to "better" our services is to pay people to not post bad things about us- this couldn't be further from the truth. Ryan, as I said, was refunded, because we truly did make a mistake on his account. Jason, however, violated our TOS. Now as I said, we had a very minor miscommunication and told Jason (and this is according to him) that he had exceeded his bandwidth. These mistakes happen. We take over 5,000 calls a month, and I expect that this will occassionally happen. If it will make a difference to Jason, sure- we apologize for that, and we also don't like having to suspend sites for CPU abuse, but that is the nature of the business. This isn't a VPS, or a dedicated server, and Jason understood our CPU-abuse policy. We did not make a mistake in suspending his site, but I do acknowledge that this creates an inconvenience to customers, which is why we offer alternative solutions. Yes- these solutions are more expensive, but if asked, we're fine with temporarily hosting someone while they move providers.

Customer service is a tough business, and we do invest heavily in it. We have to be realistic here in acknowledging that mistakes do happen, and the best that we can do is offer refunds to customers, consider the case closed, and do our best to prevent it from happening again.

Thanks

Zak

# At 0:55 on January 26, 2006, Zak wrote:

Martey,

Not much to not understand there. We did refund his payment for the miscommunication- we quickly refunded his bandwidth payment, so nothing to refund there. That wasn't what caused his downtime. For some reason, a customer service rep. according to Jason thought that he had exceeded bandwidth. Or, perhaps Jason called and said that he was likely suspended for exceeding his bandwidth, because he was receiving so much traffic, and would like to buy 50GB of bandwidth. Who knows- I won't begin to speculate, because it doesnt' get us anywhere, but I can't see how my guys would mistakingly sell someone bandwidth, claiming their site was suspended for exceeding bandwidth since that information is readily available.

Anyway, if you have any other questions, email me.

Take care,

Zak

# At 1:04 on January 30, 2006, Jason Scott wrote:

Well, look what we find over here on this part of the Internet. Hi, Ryan. I see you're fighting the good fight with Zak and his redirecting the discussion away from the point at hand.

Bear in mind that Zak's posting on my weblog came after he tried to reach me on the phone. One can look at that as "wow, what great customer service", or they can look at it as "wow, no paper trail". Zak obviously hates paper trails, from my observations. Better to settle quietly on the side before, oh, 2,000 people read my weblog entry (and a few other thousand read the Slashdot references).

Just wanted to inject a couple facts into Zak's whiz-stream of "customer service".

First of all, no, it was MIDPHASE who told me I'd exceeded the bandwidth. I didn't suggest anything. I asked what was up, and they said I'd exceeded bandwidth. In fact, this was the error being seen if people went to the website on the machine. I asked to fix this problem, and they suggested I buy more bandwidth, so I chose to double it, and that's where the $197 came from, and out. Because MIDPHASE suggested it. Be clear, however... during our "later conversation", Zak refunded my $197.

Now, my mistake for thinking Midphase had more "CPU Power" than 12 gameboys duct-taped together, live and learn. But they left me hanging for 3 hours while I wondered what was up, after contacting them several ways. They were quite content to let me hang in the wind for as long as I could sit around, without informing me of what they'd done. That kind of sucks. But again, fine, "Jason violated our TOS" (a factoid never brought up by Zak, before, say, THIS MONTH, A YEAR LATER).

All of this, all this knob-slobbery would have gone under the table, another person with a Midphase corncob in his happy ring quietly moving onward into a better place for his needs (in my case, Dreamhost), except, and this is the important part:

Even after a phone call from Zak in which I said, specifically and clearly, that I never wanted to do business with them, even after an e-mail (posted in its entirety on my weblog) in which I said I never wanted to do business with them, even then, THEY STILL KEPT CHARGING ME.

When I told them to bite the weasel, they gave me crap about "first fill out this form". Yeah, fantastic, it's like I'm in the Bronx buying a fuckin' camcorder. THAT's when I wrote "Midphase Blows Goats", a full year after this crap occurred.

And you know what? They do. Eat a rock, Zak.

# At 6:21 on April 11, 2006, Andy wrote:

This all makes very interesting reading for me today, having encountered an extraordinary situation with Midphase myself yesterday where, after emailing for some technical support and advice I was threatened with the immediate suspension of my site for 'hacked software' - in fact, the email was sent yesterday afternoon UK time with a countdown to compliance of 20 minutes.

I have no idea if my site was suspended at all yesterday because I didn't go anywhere near a computer until late yesterday evening to check my email, which was when I found the rude, arrogant and aggressive email in my inbox. I've had an apology from one person, not the one who sent it in the first place - who referred me back to my original email. I wrote and told him to show me where I referenced 'hacked software' but have had no response to that.

Apparently, despite many people in the WordPress community referencing 'hacked plugins' and using the term 'hack' and all its derivatives to denote tweaking, or amending, or deleting code in HTML and PHP files, some fool at Midphase decided my reference to hacking the code Flickr provides to display photos on a blog was, in fact, a software hack. Doh. My reason for emailing and asking for technical support was simple enough: I've had no end of trouble lately trying to install any and all Flickr third-party WordPress plugins on my blog. The use of the Flickr code is what I see as a temporary creative fix. I asked, as a PHP and SQL newbie, how to check my database for errors and what to do to fix any that might be found.

I have told Midphase that I have a Flickr Pro account and can display my photos howsoever I bloody well like. I have also explained to them the wider use of the word 'hack' and its derivatives in today's online world, not that I should have to - I am sure any cursory check of the wordpress.org pages would show many, many references to this or that plugin being 'hacked' but there you go.

I don't like bullies, never have. The attempt to bully me yesterday, which came about from someone's ignorance and complete lack of customer intervention and management skills, really pissed me off. I paid upfront for a year from January 06 for Midphase to host my blog. I didn't expect to be treated like a criminal. We shall see if they approach me in response to the post I wrote today, highly critical of Midphase, which you can access here.

# At 6:24 on April 11, 2006, Andy wrote:

The link doesn't appear to work in the above comment (at least, not in my Firefox browser right now!). A visit to my site and a search for 'to hack or not to hack' will bring up the post if you are interested in reading what took place with Midphase in relation to my blog. Or if you were to access it on the date I am writing this - 11 April 06 - then it's on the front page for the time being. Thanks!

# At 12:18 on December 11, 2006, Silky wrote:

I am having some issues with midphase as well. Their servers Cannot Handle "Amazon Affiliate Sites and link dash link exchange script. They seems to be very rude and suspended our account without any warnings and do not want to refund the money. We are very disappointed with their services as well. We will post more details as soon as we can...

# At 8:23 on December 18, 2006, Jay Hammond wrote:

Myself and many others have recently been through major problems at MidPhase. They moved to a new facility, and as a result we faced DAYS of downtime. The moved encountered many problems, some not avoidable, but many were. It seemed very unorganized, and to make it worse they made the move in the middle of a work week!! I know of a few instances where human error played a big part in the downtime. For example with the server I'm on: They couldn't get the server going when they got it to the new location they wasted hours re-trying something that wouldn't work so finally they had to re-install the OS.....THEY RE-INSTALLED THE WRONG OS!!! So upon boot nothing worked of course! So many hours later and a different technician taking over on it, it finally came back up.....the next day. If this were an isolated problem I'd say it was just the tech, but people on other servers experienced major downtime as well. They planned for things to go smooth, and when everything went wrong they didn't know what to do! Not a big deal if many of us were hosting just one site there, but like many others I'm a hosting provider who rents a server there so I can't just pick up and move anytime I want. I myself experienced over 60 HOURS of downtime, and once the sites were back up there were still problems which are still being worked out. I've been with midphase for a few years now and have had bad problems with them, although nothing this severe. I think this whole thing was handled very poorly. Support was not helpful most of the downtime, they had attitudes, unwilling to give info, and at some points non-existent. I waited 45 minutes on the phone a couple days back, 30 minutes on their online chat, and over 2 hours before any response!!! Now if that's the good customer support they claim to have then I don't want any part of it!! I lost customers over the 3 day downtime, and I'm sure I'll lose more from this. I don't know what MP will do to make this right for the hundreds of people affected, but at this point I don't know if they could do enough.

# At 16:10 on December 26, 2006, Chris wrote:

I've had major problems with Midphase Hosting. I originally signed up for the shared hosting and 1 month into the deal was hit with 12 STRAIGHT HOURS OF DOWNTIME. tech support was rude and condescending during the entire ordeal. That was only the beginning. I was talked into upgrading to a VPS, only to have 11 hours of straight downtime about 1/2 month later. Once again, their techs were rude and actually laughed at me when I demanded a credit to my account. By this time my site had been down so much I was kicked off google and I lost all my business to my company, but it doesn't stop there....

I was told the problems I experienced "were extraordinary" and "would never happen again." Well, like the commenter already aluded to... They did a dataserver move and MY VPS WAS DOWN 3 STRAIGHT WEEKENDS FOR 7-10 HOURS STRAIGHT EACH TIME. No email, No Call, nothing from Midphase. No updates on their forums. Don't use this service. Don't make the same mistake I did. Think I am some competitor making up stories about Midphase? NO. Email me directly and I will give you my phone number and we can talk or check complaint records with the BBB.

Do Not Use Midphase as your hosting provider for shared web hosting OR VPS or dedicated servers. They DO NOT KNOW what they are doing and their management is running the company into the ground.

# At 21:30 on January 18, 2007, tina wrote:

I decided to switch to Midphase because my members continuously are receiving messages that the site has exceeded it CPU usage. Even though, i hate to switch from hostmoster.com but they do not offer VPS or dedicated server. Therefore, I moved over to midphase.com and it was nightmare, my site was down for 4 days. I was told by Dan and John, the owners that they were doing maintenance and this should be expected. I was never informed about this maintenance until 8 hours after my site had been down and I had sent 10 emails asking what was going on but no answer. In addition, my site was previously down for about 2 days. They never replied back. When i called during the day time i was told that they will call me back and when i called during the night time no one answered the phone. I challenge anyone to call midphase.com around 9 PST TIME and see if your call is answered. When I asked the owners why do they fraudulently offer 24x7 , he did not have an answer. Basically, this company promotes 24x7 supports on their site and on their answering message and 24 hours to create new account. This is BS and fraud. THEY DO NOT OFFER 24X7. Staffs are incompetent of their job descriptions, Midphase has a standard of recklessly mishandling customer’s accounts, fraudulent claim of 24x7, and misused of customers account. If you are skeptic about this posting please request the chain of communication i had with midphase managers, support team and owner. I basically I lost 300 members during this down time with midphase. I had to revert my account to hostmonster.com

# At 19:23 on January 20, 2007, Bryanboy wrote:

I signed up for an account with Midphase on August 30, 2006. They suspended my account because of their internal policy that I wasn't CLEARLY made aware of when I originally signed up because I was misled to believe one thing. After many, many emails to various people in their organization and MUCH MUCHO BULLSHIT FROM THEIR STAFF IN A SPAN OF 5 MONTHS, I STILL HAVEN'T RECEIVED MY REFUND.

Click on my name for a full account (with e-mail screenshots!) of my HORRIBLE experience with MIDPHASE.

# At 18:43 on April 23, 2007, Loner wrote:

They are horrible. Their service is horrible and the server keeps failing. I was with them for 1 year and I had 8 critical problems. Worst experience I ever had with a hosting company.

# At 22:44 on July 2, 2007, Gator wrote:

I've filed a complaint with the Illinois Attorney General for all the good it will do. I have also bought the domain WWW.MIDFAZE.COM and am using it to warn people away from this fraudulent company.

# At 3:44 on October 10, 2007, Thmoas Gutman wrote:

We gave midphase.com a try in 2006 with the 1 month Free trial. after two weeks we know that the company did not work well with our xcart shopping cart system. We called Midphase to cancel our account and they told us that they will close our account. A week later we noted that our credit card had nopt be refunded, so well called again and the support told us we had to sumit an email requesting a closing of our account. So that is what we did, sent a email reqesting a closing. At that time we was sure, that our account was closed. But no, a year later we noted that not only they did not close our account BUT charged us for another year. We called right away as soon as we got our credit card bill and they told us that they will not refund or retro our account. There has been no Activity in that account not even a logon in two years and they know that, but all they could think about is taking our money and runing. They hide there cancellation email account deep in their terms of sale and it’s not even hot linked you need to copy an past into you mailer system like outlook and that is the only clue in thier website to cancel. Well, we followed thier bullsh directions and still got ripoff.