I have went through the worse week of my life with this server outage at CI HOST. I signed up for my trial 30 days of service just before the CI HOST crash. Everything was going fine for the first week or so of my service then on the 29th my site www.mouthtalk.com (a site for audio/video user contributed commentary daily events) would not load up. I started getting emails from friends and users about the site being down. I checked into it, and sure enough the site was done. So I contacted CI HOST. Customer Service told me that this would only affect me for an hour tops. Two hours later I call back, and they tell me three more hours at the most. I called 24 hours later, and got a canned message saying that it would only be three more hours. The message explained that they had some problems with a DNS upgrade and they were finishing up the upgrade. On the 31st I tried to get through, with no luck, the phones stayed busy all day. I sent countless emails, but they never were replied to. The companies support (www.cisupport.com) was also down, though their main site (www.cihost.com) was up as nothing was wrong. Finally I got through after hundreds of attempts on New Years Day. I asked to have my account canceled and I was told that I would have to call back and talk to Customer Service Monday morning (3rd) after 9am. All through New Years weekend, my service was still down. Finally after 4 hours of constant busy signals I got through to Customer Service on Monday. I was told that I could only cancel my account by going to (www.cancel.cihost.com) I tried to do so while I was on the phone with 'Steve', but that site was down as well. I asked to speak to a supervisor, but was told there was not anyone around. I asked 'Steve' how I was to cancel my account, since their site was down, he said, that was the only way. I asked him repeatably while he could not do so, but he would not answer that question. Finally he transferred me to Accounting. Accounting told me to mail them a letter and they would process it when they could. I explained that I was still on my trial period and did not want to be charged anything because of my 30 day money back plan. I tried for the next two days to get through to the (www.cancel.cihost.com) site but it stayed down as did my site. Finally on Wednesday the 6th (a week after my troubles started) I managed to get through to the cancel site. Once I cancelled my account online, I was prompted to print out a document and fax it to them. The document stated that I would have to waive any "chargeback" attempts. It also stated that if I did not send in this form with my VISA account information that they would not cancel my account, and would continue to charge me. I finally signed the account, to hopefully but a end to my week of horrors. Down the drain: a $70 domain name, which they will most likely take forever to release for me to transfer it to another service, and my $50 setup fee which is not refundable. All of this for a 1/2 month of nothing. As well I have lost many users to my site and revenue generated by Banner Ads.
Slashdot Mirror
I have went through the worse week of my life with this server outage at CI HOST. I signed up for my trial 30 days of service just before the CI HOST crash. Everything was going fine for the first week or so of my service then on the 29th my site www.mouthtalk.com (a site for audio/video user contributed commentary daily events) would not load up. I started getting emails from friends and users about the site being down. I checked into it, and sure enough the site was done. So I contacted CI HOST. Customer Service told me that this would only affect me for an hour tops. Two hours later I call back, and they tell me three more hours at the most. I called 24 hours later, and got a canned message saying that it would only be three more hours. The message explained that they had some problems with a DNS upgrade and they were finishing up the upgrade. On the 31st I tried to get through, with no luck, the phones stayed busy all day. I sent countless emails, but they never were replied to. The companies support (www.cisupport.com) was also down, though their main site (www.cihost.com) was up as nothing was wrong. Finally I got through after hundreds of attempts on New Years Day. I asked to have my account canceled and I was told that I would have to call back and talk to Customer Service Monday morning (3rd) after 9am. All through New Years weekend, my service was still down. Finally after 4 hours of constant busy signals I got through to Customer Service on Monday. I was told that I could only cancel my account by going to (www.cancel.cihost.com) I tried to do so while I was on the phone with 'Steve', but that site was down as well. I asked to speak to a supervisor, but was told there was not anyone around. I asked 'Steve' how I was to cancel my account, since their site was down, he said, that was the only way. I asked him repeatably while he could not do so, but he would not answer that question. Finally he transferred me to Accounting. Accounting told me to mail them a letter and they would process it when they could. I explained that I was still on my trial period and did not want to be charged anything because of my 30 day money back plan. I tried for the next two days to get through to the (www.cancel.cihost.com) site but it stayed down as did my site. Finally on Wednesday the 6th (a week after my troubles started) I managed to get through to the cancel site. Once I cancelled my account online, I was prompted to print out a document and fax it to them. The document stated that I would have to waive any "chargeback" attempts. It also stated that if I did not send in this form with my VISA account information that they would not cancel my account, and would continue to charge me. I finally signed the account, to hopefully but a end to my week of horrors. Down the drain: a $70 domain name, which they will most likely take forever to release for me to transfer it to another service, and my $50 setup fee which is not refundable. All of this for a 1/2 month of nothing. As well I have lost many users to my site and revenue generated by Banner Ads.