Stay Away From Feature Price

I usually don’t like to complain, especially in public, but Feature Price is one web hosting firm that I really feel I should warn you about. I dealt with Feature Price for two years, being reasonably satisfied with the product and technical service they provided for half that time. I will grant you that the service was, at times, slow and the answers somewhat cryptic, however generally the package was worth what I was paying. I had some reservations about dealing with the company from the beginning but the recent trends in customer service doctrine made it necessary for me to find a new host for inthewoodshop.org. There are five major sticking points that progress from minor to completely unacceptable so rather than write a dissertation on my view of business philosophy I will just come right out and give you the facts. If you are considering signing up with Feature Price, read the following then put yourself in my position.

1. Although arguably a minor point, I have problems dealing with companies that place the clause in their User Agreements saying they guarantee you absolutely nothing of any kind in return for your money. I paid Feature Price several hundred dollars a year. Shouldn’t I get something in return?
2. Further down the page in the User Agreement, there is a clause that stipulates, if Feature Price employees decide in their ultimate wisdom that I have been rude to them, they have the right to cancel my account forthwith and keep the year’s fees I have paid in advance. Now, why would they need a clause like that? Perhaps because they get a lot of complaints? Nevertheless, put this together with their guarantee of absolutely nothing and I am sure you can image why I entered into the deal with a certain degree of trepidation.
3. The technical support system changes in its structure, rules, and interface on almost a daily basis. One day you have to get a help desk ticket to get help. The next, you have to get help over the phone. Before you know it, they have changed the 800 number to a long distance toll number but you have to email them before using it. All of a sudden they have cancelled all phone support and gone back to a help desk ticket required before trying their new chat system, which crashes your computer every time you try to use it. My conclusion was that over a period of months, the net effect was an overall degradation in technical service to a point where it was nonexistent.
4. As an extension of my third point, I decided that the cryptic, noncommittal answers received from technical service deserved its own place on the list. Technical service was always slow. In addition, they never once answered any of my questions properly. Regardless of what I asked the reply was always that the problem was resolved, even if there was no real problem to resolve. I am not sure if it is a problem with understanding the English language or a general lack of energy and caring, but I never received a satisfactory response from the help desk.
5. The coup was the fact that in the last 8 months of hosting with Feature Price, my mail service was down or in effect inoperable about 30% to 40% of the time. In addition, the inthewoodshop.org web site experienced outages, completely beyond my control, routinely, some so bad that my site was down for an entire day. If you look at my stats you can see where I have experienced days that have no, or severely reduced traffic. When you rely on email and it becomes essentially unavailable, then there is no point paying for it. The same goes for having a web site hosted.

Now you have the facts. Feature Price is an impossible company to deal with. I really recommend that if you are considering them, you give it a great deal of thought first.