A Small Orange

I've been using A Small Orange, but after my recent crashes and downtime, I am looking to switch. Any suggestions?

here's my tech support chat from today that made me change my mind. Am I wrong to think that 22 hours is an unreasonable amount of time for a website to be down before tech support looks at it??

Ashley B. Thu, 12/03/15 08:59:34 pm America/New_York

Hello Jill . How may I help you?

Jill 09:00:06 pm

I have a website that's been down for 24 hours. need help escalating this
LWE-668-19105
ticket number

Ashley B. 09:01:17 pm

Just a moment.
I'll see what I can do, Jill, but we do process our tickets in the order they are received. I do apologize, but it may be a bit of time. Also, if you reply to the ticket more than once before we do, it bumps it to the back of the line, causing further delays, just FYI.

Jill 09:03:15 pm

this is unacceptable. my ticket has been in for over 24 hours.
this is unacceptable customer service

Ashley B. 09:04:25 pm

22 hours. Less than 22 hours, actually, since you submitted the ticket, and as I said, if you reply to the ticket before we do, it bumps it to the end of the line (looks like you replied twice after you submitted it). I do apologize, I'm only telling you this for future reference. I have notified someone of your ticket and they will look into that just as soon as they can.

Jill 09:04:54 pm

do you think 22 hours is a reasonable amount of downtime for a website

Ashley B. 09:05:19 pm

No, Jill, but as I said, the reason it took us so long to see your ticket is because it was bumped to the back of the queue twice.
I do apologize for the inconvenience, I have a tech looking into your ticket for you now.
Was there anything else I can help you with tonight?

Jill 09:10:49 pm

that's it - I just really want the website back up

Ashley B. 09:11:37 pm

Okay, we'll get that done as soon as we can.

Jill 09:12:12 pm

I replied the second time because the tech sent me an email about MySQL processes, but it was not an answer, and the site was not back up. how am I supposed to NOT respond?
i didn't respond for 10 hours, as I thought he was still working on it
and i finally realized he wasn't, and had to respond.
how can responding to a ticket that isn't fixed, that i get no status on, a bad thing?
how can asking what is going on knock me to the back of the queue? that's a terrible system

Ashley B. 09:13:26 pm

You responded twice before the tech sent you that is what I said, Jill. You had replied to the ticket you created twice before my tech even got a chance to.
I apologize, but that's how it works. Replies move to the back of the queue.

Jill 09:15:13 pm

how much time passed, from your view, between when the ticket was first created, and when I inquired about status?

Ashley B. 09:15:35 pm

Looks like about 6 hours or so, which is pretty typical for our tickets. I've seen tickets take longer than 24 hours for a response depending on the size of the queue


Jill 09:16:31 pm

well i can tell you what, I'll be changing hosts
that's an unacceptable amount of time to respond to a ticket

Ashley B. 09:17:11 pm

I'm sorry you feel that way, Jill. I wish you luck in finding a host that takes less time than that to answer their tickets.


Jill 09:17:34 pm

you guys used to answer in 15 mins. but that was back when Tim Dorr owned it

Ashley B. 09:18:38 pm

I really do apologize that we don't meet your needs or expectations for our ticket turn around time, Jill.
Was there anything more I can assist you with tonight?

Jill 09:20:24 pm

no that's it

Ashley B. 09:20:31 pm

Have a good night

Duration: 20m 59s

Chat has been opened from website: https://asmallorange.com/

jilly said:

I've been using A Small Orange, but after my recent crashes and downtime, I am looking to switch. Any suggestions?

Click to expand...

Be careful with a switch.
With large hosts can happen that you go from bad to worse.
Did they fix your site?
No matter they did or not just look for another host, to be ready to switch.
Look for one which is recommended by many customers.

We used them before and while they were nice and all the long support times were too much for us. Our sites were constantly offline and it didnt make sense to us and we got the same plan elsewhere and had no issues.

While I don't use this as an excuse, A Small Orange is owned by EIG. EIG is a big time company who buys hosts and they more or less screw things up and support becomes outsourced crap and server performance degrades. Look up Hostgator, Arivixe, and others now owned by EIG. A google search will tell you all you need to know.

I advise you to switch personally as even during their 'good times' for us, it took 2-3 hours PER reply. Not sure what your budget is but try looking at hawkhost.

1. Hawkhost
2. Big Scoots
3. MDDhosting
4. PhotonVPS(cloud servers are extremely inexpensive)

Pokemaster Kyle said:

3. MDDhosting

Click to expand...

I'm trialing them now.
They have an excellent support.

doubt said:

I'm trialing them now.
They have an excellent support.

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I definitely recommend them to people. I like seeing hosts active on discussion forums such as WHT because you sort of get a feel for who these people are and Mike, i believe is his name, is quite reputable. Not only for Mddhosting, which is expected, but also due to the help he offers people who are with other hosts.

Only con is the fact they are slightly more pricier compared to competitors such as Hawkhost and crocweb who offer lower prices for similar services and their prices are closer to more premium companies such as Liquidweb and Hostdime while not offering quite the perks they had.

But at the same time, even if slightly higher, the price does seem justified. Glad to hear you are doing well with them thus far.

It is not normal, but it is what happens to web hosting providers acquired by one quite big business group that acquires web hosting providers. Most of these web hosts used to be a good ones. As soon as they got acquired, their support has worsened. What kind of web hosting services do you have with this company?

It's an EIG brand correct? Sounds right up their alley...

Yes, it's owned by EIG.

I agree ASO email support has degraded as far as times. I know they are trying to hire some new techs, maybe that's why?

I generally go through chat and get things pretty quickly, but I have several dedicated servers..

When I hosted with a specific hosting service I won't name but it involves 'host' and 'alligator'... I'd send a support request and it would be several days before I heard something. In fact, it took 8 weeks for them to allow a domain to transfer away from them once I finally jumped ship. 24 hours would have been a treat to me!

Like Joey, I use dedicated servers, so I too go to the live chat that is open for me 24/7/365

A Small Orange! A Huge Price! That should be there motto, very average hosting and cost a fortune. Dont use.

I imagine there is some favoritism towards those who have a dedi or two... A lowly shared hosting subscriber would not be so lucky.

Yep. Used to be hosting by ASO subsidiary under EIG.

Had issues with uptimes, and yea my ticket support times were super slow.

Had to contact their parent company via twitter to even get a response.

Left shortly after.

tHa_r3v0lution said:

I imagine there is some favoritism towards those who have a dedi or two... A lowly shared hosting subscriber would not be so lucky.

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Frankly, there should be.

Oh don't get me wrong, I understand that... It just sucks for folks like me starting St the bottom.. That's all.

tHa_r3v0lution said:

Oh don't get me wrong, I understand that... It just sucks for folks like me starting St the bottom.. That's all.

Click to expand...

Been there. Of course, the trade off is I'll be spending a few thousand this year to upgrade my servers.

hi,
If your website is on shared hosting, then any webhost take that much time. Why? Because i dont think they have live support or rather 24 hr support for them.

But yes, dedicated or vps will have some extra advantages.

thanks

meyash said:

hi,
If your website is on shared hosting, then any webhost take that much time. Why? Because i dont think they have live support or rather 24 hr support for them.

But yes, dedicated or vps will have some extra advantages.

thanks

Click to expand...

This depends solely on the company.... I am currently with JustHost(about to switch) and have shared hosting. I have never opened a ticket with them. They have 24 hr Live Chat. I log in, validate, tell them my problem... While I've learned not to be too optimistic on what I expect from them, they do give ma answer after chatting. Sometimes isn't the answer I want to hear, but for small things they do pretty good. The only draw back is since I didn't use the ticket system, I don't have a good idea of what they did to fix said problem...

They are totally going down in all aspects. I wanted a VPS on Black Friday but couldn't get the discount through the system so I emailed billing. It took them several days to respond and then after I responded back I had to follow up to get a response back. Can't really complain too much on that one though. I normally pay $30 a month for my VPS, but I got this one for $75 for a year.

Bought out by EIG.

If you're running a big board, you should stay away from shared web hosting, especially an EIG brand.

linode.com sell great VPS'. Out of all of the VPS providers I've used, these guys are premium and the first host I've used where I'm spending more time on my site rather than fixing what the host has screwed up. DO I was unable to work properly without being more scared about my data not failing. I spent more money on regular backups than I did on the site itself. Companies like RamNode just aren't big enough to be trusted, for me, and OVH simply doesn't perform. Linode is a great mix at all and now uses the same pricing model as DigitalOcean, DO is bigger by a bit but really Linode outperforms by quite a bit in a lot of departments and comes packed with a great support team. I've only came across one ass so far in my support interactions (which aren't many, which I think says a lot lol).

If you need any advice on choosing a host, I'm only a message away I'd advise you to move away from ASO, especially since they've been bought out by EIG but also because a small $10 VPS can handle a bunch of sites of yours, probably cheaper than your ASO plan, and you have more control, reliability and you're not sharing with god knows how many more sites.