Ventures Online

[Business Brian]

Ventures Online was another company I recently moved from. It was very much because of issues with VO and UH that pushed me into moving my sites from the US to UK.
 
 Ventures Online have a generally very good ticketing system - once you get used to the fact that the cookies don't work properly so I had to keep signing in, and also the the fact that just because a support ticket is marked as "high priority" doesn't necessarily mean that it will be seen to promptly.
 
 My big issues with VO was that they never seemed to make much of an effort to monitor the servers. Sometimes the server loads were pretty ridiculous - try getting a dynamic site to run when the servers are running loads of 60+, 60+, 60+.
 
 Also, there were repeated failure of my site not being served. Multiple times I was told by support that a script somewhere had been left to run, and that the issue was now sorted out - but far too often the support staff didn't actually check to see if any particular issue had actually been solved.
 
 For example, one of my last support requests was about webalizer not working. Even 7 days later one of the support staff informed me that it should be working now. Of course, it wasn't, because the VO should have checked, but never did. Webalizer had been down for 10 days when my sites migrated out. Is that acceptable?
 
 It wasn't so much that there was any particular big issue to sour our relationship - as much as lots of silly little things. I was constantly frustrated at how it was left to me to discovered that my site was down and report this to VO - not least because I never knew how long the site may have been down for before I actually noticed.
 
 I am haunted by a comment someone made in WHT, about how Ventures Online were overstuffing their servers. Judging by my own experiences, he could well have been very right. All the more disappointing that VO never seemed to be actually keeping an eye on their server performance when they did so.
 
 Oh - one last point - at one point I saw Ventures Online using a lot of hidden text on their pages. Obviously a poor unformed SEO method. I'm not sure what happened, but last time I looked, Ventures Online had dropped to a PR of 0.

[Business Brian]

Heh, they sent me a bill yesterday - they are still trying to bill my account, I replied to ask them to check the matter - now it's 14 hours later, no reply, so I e-mailed them again to billing stating that if they attempt to remove monies from my account I will simply issue chargebacks against them until they resolve the issue.
 
 What is it with hosts and repeat billing anyway? That's 3 hosts now within 24 hours of each other billing me for cancelled accounts: VO, Spenix, and Catalyst2. Tsk.

[EquusBusinessFinance]

Brian,
 
I have some of my websites with Ventures Online, and was always impressed with there service, until they were recently sold to Data393.
 
I never had very many support issues, and those I had were dealt with very promptly. So I had no complaints.
 
Since they were purchased by Data393 earlier this year, I've had the server down a couple of times, and, like you, I had to inform them, rather than the other way round.
 
It's also taking them a long time to get VO and Data393 properly integrated, so Admin isn't too hot at present.