Review Title: Fast Servers, but No Power and Frustrating Customer Service [ View All Reviews ]

Earthlink Web Hosting got rated one of the top web hosting providers by C-net. How they managed that rating, I have no idea. Some serious money must have exchanged hands. I've had to deal with them on behalf of two customers now and both times was about as fun as getting a door slammed on your hand.

Let's cover the good points first. Their hosting servers are usually fast and reliable so they're probably not overloading their servers like a lot of cheap or low end hosting companies do to offer low prices. They also offer a healthy allocation of disk storage and transfer bandwidth, but not unrealistic amounts to win the comparison chart game against competitors.

Cheap hosts will eventually reaveal to you why their prices are so low. Earthlink charges a fair market price for what they offer, but their hosting plans are missing some key features for the price that they're charging. The most glaring is that none of their plans include MySQL database support. That's an amazing omission for hosting services aimed at small businesses. MySQL is part of the lifeblood of anyone running a dynamic website on a limited website budget.

Then there's the user interfaces...the confusing user interfaces that are easy to get lost in. I found myself getting lost and logging in multiple times and logging into the wrong areas of the website.

Most frustrating was the customer service experience. I've been on hold for 30 minutes now as I'm finishing up this review. They keep giving me inaccurate information and whenever I follow instructions to send a support request to them, I end up in this stupid online chat session with a phantom customer service rep. Amazingly, the "person" greets you the same way each time you start a session and the first sentence they say in response to you is always "Hi, I will assist you."

They obviously have some canned automatic responses to make it seem like you're getting more immediate attention. It'd be funny instead of annoying if those canned responses didn't fool you into trying to talk to someone who's not there yet... and now it's been 35 minutes since I got my very purposeful sounding "Hi, I will assist you."

Before I end this, I need to say for purposes of disclosure that I sell web hosting as part of my business so I could be biased, but I also know what good hosting is when I see it.