I have had so many conflicting thoughts about writing this post because quite frankly I don’t really want to waste any more of my (currently very precious!) time on this issue but at the same time I think this story needs to be told.

It is a story about two hosting companies and equally disappointing results.

The Hatchery (our company in case you didn’t know) has been a client of WebFusion’s for almost two years now, and in my capacity as CTO for Myzan Limited I was a customer for at least another 2 years.  So I would consider myself to be a pretty stable and valuable customer to them.

As a result of our business expansion we have two key requirements for our server infrastructure going forward:

1. Ability to provide both IMAP and POP email accounts to our customers (we currently only offer POP)
2. Host more sites (and more complex sites)

Since I know Web Fusion support both IMAP and POP (because that is what the marketing blurb on their website told me when I purchased our VPS 2.0 system from them last year), I decided to enable the feature this weekend and check that it all worked correctly.  Well unfortunately it didn’t.  Not only did it not work but the feature to have IMAP on our VPS 2.0 system never existed in the first place…and that is where the story kicks off as I despise not getting what I pay for.

After a heated discussion with the customer services team I was told I had to license MailEnable Pro (the server only comes with MailEnable Standard) for $280.  See their general response below:

——————————————

Dear Andrew,Thank you for your support request on the 25th of June 2008.This appears to be an error on the website.

We provide the standard mailenable,

http://www.mailenable.com/features/mailservices.asp

Please see the FAQ for Windows VPS

(link too long to display and it doesn’t work anyway)

As such we can not offer the IMAP protocol on our Windows VPS, the error on the website will be removed shortly.

——————————————

Well I don’t understand.  The link to the FAQ he provided doesn’t work and apart from which, when I signed up for the service I bought something which said in plain sight (and it still does as of 26/06/2008 15:52) that I was getting POP and IMAP mail functionality.

Instead of crying over $280 (and ignoring my frustration with their customer service) I decided that I would seize the moment to upgrade to a Dedicated Server which was going to cost us more than twice the price of our existing VPS but would not only be much faster (and support our growing business) but also *definately* support IMAP (sales person’s words).  Ok…I caved and resigned myself to the greater expense and for the sake of simplicity decided to stick it out with WebFusion as the upgrade would be much easier.

Two hours later I received confirmation of our server setup and an invoice.  Great delivery but oh dear…

Problem #1: I have been billed for two domain names I quite obviously didn’t register (2 x £6.99 + VAT) - weird.

Problem #2: The account has been created by the sales person under the name starting “cleint…”. Now spelling is a bit of a bugbear with me (let’s hope I haven’t made any errors in this post!) so I asked them to correct it.  [Update: Turns out this can't be undone without reconfiguring the entire server!]

Problem #3: I get given login credentials to access their server control panel which is supposed to be an ‘all singing, all dancing’ affair with brilliance (or at least I think that is what the salesman told me) and log right in to start creating accounts (for our clients) and associating domain names with those accounts.  Great!…well no.  When I went to setup individual mailboxes  for each domain I could only specify the prefix (i.e. ‘info’ if I was creating info[at]pocketduo.com for example).  I figured this must be a bug as they must surely provide a drop down list for each account to specify which domain you are creating the mailbox for.  So I get on the line to their Technical Support department and I am told that it isn’t a bug and that when I create ‘info’ for pocketduo.com, it will create an ‘info’ mailbox for all domains associated with that account!  You have got to be kidding right?  Has anyone else ever heard of this before?  They seem to think this is perfectly normal!  So if Joe Soap works for the support site at Web Fusion for example which has the domain name of webfusion-support.co.uk then when they create joe.soap@webfusion-support.co.uk, he will also get joe.soap@webfusion.co.uk and joe.soap@whatever-other-domains-we-own.com?  Come on!  Really?!

Now I am a bit stuck although I figure my way out of this is to simply log directly into the server using Remote Desktop (it is a dedicated server after all and this is what any client would surely be doing on a regular basis) but I can’t find my password for root access anywhere.  So I call Technical Support again and they tell me I can retrieve my password from inside the control panel if I click through a few menus and click on the ‘Request Password’ button…”but you should know sir that once you have requested that password we no longer offer software support for your server.”  Am I starring in a movie I think to myself as I argue this crazy point with the support technician who clearly understands nothing about servers and how they are used by their clients.

At this point I am flummoxed or perhaps stunned by the comedy of craziness taking place around me.  Is this a business they are running or a circus I ask myself?  I face little choice now so I just decide to retrieve the password and kick up a storm if anything goes wrong with the OS or software (which I vow not to touch) and they refuse to sort it out.  Done.  Now I can log into the server and the first thing I notice is that it is running MailEnable for email handling…and you guessed it…it is only the Standard Edition.  I would still need to license Pro Edition to get my IMAP email handling.

I have had enough now so I blast the sales person, I blast his manager (who offers me one month’s free hosting which is just 75% of the cost of MailEnable Pro) and I get put through to customer services who tell me they will cancel the account and will ‘investigate’ any refund I may be owed.

So we are now left with no IMAP, a struggling VPS server and a need for a new hosting partner.

Please stay tuned for Part II…the saga continues…and not just with WebFusion!