Has anyone ever used Vista Pages

I hosted 15 websites with VistaPages.com On April 1st, the entire server my account was hosted on was infected and my service was not secure for weeks while they told me they were fixing it. When they didn't fix the sites, I asked to have my domains pointed to another host. I have been trying to get them to point, (they don't allow me access to my domain name or I would do it myself). But now weeks later they tell me they will not point the domains, and that I will have to pay for them to be transferred to another domain host in order to point the domains.

Can you believe it?

Then, my accounts were canceled, and I get no refund for the many months left on my account. (I prepaid for a year on all the accounts I had)

I asked them about their uptime guarantee, and they pointed me to two different contracts, (the second one was a hidden contract that attempts to disclaim the uptime guarantee), it looks exactly the same but has different clauses referring to the uptime guarantee. According to the contract, it can be updated at any time, and clients will have to just deal with the changes. (You can see the contracts at:http://vistapages.com/legal/tos.php)

What a bad company- stay far away from them! So many better ones out there.

Here is a post that I made on the VISTA PAGES forums, that was deleted TWICE, and then my posting privileges were revoked. Keep in mind that I only resorted to posting on their forums after I'd talked with numerous customer service representatives on the phone, the head of Quality Peter Wakefield by e-mail, and sent in tickets trying to get this situation resolved. In each instance, the customer service representative told me that I would be reimbursed. In each case, they lied. Read on, if you dare:

I was with Vista Pages for a year. I decided to cancel my service after the horrible downtime my site experienced when many sites were hosted under an aging server. My site would be down several times a week for hours at a time. I simply couldn't continue working that way, so I canceled my service when time came.

I sent in my ticket (ticket #XFH-782927) for cancellation, which went to Peter Wakefield, who asked me why I was canceling. I explained to him the problems I was having. He suggested I purchase a VPN with Vista Pages to prevent this problem from happening again. I suggested to him that if Vista couldn't handle a small business like mine with the small business hosting package I purchased (which my business is even smaller now!), then I didn't feel that this company was capable of handling it if I bought a bigger package either.

Next thing I know, I get charged for another year's worth of service when I had canceled. I figured this must be a mistake, so I contacted Vista Pages support, gave them my ticket number for cancellation, and they apologized to me for charging me when I had canceled, and promised to reimburse me.

I waited. And waited. A couple of weeks went by, and I contacted Vista support again. I gave them my cancellation ticket number, and I was told the same thing. They apologized for charging for another year's worth of service, and promised to reimburse me.

A couple more weeks went by, and I contacted Vista support again. Same story as the 2 previous times.

I waited again. Last week I contacted Vista support, went through the same process I have the last few times, and the customer service representative promised to have my reimbursement sent to me by Tuesday of this week. He said it would take that long for the two banks to communicate with each other.

It's now Thursday afternoon, two months after I canceled my service, and I still have not received my reimbursement from Vista Pages. Can someone help me?

I have been using Drupal with Vistapages for my framework for a while. I installed it easily with that Fantastico tool that they have. I needed some modification help and they helped me, they do have extended help at $25/hour, which was good too! Their techs are experienced and can help you with pretty much everything. I have been with them a few month's and so far so good!

I write this for vista pages:
Dear Vistapages,

We have about 3000 visits per day on our web pagewww.hibalkan.com. Our sponsors already start to prosecute us, and we will have problems with the law. We give promisses to our customers similar to yours given to us, that we will have 99.9% uptime. We would like to ask you again for answer, and for our server to be up. If this does not happen in near feature (next 24 hours) we are ready to find good law company in Canada which will take care of us.

Our company will take any steps needed on international courts to achieve what was promised.

Thank you for your understanding.

Best regards,
Cortex-07 LTD
Martin Kirovakov

And they:
VistaPages Support to me show details Oct 6 (21 hours ago)

Greetings,

It has come to my attention that the new server should be ready today. You will be notified once this has been completed, in regards to the data due to the file system corruption we weren't able to restore any including our backups which were destroyed.

VistaPages Support to me show details Oct 6 (20 hours ago)

Greetings,

Sorry for the inconveniences caused. Our backups were destroyed due to the file system corruption even though they were on a separate hard drive in a raid environment.

What do you think to find good law company in Canada which will take care of us.
My mail: DarkSerial@gmail.com

Just adding my voice as someone who has had a bad experience with VistaPages. Not only are they incompetent, they consistently try to blame their customers for mistakes they make. If you complain, they are arrogant and condescending, or downright nasty. While I was waiting for them to fix a HUGE issue on their servers, I had the chance to find this tidbit on the consumerist site: http://www.consumerist.com/consumer/csr/vistapages-curses-off-customer-1.... Sad thing is, this did not surprise me in the least. I'm sure I'll be getting similar treatment as I am now migrating away and will be doing a chargeback with my cc.

I signed up with them mid last year only to regret I ever came across this company. These are scam artists of the first order. We run an online business that allows no down time, and down time is exactly what we had. Vista Pages gives a new definition to the term "Bad Service".

I am surprised you are reluctant to go with 1&1. We got fed up with VP and moved to 1&1 only realise that we should have been with 1&1 from day 1. I experienced down time once in 6 months for 7 mins, and that was it. Their phone service is great.

Don't make the same mistake a lot of us made. Keep away from Vista Pages.

The best way for you would be to an extensive research on the hosts you have shortlisted, read reviews online and on popular web hosting forums like webhostingtalk.com. You can then contact their sales department to inquire whether your necessary requirements are supported on their hosting or not.

Website Hosting

I strongly recommend to not use this hosting provider. VistaPages is the worst customer experience I ever had in my life.

Anyway, one of the issues was that my visitors were getting garbage content instead of my Drupal site from time to time and VistaPages never could fix this in a durable manner. And this was only the least worse part of the experience...

If you really want to go with VistaPages this is what you should do for sure:
* Do not register your domain with VistaPages; they will make it very hard to move to another hoster...
* Make daily backups of your Drupal site at *another* host or at your home computer
* Do subscribe for the shortest period

I really want to answer all your questions related to VistaPages. My story (very short version; there is more!) with VistaPages can be read on next page and you will find my contact information there also: http://coccinella.im/harvard-way-to-choose-hosting

I can't comment on Drupal hosting, but I used Vistapages for Joomla and other php based open source. You have to give Vistapages good marks for effort and prompt communications, but I am disturbed by all the performance issues and down-time that I have experienced in the past six months. My site has been down for four days now and now they tell us that they don't know “IF & WHEN” they will be able to restore mySQL data.

I'm not sure if it is industry practice to depend on customers backups in the case of system crash, but I had assumed that hosting companies have sufficient redundant hardware and backups in this situation. Here are excepts from their Vistapages Support forum and email conversion with their support staff. Please let me know if how other 'low cost' hosting companies would prepare and respond to such problems.

05-28-2008, 11:35 PM
At approximately 7:00PM EST, we have detected an issue with Apollo spitting out errors. We have technicians looking into the issue. Further updates will be made as available.

05-29-2008, 03:08 AM
Our technicians are still working to resolve the service interruption issue with Apollo.

May 30 , 12:22 AM
The server is now online. The technicians are now working to restore files from our regular snapshot backup files.

May 31 05:57 AM
User /home files have been restored. Files are accessible via FTP & SSH. Mail should also be accessible via POP/IMAP.

Technicians are still working on restoring Apache/HTTP service. Once this is done, customers will be able to access cPanel, Webmail and their web sites.

May 31, 02:32 PM
Customer's websites will be loading now. We're working on restoring MySQL databases.

May 31 05:32 PM
Thank you for your patience thus far. The last 36 hours have been a very difficult, frustrating time for everyone, including our support staff and technicians whom are currently working around the clock.
...
2. Add-on domains are currently not functioning. Our programmers are working on a script to rebuild these configuration files. Once this is completed, your add-on domain web sites will start to re-appear. We suspect that e-mails will also start to be accessible for add-on domains, however, this is still being investigated and will be resolved shortly.
...
3. MySQL databases have been located. We are having a difficult time extracting the databases along with the directory tree structure which is preventing us from restoring them for every customer. This issue has been moved to the background, but still remains a top-priority to recover. We encourage all customers with MySQL-driven web sites to restore from previous backups. If you are not sure how to do this, please submit a ticket with the SQL/MySQL file location (please upload it to the server before submitting a ticket) and we'll help you import them back into your databases. This was not on our centralized storage system, however this type of failure will be rectified in newer versions of our infrastructure.

May 31 , 01:30 AM
We are investigating e-mails related to parked and addon domains & hope to have this resolved shortly.

May 31, 03:16 AM
#5: MySQL Databases. There has been some confusion from our previous e-mail. So I'll take the time to clear it up as best as I can. MySQL is stored on a local system for performance (read/write) purpose as opposed to being stored on our gigabit storage network (all your /home, email files). It is taking us longer to recover MySQL files for this reason. Our technicians are currently performing data recovery on the drives pulled from the server, similar to tasks that the government agencies and data recovery firms under go. We're lucky to have that talent available to us. This process, unfortunately for everyone is time consuming, but we're working as fast as possible.
...
*** IF & WHEN *** we are successful in our attempts to recover the databases from the local drives, we will be performing a mass restoral of MySQL databases for customers. Those that have decided to restore from their own backups will be skipped to prevent new data from being lost. Those customers will be provided with the backup files seperately in their /home directory for your use.

Sunday June 1, 2008 (from email)
That's pretty bold of you to say that we feel no responsibility. Infact for your few measley bucks per month, we are working extremely hard conducting data forensics to recover the data. We do not provide weekly backups or any backups for that matter, and this is clearly mentioned in our terms of service.  It's your responsibility to keep backups of your so called "important" data.

There is no ETA because of the fact that it is a complicated process. We've already restored all of your /home files, which is more than what we should've done in terms of backup. You'll have to wait for the e-mail that is sent to let you know whether or not the recovery was successful or not.

I cannot help you further with your issue unless you have a database backup that you've taken yourself.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

March 29, 2008 - noon
two clients reported server down.
“I tried to edit it when i got home but i couldn't get it then either”

March 27, 2008
At approximately 8:00PM EST on Friday March 28, 2008 we will be performing network maintenance. There is expected to be intermittent service for about 30 minutes. All customers/services will be affected as the maintenance is being done on our core routing/switching equipment. The maintenance window will end at 9:00PM EST on Friday March 28, 2008.

We apologize for any issues this may cause you. This maintenance is being done to better serve your needs and our rapidly growing infrastructure.

March 16, 2008
Your web site is now hosted on an eServer technology web server, designed by IBM. You're also taking advantage of our new centralized storage network & enterprise anti-spam. These three advancements will help Vistapages provide customers with outstanding service, which is less prone to issues that we have experienced in the past. I'm also going to add that, this doesn't eliminate any future issues from occurring, it's technology, things break -- I'm saying that they'll happen a lot less often. We'll see a lot less issues performance slowdowns with high loads, filesystem checks and annoying SPAM.” (1:39 AM)

March 15, 2008
(Note: down at least 2 hours today)
Earlier today we had switched your website over to our new IBM infrastructure, which has gone somewhat issue free. However, there have been reports of Apache not having the correct modules after the switch over. We are currently working to restore the Apache modules to ensure solid and stable service. (11:17)

“The build is expected to last approximately 30 minutes. HTTP access will remain intermittent until that time. Up to date information is always available”

Site is up now, but I can't get into control panel. Has password changed? (7:42)

I am still down. “Give us about 1 hour, while we work out the kinks from the move.” (4:22PM)

“The issue appeared to be a fault in power distribution unit that provides power to BOX13. The datacenter we utilize offers redundant power, feeding from UPS & Utility power. The datacenter also features 2 generators. MCI is currently investigating the reasoning for the fault in power service.”

“At approximately 4:15PM, box13 went down due to an issue related to the data center. We have technicians on site, and we are working with MCI/Verizon to determine what the issue is to restore service.”

“The site is working fine. As for it being down in the morning, I do not see any indication of that, or any failures. We did switch over to IBM equipment a few moments ago, for a total outage of 4.0 minutes.” (4:09PM) [funny, they said it was moved to IBM xServer on Feb 10, 2008??]

March 13, 2008
“Over the last few days, we have found that BOX13 is performing less than adequately due to the lack of memory in the server. We are upgrading the server to accommodate the load being put on it.”

“We realized that there are slow down periods on the server you're on. The box is scheduled to receive a memory upgrade, which will resolve these immediate problems.“ (1:21AM)

March 7, 2008, 10:41
“They should catch up shortly. If you are still finding yourself having issues with reading bandwidth, let us know.” (10:41PM)

Feb 25, 2008
At approximately 7:30PM EST, we have experienced some high load issues as a result of the issue earlier today. We are rebooting the server. All should be well after the reboot.

Feb 25, 2008, 8:44
“Due to the problem we had earlier today, the server is acting quite funky at the moment. We are rebooting the server to get rid of the problem. The service should be restored in a few moments.” (8:44)

Feb 25, 2008
At approximately 3:21PM EST we were alerted about httpd failures on our shared hosting servers for BOX13 and then consecutively others that are on the new storage network.

3:55PM EST the issue was resolved and pin-pointed to the storage network switch is being investigated at this time.

Feb 24, 2008
At approximately 1:25PM EST, our network faced an incoming denial of service attack. This caused intermittent service for about 5-10 minutes as our network administrators worked to mitigate the attack.

Feb 20, 2008
The site is currently up. The server is under some load and there maybe slowdowns, however we're looking to identify the cause. Your server is also going through phase 1 of our migration plan to our IBM eServer technology, which will virtually eliminate these slow downs. So a more permanent fix to these sporatic slowdowns will be resolved by that means. (11:31)

Feb 10, 2008
“As for the recent issues with box13, we had moved it to IBM xSeries serves from our legacy Intel equipment. I will be the first to say that it didn't go as smoothly as I hoped and as others have gone. The e-mails were sent out today to notify customers as promised for a minor update to apache -- which to my knowledge has already been completed before the 5PM deadline.” (from webhostingtalk.com)

October 19, 2008
[this one occurred before I signed up]
“A few hours after a few of the employee’s were let go, a group of them gained access through means that were unknown to us (which have now been identified and blocked) and inserted malacious code that would corrupt all data within the server if the server were to be rebooted. This code was found and removed from all active servers. Following the removal of the code, we started to experience a large DOS (Read more: denial-of-service) attack. This caused severe disruptions in service for a few days as it was off and on, it came in as spurts. At this point, we had been in talks with our upstream provider and were able to block their initial attempts at flooding our network. They further advanced their attempts and we could no longer fight off the attack with the current network toolset that we had in place — we were forced to make an emergency move of our affected network to a network that would be able to properly mitigate and handle attacks such as the one we were experiencing.”

I also been screwed by Vistapages they lost all my data and said I should have done a back up, well they should have done the same. Then in an attempt to change DNS they flat out said "NO", I then attempted to transfer my domain name and tickets were just closed no response. Yet with no explaination as to why.

**NOTE TO ALL TRYING TO TRANSFER DOMAIN NAMES FROM VISTAPAGES**

Vistapages is a domain name RESELLER and not a REGISTRAR, they fall under ENOM Inc. Who clearly is not going to tolerate their shady practices and this is a good thing.

1. Google ENOM, INC
2. Click on Enom web link
3. Top of page click HELP
4. Scroll to bottom of page click CONTACT US
5. On the right side of the page e-mail LEGAL SUPPORT

In less that 24 hours I received a EPP Code, or transfer authorization code, but this won't solve the hosting problems, but if you need to move a domain name, It helped me. Vistapages is clearly in violation of ICANN, and Enom is not going to allow them to be, Big ups to Enom.

OK, don't fight with Vistapages, they will only make your life a living hell.

1. Don't sign up

2. Get out, but if you need your domain name follow intructions above

I don't hate Vistapages because it's not in my nature, I only expect the service in which I paid for, that they did not provide. Saying that, I was in, now I want out, well in fact I got out, lost money, but a leason well learned.

Saying that is to say this, I really didn't care about the domain name even though I lost money on it, and the domain is tarnished. I only fought because I knew they was in violation of ICANN, and they can not stop you from transfering domain names provided the domain name has not expired.

I can go on and on, but I will not, only trying to help consumers who feel that they have been screwed but want to move on. The information provided above will assist you with recovering your domain name.

www.pimpeasybook.com