Terrible performance and technical support
Written: Oct 31 '06
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Pros: Registrar for .ca domains
Cons: Terrible site performance, including frequent outages. Poor technical support. Lacking support for key WordPress features.
The Bottom Line: Never use Netfirms. The performance is terrible, they're lacking some key WordPress features and their technical support is very poor.
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| skemsley's Full Review: Netfirms |
I signed up for Netfirms almost two months ago for the website and blog of a non-profit organization that I volunteer with. The site is basic static HTML pages, and the blog is WordPress, so nothing fancy here. Since the beginning, I have had serious performance problems on the site: very slow ftp with dropping connections, site completely down, MySQL database (underlying the WordPress install) unavailable, WordPress blog unavailable, and email (all of webmail, POP and SMTP) unavailable. Although I originally intended to move the entire site to WordPress as a site content management system, the flakiness of the MySQL database has deterred me from doing so. We sell tickets to our events via the site (although not using any Netfirms ecommerce facilities), so when our site is down, we potentially lose ticket sales. Even when everything is available, the load times for the pages, both static HTML and WordPress, are unacceptably slow. Pages retrieved from WordPress take at least 10 seconds to load, and sometimes as long as 30 seconds.
I've called in for technical support a few times when something specific is not working, and they will only address the current outage, but will not discuss the bigger issue of how their servers are either underpowered, or their setup/management of the servers is flawed in some way. When I asked why I can't have some expectation of decent uptime and performance on my account, their only recommendation was to upgrade to an enterprise plan, which is far outside the budget (and requirements) of my organization. I currently have their Advantage Business Plan, which they claim is hosted on an enterprise-class server cluster and that "Multiple data centers ensure that your website is always available" -- a claim that is clearly untrue.
The second major problem is that of functionality, specifically around WordPress. Netfirms does not provide AllowOverride for .htaccess (there's a long thread about this on the WordPress forums, specifically talking about Netfirms, and after much run-around, I had this confirmed by Netfirms support via email). What this means to non-WordPress geeks is that I can't get "pretty" URLs for my blog posts; the URL has to include "index.php" in order to use a format other than the default (ugly) WordPress permalink structure. Not such a big deal on a blog, but a huge deal if I wanted to make the entire website run on WordPress: that would mean that all of the page URLs would have to include the "index.php", so our About page, for example, would have to be http://oursite.com/index.php/about rather than http://oursite.com/about.
Unfortunately, although I've only invested a relatively small amount by signing up for a year, I'm past the 30-day refund limit (which I didn't realize existed, or I would have exercised it about 2 weeks in), and if I want to change hosts it will have to come out of my own pocket since I can't really ask the non-profit group to pay for another web host. Out of frustration, however, I may end up doing just that, since sites that I have running on GoDaddy are working just fine.
Recommended:
No
Monthly fees (US$): $12.95
Platform used: Linux
Hosted on Secure Server: Yes
Database used: MySQL
Main focus of Web site: Sales/E-commerce
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Epinions.com ID:
skemsley
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Reviews written: 1
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