First off, welcome back to TUK – I thank all those that repeatedly messaged me about this and helped me keep my sanity. The post below may contain a slight amount of swearing – I have toned it down, but when you have ten days of frustration and being pissed off because of the clueless morons that run your hosting service, it is kind of hard. Lets hope that TUK can get back to where it was before the ten days of non-existence.

ARGHHHHHHHHH!

There’s my venting . Seriously though, this blog is now up after ten days of downtime – downtime that could have easily been avoided had the old hosting service I went with not been run by a bunch of lazy, ignorant fools. Do they deserve the abuse? Yes.

First off, let me say that I was extremely happy with Hostican’s shared hosting server – it did do the task it was meant to do, which was hosting my files with a near 100% uptime and speedy responses. There comes a time in a blog’s life when it gets too big for shared hosting, and as I had passed that I decided to upgrade to a dedicated server with Hostican itself. This was not cheap – it cost $200 a month along with a $60 setup fee, however it was with a company that had done me well so I trusted that the experience would be a pleasurable one.

I was wrong, and it was then that the problems started.

From the word go, I had problems with Hostican’s server – the website itself constantly timing out, the control panel failing to load. It appeared that they had blocked my IP address – anyways, after constantly being unable to get in for two weeks and having them reset the server multiple times, I decided enough was enough and asked them for a refund. Even though they hooked me up with a server that did not work, I told them to less server setup fees from the refund, as I had been happy with their service before then. I also explicitly mentioned in the very same email that I would like the nameservers of the domain changed to my new hosting, as without that the website would cease to function. I had already asked George to move the files a couple of days prior, so I was all set.

A part of this is my fault – when registering with Hostican, I chose TheUniversityKid.com as the free “lifetime” domain name, not expecting this blog to grow as it has done. Never do this, especially with Hostican – you’ll see why now. Despite this mishap, it should not have resulted in the blog being down for so long – this was due to Hostican, and the idiots that handled my support request.

Transferring domains out to another registrar (in my case, I used GoDaddy) is a pain – you need to wait 5-7 business days for it to transfer and you to be back in control, however this does not mean you will suffer downtime if your nameservers are updated and your files transferred. Rather than the ten seconds of downtime that I should have had, I was knocked down for ten days – all due to Hostican.

As soon as I submitted a refund request for the server payment (as it didn’t work) Hostican’s whole attitude towards me changed – replies that used to take hours to receive started taking days, requests put forward not complied with (most hard-hitting the nameserver fuckup) – their service after the refund request might have been slower, granted but it should not have been unprofessional. And unprofessional is what it was – they have cost me not just time and money, but also frustrated the hell out of me and my readers and stunted the growth of this blog.

After they cancelled the server, all that was needed to be done was me supplied with the authorization code and the nameservers changed – it would have taken me no more than a few minutes maximum to restore the blog. Getting the authorization code should not have taken more than 24 hours, maximum – it took 72 – with me having to send off a few emails as well as ask their live chat WTF was going on, and my nameserver change request was completely ignored, meaning that this blog spent ten days dead.

This blog spending ten days dead is one thing, but what has Hostican directly and indirectly cost me?

Revenue. This blog makes around $18/day, and it was down for ten days. Meaning that I have lost around $180, and I’m pretty sure that Hostican are not going to send me that amount. I will also have to compensate advertisers for the downtime, meaning that you could effectively double that figure.

Traffic. On average, this blog receives anywhere between 200 – 1000+ visitors daily, meaning that at the very least Hostican has cost me 1,000 unique visitors, and at most it could have cost me around 7,000 visitors. Meaning that for this month I will have 1/3rd of my traffic gone, as well as people that didn’t know what was happening and will not return for a few days.

Emails. I lost ten days of emails that I shouldn’t have – you can add this to potential revenue. On average, I get asked to do at least one review weekly, get quite a few free products (some of which are valued over $100) as well as many requests for help – I did not get any of them, so could not respond to any. Thats not just lost revenue, but a loss of the networking I could have done and the relationships I could have built – quite a few people that could have emailed me may think that I do not care about my readers as I didn’t reply, when this is not the case. Note, if you have emailed me something I did not get it, so please send things to my Gmail address.

Trauma. I’m not someone that gets depressed about things, but I sure as hell was pissed off at what I saw as amateur support, to say the least. You do not know what you have till it is no longer there, and I did miss posting for ten days and getting to see reader reactions and whatnot. Speaking of trauma, the downtime also led to hours and hours spent talking over MSN to various people – for some reason, quite a few people thought I had sold the blog and that it was down because it was being transferred – geesh! Anyways, due to me missing TUK so much, I can promise you that I will definitely not be selling it anytime in the near future.

Hostican are not going to compensate me at all, and in fact took $60.00 for their f**kups and poor support. I happily recommended them in the past, but after this I shall no longer – something I will do today or tomorrow is remove all mentions of them from my recommended page and RSS footer. Who do I recommend for hosting? Hostgator. I used to be critical about them before, but I recently put up a couple of small niche sites and was exceptionally happy. As long as you backup your files and buy your domain through GoDaddy, you do not need to worry about anything – the good thing about Hostgator is that they give you their first month at just $0.01 with the coupon code jury or wordpress. Not bad for a trial offer.

Sorry for the rant, but this Hostican Review had to be done. Do NOT use them, especially if you eventually decide to move; some talk about a Hostican scam but this is just as bad, as unprofessional service should not be taken in any industry. I hope I saved you guys some money

I have a tonne of things to update on, and will be doing so in the next few days – the forum is booming with more than 2,000 posts, I did my first (and last) podcast and also got a microphone + Skype so I can talk to all TUK readers (add JPereiraOwns, I’m still not sure how to use it so ask me on MSN first). I also have two posts that were deleted during the update (with over 50 comments) so will put them up soon.