Reviews of Things I Have

I do a bit of freelance web design when I get home from my 9 to 5. Oftentimes, my clients already have a site, domain, and hosting, and it’s my job to take the whole thing and give it a facelift, keeping it on the same server with the same company.

Thus, my aggravating swipe with ReadyHosting (aka Ready Hosting, ReadyHosting.com), possibly the worst web hosting company in existence, came to be.

A short list of terrible things from my experience with them:

• un-intuitive, confusing, non-user-friendly administrative panel that had me accidently bringing down my client’s website for a couple terrifying hours
• incompetent, rude, outsourced tech support
• their servers are running PHP5, supposedly, but it’s not optimized nor does it have all the features installed, so good luck trying to use many of the features of modern CMS’s (if you ask them about it, they will give you the runaround and try/fail to fix it)
• they will cache things (in my case, an .htaccess file) and keep them outside of your jurisdiction, which is, to put it lightly, problematic

(I could write more, but my blood is angry just writing those… and this was months ago I dealt with them!)

After a week or two of trying (and failing) to circumvent their shortcomings and a couple calls with their ridiculous customer support that had me pulling my hair out, I convinced my client to open an account with DreamHost and had their beautiful new website up and running in a couple hours.

From what I’ve read, they used to be a fantastic company based in the States, but then the owners sold it to an Indian firm and things went downhill fast. Yay, capitalism! Boo, unfortunately true stereotypes!

Final verdict: Run, do not walk, from ReadyHosting.com. I’ve worked with lots of hosting companies, and they were definitely the worst of them all.