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Sick of Exabytes

Posted in Technology |

Exabytes Sucks!

This site will be going through some major upgrade as I migrate the server away from Exabytes.

I’ve hosted Meshio.com on Exabytes for about 4 years and it was the last one year that they failed to deliver their promise. Their server keeps going down, and for the past few days it was so bad that I might as well host the website on my PC at home.

And this is the best part, I emailed them since the downtime occured, and followed up with another one 8 hours later, and I have yet to hear from them till now (that’s about 24 hours ago).

To add salt to injury, I was browsing up their website to look for their Customer Feedback email and I found this claim:

Reliability and Security
When you launch a web site, you expect to see your website when the URL is typed. Let’s face it, when you entrust your site to a web host, you expect reliability. At Exabytes®, reliability is never in question. We’ve been a stable and profitable hosting company since our formation in 2001. With Exabytes® behind your web site, you can be rest assured that your site will be up and ready, just like you’d expect.

Please, walk the talk. I wonder if you can sue them for posting fictatious information. I mean, if I am a newbie to web hosting, I might have been taken in by that statement. Even with their 100 days Money Back Guarantee, 100 days are still too short a period to know how good or how bad a web hosting service is. Their web hosting is anything BUT reliable.

That said, being a once loyal customer, I believe these guys has been doing a pretty good job in the past few years. It’s only in the mid 2007 that their reliability deteriorates and I’ve not seen any improvement eversince. Their support team was fantastic, but I did not choose a web hosting because they have a good support team. My main concern in choosing a web hosting company is reliability, and if your customer support was not excellent, I can still live with it. But if my website keeps going out…

Enough said. The top management at Exabytes probably are losing their focus. They are probably going to lose many more customers, but newbies will continue to sign up with them, since if you shopped around for web hosting based in Malaysia, Exabytes is probably ranking pretty high up as one of the best. But remember though, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Your only option is to consider overseas hosting facilities, which is not so bad a thing after all, other than StreamyX being the only factor that can screw you up.

As for me, I am going to migrate over to a new hosting company, which has given me 100% uptime email hosting reliability. And I can’t wait to see how their web hosting holds up.

Good-bye and sleep tight, Exabytes!




You might want to read these too... Comments
  • Somehow, cup-very-big-man, i echo u here.. sometimes for fun, i just can't access it, and i heard from some ppl here and there, tat they cant access it sometimes for some reasons.. Hmmmmmm.. wait till my time with the expires, and then i'll consult u my man.. :)
  • SK
    I can introduce a hosting provider to you if you want as I know the owner and the service is quite reliable.
  • Too bad I just renewed recently. So far I haven't face long down time yet, maybe next time might need to consult you again too. :P
  • Here are the last few weekly "downtime" reports:


    From: Mar 24 2008 12:00 AM (GMT +8:00)
    To: Mar 31 2008 12:00 AM (GMT +8:00)
    Domain: Meshio.Com
    - uptime: 97.619%
    - downtime: 04hr 00min
    - outage: 4


    From: Mar 17 2008 12:00 AM (GMT +8:00)
    To: Mar 24 2008 12:00 AM (GMT +8:00)
    Domain: Meshio.Com
    - uptime: 98.810%
    - downtime: 02hr 00min
    - outage: 1


    From: Mar 10 2008 12:00 AM (GMT +8:00)
    To: Mar 17 2008 12:00 AM (GMT +8:00)
    Domain: Meshio.Com
    - uptime: 99.405%
    - downtime: 01hr 00min
    - outage: 1


    At times when the site is up and running, visitors are greeted with their Cpanel homepage that looks like this:

    <img src="http://www.meshio.com/img/2008/meshio-com-screenshot.jpg" alt="Exabytes Constant Downtime" title="meshio-com-screenshot" width="500" height="303"></img>
  • Pin
    How many websites hosted in single server of Exabytes??? :)
  • Hello Yow Chuan,

    I am regret about the downtime of your web site which was effected by a DDOS attack to the server where your account was hosted on.

    In fighting DDOS, we need huge bandwidth and co-operation from our upper stream provider. We had tried our very best efford to counter this DDOS attacked, and apparently the DDOS attack came back after several hours.

    If you believe that hosting your site oversea such as US is better and more reliable, please drop us an email, we do offer hosting in US. We can help you migrate your site over to our US servers for free and offer you an extra 100-days fully money back guarantee if the hosting in our US server is not up to satisfactory.
  • Hi there!

    I used to host on Exabytes too but that's last year's story. Their 'famed' and much touted support is giving way to zealous overselling. Tech supports are lengthy, unprofessional and they almost never seem to be able to give acceptable answers. Responses are always generic and I suspect that they have a horde of bots handling support tickets instead of humans!

    I have already paid a year's hosting fee when one day I got so frustrated that I met up with a web guru from Singapore (Mr. Caric Tan), who kindly helped me migrate 4 sites over to his servers based in Atlanta, USA. The entire migration process took only 2-3 hours. So far, there has been zero down time since November 2007. Mr. Tan's crafty firewall rules and policies have smartly mitigated all 3 series of DDoS attacks launched against my server last month. Downtime due to DDoS is not an excuse, but rather a lame excuse made by unprofessional administrators who have no passion in their field.

    If you think 60+ is bad enough, try a reverse DNS lookup on 210.48.145.25, which was where a few of my sites used to be located.

    I hope this will reaffirm your choice to leave exabytes for good!

    Cheers,
    Roy
  • Hello Roy,

    Thanks for your comments. Your feedback about our Tech Support's response time and the quality of their response is certainly worthwhile for me to take note on that and find ways to further improve it.

    There are many types of DDOS and each with different scale of attack. Some of the DDOS can be stopped by tweaking some filtering rules and firewall rules but some larger scale of DDOS attacks do require more work around. Besides filtering rules, you also need a huge bandwidth (bigger than the DDOS traffic). In US, most of the data centers have Gigs of bandwidth and they have IDS / IPS installed on their network gateway layer, DDOS can be filtered more efficiently on that layer. In Malaysia, we have very limited options (data centers bandwidth are smaller, and not all data centers have IDS / IPS).

    * When talking about IDS / IPS, I am not referring to normal IDS / IPS, I am referring to ISP scale of IDS / IPS which can handle several hundred mbps of bandwidth and hundred thousands of sessions.

    If I am right, Mr. Caric Tan are hosted in GNAX data center in US. We do have shared hosting servers in GNAX.

    As mentioned earlier, we host 200-300 accounts per shared hosting server as clearly listed on our web site. http://www.exabytes.com.my/products/hosting/linux/

    You may do a reverse DNS to any of our shared hosting server IP and you will see 200+ domains using the same IP. Our latest servers are running on Dual Quad Core Xeon CPU with 4Gigs of RAM and we don't see any problems for server with this kind of specs to handle 200+ accounts.
  • Pin
    What is the bandwidth connecting to your web server? Is that a dedicated or shared bandwidth?
  • Chan,

    This suggests that we should NOT host anything at malaysian IDCs because there are no hardware IDS at all! :)

    And I dont suppose this is 2xQuad Core Xeon with 4GB of RAM?

    someuser@210.48.145.25 [~]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
    processor : 0
    vendor_id : GenuineIntel
    cpu family : 15
    model : 6
    model name : Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 3.00GHz
    stepping : 5
    cpu MHz : 3000.561
    cache size : 2048 KB
    physical id : 0
    siblings : 2
    core id : 0
    cpu cores : 2
    fdiv_bug : no
    hlt_bug : no
    f00f_bug : no
    coma_bug : no
    fpu : yes
    fpu_exception : yes
    cpuid level : 6
    wp : yes
    flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl est cid xtpr
    bogomips : 6004.56

    someuser@210.48.145.25 [~]# cat /proc/meminfo
    MemTotal: 2074716 kB
    MemFree: 91552 kB
    Buffers: 78752 kB
    Cached: 849276 kB
    SwapCached: 90912 kB
    Active: 1286976 kB
    Inactive: 477588 kB
    HighTotal: 1179392 kB
    HighFree: 1024 kB
    LowTotal: 895324 kB
    LowFree: 90528 kB
    SwapTotal: 4096532 kB
    SwapFree: 3871104 kB
    Dirty: 4688 kB
    Writeback: 0 kB
    Mapped: 861360 kB
    Slab: 190412 kB
    CommitLimit: 5133888 kB
    Committed_AS: 2439280 kB
    PageTables: 12876 kB
    VmallocTotal: 106488 kB
    VmallocUsed: 4900 kB
    VmallocChunk: 100136 kB
    HugePages_Total: 0
    HugePages_Free: 0
    Hugepagesize: 2048 kB
  • Hello RC,

    210.48.145.25 is one of the older servers which runs on only PD.

    For our new shared hosting servers setup, we are using Dual Quad Core Xeon.
  • Pin
    So far, servers in NTT are handling DOS support kinda promptly. I have not tried Jaring Data Centre inside TPM and TM Data Centre at MyLoca, Cyberjaya.
  • Hello Pin,

    Yeah, NTT is one of the best data center in Malaysia. CBJ1, CBJ2 and AIMS also can handle DDOS well. Not CBJ5 at the moment.
  • wong
    dont blame your web host.

    blame yourself
    you want good service but pay less.
  • Wong,
    In that case, do you have any good recommendations?
  • Lim
    I've also had bad experiences using Exabytes and I'm glad that more pages can now be found on the web detailing similar bad experiences.

    All said, down time is down time, and after having suffered quite a bit of it - I think it is really stupid for someone to come out and try to defend down time. Today (22 June 2008), servers (210.48.157.0/24) have been down for at least 3 hours - this multi-hour disappearance also happened at least twice in the past 3 months.

    Note that there is not one word of apology in the previous posts.

    Stay away from this kind of hosting company.
  • Hello Lim,

    I apology for the downtime yesterday (22 June). Please let me know your domain name so that I can send you a complete report once we received from TMNet. For the time being, some updates available:
    https://support.exabytes.com/index.php?_m=news&...

    You may email me at feedback AT exabytes.com.
  • Lv Chong
    I had an ultimately bad experience for this Exabytes. They always call themselves as "No 1. Web Hosting in Malaysia". I wonder why they do not know how to write the word “SHAME� man.

    I was asking them how come Exabytes down the internet without telling your client in advance. Do you guys know what their reply is? “You suppose to sign up the newsletter by yourself then we will able to notify you or visit our website frequently then you able to get latest update. Do not hesitate to contact us, if you need further help.� FUCK THEM~! They must be thinking their website is Google whereby I should visit daily in order to know what the crap that you guys are doing? Moreover I should sign up your newsletter in order for Exabytes to notify me? I was thinking you already got my contact details when I enroll right? Doesn’t make sense at all!!!

    Since I sign up a co-location package then I also take up a dedicated firewall as well. Yesterday when I request for the firewall logs, Exabytes engineers told me that they flush the logs daily. WHAT THE FUCK again~! They should ask my permission right? This is what I am paying for. They do not know what is Client at all. They just do whatever they desire to do. I am ultimately regret & disappointed with this kind of fucking services. They did everything which doesn’t make sense at all.

    I would advise to those who are planning to host at Exabytes, please think numerous times in case to get unnecessary frustration.
  • I am so pissed off by their services because all my clients switched to other provider.

    Their customer service is superb, but that definitely not the choice to go for coz i wan the hosting without any complaints.

    Hate them really... sux~
    Alan Kong
  • I cannot enter Nuffnang website which host at Exabytes from US proxy server. Is that my US proxy server issue or Exabytes? :?
  • Ren
    Exabytes really suck, no matter how you put it.

    Seems like the exabytes ppl do have time to come to blogs like this one, but fail at providing quick response to support tickets. I regret to ever host my sites at exabytes. Now i' planning to migrate to offshore web host. This is exactly why many local webmasters/bloggers host their sites at US web hosts!

    You non-Malaysian webmasters, don't even think abt hosting at exabytes, you'll regret!
  • Pin
    Ren, keep an eye for a new web hosting package in town! Will post the details here once I get more details.
  • I really hate exabytes.. Im using the gold package asp.net control panel. The webserver is ok, but the mysql server.. is getting me no where.. THERE ARE TONS of orders everyday, but the orders keep pending because of mysql server down.. I hope i can find a really reliable hosting company out there
  • Ren
    OK, Pin, keep me informed! :D

    BTW, I read at BlogOhBlog which claimed that shinjiru also sucks. Maybe i'll try hostgator??

  • Seems like the exabytes ppl do have time to come to blogs like this one, but fail at providing quick response to support tickets.


    (=_=") Ren...what do you mean blog like this one..???

    Just kidding yah...but anyway, you will understand why when you go here.
  • Pin
    Check this out, uptime report of web hosting companies in Malaysia

    http://www.startnewblog.com/2008/10/uptime-repo...
  • Pin
    @Ren, cloud computing platform, 12GB of storage and 10GB of monthly bandwidth and 1,000 compute cycles a month. RM80 a year. Sign up now to get free domain name for first year.

    http://www.1.com.my/2008/10/12/ready-to-host/
  • Aviod using local hosting.Try overseas hosting.Their are cheap and great support.I am using ixwebhosting.com for 3 years and i like it.
  • Wallace, thanks for sharing! I have to agree that local hosting has yet to reach an acceptable quality. I've also migrated www.meshio.com to a US-based hosting company.
  • Dave
    Hi guys,
    i'm currently with hostgator, they have been good for about 8-9 months and now i'm just getting crap..
    my sites are always down if not otherwise very slow, and all they can say is "the prob is with your ISP"

    the thing is... i don't think that true.. looking at experiences from others who have hosted overseas as well...

    so naturally i'm looking for a better host now, and doing some research on exabytes, and boy am i glad i found this blog..

    my sites mainly cater to malaysian traffic, so would having a overseas host be better? is there any credit to the "its your ISP's connection thats slow" thing..?

    thanks!
  • whatever
    hmm i face the same problems as Dave. The hostgator has been giving me "its ur isp connections thats slow " thing ... :( i am wondering too.
  • 34234sdfds
    i am using hostgator as well
    its slow these days coz international underground cable is broken...

    Regards
  • like sardin la my dear.

    why pay more huhuhu
  • iyan
    exabytes.com sucks big time. time and again, their servers would crash. online support by indian helpdesk located in mumbai. cheapo hosting can't even hire a local to handle support. avoid at all cost hosting there. only their website never go down. dont be taken in by their cheap pricing cos its cheap services using old hardwares which crashed like every month. duhhh!!!
  • Zen
    I have 20+ sites hosted at Exabytes and am extremely dissatisfied as they are migrating away from sitebuildercx (which I have had several problems with) but Exabytes adds insult to injury by not doing a seamless migration, leaving it up to their customers to fix whatever functionality their migration breaks: http://www.exabytes.com/SiteBCX-Migration-Modul...

    The problem is, most of my sites are on sitebuildercx and I have not found anything else that can accomodate custom designed websites with plugin functionality. SitebuilderCX used to work well, but has sucked the past couple years.
  • Pin
    Zen, this is classic case of how web hosting do not really know what their customer want. Through upgrading of services is with good intention, but they must also understand the cost of new integration and the time required.
  • Web Developer
    I've been developing some websites for a few local clients, some hosted on Exabytes and I can assure you their servers go down every single mother f* day. What pisses me off, they go down during after lunch presentations and that got me f* hard as I was the one providing the hosting (reseller).

    Avoid at all cost. They have many staff but I guess all staff just play2 at office and don't do shit.
  • Pin
    My client ask me what is the catch when signing up a web or email host:

    Show me the uptime report than telling me you have 99.9999999999999% of uptime.

    Tell me what is your average response time every month than telling me you have 24x7 support!

    Solve my problem and dont tell me how good you are.

    http://www.emailhosting.com.my/2009/04/15/malay...

    http://www.emailhosting.com.my/2007/12/25/uptim...

    http://www.1.com.my/2008/10/11/we-hate-late-rep...
  • Pin, check your email. I've just sent you an invoice for advertising fee.
  • Hi Zen,

    I truly understand how you feel about migration and the hectic work you need to go through especially having 20 domains to be reconfigure again and we are really sorry about that.

    We are actually being force to take such action due to the third party company no longer support us on using this software and would like to terminate our license and given us by this year May 2009 to move out from this software. On the other hand, as per said in your post that over the years, you encounter the degradation of the software, we here also encounter the same problem. We have many customer who complain over this software and we also found many bugs in this software. We also find that the support on this third party software is kind of slow as sometime, it takes like weeks to just to resolved our issue.

    Due to this matter, we have to take action to find other solution for our customer but due to the time constraint, we only manage to find to most closest to the Ebox system. We choose to use particular system because the system is the nearest with Ebox system and the Ebox data able to integrate over using our migration tools.

    If you have any concern in your mind, please do contact me.
  • Alex
    Hi,

    I'm a reseller.
    I also got the same SHIT from stupid exabtyes.... looks like chocolate, but when u taste it, it is a shit.... sigh, we all got cheated and eating shit... fuck

    Ok. Anyone can recommend a better place to go? I m planning to get a better place for my clients...

    Thx.
  • dave_m
    sometimes small hosting company will provide more reliable service because they do no need to maintain many things in a time. i dont know how they judge themselves no 1 in Malaysia
  • Dave, in Malaysia, No. 1 usually means that you are the BIGGEST, LONGEST, TALLEST or WIDEST.

    No. 1 also usually don't indicate the level of service or quality of the particular subject, because Malaysians don't like the trouble of measuring something that they cannot see directly with their naked eyes.

    So, there you have it, it's not difficult to be No. 1 in Malaysia. Heck, one good example, we just spent millions of ringgit sending the FIRST Malaysian to space and what did the Malaysians (who literally sponsored the trip with their tax money) get in return?

    No. 1 is overrated!
  • jose
    YO DAWG, I heard you like ranting, so you rant in rant while you be a fuk1ng whny bitch at the same time.
  • MAD MAN
    Bunch of idiots, get your servers up RIGHT THIS INSTANCE. I'm about to get off work but I have to wait for their servers to get up so I could upload the company files.

    F*CK
  • Cool down, Mad Man. Sign up with the package that comes with stress relievers in your next renewal.
  • I've used Exabytes for very short time, just less than 1 year. Having 100+ domains with them. They are not perfect. But so far I'm quite satisfied with their reliability and service. I have yet to experience many bad experiences as mentioned here. But at least I know in many aspects they are better than the one I used previously.

    I'm not expert in server technically. But technically aside, I find their business very attractive. Are they number 1 in Malaysia? I heard or read somewhere that they have most number of domain names registered with them among players in Malaysia. But talking about customer mindshare, they are indeed number 1 in my mind. They are almost everywhere, in exhibition, talks, conferences, now even shopping malls (their shopping bags)!

    So in summary I have yet to experience much grief as you guys experienced. But I think they are a great company, worthy of more balanced comments :-)

    http://www.rickysoo.com/2008/11/19/exabytes-fro...

    (I don't earn RM20 from post above)
  • Ricky, if it was 2-3 years back, I would have agreed with you whole-heartedly.

    Yeah, on the business end, I am convinced that CEO Chan Kee Siak is one man who understand how to create a niche in an already commoditized market. And he's definitely very good in the branding and marketing game. Hats off!

    I've only got no more than 10 domains with them previously. Maybe that might explain why :-P
  • chnag
    So today we had a meeting at our server was down in about 45 minutes so I googled "Exabytes Sucks" and here I am.

    http://www.google.com.my/search?hl=en&q=exabyte...

    May 14th 2009 at about 3PM.

    We're moving next month.
  • Hi Chnag,

    Thanks for your feedback. We don't see any of our server down on May 14th 2009 at about 3PM. Would you mind drop us an email to feedback[at]exabytes.com and I will further follow up the issue for you? Thanks!
  • Oh wow. These are like the longest running comments.
    I personally haven't deal with Exabytes, but our website is hosted by
    http://www.1.com.my.
    I'm not a techie, but reading what you all said, well, it looks like that company is doing something wrong to encur such wrath!

    But I agree with Yow Chuan on Chan's (the CEO) marketing skill.
  • alex
    I was their customer, charging appriximately RM250 (including .com domain name for RM50), the package includes google adwords credits and free website templates.

    After signing up, cannot find any link to google adwords credit and free website templates, emailed for support many times, they argue already email the details but cannot find anywhere!

    To be honest, this host is crap and expensive! Why is it so expensive? Cause we pay extra to cover their advertising expenses.

    I am not very happy for their services, after a year, terminate my account and get another host which is much cheaper and reliable. When i terminate my account, their sales assistant ask me why terminate? They say their service is better than the rest, i was like "err ... you sure? You lied!"

    Anyway, go for other host which is much cheaper and does not bull sheet.
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