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?? face it, when you entrust your site to a web host, you expect reliability. At Exabytes?, reliability is never in question. We??e 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?? 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!
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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.
Comment by Wallace — November 11, 2008 @ 1:40 am
Wallace, thanks for sharing! I have to agree that local hosting has yet to reach an acceptable quality. I've also migrated http://www.meshio.com to a US-based hosting company.
Comment by yowchuan — November 13, 2008 @ 2:57 am
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!
Comment by Dave — December 23, 2008 @ 1:50 am
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.
Comment by whatever — December 27, 2008 @ 11:59 am
i am using hostgator as well
its slow these days coz international underground cable is broken…
Regards
Comment by 34234sdfds — January 3, 2009 @ 10:45 am
like sardin la my dear.
why pay more huhuhu
Comment by hahaha — January 19, 2009 @ 4:57 pm
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!!!
Comment by iyan — January 20, 2009 @ 8:09 pm
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.
Comment by Zen — April 15, 2009 @ 9:55 pm
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.
Comment by Web Developer — April 23, 2009 @ 5:34 pm
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.
Comment by Adeline — April 27, 2009 @ 11:15 am
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.
Comment by Alex — April 27, 2009 @ 5:25 pm
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
Comment by dave_m — May 4, 2009 @ 1:13 pm
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
Comment by MAD MAN — May 8, 2009 @ 4:57 pm
Cool down, Mad Man. Sign up with the package that comes with stress relievers in your next renewal.
Comment by yowchuan — May 9, 2009 @ 4:10 am
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!
Comment by yowchuan — May 9, 2009 @ 4:16 am
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)
Comment by Ricky Soo — May 12, 2009 @ 2:40 pm
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
Comment by yowchuan — May 14, 2009 @ 12:29 pm
YO DAWG, I heard you like ranting, so you rant in rant while you be a fuk1ng whny bitch at the same time.
Comment by jose — May 14, 2009 @ 6:11 pm
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.
Comment by chnag — May 14, 2009 @ 6:16 pm
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!
Comment by Andy - Exabytes — May 15, 2009 @ 9:05 am
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.
Comment by Melinda — May 15, 2009 @ 11:10 am
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.
Comment by alex — June 23, 2009 @ 11:26 pm
Dear all,
I hosted most of my client's web site with Exabytes, except few which they have their own server or some hosted in US server.
I understand server down time may have several reasons, not just the hardware but also the local ISP issue. I read through some of your comments and i would say i don't really agree at all, especially some of your comments seems like posted by a same person and just different nick name, i assume it is posted by the competitor.
Put those aside, talking about the services, I came across with numbers of web hosting services which is totally using local server and ISP (ya..TM, do we have other choices?), Exabytes is the one with promising services and better customer support compare with others. Of course, sometime there is some issue they can't compromise and agree to solve it, with a reasonable reason and i can accept that. Unless you are willing to pay more for dedicated server.
I understand oversea one like US server is better, but unfortunately i don't find to access website that is hosted in US server are faster than hosted in Malaysia, especially if you are someone who Streamyx or any local ISP.
Unless there is a good and better option, with reliable and trust-able customer service, otherwise, i don't dare to take a risk to migrate my client's website to host in their server, as all our source code may possible use by 3rd parties.
Correct me if I'm wrong, because even local tech savvy like Hongkiat.com is using Exabytes dedicated server!
Henry
Principal of Hen Design Studio.
Comment by Hen — July 10, 2009 @ 10:51 am
Neither can I agree with some of your points and assumptions. Let me know which comment came from the same person and I will try and ask them if they are competitors like you've mentioned. I prefer not to assume things and not make this discussion into another hosting companies debate.
Anyway, after my migration a year ago (to an oversea hosting partner), I have not had any problems. Like you said, all the uptime issues were ISP-related. It's also much more affordable (at least 40% savings).
And when it comes to data integrity, I hardly think that the law enforcement in Malaysia gives much protection to the consumers, just look at the way ISPs here behave. The odds are definitely better out there.
Also, I do not see any correlation between hosting quality and consumers who host with them. If that's the case, that would mean everyone should host their website with Google (which is not such a bad idea after all!).
Comment by yowchuan — July 11, 2009 @ 1:20 am
i should have never been their affiliate
Comment by technologymoney — July 12, 2009 @ 2:06 am
Sorry but have to say this, bye bye exabytes. I moved to yeahhost, everyting seem ok now.
Comment by matsidi — July 22, 2009 @ 7:58 pm
Well i guess you guys are right. They services is getting from bad to worst. For the past 1 year, emails are failed to send and each time due to some settings that their own guys have changed. Servers went down due to harddisk / network card failures.
Yet, when the contract is renewed, they dun bother giving you a call and emailing you to an email that you have not accessed for sometime while they corresponse to you via another email.
The great part, when the due date arrives, they just switched it off, they don't bother to give you a call or mail to your business address in advance. At least if they would have call and find out the problem, that doesn't results in another major downtime.
In which when you call them, they said the fees was not renewed. Each time you just gotta talk to a different people all over again and they don't bother to look into your past histories.
Its great that you have posted this on the internet. At least people like us are trying to find whether this happens only to us, knows the issues before migrating out. If you have some contacts on other more reliable service providers , pls advise / post it here.
Many thanks,
JP
Comment by guitaristhour — August 6, 2009 @ 10:24 am
or you are probably working with exabytes.
Comment by guitaristhour — August 6, 2009 @ 10:25 am
gosh… didn't know there are so many comments on exabytes if i didn't google it myself. guess we are all the same , hitting the same problems and sad to say it is still happening. wanted to do a comparison with other hosting providers in msia, i guess i got the answer of moving out, just to who next year.
Sure have the same problem as JP, they just turned off my account without notifying and do not email to the same account that i have hosted with them, which i used it almost 16 hours a day.
well Alex surely reminds me of the adwords, which i guess its been one year back, that's something i am sure i have never received. I guess that's the customer service, the more we forgot, the better it is for them. no point asking them now…
Looking at the other postings, can't believe those sporeans? (sextoys.sg) going thru such a bad experience, not to mentioned unprofessional, this is totally unethical
http://www.meshio.com/2008/04/hosting-on-exabty...
many times i have logged in tickets, until i am in position to advise their level 1 & level 2 due to the same problems occuring esp their upgrades. my major issues are mainly with the smartermail (don't think that name suits them / it was the human problems) as i our websites hosted with exabytes have minimal activities = min problems. But the emails certainly affects the business, there was once, after long troubleshooting, outlook can't be used with RichText format. Few clients receive email with a binary file attached (supposedly MS Office).
Latest headache, can't email to yahoo accounts. The IP i believe is blocked by Yahoo! servers and only by end of the day > 8 hours, they manage to get it up and i am able to email recipients at yahoo. Happens on gmail before and they need to reroute to a different IP server. This also happens before with our customers, which ended up using a gmail account temporarily until they fixed the problems.
One thing for sure, we back up our mails offline, though the package comes with the backup service, you don;t really know whether they do a proper backup.
Sigh, yet now have another year to go and lets see what's going to re-happen again. Each time you gave them a feedback, they will tell you “We will feedback to our management”. Either they lost their voice during the feedback or they surely have an ineffective management which focuses on empty promises rather than delivering…
Comment by ExaJokers — August 10, 2009 @ 11:29 pm
gosh… didn't know there are so many comments on exabytes if i didn't google it myself. guess we are all the same , hitting the same problems and sad to say it is still happening. wanted to do a comparison with other hosting providers in msia, i guess i got the answer of moving out, just to who next year.
Sure have the same problem as JP, they just turned off my account without notifying and do not email to the same account that i have hosted with them, which i used it almost 16 hours a day.
well Alex surely reminds me of the adwords, which i guess its been one year back, that's something i am sure i have never received. I guess that's the customer service, the more we forgot, the better it is for them. no point asking them now…
Looking at the other postings, can't believe those sporeans? (sextoys.sg) going thru such a bad experience, not to mentioned unprofessional, this is totally unethical
http://www.meshio.com/2008/04/hosting-on-exabty…
many times i have logged in tickets, until i am in position to advise their level 1 & level 2 due to the same problems occuring esp their upgrades. my major issues are mainly with the smartermail (don't think that name suits them / it was the human problems) as i our websites hosted with exabytes have minimal activities = min problems. But the emails certainly affects the business, there was once, after long troubleshooting, outlook can't be used with RichText format. Few clients receive email with a binary file attached (supposedly MS Office).
Latest headache, can't email to yahoo accounts. The IP i believe is blocked by Yahoo! servers and only by end of the day > 8 hours, they manage to get it up and i am able to email recipients at yahoo. Happens on gmail before and they need to reroute to a different IP server. This also happens before with our customers, which ended up using a gmail account temporarily until they fixed the problems.
One thing for sure, we back up our mails offline, though the package comes with the backup service, you don;t really know whether they do a proper backup.
Sigh, yet now have another year to go and lets see what's going to re-happen again. Each time you gave them a feedback, they will tell you “We will feedback to our management”. Either they lost their voice during the feedback or they surely have an ineffective management which focuses on empty promises rather than delivering…
Comment by ExaJokers — August 11, 2009 @ 9:59 am
I've been quite reluctant to comment and thinking they will improve. Trust you guys facing the same issues all the while and mentioning to customer service will not be helpful. I have been emailing to a client and the email bounced back. As the reason why, this guy David mentioned due to mx settings etc and in short its always the opposite site (recipient server and not Exabytes) problems as per they claimed. So the solution, sort out with your recipient.
Told them, the same email i sent from gmail it works. This time another person (KM Chow) replied gmail is a multi-million dollar company and he checked there's no issues on the settings as claimed by David.
The god must have heard my frustration and fixed it, as my client is not aware of it.
Only 1 week back, their IP is being blocked by a server in US. This must be the sites they have been hosting as per the above submissions. Its really affecting our businesses, troubleshooting like this its a waste of time.
What can we do is just re-try, if it works…life goes on for few mths. If not… just ready to switch to another alternative.
Comment by calvinkstan — September 6, 2009 @ 2:33 pm
hmmm… i hosted at Exabytes since 2004. No problem so far for me and their support are quite good 24×7x365. They did what i requested without any hidden charges. I found many good comments there as well: http://www.exabytes.com/about/clients/testimoni...
Comment by K55 — December 2, 2009 @ 4:43 pm
I have hosted my website with Exabytes…more than a year i am with them and finally gave up. Every month surely there are issues popped up. we are heavy on email as our websites are plain html and hardly any codes. But the experiences we face on email hostings is really a nightmare. Outlook not responding, there are time u just can’t ping their server. when its working, yahoo blacklisted their IP. which means we can’t email our users which is using yahoo email address until its being resolved. This occured almost few times in a year.
Every month surely there are issues. Once they do a migration / upgrade, they forgot to change back settings on my end, what ever problem they fixed, it will re-occur again. They have moved the server to a data center in KL. Cant recall the name, the same problem still happens.
When it comes to customer services, good luck!! we gave up after lodging so many tickets. tehy do response to u in time…which is good. But few of them, is responding for the sake of responding. Their staff is asking non-qualified questions and they close your ticket when the prolbmes have not been resolved. For example the yahoo problem, we can’t email to yahoo users this is due to their IP is blacklisted. Out of sudden, they closed the ticket, and we tot its been resolved, nope. Prolbme still exists. When we are them why u close the ticket, they said we already inform yahoo to remove it , nothing else they can do.
They suppose to help to monitor as their IP is still being blacklisted. So we have to ask one of their staff to re-open the ticket until its resolved. Their uptime sucks. If their server is down, don’t try to call them, u will never be able to get anyone. We moved to the service provider in singapore paying only SGD 10 per mth. Much reasonable and at least the people we speak to are really from IT back ground.We don’t expect full 99% uptime even, but at least when there is a problem let get it fixed together.
There’s one time one of their staff, Chow, when we questioned about the uptime as this always a problem. We have to revert to use gmail accounts instead for that time being. He also mentioned to us not to compare with such billion dollar company system… what a joker…we paid for their service as customer, and the other one is totally free. So we decided, too much problems making our life shorter, we decided to move out , no refunds of coz from them, but so far with current service provider, keeping our finger crossed, no issues so far.
We have misconfigured our ports, even when we ping them in the middle of the night, they still respond to us prompty. Those who are planning to use Exabytes, i suggest u google Exabytes sucks and u can see how many of the feedbacks are there that customer faced and left to deaf ea
Comment by Cindy — August 15, 2010 @ 3:41 pm