- A Warning About CubeSoft Communications (www.csoft.net) -
My webhoster experience from hell all started with wanting
a little more than most webhosters provide! My last and now current hoster OLM.net
was everything I expected, with great service and great technical support. The
only problem is, they sell pre-designed webhosting packages and if you want
anything additional, say sub-domains or multiple domains for example, it will
cost you. In fact, if you add on a few of these features, the addons add up to
more than the original package and I've found this is nothing new. Calling or
emailing dozens of webhosters, this is usually the case. That's where CubeSoft
Communications (csoft.net) came in to the picture. At first, I was completely
turned off by their simplistic and rather rough looking website, I guess I
should have followed my instincts. Instead, after looking around for another
webhoster with similar features and not finding anything, I decided to try
CubeSoft Communications. I just told myself that they were webhosters/techs, not
web designers. I also emailed them numerous times about the many unclear things
on their webpage or about other inquiries I had and to my surprise I always
received a prompt response, sometimes within an hour. I assumed with the
"30-day refund" policy clearly stated on their homepage, I had nothing
to worry about (little did I know).
After filling out csoft's on-line form, I assumed the
registration would be speedy. After waiting 3 days (most other webhosters have
setup in 12-24 hours), I sent them an email asking if they would ever setup my
account and my account was setup in a few hours thereafter. After being with
CubeSoft for a few days, I had noticed dozens of mistakes in their telnet and
all over for that matter. Again techs, not English teachers. I was pleased with
the control over the domain I had using SSH, but I was quick to learn that the
technical support was next to none. After trying their irc server for support
(irc.csoft.net/#csoft) I quickly realized nekhbet
(nekhbet!wadjyt@user-2ive4og.dialup.mindspring.com) was the only tech that came
to the irc server and if he managed to make it at all, it would be for an hour
or two at most, usually around 8-10 pm EST and he generally seemed busy doing
something else. The irc channel was usually more of a forum to bash csoft's
horrible support among all the clients, although I did receive some information
about my questions from other clients. I started to wonder if csoft was run out
of someone's basement with one or two employees. I'm pretty sure I was not far
off of the employee count, considering every email I ever received was either
from vedge or nekhbet. I guess with 2 employees I shouldn't expect very good
service. I also noticed that the techs all had ips coming from Quebec as well as
csoft.net itself being registered to a Quebec resident, while the csoft server
was supposedly in "Oklahoma City/OK". I'm not sure how most webhosters
work, maybe it's common for a hoster to rent a dedicated server, but that fact
turned me off even more. I quickly decided that if I wanted anything done with
my domain, I would have to do it myself and if I ever needed anything setup by a
tech, I would have to wait probably a day or more until one felt like getting
around to it. That fact, I was fine with, because my domains were purely personal
and nothing had to be done immediately, even if I would have liked it to
be.
Little did I know, that csoft's horrible technical support
was the least of my worries! After using csoft for 2 weeks, I was locked out of
my account and I assume it was deleted. My email, ftp and telnet access were all
blocked and my former passwords were not working. As far as I know, there was no
reason and absolutely no warning or confirmation from csoft whatsoever. I was
completely annoyed, with my websites down and my disabled email, I can't imagine
the cost in lost revenues this could have cost a company. My files were also
held hostage by csoft and my backups weren't purged from the transfer. Nekhbet
told me he would look into finding my backups and give me a location where I
could download them. After that though, he mysteriously stopped frequenting the
irc channel. I guess that's my fault for trusting a company with my files,
without having complete backups. I recently paid OLM.net
$50 usd for a copy of older backups, retrieving some of my missing files;
however, others are now permanently irretrievable. I at first thought csoft had
made a mistake and they would fix it when they noticed, but after a day I
decided to email them. I was used to dealing with "user friendly"
companies and at first thought there had been a miscommunication or mistake, and
that contacting csoft would easily resolve the problem. I put off moving to
another webhoster, raising my email and website downtime even more. To my utter
surprise and disgust, every attempt at contacting csoft was ignored. The first
email that was sent inquired about my account, giving all the account
information, but was ignored for 2 days. I later had another party email csoft
requesting some clarification about the account. This too was ignored. Another
email was sent with a carbon copy to Julien Nadeau (julien@CSOFT.NET)
whose name is listed as the contact in the domain registration. With still no
response whatsoever, I proceeded to use the phone/fax number listed in the
listing for Csoft.net (418-969-9303). The first call was answered by an answering
machine and a message was left about the account. That phone call was never
replied to, and later phone calls went unanswered (mysteriously, now no
answering machine). A fax was also attempted, but unfortunately never went
through. The last phone call which was made (using *67), was answered, which
makes me think they had a computer filtering out my number and maybe other
irrate
clients as well; or at least I was being ignored manually. I was told that
Julien would return my phone call, which again never happened.
After the attempts to contact Csoft were so blatantly
ignored, I began looking on the Internet for similar cases. I found a few people
in the irc channel, that said their accounts were similarly deleted or had a
disabled screen displayed on their website and had not been answered. I also
found this account http://www.n0de.org/csoft.html mirrored
scarysherry.com/csoft2.html, which I now (without confirmation) completely
believe happened and prompted me to call visa. Visa credited the $75 usd (3
months service), which I assume csoft had every intention of keeping for the 2
weeks of service they rendered (however inadequate) and transferred the card to
the fraud department, issuing a new card in its place.
After this whole incident, I was completely surprised that such a horrible company could still exist and thrive on the Internet, with so many alternatives. I generally thought ignoring your customers lost them to a company that paid attention to them. I guess if you make enough money, you can do whatever you want to do to your clients. That's a lesson learned the hard way. I realize that writing this will more then likely do little or nothing, but I still want to at least get my story across. I would love to get my file backups from csoft, but I'm sure that's impossible now. I will be happy if at least one person is persuaded to use another webhoster or if I get csoft to change their policies on such issues.