Digital Forest reviews

Poor communication / disconnected company

" Add spotty service and a not too good billing department and you have a place you don't want to be. They used to support Os X server, now they don't know what it is and have no one to goto in case of emergency. This company has been bought and sold enough times so you don't know who exactly you are dealing with.. left them because of these issues after 15 yr stint.. "

Biggest Con: turnover and lack of company clarity or communications

Service Going Downhill

I've been with digital.forest, now DFColo, for almost 15 years. Started out on shared servers, colocated desktops, and am currently colocating about a dozen servers in a half rack. They lean toward expensive, but I've always felt some loyalty.

However, their customer service recently has been declining. I called them recently and was told I have no options other than to remain in my current hosting contract. They will not work with me to change my hosting configuration at all. They are pulling a harder line than any cell phone company I have worked with.

They've always been a somewhat mickey mouse affair. Their security is poor. Half the time we're checked in at the front desk. Half the time we're just led into the server room. They have a bunch of locks and cages, but we've been left alone inside for hours, with access to many others servers.

If you want truly secure hosting look elsewhere. If you want tech support who doesn't feel like it's learning on the job look elsewhere. If you want bottom of the barrel customer service you've found your place.

If uptime is important to you, go elsewhere!

If uptime is important to you, choose another hosting solution. As if uptime is not important enough, the times they seem to do server updates is at PEAK times which slows down web traffic to a halt! Also, their email servers are frequently used to send out spam and this results in their email domains being blacklisted from MANY common ISPs. Here's an example - Let's say you go to send an email to another eBay member regarding an item up for auction. You hit send and within minutes get a message saying "message undeliverable due to sending server blacklisted." This is a REGULAR occurance. (eBay, yahoo, AOL, and many more!) The tech support people ask you to send copies of your rejected messages and then claim it to be fixed, however you try it again and what do you know - STILL BLACKLISTED!

Here's the bottom line - you get what you pay for and if you want cheap service then this is the right place for you. It's cheap and you'll be constantly reminded of that while pulling your hair out!

CHOOSE ANOTHER HOSTING SOLUTION!

Biggest Pro: don't have any pros at this time
Biggest Con: read my review and decide for yourself

Sub-standard hosting = Digital Forest

I'm a webmaster for over 50 websites. I've used many different hosting providers over the course of 10 years. Some good some not so good. However, what compels me to write this review about digital forest is due to their unwillingness to meet their customer's concerns and their lack of customer service and technical support. First off they lack adequate 24/7 customer support. Try contacting them after hours or on weekends and you're out of luck. E-tickets are often not replied to for at least 24 hours. They offer no c-panel control for their hosting other than a webmail access and phpmyadmin which are located under two very different url's. Their lack of sophistication in securing shared hosting is evident as they completely lock down the permissions on their servers making it almost impossible for internal scripts to work. Try installing wordpress, a standard in cms publishing, and be dissapointed because you can't post images to your blog. Friendly dynamic generated URL's? Impossible with digital forest hosting.

The cost in their hosting services escalates considerably as adding additional email addresses, MySQL databases, spam filters or more space increases the monthly pricing considerably. Oh, and did I mention that you have to wait for them to set those services up for you because they don't offer user accessible server control.

Overall for those considering digital forest for your hosting needs, don't, you will be better served elsewhere.

Biggest Con: Lack of user control server configuration.