Network Solutions reviews – Page 6

This hosting company sucks, BIG TIME!

If you want slow loading pages, dropped connections, internal server errors, poor customer service then choose network solutions. I'm on a shared server and I hate it, if I want to change to a VPS it's $400 or more a year and then they want to charge me $500 to move my SQL and info to VPS, are you kidding me? I've called them several times about slow pages and connections and get a different answer every time. Don't call them because you have to wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, and wait for them to answer. And...don't email them, it takes them at least 24 hours to respond. Worse hosting company...EVER!!

Network Solutions UNRELIABLE!

I moved all of my client webs to NWS about 5 years ago because the host company I was using had a problem with sites going down. For the first few years, NWS was very reliable, but something has changed. For the last 6 months, my sites are constantly going down and back up without any explanation from NWS. Tonight, they all went down and when I called the customer service girl asked me, "Are you SURE you have not changed any settings?" Then she kept me on hold for 30 minutes and returned only to tell me that she had opened a trouble ticket for me and that I would receive an email within 24-48 hours. An email? That's nice :) How about getting my F*CKING websites back up???!!!

Biggest Pro: A human answers the phone.
Biggest Con: Unreliability

SO SLOW

I've never had such an incredible lag with FTP. So slow that it's almost useless! I use the same software and network connection to edit a site hosted by Laughing Squid and changes appear almost instantly with that service. With Network Solutions, files take forever to upload, the server often returns errors, and visiting the site is tedious. I have not experienced downtime, though I have had it for only one week.

Cannot even FTP my directory

No special comment but just don't waste time with this company.
I believe they make money in selling domain name but they are no efficiant about hosting and most of all about technical support.
Best,
J.

Email product is the pits!

Although I didn't have any "hosting issues" with networksolutions, I had MAJOR problems with the "upgraded" email product NS Mail Pro. Where do I begin????? The spam button does not remove the spam it simply forwards it to a server and God knows what happens at that point. I thought the purpose of the spam button was to REMOVE and you never see again. If I'm still getting the same spam mail in my inbox what purpose does the spam button serve? I paid extra to have this email product and network solutions has had to refund me almost all my money back because I was on the phone with them almost everyweek because I would get these system errors and all my email folders would just disappear(the inbox, sent, trash etc). Sometimes the mail doesn't load and I'll have to hit the refresh button several times, and the amount of space available for your message is mediocre for a business email product. If you want to save messages you're very limited. And don't get me started on the customer service reps!!! It's unbelievable the amount they don't know. They're not able to tell you why you're experiencing the problems your're having. All they do is reload something or re-sinq I think it's called. Definitely would not recommend upgrading to this "enhanced" email product..

Biggest Pro: Ease of designing your own website
Biggest Con: The email, and for business purposes your email is as important as the actual website.

Awful! This company is a joke!

DO NOT use Network Solutions. They have the worst customer service EVER. It was nothing but technical problems transferring our website over to them. Every time I tried talk to some one in tech support them kept trying to charge me $50. When I told them that if they didn't figure out our technical problems without charging us further I would cancel our service with them, they told me that there's nothing they could do and that I would have to be charged again to talk to someone. They did NOTHING to keep me as a customer and don't care at all. To top it all off, when I canceled our service they told me that they wouldn't refund me $356 for a SSL certificate! It took threating them to get them to refund me our money. Worst hosting experience EVER!

Biggest Pro: Nothing
Biggest Con: Worst customer service EVER.

Network Solutions offers no solutions- BE WARY

I use the Network Solutions server to host a simple family website to share images and videos with a large list of friends and family on a weekly basis. This is probably one of the most basic designs one can use and it should be simple to host and publish. Unfortunately, the actual server goes down constantly, and I don't mean at peak times. I have had to call Network Solutions tech support at 3 and 4am repeatedly after trying to publish our website at all times of day for over a week at a time. This has been happening for over 6 months on a weekly basis. Their tech folks will never admit that they have a problem on their end, but eventually after several days of waiting, the server is functional again and I can publish a portion of my files. However, after what must be my 50th call to tech support, they finally admitted tonight that their ENTIRE UNIX SYSTEM is having such a serious problem that they don't even have any estimates of when the server will be even remotely functional again. Here is a partial list of the problems I have encountered with Network Solutions over the last 6 months: the server goes down constantly resulting in error messages saying they are having "connection problems"- this message only shows up after you have just uploaded a bunch of files and are expecting them to save; portions of their hosting often just don’t work for no apparent reason- want to upload pictures? Be prepared to do so at least 5 or 6 times before they all save and actually show up when you publish; after waiting over 30 minutes for 20-40 small pictures to upload to a photo album, clicking SAVE results in all of the pictures disappearing and having to be re-uploaded; spending 4 days uploading small batches of photos at a time so that they will not disappear when I hit SAVE only to publish the site and have all of the images show up as big red X's (I tried the upload from 3 different computers and viewed the site from 3 different computers= same problem). Please also note that their File Manager and ftp service is completely buggy and inconsistent (that is the nicest way I can say it without using inappropriate language). They keep resetting the username and password on our ftp site without notification. This means that unless I click all the way through our account to look this information up each time I want to upload files to our ftp, there is a strong chance that I will never be able to log in. I was finally told that I must use outside software to upload to our ftp site since their own File Manager has not and never will function properly/fully. However, even using outside software to upload files (Filezilla) doesn't solve the problem, because due to Network Solutions' own settings, I have to reset all of my file permissions using their File Manager before even use Filezilla to upload the files. This is a problem, because File Manager does not work. You can reset your file permissions till the cows come home and the settings just change themselves to whatever they feel like or do not reset at all. Therefore, the folders may stay locked and you are not allowed to add or modify files. Just tonight, File Manager decided to embed the root menu into an internal folder meaning that clicking on that folder takes you not to the pictures that are actually in it, but instead back to the root menu. They can't fix this problem and told me that I can't just delete this folder and start over as it might actually delete the entire content of our ftp since the root menu is now linked to this folder. I have hit my breaking point with Network Solutions, and I am a very patient person. They have wasted literally hours of my time just trying to publish a simple website so that family in other states can see our kids grow up. I may not be a large business customer, but we use their email for our business service. We will clearly not be renewing our package with Network Solutions. I strongly recommend that you never use this server. Their tech support is useless and clearly the same people are actually maintaining their server.

Biggest Con: This server goes down constantly (both main website and ftp pages). Tecnical support is no help at all.

Thw worst customer service

They should invest in the American tech support instead of outsourcing in India. Not only they don't know anything beyond what's written in the paper in front of them they don't even understand your questions. I was asking for help setting up Sequel Pro to manage my database and after two days of calling some "tech supervisor" started by offering to "walk me through" how to set up a database through their site! I'm a gold VIP and frankly I have no idea what am I paying for.

Biggest Pro: Is there any?
Biggest Con: You could train a circus monkey to provide similar tech support.

NS FTP Trf Spd way low due to Tech Issue or is it being throttled

I've had an open ticket on slow reponse times from the FTP Server(s) at NS, since July 7, 2009. NS assures me that they are working on the issue, but today I found out that the last time someone posted any info on the ticket was July 24, 2009.

After calling in today, August 10, 2009, to check the status of the issue, I was advised that they would take the information I called in with today, and forward this to the Escalation Team and resolve the issue.

Clueless!!!!!!!!! I was calling in to check the status, I provided nothing new to aid or assist them when I called in today. They have screen captures, trace logs, ip addresses, speed test results and you name it, from previous efforts

I was advised about 7 days ago that the problem was probablty due a rule in their firewall that restricted the speed to the server, and that it appeared to be affecting not only myself and my websites, but other customer sites as well.

For now, this web-host is not recommended. I would hope that I may get the opportunity to reevalute NS as a host provider.

Biggest Pro: NS registration services are second to none....
Biggest Con: Escalation and Communication for now......Maybe Tech Support WIll Be Added, But Not There Yet!

Networksolutions - unreliable and slow

My STory about networksolutions is a story about failure.

At first i ordered a windows based hosting in the false hope i would have a (virtual) windows server so i could run my self-programmed appz on it. Well i was wrong here and you dont get any access on anything, best you get is your http folder via ftp. Oh great, then they did not offer ANY usefull open source applications for asp, so it was quite worthless.

I asked networksolutions to switch to linux/php based hosting which they offer for the same price. Spent endless time in their hotlines and with support tickets - to make it short it wasnt possible. great.

To at least have some value from the hosting i decided to install a customized snitz forum. Well what really annoyed me is that you can have 2 SQL databases with 100 MB each, which i must have "overread" somehow. I have like a ton of disk space but i may not use it for the database. oh great, i guess it has to be this way. After some complaint the available space at least was expanded to around 400 MB. The SQL server is a shared server and you only have access to your database.

While their instructions claimed it can be accessed with SQL 2000 Enterprise manager it couldnt actually you needed SQL Management studio 2005. Oh well they changed that instructions now.

Still great to access your DB via management studio? Well in theory at least - in fact you open a SQL server that has like 10000 Databases - untill it has loaded the lsit via internet that can take a while and as yopu can imagine an SQL server with that many databases aint really fast... Many SQL features like maintenance plans can not be accessed however and some features are read-only.

Well although we have gone through hell with building an ASP based forum based on Snitz we somehow managed to get a large userbase, much content and loads of activity, the forum is prospering.

Actually it could prosper much more if i didnt make the mistake to host it on networksolutions.

We could cope with everything, with limited windows ASP hosting, their crap customer service and their slow interfaces, all no real problem.

What is really the showstopper are their poor availability times. I dont have the strength anymore to implement a surveillance tool that measures exact avilability rating, but without exagerating here it was around 80-90 % last month. I have a downtime of about 30-60 minutes daily plus some random "big blackouts". We quickly adopted to the "usual downtimes" which are to be fair - usually really only 30 minutes a day. As we didnt get any answers from networksolutions staff we are telling our users (Yes they DO notice and they DO ask - at least the ones that havent left already) that it is due to backups.

What came really annoying were some "big blackouts" recently. Last tuesday the site was "offline" for 2 hours - without further notice. At the weekend we had another few "longer blackouts". Yesterday the site was brought up "404 - site not found" errors although noone touched the http dir - we already thought we got hacked when it just suddenly came back like nothing ever happened. Today i had another downtime for an hour and right now while i am writing these lines the sitte is offline again.

We have had countless support tickets which all ended up with some generic answers, never something you could understand and be like "Oh that was the cause, oh well that might happen". I think the best answer in a support ticket was "We found malware (A virus) on one backend server and had to take the whole segment offline", i think that was the only one that sounded honest and understandable. Why it is offline right now? I dont know. I will never know.

If you dont care if your site is online or offline, if you're not interested in reliable hosting and enjoy the much spare time that develops when your site is unreachable - then networksolutions is your best choice. For all others I'd just say "Hands off!"

Biggest Pro: You can host illegal content because they ignore complaints from everyone
Biggest Con: EXTREMELY unreliable - "felt" availability around 50-60%