TotalChoiceHosting Review.

I was reading the WHT forums for quite a while but never had anything to contribute. I use my hosting pretty much only for email, and usually have very little issues to complain or rave about. I use it personally and for my family and friends, but it is an important service for me.

I’ve been with www.totalchoicehosting.com for quite a while now and was generally pleased with their service. Cheap, reliable, friendly and relatively-prompt support. However, recent experience has changed my view and am getting worried the service is in the decline.

In the last few months I’ve had email issues on an intermittent basis. I probably logged 5 or so support calls for POP3 / IMAP not working in the last few weeks / months. That’s a bit annoying but not the end of the world. Total Choice Service was normally restored quite quickly.

However, yesterday I was completely annoyed as TCH (totalchoicehosting.com)  suspended my account, allegedly due to a script that was not secure and they claimed was causing server problems. Now I know you may say my script WAS affecting performance, but I assure you it wasn’t - it was a simple perl script with no loops that queries a single web page (which is unavailable) and aborts. One LWP (HTTP GET) call and that’s it. I used this script in the past to launch another script to synchronise my email from another hosting provider. Now, however, I only use TCH so the other hosting provider is dead and the scripts exits straight after it queries the unavailable web page. Email synchronisation isn’t even attempted.

I guess they got stressed out recently by the email going up and down and tried to tidy up, and arbitrarily suspended a few websites to see what happens. This is really annoying and against their acceptable use policy (which fails to mention which scripts are allowed and which aren’t, and using which criteria they evaluate a violation of the policy with regards to non-malicious scripts). Even if there was a problem with the script, they could have disabled it and contact me to correct the situation. Instead they suspended my service with no prior notice. After complaining to support they did just that, i.e. removed access to these scripts and enabled my account. I then contacted them and asked why it was done in the first place, but had no response yet. I am happy to post the tiny script to prove it is not resource intensive, and they probably know that yet aren’t admitting it.

Needless (?) to say I had some email issues yesterday just as before, so their attempt to do some housekeeping obviously failed, and it wasn’t any script’s fault by the looks of it. This is purely speculation on my part.

Having said all that, I still use Total Choice Hosting and am trying to give them a chance to get their act together. Just wanted to share my experience with you.

Original Review url:

  http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=489603&highlight=totalchoicehosting

Started out good and came highly recommended. But last year to 18 months they started getting terrible. My site went down and I didn’t even know it til client advised me. TotalChoiceHosting denied problem but it “magically” came back on. This has happened several times.
 
 Of late, it has started to be very unsteady. Often now email won’t work and I cannot get to my domain site. They give me boiler plate language and say try this, but only sketchy detaila on how to do it as if I am an expert. Then I may get another tech rep who solves it quickly. They usually say it is fine on their end, but I keep complaining and it reappears with no explanation from them — but always thanking me for using TCH. Then a day or two, an hour or two, or a month or two, it happens again. Clients say email to me is rejected. Then I have to go to the tech service route. They say “all is well on our end” but when I continue to complain, it finally gets fixed. One time last week they told me it would take 2-8 hours for the fix to proliferate through the intenet — it took the 8. Sometimes after one of the problems I am liable to get “old” mail — no explanation.
 
 I suffered through a LOT of problems when TCH switched servers — and I only knew when someone would tell me they could not get through to me.
 
 I had a “catch all” setup and they arbitrarily stopped it and changed it so I got only specific default email addresses. This caused a lot of business problems. This came in handy but did result in problems when they abruptly changed it with no explanation. When I called why I couldn’t get mail, they said they’d had a lot of problems with tons of jumk or spam mail. They told me they had to change to prevent so much spam — but no apology and they didn’t tell me ahead of time.
 
 Closest I got to an admission of fault was last week when they finally said “we are aware of problems on this server and are working to resolve the issues”.
 
 These are just some of the problems that have crept up. Don’t know why their good service changed in the last few months.
 
 I have a small, but profitable, consulting practice and deal internationally. I MUST have reliable service on my email and website.
 
 TCH — I’m outta there!

Original Review url:

http://www.webhostingjury.com/reviews/TotalChoice_Hosting

So I’m trying to look into some hosting options. My current host, Total Choice Hosting does a reasonable job, has a decent plan, but their support is lacking. TCH Hosting has the technology, they just don’t have the attitude. Or rather, they do have the attitude. It’s quite common for me to submit a request, at which point I’m informed that the support desk doesn’t support that sort of thing. Since I know they do, I ask for the ticket to be escalated, at which point I’m told that, after reviewing the ticket, they have decided to escalate it. Then I start over with the level 2 tech, and eventually it seems to get ironed out.

It shouldn’t be that hard. I appreciate that maybe they have had a bad day. But this has happened more than once to me at TotalChoiceHosting . Maybe this person just doesn’t know what they are doing. I don’t know. So I’m looking.

Reviewed by Jason @ cxliv.org

Click Here to Read the Full Review

3 Month Review - totalchoicehosting.com

What a great web site, I just fell upon Webhostingtalk while doing a google search and wow, I am very happy I did.

I wanted to give a review of my current provider. I hope this is the right spot.

We signed up with totalchoicehosting.com as a reseller in February. The signup process was pretty easy. Nothing to report. I was drawn to this company because of the high ratings found at a web host review site. I spent several days looking at the site and found it to be a pretty well run business. So i plunged and bought the deluxe reseller plan.

The web site totes about how they place all there resellers on reseller only servers, and how they are all dual cpu powered and so on. I was leary about that. Still kinda confused on why total choice hosting place resellers on reseller only servers.

I got the order complete email and instantly had a question. I submitted a help desk ticket to total choice hosting ( i cant remember the question) but i do know the response time was under 30 minutes. This has been the case for every time I have needed help. Most of the time you can chat live with them, but not 100% of the time is that the case, but when they were not online they answered my request via help desk.

I think the biggest thing about totalchoicehosting is the forums they maintain. They have a reseller only forum (password protected). In this forum they give out some very usefull information. Stuff I would never know about. Free Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy, all I had to do is plug im my company name. The forums are really awesome. I was going to pay my lawyer to make these documents and total just gave them to me.

totalchoice hosting Server speeds are excellent no complaints. My server (server12) has only been down one time that I know of. It was down for about 25 minutes. They did send me a email but they sent it to a email address i dont check very often.

I have nothing but good things to say about TCH.

Oh, on a side note, they are still pretty small company. I really dont know how many accounts they serve, so I just hope they stay in business.

I dont think you can go wrong with TCH.

I hope my review helps people make a informed choice.

Anyone know what a DOS attack is? I was just reading about this in the TCH dedicated server forum and I thought that was Disk Operating System.

Revied by user: bedhead @ webhostingtalk.com

Original Review url:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=138050&highlight=totalchoicehosting

TotalChoice Hosting understands that you demand more from your web host provider. We know you are tired of empty promises and undelivered services. In fact we built our core business model around these simple facts! Whether you need hosting for your business or your personal site, TotalChoice Hosting will be there for you. That is 24/7 service and support.
When you join TotalChoice Hosting, you are not just getting great hosting at low prices, you are joining a web hosting family.