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

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 7:47 pm and is filed under TotalChoiceHosting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.