A word of advice to those looking for a new web host. Avoid gate.com. I have been using gate.com uneventfully for the last couple years. It was originally hostsave.com then got renamed/bought as gate.com at some point.  It seems like they have really changed direction lately.

The have done a major ‘upgrade’ which in effect was not an upgrade at all. They consolidated their servers and removed features they didn’t feel like supporting anymore. They at least did send a warning email a few days before the switch saying they were doing this. I have to admit part of the problem is that i didn’t read it. Though they didn’t say exactly when the switch was. Truly amateur performance on their part.

As you might expect my site fell apart on the day of the switch.

My first gripe is the bullshit/lie that this was an ‘upgrade’. Since as far as i can tell it was not any sort of upgrade from any customers point of view.

They forced reconfiguration of all mail accounts and eliminated ‘catch-all’ support. Because i quote “It just increases spam” and all other hosts seem to be dropping support for it. Firstly, I don’t care what other hosts are doing. Secondly its total crap. I have never gotten much spam on any of the unused addresses on my site. That should be my problem anyhow. What the heck do they care?!

The reason that the catch-all is such a need for me is that i frequently give out unique emails for different sites i subscribe to in order to track who is giving out my address to spammers. I don’t bother to track what addresses i give out. I have literally hundreds of aliases that would have to be tracked down and email forwarders created for.

gate.com sucks. Sorry, I have to add this to the text since most people doing a search for gripes on something do a search for “XX sucks”. how fun.

gate.com seems to be run by total amateurs.

For those interested i have now switched to dreamhost.com. They are faster and support WAY more features than gate.com. Truly no comparison. They have a rep for NOT doing the sort of crap that other hosts do in this department. Its a little hard to get used to their control panel. It has an odd format but provides a lot of power. The nicest feature is that you may host multiple sites on the same account. Very nice.

Links:

Affinitys review of Gate.com – http://www.webhostingstuff.com/review/GatecombyAffinity.html

http://www.hostingsthatsuck.com/gate-com-sucks/

http://darksiren.net/node/126

http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/gatecom-c7326.html

Gripe, Gripe, Gripe.

Ok here are a few recurring problems i want to gripe about. Problems that have been in multiple generations of MS Windows that have never really been addressed.

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I held out as long as i could, but I finally joined the iPhone club. (Not the Apple/Mac club yet) I just got the iPhone 3G. I waited in line for about 4 hours the day after they were released. Very silly I know.But at least i didn’t camp out overnight. hehe.

Being me, I now have to figure out how every bit of it works.

For anyone looking at phones and is considering an iPhone I’ll try to do a mental dump of what I’m seeing. Ultimately i recommend it but there are some things that might be a turn off for some.

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I recently bought a new cell phone. A Motorolla v3m from Verizon. It’s about time. I’ve felt a little behind the times not having a cool cell phone i could hack. It has NOT at all been a smooth ride so far. Although this is (mostly) a very boring story, I would love to have read it yesterday before spending hours trying to figure this out. hehe.
The Verizon/Motorola software for using the USB connection does NOT work out of the box as advertised. I plugged the USB cable into the phone and got a message saying it could not find the driver software for the device.

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Periodically I do business with companies that go out of their way to stand out of the crowd. They perform in some memorable way. In many cases this a very bad thing. I consider it my obligation to share the stories of companies that have done me wrong. In the future I need to always remember to do a web search before doing business with new companies. Maybe some other pissed off consumer is doing what I’m doing. Maybe I would have avoided being the one to write these. Just do a search for “CompanyName sucks” before giving someone your business. You might be surprised what you find.

POWWEB.COM (web host provider)

On 09/30/2002 I decided to find a new host provider for my site (http://www.sphereserver.net). It requires MySQL, PHP, sub-domains and roughly a 1GB transfer per day. After a thorough search of the web using host tools like www.hostsearch.com, I found POWWEB, the self proclaimed “perfect host”. Not true. Well their web page sounds really great. They offer full services and 30G transfer per month for cheap. Don’t be fooled! As far as I can tell they have no intention of actually honoring that agreement. In my case, the site had been running tolerably for 2 weeks, one day I found the site not working. After days of trying to contact the admin I finally got the explanation it had been turned off for “resource abuse”, not for data transfer but CPU usage. Not so much as an email. In fact it took 4 days before they even responded. The site had been running for over a year on other servers without a hitch.

Evaluation: POWWEB sucks. Read the fine print in the agreement. It turns out they can turn you off and keep your money for ANY reason. (and do) It seems they overloaded their servers. When they discovered this they simply picked the top 2 sites on the server and turned them off. Sounds like good business to me, makes room for more paying customers with less popular sites. They already had my money anyhow. I had foolishly paid for a year in advance. Well hopefully a few people do a search and find this page before going to POWWEB.