Message from the President
Category: Aplus.Net
Aplus.net’s shared hosting, web design, and domain registration business was recently acquired by Hostopia.com. As the new President of Aplus.net, I greatly value your business and am committed to ensuring the Aplus.net team is focused on you, our customer first and that we deliver valued and economical web services to help you grow your business. First, I’d like to tell you more about Hostopia, provide an update on the upgrade and offer a view of what you can expect in the future from Aplus.net.
Hostopia is a leading provider of web services dedicated to helping small and medium-sized businesses grow online. It is host to approximately half a million websites, and serves over five million business email accounts, several hundred thousand domain names, and thousands of value-added web services. Hostopia is a dominant player in the private-label wholesale web services market, providing services to many tier-one telecommunication providers throughout the Americas and Europe. These companies demand near perfect performance and Hostopia’s success is directly attributed to its ability to meet these demands.
The New Platform
Hostopia’s platform is also the backbone of the future for Aplus.net. It will ensure enhanced performance and reliability for your web services and will offer new service features in the coming months to help you grow your business online. One of the key improvements of the new platform is the hybrid ability to run both UNIX and NT applications on a single hosting service. It is also a clustered-server environment delivering greatly improved response times, redundancy and many other value-added-service application advantages.
Upgrade Status and Support
The first step is to move your current services from the older systems to the new platform. We are approximately three-quarters complete, transferring hundreds of thousands of services. This is an extraordinary undertaking and our success rate to date has been very good; however, with any major system change, it is unavoidable that there will be complexities where some customers experience temporary incompatibilities. Please know that we are making our very best efforts to limit customer impact and resolve technical issues as quickly as possible. We have set up an Escalations Team and are engaged organizationally from top to bottom to help you. If you are a customer experiencing technical difficulties, please contact us using one of the methods below.
- Technical Problem or Questions – Email support@cs.aplus.net or call 1-877-275-8763.
- Billing Questions – If ever you receive an incorrect charge, know that we will review your account and correct it if an error has occurred. Email billing@cs.aplus.net or call 1-877-275-8763.
The upgrade will conclude in January. Until then, stay tuned for announcements as we prepare to bring new web services to help you grow your business.
I am very excited about about the new services we will be launching and believe you will be as well. Our vision is to be your provider of an integrated suite of valuable web services from reliable email and hosting, to website design, mobile website services, ecommerce services, email marketing tools, search engine marketing and more. Our goal is simple: To help you grow your business!
Best regards,
Peter LaMantia
President
www.aplus.net
Please fix the new platform. On the previous platform I had full webalizer statistics for my domains AND all the subdomains. I had a working crontab. I had access to CURL via cron. I had working websites, These facilities have been removed on the new platform without prior communication to your customers and, despite numerous emails and tickets, have not been reinstated. The new platform resulted in down time on my sites, and is a huge dissapointment that is no longer fit for purpose. The support is no longer up to aplus.net’s previous excellent standard with tickets just being closed with no updates or resolution.
All in all, I am hugely unexcited and fed up with this ‘mew platform’. Not enough testing was done with your customers and not enough is being done to resolve these issues. You clearly do not value my business or have any focus on actually resolving the issues which have existed since the migration.
I will no longer be recommended aplus.net in the future and am fed up that my personal time is being wasted finding workarounds to keep my site working since moving to the hostopia platform.
regards
Matt Barton
I’m not one for sugar coating, so let’s tell it like it is:
Aplus.net shared hosting was bought out and now everything needs to be moved under the guise of an “upgrade”.
What this really means is that I will be unable to access ANY of my sites for an entire WEEK, without any sort of compensation from Aplus for this major hassle.
Feel free to visit Aplus’ support forum to see how well the “upgrade” is coming along.
After trying 4 different times to get my wordpress installation updated:
John in tech support finally explained that the auto upgrade feature does not work, Additional themes cannot be installed without adding a trouble ticket. I found out that the other 4 techs either did not have this BASIC information or tried to hide it and wasted more than 8 hours of my time as I tried to resolve this issue.
This service is pitiful - you guys should fold.
Travis - We will be happy to grant you access during your lockdown week but we will need your account information so please email marketing@cs.aplus.net and we will assist you directly.
I’ve spent almost 100 hours fixing problems caused by the “upgrade.” It’s been awful for us. The new server is slower, and often locks up and refuses to return a page, even sometimes a simple html page. The “support” team is seldom available — I know I’ve waited on hold or in the queue for chat for more than 30 minutes at times. They changed things like my php version without telling me. They lost database column constraints… There was no way to see the site on the new server before it was live, so it didn’t work properly for the first few hours, (till I fixed it)…
Yesterday my chat page didn’t work, today it’s my blog page that doesn’t work. Oh, and my visitor logs were lost, and the server isn’t logging visits correctly now…
Worst “upgrade” I’ve ever had.
Jeffrey
This still does not address the issue of compensating your users for the pain and hassle this upgrade has caused. It was very damaging for our business to not be able to make blog updates, etc. during this time and my repeated inquiries about compensation have been ignored.
Peter,
Sorry to say this but I just don’t believe a word of what you wrote. I am writing this one hour and ten minutes into a wait for a phone tech. That is total BS from ANY supplier. Second, I have already spent over 5 hours on with your staff who cannot correct the problems created when you move servers and supposedly “upgraded” a perfectly good service to a stinking one. Third, even speaking with heavy accents, I could get good technical help from Rumania that was effective and available in under ten minutes under the old owners.
Your turning into a joke! No, you HAVE turned into a joke.
John VanSteenberg
Travis is correct. This is the worst “upgrade” in history. At this point, the term upgrade is laughable. People are experiencing major issues after their sites have been “upgraded”. Many have lost revenue due to critical features on their websites not functioning properly, such as the shopping cart. If your website has anything beyond a static html page, you probably already know this. And support tickets are being left open for upwards of 5, 6, 7 days.
We’ve been “upgraded” and am experiencing problems with basic FTP commands that are part of a basic FTP server but now have been disabled after the upgrade. I’ve attempted to work with Tech Support and seem to be talking “above their heads” when talking about basic items like the “append” command and other simple services that use to work prior to the upgrade. Now the access via the url “ftp://mydomain.com” has been recently turned off. I would think that before converting/migrating the use of the system and basic functions like FTP and all of the basic commands are tested to make sure they work properly, are tested and approved before implementation. These items are key to my business functions and have now been disabled with no compensation or concern on how my business succeeds. The “Escalations Team” aka Tech Support is either overwhelmed with tickets on items that use to work but are now non-functioning or at this time don’t care. My original ticket has been open for about 2 weeks with no further updates while I still receive complaints from my customers and unable to provide update information.
I am waiting now for almost 15 minutes to support chat that is running same message “You are currently number 1 in the queue. It is estimated that your wait time will be less than 1 minute.”.
I set up an new email account that is not accessible, nor via outlook, Twitter, or webmail.
This is really mess!
Dear Mr. LaMantia,
I suggest you take a minute to view the shared hosting forums on Aplus.net
http://forum.aplus.net/forumdisplay.php?f=13
Here you will see the level of dissatisfaction that exists with what you describe as “Hostopia’s platform is also the backbone of the future for Aplus.net.”
If this new upgrade is the future of Aplus.net then I might suggest to you that your future is not looking too bright.
I find it quite interesting that the problems that users have experienced with Aplus.net hosting dovetail with the acquisition of Aplus.net by Hostopia.
Since I was migrated to you new platform and have been unable to do many of the things I was able to do prior to this alleged upgrade.
My website performance has been degraded significantly since this alleged “upgrade,” and I cannot upload files to your servers via FTP because the servers are constantly timing out.
To make matters worse, I have been unable to get any response from your customer service people other than “We deeply apologize for inconvenience, but we are still investigating your issue.” This has been going on since 11/30/2009 and now it is 12/9/2009 and nothing has been resolved. I can’t even get a live person on your 24×7 tech support hotlines. And when I try the live chat it too times out on me.
So I sent a message to live chat and get a response from someone who obviously barely speaks the english language. I would prefer no contact to the gibberish that I received from your overseas tech support personnel.
The only live human being who has emailed me has been Amanda from your marketing department. She apparently seems to be the only person who cares about the future of your company and the damage to your image that is occurring by this “upgrade” disaster.
I believe you have some legal responsibility here and the potential for litigation certainly exists and grows by the minute.
There have been hundreds, and probably more like thousands, of customers who have been adversely affected by the “upgrade.” Many of us have lost valuable business - not to mention good will - as a result of your failures.
It might be a good time to get your legal team in action as I and others may soon be asking our legal representative to look into possible legal actions that they can take on behalf of me as well as the thousands of others in our “class.”
Sincerely yours,
John Decker
Our site was upgraded in the first week of October, since then we have not been able to post any news items on our site! At one time couldn’t even log on to manage our site. That took nearly 4 weeks to resolve. There is still a broken link and we are unable to access part of our site. The person assigned to our case also seems to have given up on solving the issue as I am not getting a reply to emails, can you help? We have been a customer of Aplus for over 5 years and have never had any problems in the past.
(sorry my english)
I can’t acess to the files at my database.
I’m portuguese, my sites was in portuguese language, and the portuguese language use special characters. The special characters wasn’t configured.
i submit a ticket (number 2390745) in November 15th, and until they don’t solved my problem.
And now i have another problem.
I take a new computer with windows7, and i can´t login at the control panel. I used IE, Chrome and Firefox browsers and i can’t login.
I have anothers computers with windos vista and windows Xp, and i can login.
As you see my website is no longer — the index page got eaten and has never been found. Luckly my subdomain is intact http://www.embodyspa.com However in migrating my accounts- the team didnt give me warning on when they were going to do it and they totally blew away my mail for 2 weeks. Why? I use an external spam filter. WHen they saw my mail going there they immediately eliminated any support of mail.bandk.com it took 2 weeks of talkign ot idiots and one moment of divine inspiration of one support guy to realize that one of my mail file parameters was set up wrong. Surely I cant be the only person who externally filters mail!.
On another front — all of my web design and ftp tools have had to be modified to reflect the new structure of the websites— ie html is only a symlink which a lot of my tools do not like and here are other tweaks i keep on stumbling over that really piss me off no end- where is the complete documentation of what the heck was done- not even the support team knows- because they keep on telling me to look at the file manager wiki which is like so incomplete as far as structure goes.
This all could have been done way better. I know because I ran an IT team for years.
Count as another very unsatisfied customer.
Our problem is different than the others already mentioned. We used the MySQL database which is included with an ecommerce account. When the site was moved to the new servers, they did not move the custom stored procedures. This broke our site. But get this, we no longer have the necessary permissions to create stored procedures in MySQL!
What good is a database if we can’t program it?
Also, our shopping cart has been broken since Dec. 5th. No one at APLUS can fix it.
Only promises. Hours and hours wasted. Dollars and dollars lost paying a programmer to sit around and basically do nothing.
How APLUS can move a domain/site to a new server and shut down the old server before we accept the new server is beyond me.
These guys define the word “amature”.
Count me as a SATISFIED Aplus.net customer. The converstion has been a slow process but Aplusnet staff have continued to work with us to resolve our challenges. Thank you Aplus.net team for all your help!