home: https://starling.us
by Ĝan Ŭesli Starling
copyright 2010
After eight years continuous patronage, I have had to abandon SelectedHosting.Com for all seven of my Internet domains. Service got so bad that, even while in the middle of a divorce, with hundreds of dollars owed to my attorney, and while paying out $1,596 per month in combined child and sposal support, with my crashed motorcycle still needing to be repaired...despite all that I still had no recourse but to abandon my existing contract with SelectedHosting with still some months remaining. Yes, sevice was really that bad. Let me tell you some about it.
First it was a problem with email. All email accounts were down for more than two weeks last December. Service requests made via their automated system went unheaded. Calls to their number were all met with a voice mailbox full fembot recording. Finally they fixed it, but with never an apology or explanation.
The final straw was just two weeks ago, 2010-04-04. Every single one of my HTML pages got infected with the JS/Tenia.d
trojan. Google flagged all my sites, even the unaffected XML pages for malware. SelectedHosting
once again responded to all my pleas with total silence. Again they ignored my automated service request. Again they ignored my emails. Again their voice mail box was always full. I had to manually downnload
all my pages and write a Perl script myself to cleanse my pages of JS/Tenia.d
and re-upload them. All that bother on my part just because SelectedHosting can't be bothered to run anti-virus
software occasionally? Even after doing putting myself through all that, still Google would not unflag me for malware. Once I abandoned SelectedHosting in favor of HostMonster and re-applied, only then was I able to get unflagged
for malware. On top of that I get unlimited almost everything instead of my piddly 300MB from before.
Doing a WhoIs search on SelectedHosting.Com reveals a contact name for the same Chinese individual in California on all it's sections, technical, support, etc...just like my own seven domains. That is to say, a solitary person, not a company. I had always suspected them of being, basically, a one- or two-man operation, probably out of somebody's basement or garage. My present suspicion is that it's just one guy, and that he's away a lot, maybe in China for all I know. The short and long of it is that after eight years continuous patronage, they have seen the last of my business. I had only picked SelectedHosting in the first place because they offered a Linux account with Perl and all at a decent price. And I was then just starting out with my first domain. Now it's a whole different story. If you are looking for a host, know that I am presently more than satisfied with HostMonster.
I wonder how long it will be before SelectedHosting takes my name off their recomendations page? On their Testamonials page, they've got me listed twice. Gan Uesli Starling from starling.us and the email tsongkhapa@att.net are both from me. I haven't had an AT&T email for over six years. Way back then I was truly impressed. Not anymore, though.