frandt.com is down again

[zoidberg]

I am an ex-customer of FR&T (www.frandt.com) - I was only with them for a couple of months trying to use them to host a couple of small but professional sites (I'm a webdesigner).

Their uptime record was absolutely terrible - down daily, sometimes for in excess of 10 hours at a time. On one occasion when their 24 year old 'CEO' did reply to me the excuse he gave was the downtime was due to his 'techs' learning on the job - they were trying to upgrade BIND/DNS. Obviously doing it on a 'live' system without testing it on a backup box first - !!!!!!!!

On other occasions when I submitted 'critical' helpdesk tickets they were simply ignored. Emails to tech support bounced telling me that the inbox was over it's quota!

In the forums I was told to not be so impatient, and to stop complaining! You will note that the forums are populated with kids - some of whom are not old enough to buy beer - with free hosting accounts who think they're getting a really good deal (well, free is good). But I was a paying customer - and as such I was subsidising their free accounts.

When I questioned the '100% uptime' statement on their home page, I was told that 'all' hosting companies measure uptime where if any of their systems are up, they are up. So if an old Win95 box in the office is switch on, they won't count it as downtime - !!! - this is certainly not the case. They have recently been hard down because they are still trying to get BIND/DNS working - making all access to hosted websites, email, etc etc fail. Even their own website, ticket system, forums etc have been down too.

Have a look on their website under 'staff' (if you can catch them on a good day when you can actually connect to their site). Marvel at how little experience these people have in the real world.

Very, very, very bad. Keep away!