APlus.net/Names4ever is WORST EVER

Here is my horrible Aplus.net story. I took over IT for a upstart manufacturing company about 7 months ago. The company website was hosted with aplus.net using Aplus's registrar names4ever for our two domains.


My first headache with Aplus occurred with my first task of adding a simple sendmail form on our website. The local serverinfo showed sendmail at /usr/sbin/sendmail. My script errors at “sendmail cannot be found”. A phone call to Aplus support and I'm told that the problem is my own script (my script is fine). Aplus support was condescending and could care less about my problem. Their outsourced support had no clue what sendmail was or even how the Unix permission system worked. After multiple phone calls and hours of time wasted I bagged the script and set the form up to use a sendmail script on another server.


After this trouble I hurried to transfer the domains to a decent registrar and move our websites to our own colocated servers which were up in place by then. I called Aplus support once again. Most of their reps don't speak clear English forcing you to hang up and keep calling until you get somebody understandable. I finally get to explain that I need the privacy setting removed from my domain records making it possible to transfer the domains. The short story here is that it took 40 DAYS, 2 dozen phone calls and 3 payments for the same domain transfer to get the registrar information updated and 1 domain transferred.


I'm in my last couple days with Aplus.net with only one transfer to go (though its been in “waiting for approval from current registrar” status for 6 days). My sincere hope is that somebody reads this and is able to avoid Aplus.net. When you look for a web hosting company avoid outsourced technical/customer support. Support service should always be in-house for hosting companies. And if your website means anything to you its worth a few extra bucks to host with somebody reliable.