If you ever need a quality web hosting company, stay the fuck away from Integrity Host.
Now, they attracted me because for $3.95 a month, I could host one domain and get 2GB of space, 2GB bandwidth, unlimited email and subdomains, lots of pre-installed MySQL and cgi scripts to choose from, CPanelX (which I love as an interface), and a score of other goodies I'd probably never use but might want one day, all hosted on a Linux server.
Sounded perfect. Especially because it was so cheap. So I bought three accounts for lackofoxygen.net, ivytheplant.com, and ivytopia.org. All was fine. Or so it seemed.
Now, their billing system is absolute shit. They depend on PayPal subscriptions to monitor who has paid. So if you don't have a PayPal subscription, the system thinks you haven't paid and suspends your account. After a disastrous couple of months using the PayPal subscriptions, I asked for an alternate payment method. So, they pointed me to a recurring payment system that they also used. Fine, whatever.
Unfortunately, it turned out that even if I had paid through this new system, their billing system wouldn't recognize the payment unless it was accompanied by a PayPal subscription number. So every month I went through this crap of explaining to them what the deal was. A few times I got double-billed, but I figured, hey, only $4 a month, that's no big loss. By now I could have gotten a couple more accounts for a year with what I was double-billed. Finally, they came up with a solution that seemed to work. Or so I thought...
The crap started up again late last year. I sighed and dealt with it. Boorite was using Powweb and tried to convince me to switch, but I was too lazy to really have to move everything, especially since my account was now massive with assloads of subdomains, email addresses for other people, and lots of random crap. I should have taken him up on his offer.
Several months ago, Integrity Host contacted me and said according to their TOS (which was nowhere in sight when I signed up), I'm not allowed to have media files archived. I said whatever and told them I didn't have anything archived really because things like The Adventures of Kitty was an active web page, the mp3s were boorite's and belonged to him so they weren't breaking any copyright thing, etc. Then they said I wasn't allowed to have any media files at all. No mp3s, no mpegs, no jpegs, gifs, or bitmaps. Nothing but html.
I don't even come close to using my 2GB of allotted space with my media files (well, half now with the avi files). How the hell does someone use 2 gigs of space with plain html? This effectively would render The Adventures of Kitty, my projects pages, trip pages, collection pages, etc useless because I'm not allowed to have any jpegs whatsoever.
That's when I moved lackofoxygen.net to Powweb.
I kept ivytheplant.com and ivytopia.org with Integrity Host though. Those pages are small and having nothing really on them. Though since they had only identified lackofoxygen.net in their crap about media, I left whatever media files I had on those two domains. Beginning of September my payment for the month goes through automatically. By now I had switched back to PayPal subscriptions because I had gotten sick of the monthly explanations (since their supposed fix of the system didn't hold).
Now this is where it gets fun. I get an email from Sonia, the bullshit support tech name, telling me that my account will be suspended for nonpayment. The following is the conversation I had with them for the next three weeks:
Sonia: You need to pay your account.
Me: I did pay, here's proof.
Sonia: You need to pay your account.
Me: I did pay, here's proof.
Sonia: You need to pay your account.
Me: I did pay, here's proof.
Sonia: You need to pay your account.
Me: I did pay, here's proof.
Sonia: You need to pay your account.
Me: I did pay, here's proof.
Sonia: You need to pay your account.
Me: I did pay, here's proof.
Sonia: You need to pay your account.
Me: I did pay, here's proof.
Sonia: You need to pay your account.
Me: I did pay, here's proof.
Sonia: You need to pay your account.
Me: I did pay, here's proof.
ad infinitum
Three weeks later, Sonia tells me fine, fine, just set up a new subscription with payment and we'll refund your previous payment. I tell her no dice because by now I'm out of money. I tell her that payday is September 30 and that on September 30 I will make payment (it's the start of a new billing cycle anyway). So she tells me that's fine and I can make payment then, but warns me that if I don't, my files on their server will be deleted after September 30th. Pay attention to the word "after."
One week passes without them bitching at me and it's now payday. I wake up this morning to a notice (they sent 4 each because their system sucks) telling me that my files have been deleted from their server for nonpayment. Unless I'm mistaken, it's still September 30th and the "after" part doesn't come until October 1st. Silly me.
Two weeks ago when the billing crap was going on, I decided that at the end of the month I would switch my last two accounts from Integrity Host to Powweb. I didn't tell Integrity yet because I had already paid for the month and I wanted the goddamned services I paid for. I just figured on Sept 30 I would back up my files and tell them to blow me. I probably should have backed up my files sooner. I do have backups, but this last month I added stuff and I'd like them back. But still, it's the principle of the fucking thing that they can't keep track of their own billing, even when I do everything right, they don't keep to what they tell me, and they just are complete moronic fuckheads.
So never ever use Integrity Host. Even their name is absolute shit. There's not a shred of integrity in them and as for hosting, if I wanted my web page to be a couple of html files, I'd get a fucking geocities account.
