Servage.net is terrible – don’t host with them

Stupidly I chose a new host (Servage.net) for mutantpop and other sites, with a personal recommendation, but one that I didn’t realise had a lot of benefits for the other person they didn’t tell me about (2 months+ free hosting for them, as well as the extra server space for both of us he was upfront about) which was slightly underhand.

I saw they did ‘Statistics’ in the features and was mislead to believe that included logs – it is slightly misleading, and server logs are SO basic you expect them to be there, they don’t exactly cost. Well NOT this host.

It turns out the host, Servage.net, doesn’t do logs. Not at all. Amazingly for a host in the 21st Century, they can’t or won’t give access to server logs and only have a really poor stats panel where I can’t filter for client browser or see access logs for particular files – those of you in the Podcasting world will realise how important this is. All for £5.25 a month (9.5 dollars) so it’s not exactly ‘bargain basement’

When I asked about this and mentioned I wanted to cancel and refund (I’ve had the account for only just over a month), they said:

Hello Tim,

We are very sorry to hear that you want to cancel your account. Your account is set to expire at 2007-02-11. We unfortunately only offer a refund 5 days after signingup – thank you for your understanding.

We wish you all the best in the future.

That’s terrible – their rival Dreamhosts (who’ll I’ll probably switch to) offers 97 days cool off period. What with DNS table switching (2-3 days) on a domain there’s no way you could tell if the account is for you, or come up with any problems – I for one couldn’t import SQL databases properly either, something went seriously wrong even though the dumps are via phpMyAdmin from my old host so should be fine. It simply wouldn’t import – and they didn’t know what the issue was, although they admittedly offered to import the files themselves I can’t do that everytime, or at 3am in the morning during an emergency…

So please people, AVOID Servage.net. I’ll let you know how Dreamhosts go.

And anyone want to use some spare file or web hosting space for a year (without logs?)?