A cautionary tale as you decide whom you’ll entrust with your mission-critical business applications and why Hostway gets my vote as the world’s worst web host.

I decided to write this post since my wife’s web site is down AGAIN as is the backend of the service and I’ve burned up an hour dialing the phone in an attempt to get someone, anyone, to address it.

For several years my wife’s business has hosted her web site at Bigstep. When we first started with them in 2000, I was at Vignette and looked for a robust, browser-based ecommerce/website engine that would allow she and her non-technical staff to completely run the site. It worked and we were successfully up and running in days.

Unfortunately, Bigstep had burned through $30+ million in venture capital and couldn’t make a go of it. The architecture is java-centric and thus tough to maintain and expand (and slower I hear) so they were sold to Affinity, at that point the world’s third largest hosting company (or so they claimed).

Affinity was gobbled up by Hostway in April of 2007, and I had high hopes they’d now invest in Bigstep. Not only did they not seemingly put a nickel of investment in Bigstep, as of last week, they announced they’re taking Bigstep offline at the end of March.

I wouldn’t have formed an opinion that Hostway is the world’s worst web host had it not been for all the effort I’ve expended TO TALK TO SOMEONE OR HAVE ANYONE RESPOND to an email, a phone call, or requests through the support system to understand where they were taking Bigstep strategically.

Hostway claims here that, "Superior support sets us apart from the bargain-basement Web hosts. We pride ourselves on offering the best and most reliable support in our industry. And with 24/7 live support, we’re there when you need us all day, every day and with 24/7 live support, we’re there when you need us all day, every day." Sorry Hostway. I’ve had better service from hosts like Bluehost for $6.95 per month.

Their lack of responsiveness extends, ironically, to sales. Try calling them at 1-866-467-8929 and, for example, request commercial sales. If you’re on hold for less than 10 minutes I’d be surprised (I’ve tried repeatedly to reach out via sales, support and the corporate office…all to no avail…and been on hold for 20-30 minutes or more). How long would a commercial customer stay on hold in the hope someone would come on the line and help me buy? Sorry Hostway. You get one or two minutes of my time if you’re selling and I’m buying.

"Hostway’s number one asset is the growing base of loyal customers we serve every day. Customers small and large rely on Hostway to provide secure, reliable and value-rich hosting services for their Web operations. Hostway’s number one asset is the growing base of loyal customers we serve every day."  

Hostway, you know that’s marketing speak and not reality. My wife’s business is in the smallish category and you’ve NEVER provided us with reliable services for our Web operations (the site has been down dozens of times since you acquired Affinity in April of 2007 and we’ve often called and been the catalyst for a system reboot!!). We’re not a loyal customer (the switching costs is what’s held us back thus far) and will never be a customer again once we’ve switched.

UPDATE: Not being able to connect, I called the Chicago corporate office at 312.236.2125 and randomly dialed extensions until I reached someone and ultimately got a call back from tech support for Bigstep. The kicker? It’s been a half hour since I was told they were rebooting the system and the whole shebang (our site and the admin backend) is still down returning a "server error." During my on-hold time, I poked around Google and found a major outage last summer with their premiere low-end property, ValueWeb, that caused severe problems as it was so protracted.