CI Host

Overview

CI Host is a large web hosting company with offices in Texas, California, and Illinois. They hosted vbz.net on a shared server for about 5 years until the 2005-07-11 Server Outage, and we rented one of their special-bargain dedicated servers (a 233 MHz Pentium with 30 GB of storage, $60/month) from mid-2002 until June, 2006.

Incidents

• 2006-06-24 Account Cancellation: they did cancel, but I had to call back to get erroneous charges refunded...
• 2005-07-11 Server Outage: they moved files – which temporarily broke vbz.net – without warning before or after; bad.

Review

Positive Points

• CIH is probably the first web host vbz.net had to be moved from for reasons other than the company abruptly going out of business. (This happened at least twice – first with the single-owner/operator ISP AthensNet in Athens, GA, and then with a larger web host whose name escapes me at the moment.) The fact that they've managed to stay in business for that length of time, and without any significant decline in customer service, speaks well of their management.
• Their tech support has generally been pretty steady, with only occasional annoyances (see below)
• They often do have quite good hosting deals, especially dedicated servers – CIH is the first place I ever saw offering a dedicated server with root access for well under $100/month.

Negative points

• "24/7" emergency tech support is not 24/7; see 2006-06-24 Account Cancellation
• Refused to enable referer logs without a phone call and a surcharge (minor, but annoying, especially since most web hosts enable referer logs by default, or as a control-panel option at no charge, in my experience)
• 2005-07-11 Server Outage
• Their network blocks ping traffic, which means that you cannot check to see if your server shows any signs of life by pinging it
• They also block the necessary ports for accessing a MySQL server via ODBC
• A lot of weird minor things – like the way your contact information has to be re-entered in several different places at various intervals, and the way they have you sign online forms with a so-called "digital signature" (which is not really a digital signature in the strictest sense), and a faxed copy of my server order before they would activate the server... (some of this may have changed since 2002)
• annoying (self-promotional) popup ads on their web site
• There have been rumors that they conduct themselves poorly in public relations, threatening lawsuits against anyone who criticizes them publicly, although I have not run into this myself. They are aware of this page, too, as I included a link to it when I cancelled hosting for vbz.net, so the rumors may be incorrect.
• As already mentioned, their cancellation process has... issues.

Mixed Points

• They have not kept the software on our dedicated server ($60/month) upgraded -- it still has MySQL 3.23 or so. However, with root access I should be able to upgrade it myself if needed, and this lack of maintenance may be part of what allows them to offer the server at that price. They might also be willing to do the upgrade if I asked; I haven't checked on this because the server is rather old and slow (233 MHz Pentium) and really shouldn't be running anything CPU-intensive (such as MySQL).

Overall

I wouldn't say "absolutely stay away from these people", but I would say that there are better options out there and that CIH does need to re-examine its procedures for interacting with customers (especially support and account management). If they still look like the best solution after checking the alternatives, then I'd go into the deal being prepared to act quickly (with backups of everything you put online, and ready to make phone calls) when problems arise.

Digital Signature

This is CIH's idea of a digital signature -- copied from their cancellation form on 2005-07-28:

This document will not be "signed" in the sense of a traditional paper document. To verify the contents of this form, the signatory must enter any combination of alpha/numeric characters that has been specifically adopted to serve the function of the signature, preceded and followed by the forward slash (/) symbol. Acceptable "signatures" could include: /john doe/; /jd/; and /123-4567/. For example: if your name is John Miller, you could type /John Miller/ below.

This is not really a digital signature in the technical sense, and as far as I can tell it does not confer any more security than just typing one's name by itself.

Reference

• C I Host official web site
• HTYP