O.Blog.atory

I manage another website, whdnmra.org. When it came time to find a new host because our original one went out of business, I really wanted to use DowntownHost.com, the company that hosts Touchground. I knew, however, that I would face some opposition from our BoD. So I tried to find a reasonable alternative.

At first, DH2.net seemed to be that alternative. The price was right and they got good reviews. I signed up and built our site on their servers. Everything was fine for about a year.

Then I discovered no one was receiving email from the site. I signed into the “Customer Care” section of the site and found a bulletin saying that they’d had to disable email forwarding because of spammers abusing the system. “Huh,” I thought. “That’s inconvenient. Our officers don’t want their ‘real’ email addresses on the site for the same reason.” No notice to us, the users.

I went along for a while. Then I tried to sign into the site using Dreamweaver, my usual method for FTP-ing to my sites. I couldn’t do it. The FTP login that had worked for over a year didn’t anymore.

I could still sign in through the web though, both into the Joomla install and the cPanel interface. Upon signing into cPanel, I discovered our FTP server address had changed. No notice from DH2.net, no email, no nothing. It didn’t affect the functioning of the site, but it meant that I was trying to sign onto the wrong server through Dreamweaver.

I changed the site info in Dreamweaver and everything was ok again.

Then I tried to use Joomla to upload a new component to add a club directory to the site. I couldn’t do it. “Uploads must be turned on,” the error message said. “What?” I thought. “This has always worked before.” I checked the configuration, and yes, uploads were turned on, but no joy in updating Joomla. I checked permissions of files and folders. I tried the “backdoor” way of uploading and installing a component. No matter what I tried, It WOULD NOT install.

I finally got mad and contacted our new BoD. I gave them the laundry list of issues and asked if I could move the site to DowntownHost. They unanimously said yes, despite losing some money to DH2.net - their hosting fees are non-refundable once paid. Our account with them doesn’t expire until September.

Now I’m trying to set up a new account with DowntownHost. So far it’s been pretty smooth (which I expected). I wanted to transfer our domain over to the new host to simplify things and cut all ties with DH2.net, but guess what - “Client transfer prohibited”. They have a freaking lock on our domain name through eNom. I can’t move it until it expires in March of 2009.

I would NOT recommend DH2.net as a hosting company.