Steer clear of HOSTICAN!

[asthegeekturns]

Before reading my post please keep in mind this is based on my own personal experience only.

HOSTICAN (hostican.com), based in Virginia, been around since 2003 and uses a Colocation setup. They offer shared accounts, VPS accounts, and dedicated accounts. They seem to pride themselves on offering unmetered bandwidth.

My experience:

I started with HOSTICAN about 7 months ago based on the recommendation of another vBulletin customer in this very forum. I started with their low end VPS (VPS Rage Plan), and quickly decided to move to the high end VPS plan (VPS Extreme Plan), the Extreme plan costs $99 a month.

I had several issues, first billing, the site advertises the highest end VPS plan for $84.95 per month, period. It is actually $99 a month if you don't pay a year in advance (which their sales department will actually discourage you from doing), but they don't mention that on their website.

Second, 99.9% uptime promise. Within a week of signing up they claim they were hit by a denial of service attack. Their policy is 1 month free if they fail to meet that 99.9% uptime guarantee. I never saw a credit even though I was knocked offline for over a day by the outage.

Third, no limits, but wait. They offer "ummetered bandwith" lots of disk space and plenty of memory. One would assume running vBulletin (even with a 200mb database), would be easy and reliable. In fact the performance was unreliable at best. I experienced downtime on a number of occasions. Optimizing or backing up the database would bring the whole forum (including the vBulletin Admincp), to a halt.

They recently upped the limits on the VPS extreme account. When I signed up it was 60 gb of disk space and 512mb of ram burstable to 1 gb. They now offer 90 gb of disk space and 768mb of ram burstable to 1.5 gb. When I called to have my account limits upgraded to the new levels they discouraged me from doing so. They claimed that there would be a performance drop by upgrading because there are even more vps accounts on the same machine than I have on mine now. I asked how many were on my box, they said 25 to 30.

25-30 VPS accounts on one box? That is quite a load, no wonder I run out of CPU resources and crash the site every time I optimize of backup my database.

The bottom line is this outfit looks good on the surface, but they actually squeeze tons of customers onto a box and it degrades the performance to the point of impacting normal day to day forum operation.

If I wanted to share a box with that many other accounts I would have gone with a shared plan and I sure as heck would not have paid $99 a month for it.

By the way, I am sure some of you are asking yourself if I contacted support with my concerns. I did, by phone, by chat, and by email. I even sent them a final email telling them I was fed up and about to jump ship. They never even made an attempt to address my problems and didn't seem to care that I was leaving.

7 months and $700 later I can tell you from personal experience, HOSTICAN is one of the worst web hosting outfits I have ever been with.

Caveat Emptor my friends.

[Zachery]

I would say that overselling is part of most every host.

[1996 328ti]

I would say that overselling is part of most ever host.Not every host. I pay of x disk space a x bandwidth. I'm perfectly comfortable knowing that my host is not overstating.

[Zachery]

Not every host. I pay of x disk space a x bandwidth. I'm perfectly comfortable knowing that my host is not overstating.
They are, 99% of hosts out there are overselling something. Short of renting a dedicated server, generally then they're overselling their lines.

[asthegeekturns]

I agree with Zach on this one. Part of the frustration for me is that there are so many webhosts out there that are really just a guy sitting at home with a reseller account and a glitzy website with stock photos of smiling girls wearing headsets.

There was this one I recently happened upon while doing my search, they specifically claimed not to overload their VPS servers like other hosts. A bold statement, so I started reading the whole website, I finally found a red flag, they claimed to be a tier one network provider. As we all know there are only six actual tier one network providers in the world. So I asked about the facility where their equipment was located, they were not anywhere near a tier one provider.

You just can't trust anyone any more.

Aside from installing your own equipment at a colo facility you never truly know what you are working with in web hosting. :(

[express]

You just can't trust anyone any more.



Not true at all we take care of our clients and always have. I know this vbulletin user that you speak off. We saw right thru this guy and fought his posts with vbulletin for over 4 months. If you see something that looks on the outside to good to be true it usually is.

Good luck with your next host, there are good hosts and good guys out there so do not be to hasty to paint all of us with the same brush.

Joey

[asthegeekturns]

I know this vbulletin user that you speak off. We saw right thru this guy and fought his posts with vbulletin for over 4 months.

I was actually referring to a web hosting company I found during my search for a replacement for HOSTICAN, not a vbulletin user. To the best of my knowledge the host that said he was a tier one when he wasn't does not have a presence on this forum.


Good luck with your next host, there are good hosts and good guys out there so do not be to hasty to paint all of us with the same brush.

Joey

Interestingly enough, I looked at your site. It is very well put together. I noticed something though, you are using the exact same data center pictures as another hosting company is using on thier website. Your site said you use a datacenter in Dallas, which datacenter do you use? Do you colocate? Those pictures are of a Colo facility in Dallas. If you do, and you are based in Illinois (according to your forum profile), but you use a facility in Dallas, how do you access your equipment from so far away? Just curious.

[express]

We have leased space at colo4dallas. We have had our servers there for about 3 years now.
The data center has 24/7 onsite techs. If we need anything we just call them on the phone. 15 minute reboots usually takes less.

Joey

[TCE Killa]

Hostgator is a decent host, I'm happy with them thus far. Excellent and quick support, and a good server. They even did things for me that I didn't have a clue how to do. But apparentally, if you exceed the space limit, they will shut you down while critshost. gives you an option to upgrade more space when you exceed.

Thanks for warning me about Hostican, I'll know never to go with them;).

[Hitomi]

Before reading my post please keep in mind this is based on my own personal experience only.

HOSTICAN (hostican.com), based in Virginia, been around since 2003 and uses a Colocation setup. They offer shared accounts, VPS accounts, and dedicated accounts. They seem to pride themselves on offering unmetered bandwidth.

My experience:

I started with HOSTICAN about 7 months ago based on the recommendation of another vBulletin customer in this very forum. I started with their low end VPS (VPS Rage Plan), and quickly decided to move to the high end VPS plan (VPS Extreme Plan), the Extreme plan costs $99 a month.

I had several issues, first billing, the site advertises the highest end VPS plan for $84.95 per month, period. It is actually $99 a month if you don't pay a year in advance (which their sales department will actually discourage you from doing), but they don't mention that on their website.

Second, 99.9% uptime promise. Within a week of signing up they claim they were hit by a denial of service attack. Their policy is 1 month free if they fail to meet that 99.9% uptime guarantee. I never saw a credit even though I was knocked offline for over a day by the outage.

Third, no limits, but wait. They offer "ummetered bandwith" lots of disk space and plenty of memory. One would assume running vBulletin (even with a 200mb database), would be easy and reliable. In fact the performance was unreliable at best. I experienced downtime on a number of occasions. Optimizing or backing up the database would bring the whole forum (including the vBulletin Admincp), to a halt.

They recently upped the limits on the VPS extreme account. When I signed up it was 60 gb of disk space and 512mb of ram burstable to 1 gb. They now offer 90 gb of disk space and 768mb of ram burstable to 1.5 gb. When I called to have my account limits upgraded to the new levels they discouraged me from doing so. They claimed that there would be a performance drop by upgrading because there are even more vps accounts on the same machine than I have on mine now. I asked how many were on my box, they said 25 to 30.

25-30 VPS accounts on one box? That is quite a load, no wonder I run out of CPU resources and crash the site every time I optimize of backup my database.

The bottom line is this outfit looks good on the surface, but they actually squeeze tons of customers onto a box and it degrades the performance to the point of impacting normal day to day forum operation.

If I wanted to share a box with that many other accounts I would have gone with a shared plan and I sure as heck would not have paid $99 a month for it.

By the way, I am sure some of you are asking yourself if I contacted support with my concerns. I did, by phone, by chat, and by email. I even sent them a final email telling them I was fed up and about to jump ship. They never even made an attempt to address my problems and didn't seem to care that I was leaving.

7 months and $700 later I can tell you from personal experience, HOSTICAN is one of the worst web hosting outfits I have ever been with.

Caveat Emptor my friends.
i would also post it on webhostingtalk.com alot of people hate overselling of their products frankly it discourages potential clients in long run

[alemcherry]

Sorry to hear your story. I used to have good impression about hostican, but now :( But 25-30 VPS accounts is what most hosts do, but those would more likely be smaller accounts.

[choppers4life]

I had a vps with hosticant for a month. 1 gig ram and mysql kept going away error. They said it was vbulletin. Its always vbulletin and never configuration. At lest thats what they say. I moved to an unmanaged dedicated box with 1 gig ram. No problems for over 2months.

[encryption]

couldn't help but chuckle at the topic....... hope you found someone dependable to jump to

[Sasha7]

Funny, I am in exactly the same boat. Getting Hostican cpu/memory warnings and having my site shut down - and it isn't that popular of a board (maybe 20 users max at any given time.) I went with Hostican on the recommendation found at this site and after doing some reading it seems that it is time to switch hosts again. I have asked Hostican repeatedly to help me figure out where my spikes are coming from and how to bring my forum back into compliance and all they respond with is an offer to upgrade to a package I can't afford.

Good thing for them that they started this crap this week just as I was getting ready to move a second site to host with them, they lose that piece of business.

[AMcKay]

Exact same boat!

Did research beforehand, went with hostican because they seemed good. halfway into my shared hosting plan, my less-than-fifteen-users-at-once community ceases to function without errors. I took a peek at their forum and it looks like loads of people feel the same way: Another CPU Limit thread - Your HostICan Community (http://forum.hostican.com/shared-hosting/590-another-cpu-limit-thread.html)

[choppers4life]

They are just another overseller that blames its overload/overselling problems on its clients.

[encryption]

overselling BW + Space in most cases isn't a crime, its overselling CPU time and dumping clients with processor hungry apps on the same machine. that is brutal to a server

[baghdad4ever]

the load of my site on hostican doesnt exeed 1

and they shutdown my vps without warnning

they r thieves Hostican

plz for every one you must think and think and think before joining these
A gang of thieves

[friscogal]

can anyone recommend a good host? i really need to move mine and also researched on here and webhostingforum before i moved to hostican. what a mistake. they are trying to push me to a dedicated server.