Eclipse Internet
I have the singular misfortune of developing and maintaining a web site for a client whose site is hosted with Eclipse Internet - a company whose corporate byline is “Share the experience
“. So, with that in mind, I thought I’d “share” my experience of trying to run a business web site hosted by Eclipse with the world at large. The keyword here is “trying” - in both senses of the word…
My clients have paid for hosting with Eclipse for around 4 years. I have maintained their site and looked after sundry other Internet related services for around 3.5 years. I’ve spent the last 2 years trying to persuade my clients to please, please, change to a different web hosting provider.
On a day-to-day basis, the overall web server performance sucks. I monitor some client sites at 6 hour intervals 24/7 and the Eclipse site is regularly down. So much so that monitoring its downtime is pretty pointless. Perhaps I should switch to monitoring its uptime?
FTP file transfer is throttled back so heavily that on a fairly standard broadband connection, I can upload whole sites to other servers in the time it takes me to upload a handful of HTML pages to the Eclipse server.
Then there’s the MySQL server. The hosting package comes with one solitary database (oh joy!) which wouldn’t be so bad if I could rely on decent performance. But no. The MySQL server is so obviously over-stretched that applications fail with almost clockwork regularity and I’m reduced to running the absolute bare minimum - so no fancy on-site search facility is possible here.
The web server appears to be cached - which is a right royal pain when you’re trying to develop a new page/facility as it can take anything up to 10 minutes or more to get a truly fresh copy of a new page despite trying multiple hard browser refreshes. But the real icing on the cake is the Technical Support. In 10 years I don’t think I’ve ever come across anything as dire, or as poorly named, as Eclipse’s “Technical Support”.
Some time ago, I set up a mail box for myself on the clients’ domain so that I could deal with any technical feedback or queries from the site. No big deal - just a simple mail forwarding account. Six months ago, I realised that I wasn’t getting any mails. A few quick tests confirmed that not only was no mail was coming through but no bounces were being generated either. In an uncharacteristically naive move, I contacted “Technical Support” and gave them as much information as I could. That particular ticket was closed a little while later without any response whatsoever.
In December, I did some more checking on my mail server & spam filters and set up a white list in case that would help. Still no mail…
I then relayed all of that info to “Technical Support”. The response I got was, essentially, “Check your mail server
“. Um…I’d just given them a list of mail server checks that I’d carried out. There was nothing else to check. They’d also, once again, closed the support ticket without further discussion, notice and without asking for any additional information.
Earlier this week, I thought I’d have another go. Yes — I know! Ever the optimist…
This time, I got rid of the mail forwarding and set up a webmail box on Eclipse’s server. Now I’d that taken my POP server out of the picture, I ran another set of test mails. It worked in that, this time, I got a clear bounce! OK - so it almost 15 minutes to bounce (I think it took a quick breather at Eclipse’s end) but at least it was a real, bona fide bounce and clear evidence that there was an issue with Eclipse’s mail server somewhere. So, yet another support ticket was raised which included a copy of the bounce indicating a failure at the recipient domain. Now perhaps I’d get somewhere with this?
21 hours later, the ticket was closed with a “cannot see that this bounce originated from our mail server
” message!
WHAT?
Talk about having a Victor Meldrew moment!
Needless to say, yet another support ticket was summarily opened with a full copy of just about every bit of bounce-related data I could lay my hands on.
So, let’s see that’s 4 tickets summarily closed without any a resolution (or even any obvious effort to investigate) and months without email. In the 22 support tickets I’ve raised over the years, I don’t think I’ve seen more than 5 decent answers and even most of these were of the generic “Yes - we had an
[unspecified] problem somewhere but it’s fixed now
” variety that sometimes took “Technical Support” 2 or 3 days to compose. The rest were usually quick fob-offs and an excuse to close the ticket without further investigation. I can only suppose that the company logs closed tickets as opposed to closed and resolved tickets.
In 10 years, I’ve seen my share of bad tech support and bad service generally but I think Eclipse win the overall prize for being bad at just about everything.