If you enjoy dealing with some of the most friendly tech support people that you'll find anywhere, then you'll enjoy having your web site hosted by APLUS.NET.

However, if you want to deal with tech support people that actually know what they are doing, then you'll want to avoid ever having your web site hosted by this firm.

My tale starts the weekend of December 5, 2009. One of my sites, Pine Grove Software, LLC was scheduled to have the server on which is it hosted "updated" by APLUS.NET. This upgrade was suppose to be managed entirely by APLUS.NET. In fact, as the owner of the domain being updated, we had absolutely no input into the process or the time at which the update was to take place.

The bottom line is this, APLUS.NET, when they moved the site to the new server broke our site. This was two weeks ago. And, as of Friday, Dec. 18th, 2009, the site still is not fixed.

Here are some of the problems that we have had:
The APLUS shopping cart which is included in the ecommerce plan was broken.
When the MySQL database was moved, the custom stored procedures were not moved.
On the new site, our account does not have the necessary permissions to create the stored procedures.
It took more than 10 days before we were able to FTP updated pages to our site.
When the site was moved, our .NET application folders were not created. Our applications were broken for more than 24 hours after the move and it was up to our technician to find and fix this problem.
ionCube PHP Loader was not installed (or was not installed correctly).


Only a few of the above issues have been fixed as of this date -- namely the ionCube Loader and the ability to FTP new or updated pages. The other issues are still outstanding.

There is one thing that any potential customer of this firm should understand. APLUS.NET advertises 24/7 phone support. What they do not tell you is that their support people cannot fix anything! That is, even when the problem is understood (example: not have sufficient access rights to the database to create the stored procedures), the technicians on the phone do not have the authority to fix the problem. They have to submit a "ticket". The tickets then go into the hopper until a real technician can fix the problem. As you can see, this may take weeks.

Now, don't think this is for a lack of trying on our part to get this fixed (after all, our new shopping cart is not working!). We have lost countless hours on the phone talking to the tech support personnel. We spoken with "Chris", "Michael", "Anne" and others. We have spoken with two tech support supervisors "Chris" and "Jesse". And even the supervisors can't get the problems fixed. If you have any problem beyond some simple issue, the support staff that you'll speak with, will not be able to help you. They are basically clerks who take notes and create support tickets.

One other note about this amature operation. We were willing to have them create an entirely new shopping cart for us. That is, if they would only setup a new shopping cart with the default settings, we were willing to reconfigure the cart and to load our products and to restyle the pages. They can not even do this. And this is the cart that they call the APLUS.NET PREMIUM SHOPPING CART!

And while that's bad enough, we also suggested that we point the domain back to the old site, and we would use the site hosted on the old server until the new server was working. They can not do that either. Apparently, they've destroyed the old server! Folks, when upgrading anything, rule #1 is to maintain a fallback plan. APLUS.NET destroyed the fallback!! Unbelievable!!

There are other issues not even mentioned here. If I have the time over the next few days, I'll post more. I'll also post if APLUS.NET ever gets these problems resolved and when.

Stay tuned.

Karl Thompson
December 19th, 2009

kt AT karlthompson DOT com


In all fairness to APLUS.NET, we've had them hosting this domain for five or more years and there has never been a problem. But, sometime during the past few months the assets of the company were sold to another firm, and maybe the new firm has cut corners? On the other hand, we've never had as large or as complex of a site as we do now. Maybe they never were able to handle the more advanced technical issues?