Unfortunately I’m forced to warn everybody again about Globat. I have said it before and I say it again, DO NOT HOST YOUR WEBSITE AT GLOBAT! If you are unfortunate enough to have your site hosted at globat.com; get out of there! (that is if you can)

My latest story about the Globat Automatic Upgrade Fraud is in one way different to the rest of the fraudulent automatic upgrades. In this case my customer got charged for an automatic upgrade 5 month AFTER he had moved out from Globat’s servers.  Now another 49.95 have been charged to upgrade an account that doesn;t even has a login.

Bad? Yep, but nothing new and far not all. Like probably many other customers or former customers of Globat, my customer got also charged for an account that was never his! The domain name he is charged for during the past three years is available to buy! There is no account with that name on Globat, there is no login, nothing but a yearly bill and automatic upgrades.

In the US it seems to be perfectly legal to cheat people off this way. Globat.com accounts for 100′000 websites, multiply this number by 49,95 for an automatic upgrade every year. Now let’s assume that only ten percent of those get successfully ‘upgraded’ – Did i mention that those upgrades are totally useless and are included in any real web hosting account as standard anyway? – so, let’s say 10′000 times 49.95 equals 500′000 US$ in rounded numbers. While I’m sure it is far more than 10%, even a half million bucks must make a difference in judgment of right or wrong in the United states!

Globat Automatic Upgrades Fraud

For more than five years now I hear and see what they are doing, i have published articles about it and many other people have done so too. Did it help? Nothing happened, they still make millions of bucks by cheating their clients. And nobody can tell me that the authorities are not aware of this fraud. America what’s wrong with you?
Together with my customer, I now was about to contact the support at Globat to set things straight and get a refund on that illegally withdrawn money. I tried the live chat, where the windows just closes after you entered all your data and the whole story. Psychologically perfect made to piss us off.  So i click the contact link at the bottom of their home page…. 404 page not found. What else did i expect? But I still haven’t given up yet; In the support section, (the link on the top of the page works) I found the support ticket, where we now submitted the following text:

My website xxxxxx.info has moved out from Globat on March 18th 2008, How in gods name can you charge me for yet ANOTHER AUTOMATIC UPGRADE on August 7th 2008. Please immediately refund these 49.95 to my account! My account at Globat is canceled and my login is not valid anymore. How can you automatically upgrade an account that doesn’t even exists on your servers? This is not the first time this happened. You als charged me for an account called lastminute-liveaboard.com for years. I DO NOT and NEVER HAD an account with this name on globat.com. There is no existing login, there is no website, nothing, but you charged me year after year! I also want this money refunded! There is no such website and the domain is available and for sale!

If we ever get an answer I will post it here. These automatic upgrades have to stop!

Click to Bookmark this Article

Hide Sites

The Best Free Web Hosting Accounts

Lately I wonder why anybody would want to pay for web hosting! I’m producing blogs and websites ‘by the meter’ but i never used up neither, my web space, nor my bandwidth on any account. Most of my clients run a business and there website serves the purpose of creating income in one way or another. In these cases it is understandable that the business website has to be hosted on a paid host, at least for the ‘good feeling’ in the belly. Not for the web space or for the bandwidth though. The average web hosting account for a single business uses about 50 to 100 MB on web space and 10 – 20 Gigs of traffic will do just fine. Some free web hosting accounts have become a lot better than their paid brothers and sisters! You can find better features and support on a free server than at some ‘professional’ webhosting companies who charge you every month.

So if you’re just starting up a physical business or you want to give Internet Marketing a try without investing a lot of money upfront, or you are about to start of your first self hosted WordPress blog, I have reviewed a whole bunch of free web hosting accounts for you. Many of the free web hosts i found on Google where already whipped out by the competition or have simply given up. I’ve listed the three best free web hosting accounts below.

1. http://www.000webhost.com/ Great Account and My Personal Favored! 350 MB FREE Web Space ( I got 100 MB extra, just like that, after signing in) 100 GB Traffic – CPanel Hosting – Fantastico Auto Script Installer – Unlimited Addon Domains – Own Domain Name Hosting – Unlimited MySql Databases and more. No Ads, No Banners
   
2. http://www.frihost.com/ Offers 250 MB FREE Web Space 10 GB Traffic – Unlimited parked and addon Domains Unlimited MySql Databases but NO CPanel hosting!!!
3. http://www.freehostia.com/ Starter Package – 250MB Free Web Space and 5 GB Traffic – 1 MySql Database No Ads No Banners 2 Domain Hosting

If you are running a business and you need to buy a webhosting account, there is still Blue Host. Unlimited CPanel hosting with the best service and support for the lowest price on the net.

Click to Bookmark this Article

Hide Sites

Lunar Pages Web Hosting – Two Thumbs Up!

On my endless search for the best web hosting deal for my customers I lately stumbled over Lunarpages. By checking out their services and offers i found an attractive package that fulfills all requirements of an average customer or web designer or and much more. If you’re not up for something really special where you need shell access (Lunar pages charges 2.95 extra for shell access), this is a reliable web hosting account with 99.9% server uptime measured on any 12 month period of time. Meaning your website will be visible to your prospects for almost 100% of the time.

Essential! – Solid Web Hosting Support

I also tried the award winning support of Lunarpages. I always do that; if there is a late or even no response at all, i can’t recommend a web host to my customers. Especially not if I’m the one who has to deal with it. So I’ve sent a ticket to to the support center to ask about if they have any uptime guarantee, and if this would be server uptime or network uptime. The mail was sent at 13:14, the auto responder dropped in at 13:16 telling me that i will get an answer soon and at 13:34 i had a personal response stating:

Thank you for your interest in Lunarpages.
We do not have an uptime guarantee although we do experience 99.9% uptime on all servers and network equipment over a 12 month period.
I hope this information is helpful.
Best Regards,
Michael Torrance

That makes a response time of 20 minutes; I can live with that even without a live chat support. And ‘experience’ 99.9 percent server uptime sounds better to me than any empty promise or guarantee! I made a list of the most important features this webhosting package below. Compare the features to other hosts. Some of them will offer you unlimited traffic and unlimited web space. Nobody though could ever tell me what for this would be needed other than running 20 live web cams at once or spam the whole Internet. None of them though will give you this:

Sign up for the Basic Web Hosting Package over one of the links on my blog now and save $ 2 US per month!
Use the coupon code “spring” on a two years plan and your webhosting account will be created for $4.95/Month including all the features below!

Lunarpages – Web Hosting Features

• 1 FREE Domain Name for Life
• 1,500 Gigabite Disk Storage!
• 15,000 Gigabite Data Transfer!
  
• Unlimited Add-on Domains Included FREE!
• CPanel Hosting!
• Fantastico Enabled (Over 35 Scripts)
• 24/7 Award Winning Support!
• Unlimited Databases
• Unlimited Email/FTP Accounts
• Blog, Forum & Photo Gallery
• JSP/ASP Available
• Spam Protection- IMAP Support
• Microsoft® Frontpage® Compatible
• Dreamweaver Compatible
• Ruby on Rails 6, PostGReSQL
• MySQL 4+, PHP 4+
• MySQL 5 & PHP 5.2+
• Free Web Design Templates
• Webmail (Horde and Squirrel)
• Linux Hosting

Click to Bookmark this Article

Hide Sites

Unlimited Web Hosting Accounts – Good or Bad?

Since about a year the web hosting companies around the globe have been entangled in a ‘never ending’ price war. Not unlike a Jihad nobody seems to be able to stop it.
Within a few month only web hosting accounts have gone from 600GB what already is much more than an average user will need in his entire lifetime, to 1′500GB and now are set to unlimited already. The same happened with the offer of web traffic or the so called bandwidth. Set to unlimited enables should enable every user to have his/her on MySpace or Facebook running. But does it really?

Unlimited Web Space and Unlimited Traffic vs. Server Uptime

I was wondering what the bigger webhosting companies would have to say about their uptime guarantees and promises after giving away unlimited web hosting accounts. I was up for a surprise when i learned that one of the biggest hosting companies had removed the uptime guarantee from the advertising and from their TOS. This seemed to be what i was looking for, so i went asking what’s up and why it has been removed. Whilst i never actually got an answer why the 99.9% clausal had been removed i was even more surprised to hear that the 99% guarantee only concerns NETWORK UPTIME and NOT SERVER UPTIME! Did you know the difference? Further i was told that users, hosting on shared servers, had to accept some downtime or buy a dedicated server!
So let’s get this one straight; 99% Network uptime means that their network is up and running 99% of the time in a 12 month period. NOT Your Website!
Only if the hosting companies guarantee you a 99.9% SERVER UPTIME your website(s) will be visible to the public for 99% of the time measured over a 12 month period.

Is that what All Web Hosting Companies do?

No, it’s not, at least not yet. I went on with my search for the truth about unlimited webspace. My next stop was www.ixwebhosting.com, a medium sized web hosting company that hosts about 350′000 domains at the moment.
IX also offers unlimited webspace and unlimited bandwidth plus a free domain for life.
First i looked at their TOS and look what i found:

99.9% Uptime Guarantee
IX Web Hosting guarantees that your website will be up and running at least 99.9% of the time during any 12-month period. This guarantee includes network uptime, server uptime, web server and service uptime.

Now that sounds different to me! The next stop was the live chat section. I always like to meet Level 1 support staff before i decide if a host is good for me or my customers. And i got my confirmation within minutes:

Sergey Bakhmach: Thank you for coming, my name is Sergey. How may I help you?
McHow2: Hi, i wonder how much server uptime (in %)you can guarantee your customers. I need my sites to be available 24/7 7 days a week
Sergey Bakhmach: we guaranty 99.9% uptime
McHow2: network uptime or server uptime, that seems to be a difference
Sergey Bakhmach: it is your servers uptime
Sergey Bakhmach: and we recently changed our server location and we now have stable network with new channnels we provide 99.9% server uptime

Size Does Matter

So why can a huge web hosting company only guarantee 99% Network uptime while a medium company can guarantee you 99% server uptime? My guess for now it’s the size that matters here. As larger a hosting company gets as more problems come up. Slow support response if at all and slow server response. CPU overload errors and MySql slow queries come up on daily bases. I will keep on investigating the matter and let you know here what i found.

I have to say though that even if you host your website or blog on a big company’s server you might not experience any problems at all. That widely depends on WHO ELSE is on the same (shared) server and on how many sites you are hosting on one account.

Important Things To Keep in Mind when you select your Web Hosting Companies

• Keep in mind that if you host all your many web sites on one server, if one goes down – they all go down, and your complete web presence disappears at once for several hours. that can be very costly.
• If you run Google AdSense campaigns on your sites, your sites are better up and running at all times. Not only do you loose clicks but the Cost per Click (CPC) will also slowly decrease.
• When selling your own or Affiliate products on your site or blog you are likely to loose business while your web presence is not available to your potential customers.
• And Finally , if you pay for your clicks, if you run Google AdWords campaigns for example, you don’t want to pay for clicks that end on a 404 or a 500 page. That’s a total waste of money.

Click to Bookmark this Article

Hide Sites

The Automatic Upgrade Ripoff of Globat.com

One of my customers has just forwarded the e-mail below. He asked me if I’ve ever heard something like this before. and indeed I have. It was Globat.com again, several years ago when Lou Rio suddenly had the brilliant idea to upgrade all user accounts to a so called T2 package. The automatic upgrade then, was ‘only’ 19.95$ per year. At this time i had several websites hosted at Globat.com myself and despite the fact that i already had a T2 package, my account was upgraded and charged anyway. I never got the e-mail though. Since it came from a very suspicious e-mail address it had landed in the junk mail where it was supposed to land.

When I found out about the automatic upgrade, I immediately called Globat to reverse the process. It took many e-mails, calls and month until the 19.95$ where back on my account. Even though my Globat account had many month to go and transferring websites sure isn’t one of my most favored jobs to do, I moved out almost instantly. I packed my bundle and went to Blue Host, a reliable and affordable web host, that gets better and better every year. Even though I never had a problem since and the support on my new web host has always been great, I could not convince all of my customers to move out there. By now, only one of my customers still has a Globat account, or should i say had?

Several years have passed by since i moved out and I never thought of Globat again until I got the e-mail from my customer this morning. The e-mail was sent from: Received:(from nobody@localhost)so it for sure would land in the junk mail. For good reason. If you have a Globat account and you are not lucky enough to find this mail in your junk mail box, your account will automatically be charged 49.95$ from hereon after, year after year. And for what? For that people can watch your website on there cell phones and i-pods; like they couldn’t without this upgrade…

I mean FULLY AUTOMATICALLY! If you don’t say explicitly NO, the Ferrari is yours! you bought it, you pay for it! Even though you actually got a Mazda instead.

I thought i let the world now what’s going on as soon as possible. If you have your web site hosted on Globat.com, beware! 49.95 will be charged from your credit card by May 1st 2008, if you don’t click the specially provided link in the specially prepared ‘ to become junk ‘ e-mail below. Another way to have as little rejections as possible. Think of it, Globat claims to host over 100′000 websites, multiply this with the automatic upgrade of 49.95 and you got 5 Million Dollars for sending out a single e-mail and hoping that no one finds it! Wouhhw That’s taking Internet Marketing to a complete new dimension. If we go down that road, beware of car dealers, real estate agents and the rest of the world. Suddenly you own a House and a Ferrari and a Lear Jet, just because you didn’t explicitly say No, I don’t want to buy that!

I’ve just checked back on Globat.com hosting accounts. I compared the account volume to my Blue Host account and had a laugh more. They offer 500 GB less web space, 14′000 GB less Bandwidth/month – yes that’s right 14 Terra bite less! – only 10 domains on one account instead of unlimited, the free domain name is free for the first year only, 3 MySql databases instead of the 50 at Blue Host and so on, the list would get too long here. All this for the exactly same price as my own account. 6.95/month. BUT, remember the automatic upgrade! As soon as you signup, you’ll be upgraded automatically and out of the 6.95 we get 11.10$/month for a not very big package i have to say. In the future we will all work with video on our websites and we WILL need large bandwith packages today, otherwise we’ll end up paying extra bandwith soon.

For details of what you get at Blue Host read this, the list is slightly longer than the one you’ll find at globat.com.

Here the original automatic update mail from Globat.com

Dear xxxxx,

Every day, more and more people are relying on mobile devices to stay connected. No longer used by just business travelers, mobile devices are now used by everyone from teenagers to CEO’s. Plus, with many cell phones now offering the ability to browse the Web, a large amount of consumers are now viewing Web sites on mobile devices.

Are you missing out on these visitors? The unique nature of mobile devices means that your Web site must be coded correctly to show up on these smaller screens and with faster loading times. With our new tool, GloMobile(tm), you can do just that with no programming knowledge at all. In 10 days from this date, we will upgrade you to this powerful tool for just the low access fee of $49.95 per year. GloMobile will ensure that you don’t miss out on the millions on users browsing the Internet on their cell phones and other mobile devices.

Here’s what GloMobile will do for you:

? Generate a version of your Web site easily accessible cell phones and other mobile devices
? Your Web site will be easier to read and navigate for mobile device users
? The correct version of your Web site will load depending on the device accessing it (mobile version vs standard version)

GloMobile is very easy to use and will bring your site to a new, professional level. For more information about GloMobile, please visit the following link:

xxx://www.globat.com/learnmore_glomobile.htm
(If link does not work, please copy and paste the entire link into your browser.)

= = = Important: This Is an Automatic Upgrade = = =

Since we began our upgrade program, we have received lots of feedback from our customers who only heard about these upgrade promotions too late or through a friend. Many customers then suggested that we utilize an automatic upgrade process along with some form of an additional incentive to initiate these upgrades. Well, we have listened to your feedback and we are acting on it!

As one of our most valued customers and based on our customer feedback, we are absolutely certain that you want to take advantage of this opportunity. For years, our customers have been looking for something like this, and we’re excited to finally be able to offer it. You do not want to miss out on this opportunity.

For that reason, we will automatically upgrade your current hosting package by adding GloMobile and charging the $49.95 access fee to your account on file on Thursday, May 1, 2008, unless you specifically tell us not to upgrade you by clicking on the link at the end of this e-mail.

Last but not least, your upgraded account will also qualify for 3 free months of hosting once the upgrade is complete and you are fully satisfied with it. I know that this sounds too good to pass up, but if you for any reason do NOT wish to take advantage of this incredible upgrade promotion, you will need to tell us so by clicking on the link at the end of this e-mail.

If you are still not convinced that this is a tremendous opportunity and you are positive that you do not want to participate, you need to tell us not to upgrade your account by clicking on the link below. (If you do not click this link, your account will automatically be upgraded and you will be charged the $49.95 access fee per year.):

NO, I DO NOT WANT this upgrade and hereby decline my 3 free months (click below):
xxxx://www.globat.com/optout_glomobile.php?xxxxxx
(If link does not work, please copy and paste the entire link into your browser.)

Thank you for your continued trust! If you have any additional questions about this new package, please contact us anytime at tbupgrade1@globat.com, or call us at 1-877-245-6228.

Best regards,

Globat.com – Sales and Marketing Team
(877) 245-6228 for US Customers
(323) 874-9000 for International Customers

Some similar experience must have been made by thousands of people. Searching at Google for globat automatic upgrade though reveals less than 400 results. What does that say to you? Most people won’t even realize that they’ve been charged, and most disturbing I find the fact that not thousands of people would at least complain about these very suspicious practices. Have we all gotten used to be cheated on?

Similar stories about Globat.com:

• http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/179884/consumer_watch_globatcoms_questionable.html
• http://blog.lifebeyondcode.com/2008/02/11/from-globat-with-love-automatic-upgrade/
• http://www.jasonslater.co.uk/2008/02/26/globat-automatic-charges-what-are-you-doing/

Click to Bookmark this Article

Hide Sites

Web Hosting News

So what could be so new in webhosting that it is worth writing about? I mean what could be so significant besides the packages getting larger by the month and web traffic… I wish I had only half that much. But yes, there has been something going on for quite a while now and finally the bird is out of the nest.

Simple Scripts

And they called it Simple Scripts. For those of you who are familiar with Fantastico, the module that some of the better web hosting providers offer. Fantastico is full of truly fantastic tools and scripts but who am I kidding? Updating was always a drag. All updates to the scripts had to be made manually and if you where lucky enough to check the Fanastico module on regular bases you would even find a notification that your version is outdated and has to be manually updated.

Automatic Updates

Updating modules like PhpBB forums or shopping carts can be not only a lot of work, but also cost you a lot of time or money to get it done. And updates are important, so you better get to it or have your site or forum broken into. Now that is what has changed now! With Simple Scripts installed on your web hosting account you can simply forget about all that work, time and money. The automated updates in Simple Scripts will do all the work for you. be it your forum or your WordPress blog, your shopping cart or your e-mail client. And guess what; you can get it all it’s all there pre-installed and ready to use. The only thing you need is to sign up for a web hosting account at Blue Host. For details on what else this Web Hosting Company has to offer besides Simple Scripts have a look at the web hosting detail table i have created. You can also find a Live Demo Button. Click the button and you can try the whole account with all the features just as you like.

What Else Is New in Web Hosting?

For those of you who are still not satisfied, (It will take you the bigger part of a Sunday afternoon to go through all the possibilities provided by Simple Scripts) we do have some additional good news. Blue Host just raised it’s web hosting space by 250% to unbelievable 1′500 GB for a single account. The traffic also went up by 250% and you now get 15′000 GB Bandwith per month.

See below the Simple Scripts selection table.

Click to Bookmark this Article

Hide Sites