Yay! A whole free month of crappy Simple Helix Hosting!

I posted yesterday about how bad Simple Helix sucks. In short, my (10) sites were down from Monday night till this afternoon. Several of my clients ended up being pissed because they had lost untold amounts of money from their sites being down and I wasn’t very happy either.

To redeem themselves, SH just sent me this email:

Dear Jeremy Blake,

We at SimpleHelix recognize that the recent downtime you experienced was highly unacceptable, and for this we offer our most sincere apologies. Our SLA agreement (http://simplehelix.com/company#uptime), states that we will compensate you one day of hosting per hour of downtime experienced. We acknowledge that the amount of downtime experienced was excessive, and as such have compensated you a full month’s hosting services.

We also realize that offering compensation is merely the first step towards earning back your confidence in our hosting services. This recent outage has offered our company a unique opportunity to acknowledge areas that require improvement and form more agressive preparedness strategies. For instance, we are continuing to work with R1Soft (our back up solution vendor) to improve the efficiency at which we can restore your data and get it back into production. We are also purchasing additional hardware, allowing us to have a "hot spare" available at all times to increase the efficiency of our bare metal restores. The combination of these two factors alone will significantly decrease the amount of downtime incurred in the unlikely event that we should experience hardware failure in future. In addition to this, we are conducting monthly tests to ensure our readiness should such an event recur.

In light of various feedback received from our clients we are also implementing a forum publicly accessible from our website. This will improve communications between our clients and our technicians, particularly in instances where downtime is being experienced. 

We thank you for your patience during this process, and please let us know if you have any other questions regarding this matter. Thanks, Jeremy Blake.

Sincerely,

The SimpleHelix Team

Thank goodness I got this email! I was worried they wouldn’t redeem themselves. haha. What is up with them? I don’t want another free month of crappy hosting. Who would? I love how they even tiptoe around the issue that their hosting has sucked it up for the last year and beyond that.

Simple Helix has provided zero explanation for any of the other down time my sites have suffered throughout the year, and I can provide all sorts of dodgy support email responses if anybody wants to hear how full of BS these guys are.

I almost feel bad for Simple Helix. I personally think they expanded too fast for their own good (like many small businesses) and couldn’t quite keep up. That’s giving them the benefit of the doubt, though. I wish them luck, but for now, I’m researching how I’m going to transfer 10 magento sites over to another hosting company. I have one scoped out, but I’ll let you guys know who I end up going with once I choose someone.