I thought it would be nice to have a small on-line asp.net site to demonstrate and try things. Saw an adverstisement in (Dutch) Microsoft .NET magazine of a
vianetworks offering and took the jump. Quite cheap so I didn't expect that much. Reallity was something fit to be sent straigh to WTF. I'll tell you some off my experiences so you'll be warned and can stay far away from them.
Vianetworks offered a developers site for euro 1.99 (ex VAT) a month with 3 months for free. I ordered two sites. When it came to paying all my alarm bells should have gone off as my credit card number went over an unsecured connection. I must have been blinded by greed.
One site went up and it did work. Pretty fast but the only thing it serves are asp(x) pages in your root folder. Subfolders are shielded off and serving a dll over http (to
embed aWindows user control in IE) is blocked as well. The latter is no problem for the Unix box of my real provider. You have some mailboxes and a sql database. Not too good, not to bad.
The other site didn't come up and I got in touch with Vianetworks support. Support comes in three flavors:
- Not possible here (serve a dll)
- Hilarious bullshit. (I complained about my domain not being published, as a response I got a WhoIs dump, the site did not exist)
- No response at all, all attempts to follow up on 1 or 2 take this path
They have an (expensive) phone support line. You can leave a message and they will call you. They don't. A phone call to the main office brings you to someone who happens to be out for the moment but will call you. He doesn't. What else can you do ? Write a blogpost. As a final check I checked the URL. And to my surprise it is there now ! Well that saves me from calling them frauds but I will not do bussiness with these people ever again. What a lousy mess.