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Review Tier.net review - Horrible Experience

Webfanatic

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I am not sure if anyone here is familiar with the company Tier.net but i wanted to share my experience with you and their owner Evan Kemlet.

We run a social media community website that allows users to chat and interact with friends and strangers. Users can create profiles and upload avatars to their profiles.One day our site was down and I reached out to their support team. To my surprise they said that someone had reported that a child pornographic image was uploaded as an avatar. I clicked the link that was reported and did see a nude image of a female of unknown age. Regardless, it was nude and that particular page doesn't allow nudity so it would be removed. Unfortunately, when you run a site that involves many strangers meeting and interacting there are the occasional bad apple that comes along. With that in mind, image was confirmed to be removed already when i checked on it from the server end. I pointed that out immediately to the support person.Suddenly, I get an interuption by Evan out of nowhere (the owner and i will get to him later as well) saying to stop abusing the support department and that my service will be terminated effective immediately because we are hosting child pornography. I said then provide me a refund on the 2.5 months additional months of service I prepaid for. That seemed like a reasonable request, as we would have been more than happy to leave this company just from all the downtime alone. He instantly said there will be no refund and he completely disabled the live chat system and kicked me out of our account. Server was immediately brought offline and i was locked out from getting back any of my data (No access to any recent back up) Not even a single chance to respond further or say a word. Boom, plug pulled. A big huge notice when i tried to log back into my admin dashboard saying "Hosting Child Pornography and Abuse of Staff". Wow.

My experience with them was nothing short of unprofessional, frustrating and perplexing.
The source of the problem is Evan, one of the owners or part owners. He seemingly is the presales, technical and decision "brains" of the operation. Boy, what an arrogant and confrontational person he is.

I had a total of two servers with them. Both set up/migration experiences were horrible. I informed him of my needs and we both agreed on a price. I found them here on WHT. On one of the servers, part of the agreement was to migrate our website from another host to a server without a control panel for a fixed fee. We agreed to a one month full management plan to cover full migration and agreed upon certain configurations. Certainly not even nearly a month worth of work. All of our requests were communicated clearly to him and no single additional request was made from what we had already agreed to. After Day 1 of the migration many things stopped working suddenly. I had to open multiple tickets with them. You think one issue is resolved then up comes another thing. They kept trying to fix it and telling me this and that cannot be done, only to find out that actually what i requested could be done. If i questioned anything, I was replied to in a rude manner. I finally realized why he always pushed Cpanel onto me because quite simply their support team (appears to just be him doing the technical work) simply cannot handle a simple task such as a migration unless it's Cpanel. This went on for up to a month before it was in "workable" condition. I had to endure an exhausting month of having to listen to Evan demonstrate his arrogance about how much he knows about techical things and hear him complain and whine about how little money he was making for the server migration fee we both agreed on. If he couldn't handle it he should not have agreed to the price. In fact, i remember i even said i can find someone else, but he kept selling me on how he can do it so i agreed to let him do it. That month really set him off and his demeanor became seemingly worse by the day. I was left with a server that did not meet the requirements i had requested but i did not want to bother with it anymore. Hired some other system admins to fix his mistakes. Our second server, this time with Cpanel was the same sort of experience. Thing's going wrong.

The past several months have been a total nightmare in terms of server uptime. On multiple occasions the server would just suddenly go offline. Not just minutes, were talking hours. Their SLA guarantee is 100% uptime. What a bunch of baloney.

During these multiple downtimes, I would contact live chat support feature on their site. Every single time I made inquiries to them checking on the situation, I would get the same generic response that it will be fixed very shortly. I would wait some time and ask them again. As you can imagine, if your entire server is down you get a bit on edge especially if they say it will be fixed soon. Nobody seemed to have any idea of what exactly was going on over there. In fairness, I must point out that the other support team members were nice in most interactions I had with them, they just didn't really have a grasp as to what exactly was going on. On almost every single inquiry i made during the past several months, it would always end up with Evan suddenly jumping into the chat and accusing me of support abuse. If your server is down for hours, it is not uncommmon to ask at least a couple times for an update and ETA especially if you are promised that it will be resolved very shortly. The conversation usually would start with Evan saying to stop abusing their support department and being very hostile and rude with me. It was a self managed server so I had no other reason to contact them. Unfortunately, it was just down so frequently I was forced to.

This went on for several months, multiple times. The sad part was all of these downtimes there was always a new person to blame. They kept trying to blame others like saying its Psychz network or LACNIC ranges or the upstream provider or something other than themselves. Kept making broken promises about it finally getting resolved. To think I never made a single claim on their SLA uptime guarantee. I should have as it was down for many hours.


In our months of dealing with this company it was nothing but stressful and frustrating. Their practices, support and quality of hardware and hosting service is, quite frankly, poor. I've hosted with several providers over the last 20 years, and I would rank them as the WORST, and it's not even close.

I believe Evan found the perfect opportunity to cut ties with me. Just a week or so after a renewal, he keeps the money i prepaid and he also knew I was not going to renew with them again given the enormous amount of downtime. I made that clear to him based on the downtime. Perfect storm for him to do what he did. Thank God I am done with him. To those reading this review, of course you can make your own judgements. Just be wary of what you're in for if you choose them. I was also caught up in the seemingly good prices and promises and hope of the network and services getting better. It was all wishful thinking. To me it is not worth the risk especially in a competitive market and so many better hosting providers out there.

There was still about 2.5 months remaining on the service (near $400 of unprovided hosting services) I am going to be reaching out to the bank. We need to put a stop to this sort of company able to do business this way.

It could happen to you at any moment. Be very careful of this company and the people who operate it. I can name 5-10 hosts on these very forums (who don't post as much advertising threads as they do) who have better pricing, hardware, customer service, customer support, network and handling of a suspected "TOS violation" situation such as what we had. Be wise and take your business elsewhere.
 
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  • I haven't heard about them before but yeah, its really sad to see you had such a bad experience with them. Thank you for sharing your feedback with us, hope it might help others
     

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