Infamous Microclear.net, now Doing business as Gearhost
Written: Jun 29 '02 (Updated May 17 '03)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Account set-up: |
 |
|
| Web page loading time: |
|
|
| Quality of customer support: |
|
|
|
Pros: Price (not to be confused with 'value')
Cons: History of Fraudulent practices continues apace
The Bottom Line: Avoid the new company 'Gearhost' as it is the same person that ran Microclear.net
|
|
|
| tsellers's Full Review: Microclear.Net |
A few years ago Microclear.net posted to the Cold Fusion Support Forum, offering free Cold Fusion accounts. Rather sceptical, I tried the service and after a couple of months it seemed not too bad. So when he terminated the free account offer it seemed good enough that I placed my own site and a Federal Gov't site that I administered on as paying sites.
Eventually problems started to surface. Downtime with excuses like 'moving to a new T3 line', etc., etc. People in the Allaire Forum started also to posts lots of complaints. Someone actually got a hold of his cell phone number, and I managed to get him a couple of times. Sounded like a nice enough guy on the phone. Always in his vehicle somewhere. I asked him straight why there never seemed to be anyone except him, and he gave some vague answer saying all the other staff were tied up. People started to post that their credit cards had been billed for one or two years worth of hosting, and then one day microclear had a web page that gave some message saying that they were down for an indefinite period which gave a hotmail address for contact, and all the sites were down.
I checked with my boss and indeed his card had been charged for a year or more. He had assumed that I had made such an arrangement so he did not question it, and by that time it was too late for a chargeback. I don't think I got billed for much more than an extra month or so. He was the second hosting service that I had so much trouble with so when I saw the writing on the wall, I had my own server set up and ready to go by the time he went down, and I'm still on my own server which works just great. However others were not so lucky, the posts on the Allaire forum were fast and furious. One person from the forum who lived in Colorado actually got the address info, etc., from Whois and found it to be an apartment that he had recently been evicted from, and he had run his server from that location apparently. Neighbours confirmed he was a one-man band. A number of people posted that they had notified the legal authorities in Colorado and as far as I know no-one ever had any luck in getting their money back.
I kind of thought that Mr Kekos would once again surface some day and use the anonymity of the internet to pull it again. So every 6 months or so I would just do a Google search on his name, and sure enough, after a couple of years, he turns up again as 'Gearhost'. It appears to be almost the same MO as Microclear.net. Indeed I wonder if the authorities in Colorado are aware.
I'm going to let the Cold Fusion Forum know he has resurfaced as there are probably people there that remember him.
Update: Sept 24
Shortly after this original post, I got a note from Mr Kekos. He was distressed that I was drawing attention to the past problems, and apologizied for the past, saying he was trying to make amends to previous customers by offering them free hosting. So I passed his sentiments on to those clients. They in fact did contact him, and have reported back to me that he never did reply to them. One told me that he did not require free hosting and told Mr Kekos he would take a software package that Gearhost markets on their site instead. He did not receive a reply either.
Sept 28 Update:
I was contacted a Brad Harrier who wanted to let me know that he tried to post a link to this published opinion on the Webhostingtalk.com forum, where Gearhost is a prominent advertising client, and the Thread was promptly removed. Fortunately he provided a copy which is reproduced below:
BHarrier Posted:
There is an interesting review on Gearhost at:
http://www.epinions.com/content_68468510340
Apparently Gearhost used to be Microclear.net, a fly by night company in Colorado that trolled for customers in forums such as the Cold Fusion forum. People started to post that their credit cards had been billed for one or two years worth of hosting, and then one day microclear had a web page that gave some message saying that they were down for an indefinite period which gave a hotmail address for contact, and all the sites were down. It was a one-man show run out of an apartment in Inglewood by a Ryan Kekos, who did a great job of making Microclear sound like a big company.
If you read their own forums and analyze the writing styles it looks as though Gearhost is the same thing, lots of company representatives who write in a style much like their CEO. However, it seems like none of them can ever be contacted on the phone? Here are some posts from recent days in their own forum that are so reminiscent of Microclear:
Sept. 25: "What's the status now? In the network status section it says Callisto will be back to normal after 15 mins and that was 2 days ago! Today I received an email from a customer telling me that when she tried to login to my site she got a "Page Under Construction" message. Is this due to the server?"
-No reply as yet
Sept 14: "We apologize for the short notice, this is critical due to some recent changes. The end result is better network/server performance and availability. "
-This is classic rhetoric from the Microclear era
I feel for all the clients who are there at present, they will probably end up like the orphans of Microclear only after they have to endure a bumpy cart ride down the road of hard knocks and endless excuses.
ryank replied:
BHarrier,
I don't see anything interesting about slanderous comments against GearHost or Microclear who are not even the same company. Your statements are wrong, your post is childish and I personally don't have time to try and defend my company against this. Do a search and you'll find we host thousands of customers who are very happy with us. Enough said.
BHarrier replied:
Mr Kekos:
I regret that the original post was a cause of upset. However, it is simply a collection of information that is documentary in nature, can be verified, and is therefore neither slanderous or wrong.
It is unfortunate that you do not have the time to shed some light on the Company called Gearhost, or for that matter, what happened at Microclear. I don't dispute that they are not the same company, nor that Gearhost has lots of happy clients. Also you cannot dispute that they also have lots of unhappy clients.
If you did have some time it would be in your best interest to clarify some of the following points that cannot be garnered from your website:
1: Why do all of your DNS servers appear to be on the same subnet, creating a single point of failure for your DNS data, and thus for your entire Internet presence? If the connection to the Internet for your DNS servers were to fail, your DNS servers would be cut off. If any other problem arose that caused your subnet to become unavailable, your DNS servers would similarly be cut off. If this were to happen, the rest of your Internet presence would effectively also be cut off, because the rest of the Internet wouldn't know where to find your other services.
2: Why is there only one MX record for the zone? This means that there is no backup mail server available if the primary mail server becomes unavailable. If the primary mail server for the zone goes down, it will not be possible to send mail to a user in the zone, meaning that any mail sent to a user the zone will be bounced or delayed.
3: How about posting a directory of your staff with their full names, positions, and contact phone numbers for your clients?
4: Why did you not make retribution to former affected members of Microclear who had their cards billed and never refunded? I contacted TSellers who tells me he can supply actual names and contact information of previosuly affected clients who received no compensation.
Best Regards, Brad Harrier
May 17 2003 Update:
I noticed a recent rating so thought an update was warranted. From time to time I go by the Gearhost user Forum and things seem to be about the same. Numerous complaints which seem predominanty to focus on the speed or downtime. A couple of emails I received complained about unauthorized advance prebillings of their credit cards, however this should not really be a problem, if your card is billed in such a manner you simply process a 'chargeback' against the offending merchant and you will not have to pay unless they have an actual imprint of your card and a signature for that transaction. Mr. Kekos notes in replies to the complaints of downtime that they are due to DOS attacks being launched, there would really be no way to verify if that is the case or not.
Recommended:
No
Monthly fees (US$): Variable
Platform used: Windows NT
Hosted on Secure Server: No
Database used: Other ODBC database
Main focus of Web site: Publishing/Content
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
tsellers
|
|
Location: Alberta, Canada
Reviews written: 8
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
Computer Equipment Broker
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.