I wrote this a long time ago (forgot when but prolly a year or two) but will only publish it now after I was able to transfer my company’s domain from them. I am posting this to warn potential victims. Caveat Emptor. Buyer Beware. When a deal looks too good to be true then it might not be a good deal at all.
In case you don’t know, I have another blog called Mukhang Pera which is where I blog about contests, ways to make money, promos, sales, etc. I transferred the webhosting of the blog to Kinohost early this year since it’s cheap and was recommended by a friend. At first, their service was so-so. I don’t know why I’m not getting notifications when the owner, Jon Towns, replies to my support tickets. I suspect he wasn’t able to configure the account he made for me properly. I let it pass but I should have paid attention that it’s a bad sign of Kinohost’s service.
Since I didn’t update Mukhang Pera often back then, I didn’t notice anything wrong until I saw replies to some blog posts and I never received email notifications which Wordpress sends when I get comments. I submitted a support ticket. I tried to wait patiently for support’s reply. Weeks passed and I was never contacted so I emailed Jon directly. It took him weeks to reply and while waiting and getting more and more annoyed, I googled him and Kinohost. That’s when I found out how bad the situation is. According to this blog post and the replies, Jon is 15-years old and he doesn’t know shit about running a server. Besides Kinohost, he runs Parade Hosting and who knows what else. He always comes up with lame excuses when he finally gets back to his clients. What’s worse is that if a client criticizes him, Jon will ban him. I couldn’t believe what I was reading at that time! In the meantime, I tried to fix my email problems blindly. I installed some scripts and fortunately, I was able to get Mukhang Pera to send emails. I began to take my blog seriously and updated regularly.
When Jon finally replied to my email, he said that he was sick with bird flu and that it was bad so he wasn’t able to get back at me fast. I’m 99% sure that’s just an excuse but I didn’t tell him I know but I didn’t acknowledge his sickness either when I replied, telling him about the email problem. The jerk never replied back. I figured I might as well keep blogging since I don’t know how to make him attend to my needs.
A couple of days ago, I was getting CURL errors when I try posting. I configured Mukhang Pera to auto-post on Twitter and Plurk when I publish a blog post. I make scheduled blog posts and I need Twitter and Plurk to announce updates because I get most of my blog traffic from there. I submitted a support ticket about the CURL problem and just like I expected, no reply. I just got so sick and tired of Kinohost so I transferred the domain to godaddy.com and purchased web space with totalchoicehosting.com which hosts this blog. Unfortunately for me, the email Jon used as administrator contact is his email. The transfer procedure email from godaddy gets sent to the administrator email so I still need Jon to fix it. I was fuming over this and decided that I would file a lawsuit against Kinohost. I emailed Jon, telling him to keep the money but approve the domain transfer. I also told him that if I don’t hear from him within 48 hours, I will resort to more drastic measures. My friend who recommended Kinohost also messaged him. Well that worked. He changed the email to mine. Then I was finally able to transfer my website.
I was able to find a good webhost after Kino but that too turned out to be a nightmare. I’m with Host Gator now. So far so good but who knows, right?
