I’ve been using Hasweb to host this domain since early 2004, but switched to WordPress.com last month.

I sent this in to my old host:

Just wanted to let you know I’ve moved my site to WordPress.com hosting. As someone who does marketing, I appreciate that you can’t be all things to all people, which is why I didn’t press you to create a comparable package.

It doesn’t seem like Hostdime, Hasweb’s parent company, is too interested in trying though. It’s seemed to be a brand in maintenence mode for years.

The forums are dead, and the newest reviews I can find are years old. The forums used to be a lively place where happy users chatted with the forum administrator, who went by the name Aric.

All those users moved on years ago, and Aric is nowhere to be found. The forum has a few threads made this year, but they have no replies.

The only good thing I have to say after all this time is that their support system, run by the same people who handle support for all Hostdime properties, gets back quickly. Unfortunately, my last contact before sending the cancellation request didn’t go too well.

We had a back-and-forth over the course of a day trying to figure out why my site was hanging up. Eventually a new Server Analyst hopped into the ticket to say they were doing a RAID rebuild on the server, and that was causing the slowness.

All the support people involved with the ticket had titles that started with “Server Analyst.” You’d think all of them would know a RAID rebuild was happening and let people who ask about the slowdown know on the first contact.

That slowness went away when the rebuild finished, but the slowness I’d been dealing with for a few months was still there, and they had no solution. They couldn’t even see that slowness existed. The slowness wasn’t on my end or from things I could control. Traceroutes and pathpings to the server had good latency. The few plugins I used were high quality and properly configured.

I’ve had an uneasy feeling about Hasweb since the forums died a few years ago, but it wasn’t until I moved that I could put it to words.

Hostdime cares about people who sign up to Hasweb, and the support staff makes a token effort to put fires out. But not much beyond that.

The original draft of my message to them had a line about me recommending it to people who need shared hosting, but that made less sense the more I thought about it.

Hasweb didn’t give me any trouble in the cancellation process, and they did offer to give me a discount if I decided to come back. But I can’t recommend Hasweb, and I would shop around for other hosts if I ever needed shared hosting again.

It’s a passable shared host, but an active user community is something I’ve come to value while hosting at WordPress.com, and most shared hosting companies have them.