mohdimran.com up, TagMe! up, bad experience with mesrahosting.net

The past 2 days have been one of the happiest time of my life, and particularly today, I feel like I’m flying high. Sorry, I’ve been quite for a while, and it’s for a reason. I’ve been struggling (take not that the word struggling is bold) to get mohdimran.com up and running again, and being in fiery situation that I don’t have mood to blog.

To those who is wondering what really happened to mohdimran.com, or to TagMe!, here are the events in the chronological order that really put me in a very mess, wearing and fiery situations.

November 23, 2006
Received a call from mesrahosting.net, telling me that my hosting is using too much resources. And they said it comes from tagboard. They ask me to do something about it. I have a bad feeling already, so my immediate remedy is to close the new registration to TagMe!. Blog about this is here.

January 15, 2007
My hosting has been suspended, with this message shown “Suspended Due Overload Resources, Please Check Your Email For Latest Update”. Called mesrahosting.net, and they said they have sent me email about the matter. I said I didn’t receive any. Then he ask me to speak to Mr Zainul, and gave me his phone number. Give the fella a call several times, but not picked up. Called mesrahosting.net again, and ask them to leave a message to Mr Zainul to call me back about my hosting.

January 16, 2007
I think I had enough with mesrahosting.net. It’s better for me to terminate my account here, and find hosting somewhere else. I don’t really care that I still got 8 more months before my hosting is expired. The most important thing now is for me to able to transfer mohdimran.com domain somewhere else.

Gone through their Terms and Conditions on how to terminate account, and below is the screen capture of the exact texts that I found.

And that is what I did, sending account termination request to cancel@mesrahosting.net. And haven’t heard anything yet from Mr Zainul, so gave mesrahosting.net a call again today. My call couldn’t get through, but instead being picked up by answering machine. I wonder what time their office closed (I gave them a call around 3pm something). I tried the online support on their website, but no one pick up the session too.

I’ve also initiating a domain transfer request from current onlinenic.com, current registrar, to godaddy.com, new registrar. Since the domain is registered under their name, the email of the next steps for the domain transfer is sent to domreg@mesrahosting.net.

January 17, 2007
Didn’t receive any news yet from mesrahosting. I’m getting really tired about this. I tried the online support again, and manage to talk to them. Below is my chat transcript with the fella

Company: MesraHosting.net
Department: MesraHosting.net Support
Name: Administrator
Email: admin@mesrahosting.net
Day: Wed 01/17/07 03:38 pm
** You are now speaking with Administrator, MesraHosting.net Support.
**
Administrator : Selamat datang ke Pusat Bantuan Pelanggan Mesra,
Boleh saya bantu anda?
Administrator : nama domain anda ?
Imran : mohdimran.com
Administrator : ok . .apa yang boleh saya bantu ?
Imran : semlm, saya ada hantar email pasal nak terminate saya punya
akaun. nak checklah pihak tuan/puan ada dpt ke tak
Administrator : saya tak dapat lah .. u hantar ke email mana ye ?
Imran : saya hantar dekat cancel@mesrahosting.net
Administrator : ok .. boleh tolong hantar ke support@mesrahosting.net
Imran : okie. saya akan forward email tu balik
Imran : dan satu lagi. saya ada request domain transfer
Imran : dia ada hantar email dekat domreg@mesrahosting.net utk
authorization
Imran : so harap2 boleh authorizekan…

Sigh! Now they ask me to send the account termination request to support@mesrahosting.net.

January 18, 2007
Still no call from Mr Zainul, and I still don’t know what is the status with my mohdimran.com domain transfer request. They should forward the email that godaddy.com sent to domreg@mesrahosting.net. I called Zainul, couldn’t get through. Then called mesrahosting.net. The receptionist said that I should speak to Nurul, but she’s out for lunch already. Call her again after lunch, and only manages to get her at 2:40pm, where she told me to call back in 15 minutes time, where I have meeting at 3.00pm. Another day wasted.

January 24, 2007
Oh dear. I’m exhausted already with all the phone calls. Called mesrahosting again, and I get Nurul again. She’s making mundane voice, which implicitly said “sigh… this guy again….”. And same answer that I get – I need to talk to Mr Zainul. Arrgghhhhh. Why it always has to end up me to call Mr Zainul. Ok. This time, I tried to called him 5 times, but same as last time, my phone is not even picked up. Actually, on the mesrahosting.net website, there are 4 phone numbers of which they claim – Live Technical Support. One of the number is Zainul’s number, so I gave a call to other 3 numbers. The outcome – 2 numbers cannot be reached, and 1 number didn’t picked up. Ok. My last resort. I sent email to support@mesrahosting.net, using a bit of harshed words. And below is what I sent to them.

from: Imran Ismail
to: support@mesrahosting.net
date: Jan 24, 2007 4:16 PM
subject: Status mohdimran.com
mailed-by: gmail.com

Kepada sesiapa yang berkenaan.

So macamana nih. Dah byk phone calls saya dah buat kat mesrahosting.net. Dan dah banyak kali saya try call En Zainul, tapi tiada jawapan. Dah hampir 2 minggu akaun saya kena suspend, dan request saya untuk pembatalan akaun dan “domain transfer” masih belum terjawab.

Regards,
Imran

I’m a very peaceful person, and I don’t really like fiery situation when dealing with things. I don’t really dare to use any harsher words in my email, so the above is how harsh that I can get in my email.

Aaahh. Finally, I received a reply from them.

from: “MesraHosting.net – Technical Support Department”
to: Imran Ismail
date: Jan 24, 2007 9:06 PM
subject: Re: Status mohdimran.com

Assalamualaikum,

Saya memohon maaf kerana tidak dapat reply sms dan juga email ini dengan segera kerana saya MC sejak beberapa hari lepas yang mana kerja kerja domain adalah di bawah tanggung jawab saya, walau bagaimana pun sila hantar sekali lagi request anda untuk transfer dan ianya akan di hantar ke email anda di alamat mohdimran.ismail@gmail.com

Terima kasih

Finally, the registrant name and email of mohdimran.com domain has been changed to my name. And this is basically what I’ve been waiting for the past 8 days.

January 25, 2007
I couldn’t proceed with the domain transfer, since I required auth code from my current registrar. Managed to talk to onlinenic.com technical support, and they said I should get the auth code from mesrahosting.net. Oh no. I thought my business with mesrahosting.net has finished. Send email to them again asking for that.

January 26, 2007
Still no reply from mesrahosting.net about my auth code. Resend them second email asking for it. I won’t bother to call, as what they will say – please contact Mr Zainul.

January 29, 2007
Finally, got my auth code from mesrahosting.net. So I proceed with domain transfer process at godaddy.com. Then, received an email from onlinenic.com. For security reason, transfer-out notice is sent to current registrant fearing that the domain transfer request is initiated by unauthorized person. Basically, in that notice, it stated a way on how to cancel the transfer process, in the event that the transfer is initiated by unauthorized party. If I wish to proceed with the transfer, I have to do nothing. If they not hear anything from me by 1st February, the transfer will proceed. Feb 1st. Ooohh.. That still long to go.

February 1, 2007
Nothing still happened, and my domain transfer status remains as “waiting for current registrar approval”. Penantian satu penyiksaan.

February 4, 2007
Hooray! I’m so happy today. At about 1:30 pm, I received email from godaddy.com that my domain transfer request is completed. That means, mohdimran.com is mine again! Anyway, I only happened to read the email around 10pm. So without further ado, I buy a web hosting as godaddy.com as well. The process is really smooth. The hosting is ready to be used as soon as my credit card payment is authorized. Changing DNS of my domain got updated pretty quick too, so I manage to use www.mohdimran.com only after several minutes I’ve updated my domain DNS.

February 5, 2007
Been really busy setting up my new hosting again. Been working on some changes to TagMe! as well, to make it work on this new server (with new environment)

February 6, 2006
TagMe! is ready, with a new feature added in – Control Panel. I can’t wait to let all TagMe! users know about this. Will do shortly.

There you go, my sickening 22 days of waiting before mohdimran.com & TagMe! is up again. And most of the time got wasted dealing with mesrahosting.net

Let us now look at the meaning of the word “mesra” as it is in mesrahosting.

mesra
–adjective amicable; friendly; hospitable; giving hospitality; warm and friendly; benign; kindly; mild and gentle; not malignant.

Well, I don’t feel any when I deal with them. If they want money from you, there will be super nice, sending reminder email that the hosting period is almost expired and needed renewal. But when it come to support, it hopeless.

What that Zainul guy claim that he’s been busy with so many hosting under him might be true, but does that show that it’s a one man show here? It’s the weakness of mesrahosting.net of not developing a good technical support, of which, why the customer like myself should be bothered about this? Or they are busy serving bigger customers, and since I’m just an individual customer, give less priority. But hey. You just loose one of your customer.

It’s no doubt that mesrahosting.net really offers a very cheap hosting service compared to any other web hosting company in Malaysia. RM100 for 2GB web space, 50GB monthly bandwidth, unlimited mySQL database (to name a few). But come to think of it again, they can offer cheaper price due to they are hosting lots of website on a single server, jeopardize the resources that one website can use. As a result, something that is not that heavy as my TagMe! already bottle-neck their server resources.

Talking about customer support, this really gave me heart attack. Don’t be fooled by the friendliness of the lady handling the sales department, as that’s what sales department is all about. And you won’t be handling with those from sales department all the time, since there will come a time that you need to deal with the technical department.

Talking about technical support, don’t be fooled again by what is stated on the website.

My first impression, wow! There are so many people available to assist you with any technical request. Until the time I need them, calling all the number won’t get any answer. You can try to call those numbers yourself if you won’t believe me. And if they answer you, I guess, I’m not as lucky as you.

It’s not really my intention to condemn mesrahosting.net in any way, but I just want to express my frustration with the bad support that I get from them.

My two cents, if you need to get any hosting, make sure that you register the domain yourself and have ownership to it. It is a lot easier if you need to switch hosting, or transfer the domain to other registrar, without having to waste unnecessary number of days just to resolve the ownership of that domain again (like what happened to me).