Preface

OK, so normally I try to remain positive with regards to most services.  While I have experienced frustrating, and sometimes downright horrible service before, I can usually withhold my anger and frustration as much as possible, since it’s normally not the representative’s fault whom I deal with.  Furthermore, I’ve been on both sides of the customer service conversation before, ad I understand what it’s like to be on the service side as well, and know that getting frustrated and angry doesn’t resolve the situation any better.  I also know how the customer can get frustrated and out of sorts with their experiences with customer service.  Once the support process gets to that point, productivity usually drops to zero, and nothing can be further figured out or resolved.  So, I usually do my part to maintain a level of understanding and respect, and try not to spread negative frustrations about such an encounter.  However, in the case of Network Solutions, I have reached a point of boiling frustration, that cannot be resolved.  While it will do no good to write about my encounters with Network Solutions, as they have been around a long time and appear to have little concern for the frustrations of their customers.  At the very least, however, it will help release a bit of the frustration pressure of my experiences with them, and may save some readers the headaches of dealing with them, by warning them ahead of time against going with Network Solutions, and going with a different registrar / host instead.

Initial Experiences

When I took over control of a few websites, I quickly found out that the websites were hosted through Network Solutions.  Now,  I hadn’t dealt with Network Solutions for quite a long time, so I didn’t think too much about it, and figured that the bad reviews and complaints I had read about online were overreactions, and that they weren’t as bad as initially assumed.  So, I didn’t put too much thought into it, and began my work with them, using their “Website Builder Tool” that my predecessor had decided to use to build the website.  This worked “OK”, for the most part, but provided a severe amount of limitations and frustrations that quickly grew to anger me every time I used it.  I, a web developer, was severely constrained by using their WYSIWYG tool, and being unable to provide any of my code to create a better, more interactive, dynamic website.  After further inspection, I noticed that we were hosted on a Windows Server, which meant no MySQL or PHP.

Grr…

So I contacted Network Solutions to see about what to do to switch services over to a Linux host instead, so I would have better access to the tools that I needed.  A few days passed, and I got a response back from them saying that they couldn’t do a transfer, and I had to set up a new hosting package with them, manually transfer what I wanted over, cancel the existing hosting package, and then they would credit back the remaining time on my existing package.

WHAT?!

This would result in insurmountable downtime while attempting to transfer hosting packages, domain names, etc. from one account to another; not something recommended for a live, commercial website.  So, I rescinded my request to transfer to a Linux server, and instead left it as is.

A .DOCX File Is not a .ZIP File

After doing some additional work on the site, I uploaded a .DOCX file, and linked to it for download by our customers.  It seemed to work OK, until I started getting some complaints from our customers that they were unable to properly download the .DOCX file.  After doing some checking, I noticed that if I clicked the link to the file in Chrome, Safari, or Firefox, it downloaded properly as a .DOCX file.  But if I did it using IE, it instead downloaded as a .ZIP file.  I could change the extension of the .ZIP file back to a .DOCX file and it would work fine, but it was unacceptable to expect our users to have to change the extension, just because the webhost was having an issue serving up a .DOCX file.

I did some research, and came across the solution – apparently if the host doesn’t properly have the MIME types configured on their server, it won’t properly serve .DOCX (or .XLSX, .PPTX, etc., for that matter) files to the user’s browser.  If the MIME type is missing, the server will not know how to server it, and will instead rely on the browser trying to figure it out (which Chrome, etc. could figure out).  IE obviously couldn’t do, and as such resorted to downloading it as a .ZIP instead.  Even though .DOCX files had been around since 2007 (six years ago), Network Solutions still hadn’t made the jump on our shared Windows host to properly serve those types of files!

I sent Network Solutions a support ticket, explaining in detail what the problem was, and got this response back from them:

I am sorry to hear of your difficulties you are having with your nsHosting. We were able to replicate the issue however the file opened properly and saved as a .docx. We would suggest saving the file as a .doc to prevent the file type confusion.

What.  The.  Hell?  First off, I got lost when they told me that they could replicate the issue, but yet it opened and saved as a .DOCX.  That made no sense to me.  Secondly, the suggested that I save it as a .DOC instead, to resolve the problem!?  I’m supposed to save it as a 7+ year old file format, so that the server properly streams the document to clients’ browsers?  Adding an entry into the list of MIME types on the servers is child’s play.  I couldn’t believe such an asinine recommendation from them!  Unfortunately, this was only a sign of horrible things to come from them…

Death to the WYSIWYG!

Fast forward a time, and I’m still struggling with dealing with Network Solutions’ crappy WYSIWYG editor.  I was well aware of its limitations, but made due with what it had.  That was, until it started flaking out on me.  And no, I’m not talking about simple page timeouts, file save failures, etc.  I’m talking about much, MUCH worse!  Example:

• Horribly generated HTML
• Inability to adjust font color / bold / italics / etc
• Randomly inserted WYSIWYG color pickers INTO the HTML coding!
• Failure to use anything except for IE for editing any longer!

Yes, those problems… problems that shouldn’t exist.  At all.  EVER!  I can [slightly] understand the issues of horribly generated HTML code.  A WYSIWYG, after all, is a layer above the code that attempts to take the inputs of a non-developer, and generate complex, underlying code that matches to the user’s expectations.  After several edits, bolds, unbolds, etc., I can understand how the code can get complicated enough (spans inside of divs, inside of more spans, with font tags strewn about) to create some non-standard code.

However, this got to the point where the WYSIWYG could no longer keep up!  I could select a block of text (yes, a simple text selection), click to bold, unbold, italicize, or change colors, and end up with text somewhere else completely that was a different color, size, font, etc.  No longer was my selected text even what I was editing!

Along with this issue of random non-selected text being changed, there was also the issue of the WYSIWYG randomly inserting the text color picker into the code!  Yes, the piece of user interface meant to provide abstraction between the user and the source was now erroneously somehow inserting itself into the code.  Talk about recursion!

Lastly, after a period of time, it appeared that Network Solutions updated their WYSIWYG, which broke almost all functionality with any browser other than IE.  While one could still use Safari, Chrome, or Firefox to edit some of the basics of the code, if one attempted to edit the underlying source using the advanced editor, the SAVE and CANCEL buttons needed to close out the advanced editor and persist the changes to the page wouldn’t work.  Furthermore, they weren’t even clickable!  If you attempted to click on them, they wouldn’t even respond to the event and depress visibly.  They were just… useless!

Joomla 1.5 Template to Joomla 3.0 Template Debacle

Moving on beyond the previously mentioned website, we move to our other website.  This one was configured differently than the previous website.  It was build upon Joomla 1.5, and also hosted on Network Solutions (albeit on a Linux host, rather than a Windows host).  When the site had been developed (before I started), a custom template was developed by Network Solutions for the website to use.  This template was highly coupled with the website itself, and did not lend itself very well to being modified and tweaked, based on how Network Solutions made it.  After a few years of it being the way it was, it was time to upgrade Joomla to 3.0.  Unfortunately, the template that Network Solutions made was only for Joomla 1.5 (understandable, as there’s a huge difference between 1.5 and 3.0).  I didn’t want to have to overhaul the website too much, so I contacted Network Solutions and asked about upgrading our template to support 3.0, and whether that would be included in the cost that was paid to create the initial template, or if we had to buy a new template.  After a day, I received this response back from Network solutions:

I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. With regard to your concern, I was able to check that the Joomla application was manually installed on your server. Please contact your Web Master or refer to Joomla instructions on how to do the upgrade.

Um, WHAT?!?  That had absolutely nothing to do with my question.  I didn’t ask anything about my Joomla installation.  I asked them about what to do if we wanted to upgrade our custom template that they made to 3.0!  Obviously, I could tell that they spent zero time on reading my email, and had absolutely no idea what the hell I asked them.  So I chalked it up as another useless support response from them, and decided to do everything myself, including creating a new 3.0 compatible template from scratch.

Poor FTP Upload Transfer Speeds

Of course, the fun doesn’t stop there.  Oh no, not at all!  Before I could work on a Joomla 3.0 template, I first needed to upload and install Joomla 3.0 on their servers.  Their one-click install only allowed for installing of Joomla 1.7, which reached its End Of Life over a year ago!  I figured that it wasn’t too big of a deal, since I could upload and configure a measly 13MB package to their servers.  I quickly found out, however, that that wasn’t the case.

My internet speeds are roughly 30Mb/s down, and 5Mb/s up.  Assuming a 13MB (104Mb) file, and assuming a 50% packet negotiation overhead, it should take roughly 31.2 seconds to upload the entire file to their website.  Unfortunately, it took much, MUCH longer to do that.  I attempted all of the following:

• Upload via Coda and its built-in FTP connection
• Upload via WinSCP
• Upload via Windows FTP / Network manager

All three failed with horrible ends.  Coda simply would only upload about a 1/3 of the files before giving up and quitting.  Windows FTP manager timed out, and wouldn’t even connect.  WinSCP, when in FTP mode would start to try to connect, and would transfer at the speed of Bytes per second, and would time out on the very first file.  After switching to SFTP, I was able to upload in the range of about 1Kbps.  This took an INSANE amount of time to finally upload 13MB of files.   I sent another support ticket to Network Solutions inquiring about their slow FTP performance, and received the following (useless) response back from them:

I am sorry to hear that you are having issues with using FTP on your hosting. I tested FTP functionality on your hosting account – it is working correctly. I was able to read, write, overwrite, rename and delete files all without issues. Please ensure you have passive mode enabled and port 21 open on your network.

http://www.networksolutions.com/support/how-do-i-edit-retrieve-my-ftp-account-username-and-password/

If you verify both of these settings, and you are still having issues, your computer technician or network administrator will need to assist you with your FTP issues. We cannot help you further with diagnosing why you may not be able to FTP. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Allow me a moment to perform a massive facepalm…  Again, um, WHAT!?!  Yes, I can connect, yes it’s ungodly slow, and yes, it’s YOUR issue.  Don’t send me a link on how to request that my password be reset!  If my password was wrong… IT WOULDN’T WORK!  Lastly, I AM the computer / network technician / administrator!  It’s not an issue with MY FTP.  In my support ticket, I informed them that I tried via multiple different PCs, on multiple different networks.  It was not an isolated issue.  It centered on their own services.  But their lack of care or attempt to read my email was completely apparent.

A few days later, it suddenly seemed to work better.  I eventually managed to upload and install Joomla 3.0 on their servers, and begin working on overhauling their website.  I don’t know if they were having network issues, server overload issues, or port forwarding problems.  They seemed to resolve it, but with absolutely no response to their customers.

Poor Database Access Performance

Of course, the fun STILL doesn’t stop by this point!  Oh no, not even close.  I noticed that with our old Joomla 1.5 site, we were having some significant performance issues when loading each page.  I had incorrectly assumed that it was a performance issue with Joomla 1.5, and had assumed that upgrading to 3.0 would resolve my performance issues.

I was wrong…

After migrating my site that I had been developing locally on my laptop to Network Solutions’ servers, I quickly noticed something troubling…  Every time I would attempt to load a page of the site, or every time I attempted to save a configuration change on the backend, the page would take 5-10 seconds to load and refresh the changes that I made.  I noticed that if I opened up Chrome’s page inspector and clicked on a link on the page, it would take roughly 5-9 seconds before the page even started loading!

This meant that during this 5-9 second period, the PHP file was accessed, parsed, interpreted, and  the database was queried in order to get the data needed to generate the page.  Furthermore, based on the fact that the Joomla configuration itself went quite quickly, I knew that the issue wasn’t a limitation on CPU performance on the website itself, it had to be an issue with the database querying.  Network Solutions was tanking the ability for the Joomla interface to query the database for the data to display on the page.  And once the data was properly returned to generate the HTML for the page, the remainder of the client-side processing / loading of dependencies went quickly.

So, I decided, once again, to send Network Solutions one more ticket to bring to light the issue of their database performance.  And, again, I got a useless response:

[…]your website may be too robust for a shared hosting environment. If you are comfortable managing your own server or moving your site to a more advanced hosting solution, we do offer VPS packages that may fit your needs.

Repeat after me: USELESS!  Rather than Network Solutions owning up to their own performance issues, they offer me the ability to pay them a considerable amount more so that I can get a functional website.  Let me point out a quick statement – this website contains about 6 pages of static data.  “Robust”, it is not.  To even suggest such a solution is both irresponsible and borderline corrupt.  Heck, I could probably stand up a Amazon EC2 “micro” instance, and get sufficient performance for this site!

Results

It’s at this point where I’ve finally said “Screw It” to Network Solutions.  I have pinged them through their support ticket system, through Facebook, and through Twitter.  Nothing in my attempts has caused a positive experience with them, nor has any interaction with them improved my faith in their ability to provide themselves as an effective, useful webhost.  All of the problem I listed above shouldn’t have been problems to begin with.  And yet, even if they did become problems, they should have been quickly (and easily!) resolved.  I pretty much gave them the exact solution with what needed to be done for each and every one of the support tickets that I sent them.  And yet, they seemed to blatantly ignore my tickets, and give me the same usual, canned responses.

Let this post serve as a warning to anyone who’s thinking about doing business with Network Solutions – DON’T!  I don’t think you could even pick a worse webhost.  You would be better off standing up an Amazon EC2 instance, or hosting it yourself.  If you’re not comfortable with either of those solutions, any other host (1&1, GoDaddy, DreamHost, BlueHost, or almost any other startup host) will serve better than Network Solutions.  I hope with this massively long blog post, that I may spare at least one person from the horror that is Network Solutions.

An Update!

After posting this last night, I spent a bit of time writing a performance test to compare the MySQL performance between Network Solutions and other web hosts.  I used a really simple block of code:

Basically, what I wanted to do was to simulate the way that Joomla connects to the database and queries data to generate the dynamic webpages.  I didn’t want to spend too much time digging into the Joomla code to determine how it connects and queries the database, so I decided to make a worst case scenario.  I simply looped over a block 1,000 times.  Each time a connection is made to the database, a query is run, and the database is then subsequently closed.  I didn’t want to do it all within the same connection, because I wanted to make sure any problems stood out and were easier to recognize.  And boy, were they recognizable!  After doing the test, I noticed the following:

Network Solutions:  Total Time – 5.9s, Average Query Time – 0.0059s
1and1: Total Time – 0.293s, Average Query Time – 0.0003s
Local MBA with a SSD: Total Time – 0.078s, Average Query Time 0.000078s a query

What does this tell me?

Well, for starters, my MacBook Air, 2012 Model is FAST!  Running a lightweight XAMPP server, I was able to get blazingly fast query times.  This was to be expected.  Comparing this performance then to that of 1and1.com, which hosts some of my websites and databases, I see that 1and1.com takes roughly 4x longer to perform the same query.  That difference doesn’t surprise me too much, due to the assumption of 1and1’s servers not necessarily being configured with the databases on the same physical (or even virtual) servers as that of the web hosting.  I also attributed it to the probability of them using non-SSD drives for their servers (albeit in probably a RAID format using business-class SAS drives.

What I did not expect, however, was the fact that Network Solutions was 20x (TWENTY TIMES!) slower than that of 1and1!  What took 1and1 a bit over one-fourth of a second to perform, took Network Solutions almost SIX SECONDS to do!  This is outrageous, and absolutely unacceptable for any webhost.  It’s no surprise that each of my webpages on there take 6-8 seconds to generate!  If a page would normally take 1/4 of a second to generate on 1and1, it will now take six seconds to do the same on Network Solutions.  That’s insane!

For Network Solutions, then, to have the audacity to tell me that my website is too complicated for their shared hosting, and that I should switch to their VPS hosting, is ridiculous.  I am on the same low-level, shared hosting on 1and1, and it is twenty times faster to do the same thing on there.  Not to mention, it’s cheaper too!

– admin