Sketchy crew

Well, it has been a while since I have had a post like this. I believe it might have been Home Depot. I considered changing the name of the company, but decided against it. The reason? Everything I am going to say here is true. I won’t call names. I won’t make idle threats. Just the facts. And it will be damning enough all on its own.

Aplus was chosen to host the website and email for my family’s business around 2001 or 2002. I didn’t work at the company at the time, but I set it up. I had read about APlus on websites like CNet and the prices were slightly inflated, but it seemed reputable from what I could tell. Even today, APlus is well represented on CNet as the #1 provider on the list of most popular web hosts. I have no idea what criteria they use for those rankings, but whatever.

I signed up for the professional plan with APlus. At the time, I think that included unlimited email addresses and a modest space limitation of 250 megs. I am not sure what the transfer limits are. Anyway, at the time, I remember thinking it was pretty competitive and I hoped the uptime would be good.

The uptime was good. And the account really worked out pretty well for a while. It was no frills, but it fit our purposes. Then, as we started getting bigger and having bigger needs in terms of space I started looking back into the hosting company. I had finally joined the family business so I thought it would be good to check into it anyway as the resident geek. What I found was that we were still paying $20 per month. We still had the same now antiquated limits of 250 mb hosted space. That couldn’t possibly be right!