WordPress MU Hosting from TMD – 5 Must-Ask Web Hosting Questions Before You Buy

WordPress MU Hosting from TMD – 5 Must-Ask Web Hosting Questions Before You Buy Web Hosting (TMD Hosting)

WordPress MU / Multisite Web Hosting at TMDHosting (RANT)

TMD Hosting for WordPress MU / Multisite doesn’t work.

There’s a distinct langugage barrier which causes confusion but like working with folks anywhere this can be overcome -when there’s a will to do so! Parsing whatever language they speak (wouldn’t tell me -instead acted as though they didn’t know what I was talking about). I don’t care what language you speak as long as support is legible in the tickets. At TMD Hosting, the lanugage barrier causes problems until you say something, then a native English writer/speaker gets involved.

You will notice as soon as you sign up with TMDHosting “new wave of web hosting”, that something is wrong. It’s subtle at first. By the time you realize what’s going on, it’s already like dealing with a completely outsourced, “the business seems to be running from a shack in Siberia”.

My latest ticket required, “Gabriel Reed, Vincent Thomas, Stanley Cooper, George Moody and Bob Davis” to tell me, “Due to the fact that your case is now handled by our Supervisors i will escalate this ticket accordingly.” These aren’t real people. They simply ignore emails or tickets asking about the company.

For example, I was told,
“Hello,

Despite the fact that we have been able to restore the access to the admin panel as far as I can see the user admin has privileges only over the main blog. We have investigated the issue in details and despite all of our efforts to resolve it we failed to do so.We are trying to serve every single request, however your ticket requires deeper development/web programming knowledge and that is why we are not able to assist you.

The best thing you can do is to contact a web developer, who will be able to help you fix your problem.

Another thing you might consider is to contact the software developers of your application; they might be able to think of an easy fix for your problem(s). Having a look at the application’s official forum might be useful for your needs too. Another possible solution would be to completely reinstall your application and set it in a way best will suits your needs.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any further questions or comments.

Kind regards,”

This is for an issue they caused, that brought my sites down all at once. They are still down. How’s that for customer service?

That’s why I say, WordPress MU or Multisite hosting at TMD simply doesn’t work.

Initial set up of WordPress MU at TMD Hosting took over a week. Each time I needed to add a domain, it took days. I repeatedly asked for a list of steps I could take to setup my own domains on WordPress MU at TMD Hosting but was denied each time. It’s like setting up WordPress MU at TMD Hosting requires a secret decoder ring. They obviously hadn’t trained their support team on how to admin, setup or use WordPress MU.

So now I’m stuck, locked out of my account with no Super Admin. They simply lost my credentials trying to fix something else. They kept insinuating I was wrong after they kept sending me a regular login as I’m locked out of all my sites’ super admin options. Whatever. So over TMD.

My support tickets (TMD WorPress MU Hosting Support Tickets) have been “Forwarded” to supervisors after having been “escalated to our Senior Support Team” 5 days ago.

TMD Hosting’s locking us out of WordPress MU super admin dashboard creates all sorts of issues with the domains setup in WordPress MU.

So TMD willfully broke the terms of our hosting agreement, quit communications and left me with a new invoice.

The only reason you’re reading this is because they didn’t respond after giving them one more chance to fix the setup. So nothing has been resolved -well except for a few of my 14 other tickets that got half resolved.

TMDHosting’s internal control panel (not Cpanel) is nearly impossible to figure out, never remembers any settings and will make interface designers vomit uncontrollably -if it doesn’t make your head just explode.

Okay, I’m done. I just didn’t want anyone else to make the same mistake without being warned. Sticking to my regular data centers and will wait for them to figure out WordPress MU hosting before I try again.

This is being sent to all TMDHosting partners, data centers, web hosting forums, wordpress blogs etc. This kind of experience could cause serious harm to WordPress MU if folks don’t understand the difference between crappy hosting and the WordPress MU platform, which is stellar imho.

In case you’re the type that likes to fact-check, you’ll probably get a kick out of the way the conversations deteriorated over the last year. So I’m posting the support tickets with just the passwords X’d out.

Oh, got a question from a client yesterday while reviewing their site, hosted at TMD, it was rhetorical, “we’re not going to host the site on this server, are we?” I was doing a client review with 2 folks from their company and the site took about 15 seconds to load pages. It was worse on my phone (Verizon) but watching a site load slowly, with your client on their machine, sa-aaaucks.

Support Tickets pasted from TMD Hosting Account

Update: 1/24/11 – I got a response back from TMD explaining how I’m wrong and they’re right. Gross. My site is still down and now they’re blaming me hundreds of dollars later plus hundreds of hours spent trying to figure out their WordPress MU hosting platform. Of course the next thing they did was charge my credit card for another $20 bucks after I asked them specifically not to.

So I’ve grabbed my files and will wait for TMDs next response. I’m a believer that hosts get better over time. I’ve seen hosts like GoDaddy and Hostgator make big improvements over time. So much so that I think they might do well to reward customers that have been with them over the last 5 or 10 years.