IBBoard

The following covers the main events while being hosted at Micfo.com, including downtime, broken promises and hidden updates to the Terms of Service with potentially significant consequences for many webmasters.

• 10th May 2005: Signed up for a 30-day trial at Micfo and registered HiveWorldTerra.co.uk to give the Hive World Terra Forums a better domain. The domain also gave me somewhere to host the main website after clan-bertram.co.uk expired.
• 10th June 2005: Signed up for a year of Super package and took the double disk space and bandwidth signup incentive. Since the eventual idea was to make Skins @ Hive World Terra a canon-based competitor to DoWFiles.com, the increase was a bonus.
• 23rd June 2005: First took advantage of the 'Independance Day offer' that gave you double disk space and bandwidth for $20. Was told by both the CEO on the forums and the Promotions department in a support ticket that they could confirm there would be no limits on using my disk space and bandwidth, even if I doubled it multiple times, that the servers could handle it, and that I would not be arbitrarily removed for using what I had paid for. Instead it was explicitly stated that I could use my full quotas and servers would be balanced to remove accounts as neccesary.
• 14th July 2005: Started migrating Skins @ Hive World Terra to the skins.hiveworldterra.co.uk subdomain.
• 17th August 2005: Amir repeats his claim that we will be moved between servers to ensure we can use all of our doubled bandwidth and that we won't be stopped from using it.
• 27th August 2005: Doubled the disk space and bandwidth three more times before the offer ended, leaving me with over 1TB of bandwidth.
• 24th September 2005: While my Micfo server is infrequently getting over 99.5% uptime and badly failing to get the guaranteed 99.9% uptime others report worse downtime².
• 12th October 2005: After numerous problems with the old server including a lot of downtime, and due to the fact that Micfo was migrating from ev1 servers to their own cages in Equinix, all of the sites were migrated to the new Aurora server.
• 20th October 2005: Micfo attempt to resolve early problems with extra memory instead of fixing the underlying problem.
• 12th February 2006: The new server at Equinix, Aurora, has still had problems, including server load hitting over 100¹ for long enough to drag the 15 minute average over 50. There were also times when it hit 180, but reports of these were kept within support tickets that I can no-longer access.
• 28th March 2006: Micfo remove their guaranteed support ticket response time, which they had only occasionally been keeping to. This is supposedly to improve the quality of support responses, but little change can be seen. As of 29th April 2008, Micfo still put this on their page of guarantees despite having removed it two years earlier.
• 6th May 2006: I posted a topic on the Micfo forums asking for clarification about my recent discovery that software and streaming websites were now not allowed on Micfo hosting.
• 14th May 2006: Micfo finally reply by simply re-stating their ToS: download and streaming sites are not allowed.
• 18th May 2006: After requests for more clarification, Micfo reply that there will be an additional line added that excludes all files under 1MB from breeching the ToS. As of 29th April 2008 this line has still not been added.
• 24th May 2006: The situation does not looking promising, and even if it is clarified then there is uncertainty as to whether it is best to stay with a host who silently slips new additions such as this into the Terms of Service. The hwtskins.co.uk domain is registered and parked at A Small Orange to host any files such as Rollcall army creating application that Micfo may have objections to.
• 17th June 2006: Over one month after their last reply on the subject, and with fourty replies on the topic from customers, the Micfo forums go down for 'maintenance'. The message says it will take 48 hours.
• 26th June 2006: The forums become available again, although Micfo has still not added a reply on the subjet of software downloads as the forums open. Customers are begining to wonder whether to leave for more open and up-front hosts. By the end of the day Micfo change their answer and say you can host any software if you've developed it, but otherwise the Terms of Service remain the same.
• 27th June 2006: The Hive World Terra website is moved to the new A Small Orange hosting, along with all of the other sites. I end a generally poor year of hosting with Micfo LLC. On the plus point I did get a refund for one of the doublings since there were now restrictions that I had been told there would not be. On the down side one of the billing staff was completely incompetent and my first refund actually resulted in me being charged again!
• 28th June 2006: Micfo clarify that their Terms of Service cover all software including installers for textures, that you must be the original developer only and not a maintainer, so community download sites are prohibited.
• 29th December 2006: Six months after the last clarification from Micfo and the Terms of Service still hadn't been updated. At one point in the following days the Terms of Service that were linked from the main site were even removed!
• 13th April 2007: I kept visiting the forums to see what was happening and continue to help people with their general website problems. After multiple hints in my posts that I've moved (including changing my title and signature to "Former Micfo customer"), but no sales pitches for other providers, I was banned from the forums with a blunt and unprofessional message and an equally unprofessional personal message.
• 29th April 2008: I'm approching the start of a third happy year with A Small Orange, Micfo is still in existence, they still have huge packages that must be oversold, and ther Terms of Service still haven't changed.
• 13th October 2014: Over eight years after I had all of the persistent and ignored issues detailed above, Amir Golestan (still Executive Director of Micfo LLC hosting) contacts me to try to "rectify [my] experience with Micfo". He provided a full refund of the money I had spent on Micfo and offered a free year of Business of Cloud hosting. Also in the email was a polite request to take down this review. As the article is factually accurate and as I believe in the benefit of recording historical events³ then I accepted the refund as compensation, but declined the offer of hosting and the request to take down this article. This line was added.

Side notes

Footnotes

1. Server load (as measured by Linux) is a measure of how many processes the processor is dealing with and what the backlog is like. General consensus is that a value of one per core is acceptable (so a 12-core server could have a load of around 12 and not be considered overloaded)
2. The old posts aren't recorded by the Wayback Machine, but the feedback forum of the time gives a good impression of the state of the service.
3. cf. the number of links in this page that are now Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) links!
4. Out of interest, after being contacted eight years after posting this, I searched on Google for the phrases "Micfo review" and "Micfo hosting review" and found this page ranked 11th and 9th respectively. I have been told that this had no bearing on Amir Golestan's desire to rectify my experience.