Coolhandle Support Reviewed
Coolhandle is one of the oldest web hosting companies one of the very few who doesn't over advertise their services. For the past 1.5 years, coolhandle has been our powering one of our partner site with pretty stable performance. Because of this, we rarely contact their support team for assistance. Thus we're not so sure how it goes on and hard to comment a word for it. However, we just got such experience with website problem so we're going to tell you how their people fix problems for clients.
About one year ago we did a very positive coolhandle review for their great features and performance. However, from last wednesday, our website failed to response and web server can't be pinged. I guess it's my network problem because my ISP always block some connections. I then connected my VPN account and try to trace the server. Unfortunately, it failed again after 10 local nodes. I also tried to ping/trace from third party site like dnsstuff and whois site, all failed. So finally I think it's server end problems and logon their support site for urgent assistance.
Unfortunately, their live support is offline(Live chat is always offline based our continuous monitoring) and I can't call phone support based my location. The only choice is to submit support form and wait their response. Since its a big urgent, I filled out the form in quick time and almost instantly I received helpdesk login credentials. I clicked the ticket link and suppose it will get me to the support area. Unfortunately, it just returned invalid login error and didn't provide a login box at all to enter the credentials! Since the support request is already sent, I guess they will handle it fastly for such issue. However, after 5 hours waiting, there's still no updates and I have to send notification again via support form. This time I get their response quickly in about 30 minutes. They said the server already migrated to new data center and provided me a new IP to update from domain registrar.
Surprisely, the new server connection is much much faster than the old one so I think they're doing good job. The DNS propagation is pretty quick too so I start to view how my site performs. Yes it's fast as expected. I then logged into the site admin for news update. But when I tried to publish, I get 404 not found error and such error will be displayed for whatever changes I want to apply. Since it's a wordpress site, I tried all solutions I can think of such as deactivate all plugins and switch to default theme etc but problems still not fixed. New articles can't be published, existing articles can't be updated and permalinks can't be updated. I then send another support request to coolhandle. I sent the support from 22:00 pm and got reply from the next morning. They said it's a security rule on server end and they just made a change for it, they suggest me try again. Yes, I can't publish new articles this time but they switched the permalinks to default value which is not I needed. I then tried to update with new structures but returned file not found error again! I also tried to manually apply rules via .htaccess but nothing worked. I then send support request again for the issue, no replying.. another request sent, still no reply. 3 days passed and no one replied. I can't bear with such slowness and moved the site to my another server account with about 30 minutes efforts.
What I learnt from Coolhandle Support?
As you see, I got very bad experience in dealing with the coolhandle support and finally forced me to change server space. Below is my basic conclusion to their service:
- Coolhandle support is not operating 24×7. As you see from my experience their live chat is always offline and ticket support is a bit slow. I'm not sure if they're just too busy for lack of support staff or just work during business hours but it's absolutely not good to clients in case there's problem occured like us.
- Their support structure is not well designed. Coolhandle is cpanel/whmcs based service. Users can submit ticket under client area based the design. But they use Kayako software for knowledge base and website form support is sent to this system. However, they don't provide people a login area to view tickets so you can't track how your support is going on.
- They don't follow up problems carefully. I sent the support requests and described several problems. However, their support just fixed one and ignored all others. After I send out further updates, they don't even reply at all.
More about Coolhandle Web Hosting
Coolhandle has been recognized reliable and advanced web hosting provider for their rich feature hosting plans and affordable costs. They take advantage of all leading equipments and technologies such as DELL server, Cloudflare and Cloudlinux platforms etc. They're always the very first to provide such support to clients. However, based our experience with their helpdesk, they're absolutely doing bad. They provide very limited support resources and most of the time you probably have no more choice but to wait. If you highly rely on hosting support in setting up your website, coolhandle is definitely not perfect choice. Instead, arvixe is our best recommendation for best web hosting support.
Go to arvixe site for best supported hosting plans! http://www.arvixe.com
