Review by spankenstein Added: February 23, 2008
Would not recommend this host to others. Review text: For more than 20 years I have been a professional IT consultant, technician and web developer, with numerous technical certifications from Microsoft, Cisco, Novel and others, so these comments are not ‘newbie ignorance’.
I have been an unhappy customer of Netfirms for more than two years, and find that Netfirms fails to provide reliable services time and time again. As an example: both Netfirms' slow and frequently unreliable administration site, and internet hosting services, appear to be completely down for ALL of its customers (again) as of Feb 23, 2008. This total service outage has been in effect for more than 3 hours at the time of this writing. Even their corporate homepages are out of service. This is not the first time this has happened. I am moving my own hosting elsewhere. I would strongly recommend against using them as a service provider.
If you do decide to use them because of the 'low cost', and are switching your existing web services to them, expect a 2-3 day total outage on your email services after you change your DNS over to the Netfirms' servers. Netfirms will blame this on "DNS propagation delays", which is an inaccurate statement at best; the actual problem is in the (intentional?) internal delay in the automatic configuration of the Netfirms mail servers. (I have the trace logs to prove it). Their mail servers will actively reject all email to your domain long after the DNS updates have "taken hold" on the net, leaving your email service in "limbo" for an extended period of time. This behavior has been conclusively demonstrated and documented on several occasions, for several different new hosting account setups/transfers, as I made the unfortunate mistake of initially recommending several of my clients switch to Netfirms as well. Never again!
