OLM

Pros: They answer the phone if their servers are working.
Cons: They do not know when the servers are down.

It's hard to find a hosting company that is worse than OLM for at least shared accounts. They were good from 1997 to 2003. Not so good after that. Foreign people now answer the phone and they do not know as much as the old people.

Pros: there are none
Cons: terrible response time to server issues, constant server problems, tech support appears to be incompetant

I chose OLM first because of it's feature. But soon realized that going with them was a huge mistake. I constantly have problems with the server. The ftp connection is down, or Miva doesn't work, or login issues with Ensim. If that wasn't bad enough, things are worsen by their bad response time. One time I needed them to correct a DNS problem on their DNS server. They were pointing my domain to the wrong IP. It took them more than 1 week to fix something so simple as that. Another time I tried to setup Miva Merchant which was a nightmare. I couldn't do any credit card validations until I called them. Their response was that I had outdated modules and that I had to update the module myself. In my opinion, I expect the hosting company to do that since they did claim that that the support Miva Merchant and they should be responsible for keeping the files up to date. Bottom line, don't go with OLM, whatever they offer is not worth the trouble you'll receive from them.

Pros: Cheap service. Tech support is very good when they answer their phones.
Cons: Reliability is absolutely poor at best. I wouldn't recommend running a business on their servers.

I suffer at least 2 down-times a month. Everytime I report this, I am either told that my server needed to be rebooted, or there was nothing wrong with it and the problem was on my end, even though I had connectivity with the entire outside world except my websites URL. The downtimes run from 30 minutes to 3 hours. Seemingly this is their pat answer for any failure.

The most recent call reporting attempt on a down server on their 800 number was a recording telling me that my call couldn't be completed. I tried their direct line and another recording stated they were not accepting calls at this time.

I'm curous how they are going to explain away this issue on a system reboot or insinuating the problem is on my end.

Pros: I like the control panel
Cons: Unreliable servers Bad Customer service Lots of Spam and Viruses

The company I work for has a dedicated server with olm and we are ALWAYS having problems with them. We get so many complaints about spam, and we have downtime and mail problems almost every week.

Also, the tech support is not very helpful. We wait on hold about 10 or 15 minutes to talk to some one and they are usually not very knowledgeable. Sometimes if there is an ongoing problem we will hear a different explanation from every person we talk to.