Stay clear from Pair Networks

The essence of this review is to stay clear from Pair Networks. This is an advice based on how we were maltreated by this webhosting company in Pittsburg.

History

GhanaWeb (ghanaweb.com) has since January 1999 been hosted by pair.com. We started with a shared hosting account of $ 45 per month. Over the years we expanded our business with Pair Networks to 7 dedicated servers costing about $ 3700 per month. It is safe to say that we were one of their biggest customers.

The service has been quite excellent which is the reason why we remained with them for so many years. Yet we strongly advice webmasters to avoid this company for hosting websites.

DDOS attack

On April 11th ghanaweb.com was knocked down by a strong DDOS attack. It was the first time ever for our medium to experience this.

Instead of helping us Pair disabled our domain ghanaweb.com !!!!

GhanaWeb (ghanaweb.com) is the most popular website of the country Ghana, visited by 3 million people per month and gainfully employing over 50 staff.

It is difficult to believe that Pair Networks could maltreat a loyal customer like this but yet it happened.

Downtime

Because Pair Networks abruptly stopped hosting our website we had to migrate the website to adifferent hosting provider in an emergency.

This was not a trivial exercise because ghanaweb.com is one of the biggest websites in the world containing millions of articles and photos.

It took as 6 days of literally working through the clock to put our site provionally back online at a different webhosting provider.

During these days Pair practically remained silent over their decision to shut down ghanaweb.com. Also no help what-so-ever was offered to us.

Pair's motivation to shut down GhanaWeb

On the 18th we received an email stating that "we unable to provide further service for ghanaweb.com or any of its sub-domains."

The email didn't make any references to rules which GhanaWeb might have violated which could justify such an extreme decision.

Clearly the decision was based out of fear for the impact the DDOS attack had on other customers and Pair's unwillingless to deal with the attack.

Could Pair have acted differently?

Certainly.

Shortly after the attack we activated the anti-DDOS protection of Cloudflare and followed all the technical measures supplied by Cloudflare to protect our website.

One of these actions was to change the ip-address of our domain. It was a trivial measure which our provider could have done in minutes.

Unfortunately this webhosting company boldly REFUSED to change our ip-address out of fear that pair.com might itself might become subject of the DDOS attack.

Just by changing the ip-address our website could have been back online in a matter of hours.

The Verdict

The actions of Pair Networks can be best described as "throwing the customer in front of the bus".

Rather than protecting the customer against the DDOS attack they shut down the customer. It didn't matter that the customer in question was doing business with Pair Networks since 1998. It didn't matter that the customer was in good standing paying for 6 months upfront. It didn't matter that the customers's budget was over $ 60,000 per year.

Nobody should entrust his business to a cold-hearted cynical company like this.

Kevin Martin, the founder of Pair Networks, should be deeply ashamed of what has become of his company.