I have an ISP, Globat.com. I am going to be rid of them soon, perhaps sooner than I thought, if I have my way. I used to park my Internet presence with Earthlink, but they cost a lot, and I had been shown this little company called Globat that offered a ton of space for your web site for just a very little money. Earthlink had given me no trouble, really, but they were expensive, and I was greedy for disk space. So I made the switch.
Globat was fine for a while, until my web site started to choke a little. And when I had questions about installing Movable Type, they were unable/unwilling to help. Each time my web site was inaccessible, or if it took several minutes to load my home page, I would dutifully send off a message to tech support, letting them know of my problems. Once it lasted a day and a half, but most times it was several hours of not-quite-outage. In one or two of these cases (and there were a dozen of them) I received a reply indicating that the problem might be other people on my same server, other customers, who were taking up too much of the server's resources.
But most of the time, I'd get a reply from Globat saying that they had checked, and everything seemed fine with my site, and they were closing the ticket. Of course, this was 24 to 36 hours later, and the problem had been gone for some time.
Finally, I felt they had strung me along enough. I was getting two-and-a-half GB of space, sure, but for all the customer service I was receiving, I might as well have been beating on the box myself.
I decided to leave. Picking another ISP was easy, but Globat was no help. I determined to move my sites slowly, leaving Globat up until it was time to renew, then letting it lapse. After all, I paid for a full year in advance.
Well, the jig is up. Tonight, I received a receipt from Globat, letting me know that I had been charged for another full year. I received no notice that my renewal was coming up. I received no indication that I should check my credit card on file to make sure my information was still valid. I just got a receipt.
And so, I asked them to rescind the charge and to cancel my account immediately. That they have done, and with an alacrity that belies my previous experiences with them.
So... if you want cheap hosting, Globat is good. If you want customer service, try someone else.