So, we host shrikrsna.com over at Netfirms. They’re been an average hosting provider for us. Nothing to write home about or recommend to others. They have an average feature set and a substandard webmail interface. We’ve scraped by without having any major issues in outage.
We decided to use a subdomain of shrikrsna.com to host an internal application for them, when our woes started. They have a fairly dumb user interface, non-existent to non-functional, rarely updated FAQ. Lack of proper forum to interact with others coupled with a slow and incorrect email help has forced my hand to blog about it. I created a subdomain called “erp.shrikrsna.com” and waited for it to become active. Usually with all hosts, activating subdomains is trivial and takes a couple of minutes at most. Here at netfirms it took about 24 hours. *Pathetic*. Anyway, once it worked, i quickly went back to their control panel, selected the subdomain and went about updating the “A Name” just as the help and interface allowed me to. This action however, kept returning with the “Invalid subdomain” message. After attempting this after a little while, it still didnt work and left me frustrated. I resorted to sending an email to the support requesting a quick reply and a resolution.
The help arrived another 2 days later, basically letting me know that this feature is not available! WTF!! It was right there in their help, one of the few help entries they’ve got. What were they trying to tell me that this feature does not exist. In frustration, I tried something which let me find the solution to my problem. I went back to the interface to change A Name and redirected wtf.shrikrsna.com to the Dreamhost IP address where we’re hosting our Rails app. It worked! The problem was that I shouldnt have first created the subdomain first. I then quickly deleted the subdomain, and went back to the interface to change the A NAME, typed erp as the subdomain and it worked. No thank Netfirms.com. Your service sucks, your control panel sucks too and I’m not renewing my account with your folks.
(P.S. I’m now waiting another 24 hours for the damn thing to update its own DNS!)