Volusion negative review #12905 by Former Employee (hidden@o...)
Volusion got a negative review on
Former Employee ( hidden@o... )
What volusion offers is a turn-key shopping cart solution-- it's not a web hosting company. If you want a store up today, then yeah they're perfect! If you need to do anything serious, forget it.
The software is closed source and operates on an outdated ASP 2.0 code base using Microsoft SQL and IIS web services which are the worst, and one of the most expensive (next to oracle), solutions on the market.
The company is bi-polar with offices in California and Texas, with two very different personalities (the older owner is in Texas, which is the one that capitalized on a young man's work and made volusion a company, the younger guy is in California-- and both have very different personalities). The difference between their 'simi-dedicated" and "shared" plans was all of 5-10 users per server. Their bandwidh charges are one of the highest in the industry-- if you're selling digital downloads, its often cheaper to just mail a CD out to the customer than download it. The admins and tech support staff would often sake their heads at that, but hey it was a paycheck.
As of late 2008 they began moving from Rackspace to their own data center, and had no previous experience managing a data center at that time, and yet the chose to build one in-house in a relatively poorly connected area. Of course, when this move was happening, they had tech support lie to customers (mostly thanks to the texas office) and tell them that their servers weren't moving-- that was why everyone had to switch back to use volusion's dns servers in 2008/2009 or be screwed. They had some people on staff that had some data center experience, but they were fired, along with some others that night. It was unclear, but these people had also voiced concerns about lying to customers about the move from rackspace during a meeting.
Support is very underpaid. The industry standard is $19/hr for the work they're asked to do, and yet they try to hire people for $13-$15 an hour, with quotas on call time rather than quality of work offered. If they can't solve your problem in 5 minutes, they're taking too long, and counts against them. There is needless to say a very high turnover there which means knowledgeable people leave faster than they can train new staff, often throwing them on the phones before they are fully trained (here watch the training videos, okay go!)
Since the software is closed, there is no way to add a feature to your store if you need things done slightly differently. There's also no direct access to the database, and writing your own queries is done through a very convoluted setup, but it works for most people. For most stores this is fine, for others not so. Use of .asp scripts are limited, and your ability to send out emails equally so.
Honestly use dreamhost.com or 1and1.com and get an open sourced shopping cart, or have a programmer in your locale develop one (outsourcing is asking for trouble). If your hosting company doesn't offer ssh access and Linux hosting, it isn't worth the headaches you'll have later. SSH/Shell access allows developers to fix things quickly that would be time consuming to do by hand, also it allows you to create binary/compiled cgi scrips which run many times faster and use less memory than PHP/Perl scripts (though requires knowledge of C/C++). Don't get me started about Ruby and Java...
The software is closed source and operates on an outdated ASP 2.0 code base using Microsoft SQL and IIS web services which are the worst, and one of the most expensive (next to oracle), solutions on the market.
The company is bi-polar with offices in California and Texas, with two very different personalities (the older owner is in Texas, which is the one that capitalized on a young man's work and made volusion a company, the younger guy is in California-- and both have very different personalities). The difference between their 'simi-dedicated" and "shared" plans was all of 5-10 users per server. Their bandwidh charges are one of the highest in the industry-- if you're selling digital downloads, its often cheaper to just mail a CD out to the customer than download it. The admins and tech support staff would often sake their heads at that, but hey it was a paycheck.
As of late 2008 they began moving from Rackspace to their own data center, and had no previous experience managing a data center at that time, and yet the chose to build one in-house in a relatively poorly connected area. Of course, when this move was happening, they had tech support lie to customers (mostly thanks to the texas office) and tell them that their servers weren't moving-- that was why everyone had to switch back to use volusion's dns servers in 2008/2009 or be screwed. They had some people on staff that had some data center experience, but they were fired, along with some others that night. It was unclear, but these people had also voiced concerns about lying to customers about the move from rackspace during a meeting.
Support is very underpaid. The industry standard is $19/hr for the work they're asked to do, and yet they try to hire people for $13-$15 an hour, with quotas on call time rather than quality of work offered. If they can't solve your problem in 5 minutes, they're taking too long, and counts against them. There is needless to say a very high turnover there which means knowledgeable people leave faster than they can train new staff, often throwing them on the phones before they are fully trained (here watch the training videos, okay go!)
Since the software is closed, there is no way to add a feature to your store if you need things done slightly differently. There's also no direct access to the database, and writing your own queries is done through a very convoluted setup, but it works for most people. For most stores this is fine, for others not so. Use of .asp scripts are limited, and your ability to send out emails equally so.
Honestly use dreamhost.com or 1and1.com and get an open sourced shopping cart, or have a programmer in your locale develop one (outsourcing is asking for trouble). If your hosting company doesn't offer ssh access and Linux hosting, it isn't worth the headaches you'll have later. SSH/Shell access allows developers to fix things quickly that would be time consuming to do by hand, also it allows you to create binary/compiled cgi scrips which run many times faster and use less memory than PHP/Perl scripts (though requires knowledge of C/C++). Don't get me started about Ruby and Java...
85 out of 94 users found this review to be helpful!