A simply awful experience. We have been loyal customers of CrystalTech/Newtek for 10+ years... recommending their services to any client or colleague looking for hosting, but no more.

We received an email from them telling us that our account had been deleted. The issue was that our billing had changed, but they had not received an update... so after X days, the account was deleted. According to CrystalTech/Newtek, advance notice emails were sent to alert us of this, but none of these were received. We checked our logs of all emails sent to and from CrystalTech/Newtek support, and no advance notices were found. They did, however, have no problem with their cancellation email. We explained this fact to them, and their response was to offer to restore our account for the low price of $120. This was unacceptable. We spoke with several representatives over the course of a few weeks to resolve the issue, escalating it up the chain, but they continued to demand the $120 "restore" fee.

Understand, we are not trying to get "even" with CrystalTech/Newtek. If any emails had been in our logs that were overlooked, we would have gladly admitted we were at fault and paid the restore fee. However, this was not the case.

We have worked with a variety of high quality hosting providers, but this experience has definitely removed CrystalTech/Newtek from that list. They normally had great customer service, and competitive prices, but that pales in comparison to the concern that your account can be deleted randomly at any moment. Reliability is much too important to my clients. We will be advising everyone currently using their services to find alternate providers. Do not use CrystalTech/Newtek.

Feb 2010: The CrystalTech support team are friendly people. Unfortunately, much of their hosting technology is very old.

Examples:

(1) I have a dedicated server with a database on a shared SQL server. I often receive SQL timeouts and, since I have a few tables which are very small (less than 5,000 records), I am certain it's 100% caused by their hosting OVER 400 databases on the same shared server! How do I know? SQL Management Studio 2008 (SMS2008) shows you the counter. They claim it's monitored but, each time I report an issue, the support team (including level-2 server administrators) state they have no way of knowing which customer is abusing the system (due to poor code and/or database design). This is the stupidest excuse I've ever heard; SQL has built-in tools for capturing such info for latter analysis.

(2) I often receive nonsensical advice from their so-called expert support staff. I was recently told by them to export my database to my local machine to make data-level changes, and then make a .BAK file and upload that via FTP to our web server and then use their Web Control Center to restore that .BAK file thereby REPLACING my SQL database .... which happens to be continually updated by my website's visitors. What kind of bonehead offers such a suggestion without first asking if my data is static?

(3) This one is the MOST DANGEROUS for all CrystalTech customer who have a SQL database on one of their Shared SQL servers: Your "Recovery Mode" is set to "Simple". They only backup your database once per day. In the event of a storage failure, you will LOSE all data changes that took place since the last backup. The solution? Have then change your database's Recovery Mode to "Full". However, this creates another issue ONLY for CrystalTech: Data-changes are then stored in a Database Log file. As that log grows, database performance will suffer. The only way to get the log to "shrink" is to backup the Log File (in addition to the database itself). Guess what? CrystalTech refuses to do that for you on a Shared SQL server. Why? who the heck knows but it's PURE STUPIDITY at either setting they offer as described above.

Unique control panel that has less clutter than most yet remains functional.