Canaca.com User Reviews

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Posted on Oct 29, 2006 by Caveat Emptor

Caveat Emptor, 29th of October, 2006
Caveat emptor is Latin for "let the buyer beware" . . . and you better beware of this company. I wish I had found feedback on the net before I got involved with them. I registered multiple domain names at $10 PER year and they charged my c/c $30US for each one. They claim that the second year is "renewal" although option of 1 and 2 year registration was given during the registration process. At least 3 places on their website says domain registration is $10 PER year. Nothing said about US dollars. I too thought I was dealing with a Canadian company and CDN dollars. Expect also customer service is offshore. Email responses frequently don't respond correctly to the issue raised and syntax is wrong. Haven't been able to get past receptionist to talk to anyone in charge and repeated emails receive a curt reply. Don't just bitch about them here, file a complaint. If you have a concern about the purchase of goods and/or services contact the Ministry of Consumer and Business Services:

Consumer Services Bureau
Ministry of Consumer and Business Services
250 Yonge St., 32nd Floor
Toronto ON M5B 2N5

Toll-free: 1-800-889-9768
Phone: 416-326-8800
TTY Toll-free: 1-800-268-7095
TTY: 416-325-3408
E-mail: cbsinfo@cbs.gov.on.ca

I have had several websites through Canaca, and have found that their hosting is reliable, but their customer service sucks big time. After setting up my account, I recieved no automated confirmation email. No phone call either. I tried to call them at 9:53 (correct time zone- 10:53 my time) and it said sorry but the sales lines are currently closed. Hours are from 9:00am till 5:00pm... well hello, it's 53 minutes after nine you big dumb bitch... what the hell?
Never again will I go with canaca. Frankly, it is a disgrace that a company such as that has such a similar name to the great country of Canada.
psh... I spit in your face Canaca... Fuck You

Canaca -dot-com does not provide a good customer service, and I do NOT recommend their services....

--- email from canaca --
Soory,but each time one of the accounting department staff answeres your ticket so we can not let you know the name.

As mentioned in last reply all hosting accounts are auto-renewed as indicated in our contract (http://www.canaca.com) which you are required to read before signing up.By signing up with us, confirming your order and using our service you agree with those terms and authorise your consent. It indicates that we will automaticaly renew your term when the current term is up.

Therefore,If you have cancelled your account or requested that we did not place any charges on the card number please provide the ticket number and we can offer a full return. If you did not follow our cancellation terms we cannot offer any refund and you account will be closed on its next renewal date.

Thanks.

Best Regards,
Canaca-Com Inc.
http://faq.canaca.com

I have a friend using Canaca and it seemed like a good deal. I've been with them 3 weeks and the server has been overloaded the entire time. I sent an email to try and resolve this and they told me it would be better in a few days.

I'm somewhat new to this business but I'd say thats the most ridiculous answer a hosting service has every given a business using thier services.

Its been a few days and it has gotten much worse. It takes anywhere from 5 to 20 seconds to load a simple page. I'm very unhappy with Canaca and I don't feel this issue is going to be resolved.

I'm on the market now for a new host and I have to go through yet another site move.

I have had a terrible service with canaca web hosting! sorry did I say service...??? there is no service!!! They take your money and dont give you what you have paid for!!!

stay well clear of this company, if you can call it that, I'll call it a scam.

I wish there was some internet regulator I could report them too or even find out who processes thier payments.

After paying for 3 months hosting I found out that I could not log into my account 95% of the time and was unable to upload files 95% of the time. the other 5% was useless ase the transfer rate was so slow I couldn't even transfer 1 10KB images in over 10 minutes!!!! with my new host it take about a tenth of a second!

I sent loads of emails asking for my money back within the 30 days money back period. Guess what, all my emails were returned as unreceivable..

I think you get the picture

Regards

Jay
http://www.adultdvdstoreonline.co.uk

Every about 6 months Canaca switches off completely, even their own website is offline. Happened again this morning. The outage lasts the whole night, US-time. Since I am in Europe, when I wake up in the morning and want to read my all-important emails, there is nothing. My website is gone, canaca.com is unreachable. By about lunchtime in Europe, the sun rises in the US and Canaca starts up again. To me it almost looks like planned outages, but there is no warning,neither an apology afterwards. I find this very strange indeed, I mean the outages, not the fact that there is no apology.

i have been with them for 3 years, i am totally confused after reading all of this, my website and theres is offline, so i decided to investigate. i have only read bad stuff about them. do they really have 30,000 clients. i really hope they get back online.
kam

CANACA sucks!!!! Like all these other people have have experienced, their so called customer service...which is non existent. These people do not care at all about your business. It is not worth the savings. The billing department dosen't send bills and then suspends your account.
Any problems with your sevice is never there fault but everyone elses.
If i ran that company I would be embarassed.

I do not have this company as a provider for anything so I cannot judge them for theyre quality of service or customer service. However, having said that I would like to comment on the person who addressed the issue that customer service is run from Iran, and India. I think that is a very poor reason not to want a company. I understand you had repair issues as well, and I apologize however: I work in a call center right now...in Canada, however I work for a company in the United States. We deal with other centers, most of which are in the United States, and us Canadians are much better people to talk with and actually take the time to assist the customers. My point is just because the customer service is not close to where you live does not mean they are bad people...smarten up.

DTA = "Don't Trust Acanac" (Canaca)


I need to get the word out about Acanac. This is a warning to anybody interested in signing up for service with Acanac.

They offer great prices for service, but their service is horrible.

They can offer great prices because they use employees overseas that don't speak English. You may not notice this if you phone them to sign up, and that's because their sales office is here in Ontario, Canada, using English speaking employees.

They have below poor customer service. They don't care and never return phone calls. Once you've paid them up front, they've got their money, and they believe that their job is done.

I signed up for VOIP & Internet with them. Once I realized the mistake I made it took over 4 months to get a partial refund for service, and I'm still fighting to get back money that they still owe me. Truly it's 5 months now and they still owe me money.

I should also mention that thay hang up on you purposely if you mention that you want a refund. Scary!

What says it best is the Better Business Bureau. (www.bbb.org) They've got Acanac at an "unsatisfactory" level.

Trust me, no amount of money saved is worth it. I'm working with the BBB to try and get my money back currently.

The complaints Acanac received were all different:

These complaints concerned:

1. Customer Service Issues
BBB Definition:
Service Issues - Claims of alleged delay in completing service, failure to provide promised service, inferior quality of provided service, or damaged merchandise as a result of delivery service. Claims alleging unsatisfactory customer service, including personnel's failure to provide assistance in a timely manner, failure to address or respond to customer dissatisfaction, unavailability for customer support, and/or inappropriate behavior or attitude exhibited by company staff.

2. Guarantee or Warranty Issues
BBB Definition:
Guarantee or Warranty Issues - Claims alleging failure to honor the terms regarding guarantees or warranties.

3. Billing or Collection Issues
BBB Definition:
Billing or Collection Issues - Claim alleging billing errors, unauthorized charges, or questionable collection practices.

4. Service or Repair Issues
BBB Definition:
Repair Issues - Claims of alleged incorrect diagnosis of a problem, delay in completion of repair, inferior workmanship. Claims of alleged delay in completing service, failure to provide promised service, inferior quality of provided service, damage merchandise as a result of delivery service. alleged incorrect diagnosis of a problem, delay in completion of repair, inferior workmanship.

I went 3 months without home phone because of them. Acanac refused to release my phone number back to Bell (which is illegal), but they didn't care.

My cell phone bills cost me $173.56 total and all calls were to Acanac to cancel service and transfer my number back to Bell.

Thank you Bell for bringing me back!

Save yourself the hassel.

Don't Trust Acanac or Canaca.

I contract with a company and thought 2 years ago the gold plan was the thing. Well we are at the start of our free year so there should be no payment due till 2007. I get up this morning and check my bank and find there are 5 pending account withdrawals for $215.58 of which I have not authorized any. I tried calling the accounts department and get nothing but music for 10 minutes then the wait time is longer than 30 minutes so please email us or call back in 20 minutes. I have tried this all day. No human, no email reply and about to have a serious issue at the bank of which I will hold Canaca Liable for. I suggest you stay away from canaca at all costs. It could cost you more than you expect.

Stay away from these guys. The support and services are horrible. They never answer the phones and often ignore support tickets so there is no way to reach them. They even billed me more than the invoice when they charged my credit card. It has been two weeks and still not fixed after lots of phone calls and two support tickets. My rating is a big fat "0"

Actually no not india, the tech support is entirely based out of iran..... yeah that's right iran. (3 employees in Canada, 20 in iran, 20 in india) Your data and site is being accessed and managed from there. That is one of the reasons why most tech support is done through emails, which ultimately get lost in translation. Am not sure about y'all but i for sure wouldn't want to host my site there. Other than that their VOIP services are so bad a joke, that it really isn't funny anymore. You could get better voice quality across a string with 2 cans at each end at least that way you don't have a router to reboot every 15 min and the other features are pretty much non-existent anyways. As far as their DSL service goes they are resellers for bell, i would rather drink one less coffee and use sympatico for $2 a month than tear my hair apart dealing with random disconnects.

I am all for encouraging small businesses, but i'd rather support a small business that at least give something back to the community that it relies on so much for it's very existence.

I've read your comments and I have had the same things happen to me. The numerous downtimes, only one answer per ticket. If there was many questions in my tickets they would only answer one.

The long wait for the website recovery and an answer to my emergency@canaca.com tech support inquieries have made me go nuts during the many downtimes!

There seems to have been a change in tech support and I think you're right about India. Fortunately and if I'm not mistaken, we have laws in Canada that prevents telecomunication companies to have more then 20 percent of their workforce from out of Canada. I hope it would be the same with this company. Unless they are not using a canadian cie name or number... Wich I plan on making verifications about. We have a Canadian company registry after all. ;-) I also got to verify if those telecoms legislations apply to webhosting companies.

I have sent comments to their administration. I certainly hope they improve their service or I should say hoped. I'm actually looking around for a webhosting replacement nowadays...

Chris.

I was with them for almost a year.. God.. What a terrible experience?..

Do you know I have over 100 emails regarding my two domains with these guys.. All these emails are about site down and their responses.. (Standard bulls$%# like someother client is overloading the server etc..)

Most horrific experience for me ever.. I am a tech guy.. I do programming in C,java,html,asp,vb,php,cgi etc.. I am an architect in a big firm.. I am not some amatuer trying to do things and need spoon feeding from a host.. These guys DO NOT have 99.9% uptime period. The tech support always try to deviate from the real issue.. so that they close the case..

I closed both accounts (after painful process of course), moved to another company (http://www.foghost.com) and has 100% uptime since then with wonderful support people..

Dont ever make the mistake I did. Go with anyone but canaca.

I had been with canaca for 18 months out of a 24 month contract. My first couple of months were quite trouble free - that however does not mean that I did not experiece problems, downtime, or crashes.

After the first few months problems got worse and everytime the site would go down email system would go down as well, and this was prety big as it was for client office of 12 people who all depended heavily on their emails.

Tech support was extremely poor their normal response time for tickers marked Critical or Emergency was 36 to 48 hours.

After 18 months they auto-billed my account it took me a lot hassle to get it refunded and in the process I found out through Canada number that this is just their front office their hosting is done in INDIA.

MY ADVISE DO NOT GO TO CANNACA YOU WILL :

1. COMPROMISE YOUR CREDIT CARD
2. Have downtime headaches.
3. Never get tech-support - and when you do they will pass sarcastic comments just rub it in that you are dum and they are smart.

I've had almost nothing but good times with them. they're cheap, give me everything I need and I've always had good experience with their uptime. I've been with them for 2 years without any problems, and manage 3 different sites with them, all without problems. They're light on the features, but otherwise I think they're swell.

While Canaca's pricing, allowances for bandwidth, server space and features are nice, they have not lived up to their 99.9% uptime claim - one of my domains on this site was down most the day after it launched. They claimed this was due to 'server maintenance and upgrades, but it seemed to take far too long for that to be the case and if it was, in fact, for maintenance, there was no announcement that it was going to take place. Also their claim of 1-800 support is simply not true. There is a 1-800 number but if you call it you get a recording telling you to send them an e-mail. Even the recording at the 1-800 number does not tell the truth. It says that once you email, someone will call you within 15 minutes. Not only will they not call you within 15 minutes, they won't call you at all - ever. So you should have a backup email outside of your Canaca hosted domains - if your email is what you are having a problem with you are presented with a problem with email only support.



Canaca is also now offering a VOIP and ISP service. But, since they don't offer customer service, or technical support and don't seem to be able to keep a web server up and running consistently I certainly wouldn't recommend putting them in charge of your telephone or internet.

This is one of the best hosts I have seen. I have been with them over 1 year and have never had a serious problem. There down time is very minimal. There hosting prices are the best I have seen with any US company and there packages are the best I have found.

Bottom line first -- STAY AWAY from canaca.com. There, you've been warned; if you get in you have only yourself to blame. Now the details. I took my personal site to canaca.com because their plan looked very good, and their large disk storage and bandwidth limits were particularly welcome. However, the experience has been nothing but trouble. TWO server crashes in one year (one resulting in significant data loss to me because they somehow didn't have backups), and their customer support is virtually non-existent. (The claim on their website of emergency phone support is a lie -- the phone number only gives you a recorded message with an address emergency@canaca.com which is supposed to get back to you in 15 minutes, but in reality probably won't even after two days.) When I finally did get someone on the phone for support, an operator (whose first language is apparently not English) asked me if I could hold. I courteously agreed but after 15 minutes of listening to elevator music was mysteriously sent back to the main touch-tone menu. This time the system said all operators were busy (doing what, I don't know; surely it wasn't customer support), the expected wait time was more than half an hour, and I should try later. And oh yes, they also canceled my account for non-payment (though I never got any renewal notice, and my year hadn't quite run out yet), and forwarded my request for renewal to their accounting department, which has been sitting on its hands for the past three days.

I would not want to libel anyone, let alone a group of people. So let me put it this way, I think: [I am free to think what I will, right?] 1. Canaca.com inc is blatantly perpetrating fraud on the internet. 2. They knowingly engage in the same false advertising for over a year. 3. They intentionally mislead their customers in order to charge for another year of service. 4. I have a lot of respect for the Canadian People, but this company represents the worst of any USA company I have ever seen operate and is a serious misrepresentation of the Canadian People. If I was Canadian, I would abhor the stench this represents to all Canadian people. 5. You could not pay me to use the services of this company. 6. I would vehemently oppose anyone who wanted to try this hosting service. To explain my thinking: Fraud is: 1. “Intentional deception resulting in injury to another person” or, 2. “A person or persons who make deceitful pretenses” or 3. “Something intended to deceive; deliberate trickery intended to gain an advantage” A year ago, I put considerable effort into comparing web hosting services. I think the deceitful pretences I perceive are valid, they exist over a year later. One of the most onerous pretences was that of “24/7 phone support.” This was one of the deciding factors for me. It was not true when I signed up. It is not true now, more than a year later. I could not get my domain name to work reliably. I thought it could be something I was doing wrong. I could not get support for any resolution for this problem. If the domain name does not work, the site is useless. I think this constitutes fraud at the basest level. It was clear that there was no refund forthcoming. I through up my hands in abject disgust. A year later, I get an email from canaca.com, stating that my domain name will NOT be automatically renewed. This seems to me to have been a trick. I let the domain name expire, only to have my bank account raided for another year’s payment [not for the domain name, but for the web hosting]. Canaca.com has now played with me for over a month, and now finally tells me that they will not refund my money, but will host my site for the entire year! The name of this company is an insult to the Canadian people. I feel so stupid for falling for this kind of fraud. Please do not make my mistake! Any other hosting has to be better! On a relative rating scale I would use canaca.com as the definitive example of what a zero is. Even on price, to pay anything for this service is a serious mistake. I think all of the positive reviews on this site for canaca.com must be from charlatans. I honestly do not know how anyone could like to be cheated. I think all customers of canaca.com are cheated. …but hey, that is just my opinion. Read all the others! I fully intend to make the truth know to any and all about Canaca.com

I am currently hosting with Canaca. I am unhappy! The billing department went 6 months without billing me, which is my fault as well. However, I received three bills in one day. They suspended my account and demanded payment. E mail server rarely works, ftp never works, support is slow and they answer around the question. The hosting disk space is awesome. I haven't seen a company that can top it for the price.

Recently someone launched a malicious attack on our web site by continuously downloading a file which caused our traffic to exceed the limit and they charge us $1092 for the overage. Canaca does not warn us of approaching the limit, and does not shutdown the website, did not provide info on how to block IP's. But worst of all, they do not let us or help us install software that can thwart such attacks (I need root access to install mod_bandwidth, an Apache module). It is now clear to me that they that don't care about customers. I already paid for 2 years of their service, now I just have to give it up and find another hosting company.

canaca sucks.

never can get on ftp with canaca.com
every night for 6 hours if canaca.com hosting the site will be out of order.

there support@canaca.com is the worst ever. you send details to canaca.com and canaca will reply, it seems fine please check it again. nothing solved by canaca.com cheap web hosting.

canaca.com says 99.9% up time to them means 99 minutes of the day.

canaca.com false advertises on their website, there is no 1800 support like canaca.com says. the canaca.com sales rep will laugh at you for wanting a service that a real hosting company will offer.

my advice is dont support this company. they also have another company that has all the same servers canaca runs a company called
acanac webhosting. they are the same company same person answers the phone but they have different numbers.

canaca and acanac are crooks

Here is my quick review of Canaca:

The speed as usually slow around peak hours - especially FTP. The service is slow to repond or doesn't respond. I wouldn't really have noticed this but I got a free account with 1and1 and everything is so much faster. The prices at Canaca are pretty good though but there is better out there.

Canaca.com web hosting seems drastically oversold. I often go days when I cannot get a list let alone use my site. Two months and it still is not build well enough to use because of canacas poor quality service.

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