Canaca Hosting Sucks!
Hosting plays a major role in the health of your web site in search engines. If any search engine’s bot encounter problems (server configuration, down times, long access times) while accessing your site, this will affect your rankings.
The worst option one could choose in Canada is Canaca.com. They are the worst hosting company we’ve worked with until now. It’s worse than those in Trinidad Tobago. Among the problems we have encountered almost daily, are:
- FTP server is down or is blocking access to any user
- email server is down, so we can’t communicate with our clients
- web site is down (this is really a torture)
- not receiving any answers from the technical team
But the worst happened yesterday when their own name servers went down. This means that our domain name, www.pitstopmedia.com, and other thousands of websites were, practically, nonexistent for search engines.
When a search engine bot tries to index your page, they will first try to resolve the name server. If the name server is down, the bot will think there is not such site as yours and therefore it will de-index it from their database.
Also, you will be throwing money out of the window with your PPC campaigns, since Adwords and others will charge you for clicks, and your website will be down when people click on your ads.
This is why we are moving our website from canaca.com and we advise every one to do the same. If you need SEO assistance with moving your website to a more reliable SEO hosting company please contact us and we’ll be glad to help you.
Also if you’ve encountered similar problems with canaca.com I suggest talking with your lawyer and take action agains them.
Also you may read other comments about canaca.com below:
CANACA SUCKS! POOR customer service, Loads of DOWNTIME!!!!!!
“When I first set up with Canaca almost a year ago I had a number of problems. These were resolved usually after several emails. It seemed to get better for awhile, but now…. Last week I noticed that the several of my domains were no longer listed in the MX records. I contacted Canaca to fix this problem. They fixed that but broke a redirect I had them setup last September. The website has been unavailable since Friday. I haven’t had any response to my emails since Monday. I am seriously considering moving my sites to another host.”
Canaca.com’s Technical Support: Non-existant. Canaca’s Servers ALWAYS crash
We have been with them for two months and have had nothing but trouble. DNS problems especially. Tech support can take days to answer and don’t seem to really read the questions asked. I am waiting to hear back about a refund.
I can’t believe that any hosting company could be so uncaring. I am leaving canaca.com ASAP! That won’t be easy. Who can you trust today.
Unbelievably bad. Canaca.com isconstandly down, and had maybe — MAYBE — 90% uptime. Completely unacceptable. All of a sudden we would find our site shut down because we hadn’t paid — granted, that’s their right, but we were supposed to be invoiced and we never, ever heard from them.
Pitstop Media is a Vancouver based search engine marketing company which offers results oriented PPC and SEO services. If you need help with your search engine optimization projects or with pay per click management and/or PPC optimization please contact us for a free, no obligation quote. We’ve helped companies rank on the first page of Google in a short period of time for highly competitive terms, and we’ve reduced paid advertising cost by as much as 148% while increased AdWords conversion rates by as much as 410% . Let us rank your website on the first page, too!
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Michael Williams said:
Jan 09, 09 at 7:55 amYes, Canaca is one of the worst. But to avoid search engines failing to find your site. Set your robot txt file to read your site once a day, not all the time. (only do that with regularly updated blogs or other user generated content pages)
Canaca, does not have a support dept. they are all outsourced. I believe that they are out of several basements! Only upside to Canaca is their pricing…. id rather have quality because it will end up costing you more with site downtime.
Earth4Energy said:
Mar 19, 09 at 1:59 pmA really great post here. I assume there’s a chance to post more about related theme here. Really great. Thank you.
Aziz said:
May 30, 09 at 4:15 pmHeyy
Canaca is the cheapest company and the have the cheapest server and support people,, I advise who still in canaca to move to another host ,, bcz it’s reallly sucksss also no feature’s and tool’s in the resller CP.I had a hard time with canaca.
Acme said:
Jun 10, 09 at 2:03 pmI just bought the small bronze plan with them and its a nightmare, I have 30 days return right so I will cancel, but does someone else know a good hosting company ?
Pickering said:
Jun 21, 09 at 10:15 amI’ve been with them for a few years and had no trouble until June 2009. If memory serves correct, they used to have telephone support. But now it seems support is 100% e-mail and is outsourced to India (and whoever they are using, they aren’t even smart enough to use western pseudonyms), who are terrible.
It takes several e-mails playing “broken telephone” with them before they understand the question / problem.
I’m currently researching other options.
njaguar said:
Aug 23, 09 at 1:55 amI have been using Canaca for 2 years now and they have been nothing but awesome. I have never had a problem with them and if I ever did they would get back to me within 6 hours.
I’d recommend Canaca to anyone looking for a web host. They are just #1 and my servers have never been down due to them.
TraiaN said:
Aug 23, 09 at 8:54 pmWe are not using canaca’s services for almost a year. maybe they’re getting better….
oy vey said:
Oct 07, 09 at 9:57 ami recently switched my canaca pop account to gmail and it worked fine for 2 weeks. then, i stopped receiving emails on Oct 01, 2009. I quickly figured that it must be something with canaca, and immediately opened a ticket with them. i pledged to get some sort of an update on my issue, for days. it is oct 07 today, almost a week later, and i got one response from one of their team members that ‘issue has been resolved’, which was not true. today, i tried adding my pop account to gmail again, and it worked. but still not a word from canaca. i have a feeling this was a screw-up on a massive scale, based on the total silence from their end, and am curious to see if anyone knows what might have caused this, or if this has happened to anyone else.
the error message i got from gmail after attempting to add my pop to my gmail was:
There was a problem connecting to mail.lab303.com
Server returned error: “Connection refused”
i am sure there are more of ‘us’ out there, let’s see what we can do to get a full explanation of what went on.
oy vey said:
Oct 07, 09 at 10:12 amoh, btw, i had a string of issues with them about 2 years ago, and called the mississauga office. i talked to the sales person and told her that if i don’t talk to someone in tech support TODAY, i will pull my account. strangely enough, my phone rang long distance and i talked to a guy with indian accent, over a very poor phone line that had an echo delay of about 1-2 seconds. probably skype. so, yes, their techs are all in india, and needless to say, my issue was resolved promptly.
Mr. Chris said:
Oct 07, 09 at 6:54 pmMy website with Canaca has been down for over the last four hours. Strange thing is, it’s like my entire FTP account has been wiped clean and nobody on their end has been answering my calls. Does anyone know of a good reliable web hosting service in Canada?
Mine Also said:
Oct 08, 09 at 2:48 pmMy website with Canaca is also effed.
No e-mail, POP, web, ftp, nothing.
I have a feeling due to the 72 hour nature of this downtime this is serious. Their tech support used to be good — lately it takes 6 hours for an e-mail response and nothing is being repaired.
Emily B. said:
Nov 13, 09 at 12:07 pmMy site’s been down since October 1st (now Nov. 12) and they keep telling me the issue has been resolved and/or suggesting I re-upload my entire site (which I have done, and it has not solved the problem).
Just wanted to throw that in there too. I’m not happy at all with this as my website is the face of my company.
One more person looking for a recommendation for a server…
TraiaN said:
Nov 13, 09 at 1:05 pmwe’re using netfirms.ca and we’re quite happy with them
Brian-T: said:
Nov 30, 09 at 7:04 pmThis is unbelievable. I would love to sue canaca for all the lost business and grief they have caused me.
All my sites and emails are down and I can’t even contact them to get support anyone know of a good real canadian server that is affordable?
Tracy said:
Nov 30, 09 at 7:05 pmWell today they are completely down again. i think this happens 2 a year that they have a big Crash or a big problem that i have seen. there website is also down so I think the complete network is down. the last 12 months i have been having more problems ever ftp uploading also having a hard time getting into my emails in cpanel. i went over to host gator for a new project that I am starting what a big difference : ). cancan was my first and my last. to bad ,they used to be good hosting company a long time ago. But luckily my website is not a revenue generating website this has just been a hobby good luck to you all.
Antony said:
Nov 30, 09 at 7:16 pmI have been with Canaca since 2002 and overall I have found them to be fairly good. But in recent times there has been an increase in downtimes and a lack of contact options for them.
I cite this example.
My site went down along with their own site. The only option was to email them but I couldn’t do this because both my and their sites were down.
There should always be a contact number for support.
I hunted around and found their technical support gentlemans contact details
Paul Louro
52 Knightswood Ave
Maple, ON L6A 1M2
(905) 553-3807
I provide it here so that others may avoid my frustrations.
Safir said:
Dec 15, 09 at 1:06 pmNothing but good things to say about canaca. never had any problems. once or twice i have had a problem with there ensim control panel. but then they switched me to cpanel. I do agree with some of the comments. phone support would really help customers alot though. but email is good too i guess
Martin Johnson said:
Feb 04, 10 at 4:34 pmWe’ve been with Canaca hosting for many years – and have found them to be very excellent. We currently host more than a dozen domains through them and have nothing but praise for their service.
I’m very surprised at all the negative experiences and comments above. I can’t even recall the last time our websites were down, and I’ve *NEVER* had difficulty logging into our various FTP areas (and we do so on nearly a daily basis).
Safaa Almasoudi said:
Feb 18, 10 at 7:04 pmAfter two and half years of hard work on my website, everything is gone in one day.
I got only apologizes from canaca.
A month ago thiers server crashed and from that time I lost some files and articles, tried my best to fix the problems but I couldn’t because problems from hosting company (CANACA).
Contact them they could not fix any problem.
Finally my website disappeared and I contact them and after few hours I got this reply:
“Hello,
Please accept our apologizes for the inconvenience and the bad experience which you have had with us.
Unfortunately the hard disk which your account is hosted on has been crashed and we are restoring your account from the backup server.
This process takes a few hours time. We do our best to fix the issue as soon as possible. Please wait. Your patience is more appreciated.
Best Regards,
Canaca Com Inc.
Please mail us about the quality of your experience at feedback@canaca.com”
Went to my website there’s nothing, checked cpanel the “public_html” and “www” both were empty, and there’s only one file left “cgi-bin”.
So I lost my website, money, time and two and half years hard work and got Canaca’s apologizes.
Jake said:
Apr 07, 10 at 2:05 pmCanaca hosting is not good.My advise to all out there would be to not go in for Canaca, because, even though they were allright about 2 years back, its not the case now.
Their mail servers are down every 2-3 days, and where they used to respond to/resolve problems within a few minutes, it now takes hours, and your website, or your email servers could be down.
We had several problems with Canaca, and the problems have been nearly every 2 days, without respite.
Evan said:
Apr 22, 10 at 5:27 pmI use to have regular account with them for 5 domains.
This is the most sucking hosting company ever!
All of my web sites were offline all the time.
I almost lost few of my costumer’s because of those idiots.
I was about to take them to court.
In the end of my total cancellation of that account, those idiots send me Islamic propaganda sht.
DIE CANACA stupid azzz. Go host u Camels in desert. Stop screw people!
Steve said:
Jun 10, 10 at 4:46 pmFor a marketing company you show a TERRIBLE lack of understanding of how search engines work. If Google checks your site and it is down it doesn’t de-index it. Get real! Thanks for reminding me not to use pitstop’s services after a comment like that!
TraiaN said:
Jun 10, 10 at 5:08 pmSteve, when a website is down at the moment search engine bots are trying to access it, it could mean that the website doesn’t exist anymore, not necessarily because of hosting issues, but also maybe the owner wanted to shut it down. After several unsuccessful attempts your website will be de-listed from the respective search engines, because there is no point in trying to access a website that doesn’t exist anymore. From time to time, based on the popularity of your website, search engines will try to access again and again, every time at longer intervals and it will list the website again.
I totally don’t recommend it, but if you think it’s not a bad thing to have the website down then why don’t you shut yours down for a couple of weeks and see the results? Or block the root in the robots.txt, which is almost the same thing… Good luck!
Sam said:
Aug 05, 10 at 11:48 pmCanaca are down right now, all their websites, all their hosted plans. What a useless company
zulker hyder said:
Aug 23, 10 at 3:59 pmcanaca is ok for me,not too bed not to good, i am with canaca since 2005. they used to have phone support now dont, only email support, and they used to have 3 package for share hosting, now only one, cheap hosting,disk space, bandwidth is ok with me.
my comment is neutral. becuase thier reply by email is 12-24 hours some times reply via email is is half hour. my comment neither negative nor pogetive, neutral
thanks
robin
newyork
queens