Yes, I hate XO Communications
Update Feb 28: The folks at XO have joined in the conversation and cleared up many of the issues I was having. I still think they need to clarify these things in their backend system, but it seems as if there is a way to do redirects, just no way to get help if something goes wrong.
Feb 23 – I have moved the client to HostGator.
Every once in a while an SEM consultant will come across a gem of a client. One that understands enough about our business to trust and respect the recommendations we make. It is these clients that we get the most involved with and spend extra time ensuring their success. And it hurts me when someone else decreases those businesses’ chances for that success. All because a service provider is cutting costs in tech support.
I got one such client recently from a referral. They did the unthinkable and brought me in as the SEO consultant while the site was being redesigned. We had some issues with the developers, so I have been fixing some things since the site was completed this weekend.
The fixing includes adding tracking codes, unique title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags. This also means removing archaic table based code and inline styling. This is while I await the flash files so that I can change some links on their homepage and in navigation. Why navigation? They used relative URLs. Yay.
What more you ask? How else can a project that started so well go wrong? It’s not the developers I have issues with, it is their host, XO Communications. You see, the client’s site is on a Linux-based server running Apache. Yes, I was thrilled to see that making small changes like 301 redirects should in fact remain small.
No. Apparently, XO Communications does not allow their clients to use mod_rewrite. XO does not make it clear how to use an htaccess file and what issues might arise when it is uploaded incorrectly. You can place an .htaccess file, but it won’t work but if it isn’t coded and loaded as a UNIX file, there are line break issues that cause issues. There is no way to point their /index.html to their www and non-www (which XO nicely redirects for everyone without asking which is preferred). On top of that, any old links are wasted at this moment until they can be changed. Why? I cannot redirect them using anything more than a meta refresh, which is what I might have to resort to in the end. They might as well be on a Windows server, they might have more control that way.
Update: Please see the comments from XO below for more instruction on how to use htaccess in their server environment.
Contacting tech support was as helpful as their help section of the website. Their first response:
Unfortunately, we cannot change any settings on our Apache server to allow for whatever directives you are using in your .htaccess file. You can find a lot of information on what .htaccess file directives you can use on our server by using our knowledge base.
To find all of the .htaccess information we have, simple click on “Help” in the upper right hand corner of your Gateway. Once you get to the knowledge base, simply search for keyword “htaccess” and you will find all the information you need. I sincerely hope this assists you as our support is very limited on actually helping you with the actual directives.
The second response from XO after asking what I can do to redirect files on the site was worse.
I am sorry to report that we do not provide any assistance with setting up redirects. You can, however, find these instructions in the Help Center.
[I took them out, sorry, but worthless, I had seen them hours before.]
Our Professional Services team can set up your redirects for a fee. They can also optimize your web site so it is ranked higher on search engines.
Professional Services is currently offering 20% off their fees for the work they do. Would you like a free quote from them? Please let me know and I will forward your request.
Did you catch that? They can set up redirects for a FEE and on top of that, they can optimize my web site so it ranks higher! Really?!?!?!
XO Communications is resorting to holding the server functions hostage from their paying customers so that they will pay more. They are taking something that we work hard to convince people is not snake oil, and hide it from their clients under lock and key.
You’d think they would be a cheaper host then right? If my client prepays for a year, they are paying $162 to XO Communications for the year. I pay $120 for the year to HostGator and get more control to my server than my client could ever dream of! And I am not talking high level server control here people. I am a marketer by trade, I only know enough server side to make myself dangerous.
I have scoured the internet for this entire day to figure out how to deal with this short of telling the client to cut and run. That call is tomorrow.
XO Communications you should be ashamed.
Oh and I was on twitter all day alerting you to this issue using your @XOCares account. If you guys want any help with social media and customer relations, let me know. I know some awesome people who could help you out. Until then, please know that I will take as many people away from you as I can and push them over to any number of hosts that are open to assisting small business owners succeed in business.
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19 responses to "Yes, I hate XO Communications"
Wow. So glad I use HostGator. I haven’t had a problem with them yet. It’s amazing what some of these companies think they can get away with because their customers are too ignorant to know better.
Thanks for spreading the word about this sham of a company.
haha… I feel the same way about that company. Funny thing is that they are based in Fort lauderdale next to a client of mine. Its a super small office as well. I was forced to use them and quickly wanted to find any sharp object and jab myself in the eye repeatedly.
Good luck with that call hun. I feel your pain for sure and the client will have no idea what you are saying but hopefully they are smart enough to listen to you so that you can get them back on track which is why you are so good!
In response to this issue, XO does allow customers to use mod rewrite on their hosting accounts via .htaccess files at no extra cost or involvement from Customer Care. We do apologize for any miscommunication that has occurred between you and our Care agents. The mod rewrite documentation is available in the XO Hosting Online Gateway describing how to complete these directives. 301 redirects are very popular and crucial in building strong SEO and are used by many of our customers. Our Professional Services team can be contracted to perform website design, development, and SEO services for any of our customers that do not have the time to implement these tasks on their own. Again, our customers can implement the mod rewrite rules on their own with no cost.
Hi John,
First, thank you for commenting. I’m glad you all are paying attention, but I think you need to review your own help section.
The functions of the .htaccess file your clients can modify are
I was directed to your Help area by your Customer Support as well. This section on htaccess houses answers for the following questions only:
The Newest Addition to this list is Directives affecting URLs within your Web site:.This lists the Redirect Permanent (that I had to learn about from another site, since traditionally it is Redirect 301), but even then the htaccess file I uploaded would not register. Only the last URL would be affected. This was all confirmed by another blog post on the subject XO Hosting Review.When contacting customer support I got the responses above. They provided no support but to say that my client could pay XO for SEO help. Sorry guys, that is what I am. You need to stop making yourselves out to be SEOs and stick to hosting.
I didn't even mention the issue with WordPress. Apparently there is a redirect in place so that the sub folder cannot be the URL. Any browser that openeded example.com/blog was kicked back to the homepage. A plugin is required to stop this from happening, and even then, permalinks are next to impossible because WordPress cannot write to the htaccess file. Changing permissions is impossible there too.
Sorry, doesn't change anything that I can redirect one URL, and no one has figured out how to fix it yet. Trust me. Had they, I would have found the solution and there is none.
The article “Directives affecting URLs within your Web site” is not a new addition to the XO Knowledge base the last time that page was even updated was 5/15/2008. This article explains how to do a 301 and a 302 redirect. These directives are based on the mod_alias Apache module.
*****
RedirectPermanent
Example: RedirectPermanent /junk.html http://yourwebsiteaddress.com/new.html
Description: Sends an external redirect asking the client to fetch a different URL and returns a status code of 301. If the browser asks for junk.html, it will be redirected to http://yourwebsiteaddress.com/new.html.
RedirectTemp
Example: RedirectTemp /junk.html http://yourwebsiteaddress.com/new.html
Description: Sends an external redirect asking the client to fetch a different URL and returns a status code of 302. If the browser asks for junk.html, it will be redirected to http://yourwebsiteaddress.com/new.html.
*****
The issue you mentioned concerning the last rule working, as well as the problem you cited in XO Hosting Review blog post, has to do with the return characters “%0D” that Windows adds to the end of a plain text file. The .htaccess file has to be in a UNIX format. Windows formats a text file with a line feed and a carriage return while UNIX formats the end of a file with only a line feed. For example, if you create an .htaccess file in Notepad and upload it to the server you are sure to get a parsing error. However, if you use a code editor (such as PSPad) it allows you to choose what kind of format the file should be in; choose UNIX and you’ll see no such errors. You could also use the free text editor tool in the XO File Manager like our friend Ashton.
Just recently our Professional Services team launched their newly redesigned portfolio. The main URL of the portfolio changed so we had to put some 301 redirects in place. Here is a snippet of our active htaccess file on the old domain (concentric.com/professional-services/):
*****
RedirectPermanent /professional-services/ http://www.cts.com/
RedirectPermanent /professional-services/index.html http://www.cts.com/
RedirectPermanent /professional-services/portfolio.html http://www.cts.com/portfolio.html
*****
And Here is the live htaccess file on our new domain (cts.com): (numbered for reference)
*****
1. CGIMapExtension /usr/local/bin/php5 php
2. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^cts.com$ [NC]
3. RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.cts.com/$1 [R=301,L]
4. RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
5. RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
6. RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]
7. RedirectPermanent /professional-services/ http://www.cts.com/
*****
Line one simply enables php5. (We have three versions of PHP for customers to choose from: 3/4/5. 4 is default.)
Line two and three is there to force ‘non-www’ traffic to ‘www’ which you mentioned in the 5th paragraph of your post as not working. This functionality works great, see for yourself by going to cts.com without the www and watch the headers push a 301 to http://www.cts.com.
Line four, five, and six are the mod_rewrite rules we have in place to rewrite the URL on the server side from: http://www.cts.com/search-engine-optimization.html to what the actual URL really is:
http://www.cts.com/index.php?id=37
Line 7 is a 301 redirect for traffic going to: http://www.cts.com/professional-services/ which is 301’d to http://www.cts.com/
In regards to the WordPress redirection problem. There is not a redirect in place per se, WordPress is getting an internal error and incorrectly redirecting to the root / URL of the site. Technically the XO Hosting platform is not redirecting you, WordPress is. This is fixed, as you mentioned, by using a plug-in which disables canonical URL’s. Canonical URL’s in WordPress is in place to 301 badly formatted URL’s to the proper URL as explained by Mark: http://markjaquith.wordpress.com/2007/09/25/wordpress-23-canonical-urls/. In Mark’s post he explains that WordPress condenses the various alternative URLs that it allows; which is good for SEO. The key component that causes the inconvenience with WordPress permalinks and canonical URLs has already been identified by our Professional Services team; Our Engineering team is now tasked with testing and implementing a sound solution.
In conclusion, perhaps we could elaborate further in the XO Knowledge Base, but what you have written in your blog is incorrect. XO Hosting customers can do 301 redirects, they can do as many redirects as they want, they can use mod_rewrite for friendly URLs and non-www redirection, and they can do all of this without any additional cost. The WordPress problems concerning the canonical names and permalinks are known issues on our shared hosting platform and steps have already been taken to correct. However, these two WordPress issues were not mentioned in your original post and are not at all related to mod_rewrite, or other .htaccess directives. XO Customer Care is not trained to assist with any scripting issues, but they are able to point customers to the free documentation provided in the XO Knowledge Base that covers these topics.
As you know, designing, developing, marketing, and maintaining a website is not a simple task that everyone has time to invest; if it were simple there would not be a need to pay for website developers or SEO specialists. Like you, XO offers these Professional Services for a fee to assist our clients meet their business goals.
Our company, founded in 1996, is not headquartered in a “super small office in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida” as Amanda described. It is located in Herndon, Virginia. XO Communications is one of the nation’s largest telecommunications service providers focused exclusively on businesses, government, and carrier and wholesale service providers nationwide. Our nationwide, private multi-terabit network provides service to more than 75 local markets.
Hello Kate
I guess that I do not totally agree with your statement that XO does not know how to search engine optimize a site. I had them perform some work for me in the past and now I rank quite well for my iNIC brand due to their efforts
Thanks
TC
TC, I am happy that they helped you out. But they are making their hosting impossible for other SEO agencies and consultants to work with. It’s a bad business practice to over charge people for hosting and not give them complete access to their account. They should not be requiring their clients to come to them if they would like SEO assistance.
And are you ranking for anything other than your brand name? Had they actually helped you, you would have title tags, meta descriptions, and modern code for your site. Just a few of the things that an SEO does initially. But seeing as all your site does is post links to new stories, I am not sure what you would rank for.
Regardless, I am glad you are happy, but for the rest of the businesses on the web, this is a bad deal.
First off, I apologize to John, his comment was put into spam somehow. I wanted to make sure that XO knew I wasn’t deleting anything. I will review the new data and make any new comments or edits to my post.
And thank you John for taking the time to address this issue. I am hoping that this situation will bring to light any issues you might be having with your system and working with SEO consultants. I’ll address you last comment soon.
Hi John,
Here is my proposed solution. I am going to edit the sections of my review that are not correct the way they are stated. It is possible that the way the .htaccess file was uploaded affected the redirects. But what I experienced was that only one of them worked, and it was only the last one. The only documentation on the subject was the post noted above which validated what I was seeing. Seeing that lead me to believe there was no way to redirect anything. In contacting support, no help was provided, and the Help Section of your client side is very lacking in support to your clients.
I thank you for commenting and making some of this clear, but I am going to suggest that you make it a priority internally to edit and beef up your support section. Make it clear that there are problems with WordPress installations and how to fix them. And you never addressed the permalinks issue within WordPress either. If a user wants to use permalinks, there has to be an appended index.php for them to work, typical of Windows Server environments.
Cover in your support files that if the htaccess file isn’t working that the client needs to check how the file is formatted and uploaded. This is all information that you clients should be able to search for without having to write a post and get responses that way.
In this new business environment, you should enable and train your customer contact points to help your clients in every situation. And if they don’t know the answer, who to escalate the issue to. The answer “we don’t support that” and “you can pay us to help” are just sub par in the hosting world.
Again, I will make the necessary corrections, but I suggest you do the same. Explain things to your customers, those that don’t know how to use an htaccess file will never know, and those that do will love you for helping them understand.
Hi Kate, thank you for posting this because it really helps to know I’m not crazy to expect more from XO. I’ve spent the entire day trying to get an .htaccess file to work on XO. I read several tutorials and XO’s help files (which are still wrong and very incomplete), and of course I received 500 errors multiple times as I tried different options. Waiting 5 minutes for a refresh seems ridiculous. Our IT manager finally got the custom 404 page to work by ignoring XO’s help file and using ErrorDocument instead of ErrorPage, but my redirects still don’t. I tried their RedirectPermanent, Redirect permanent, Redirect 301, took out the www, added an absolute url to the first (old uri), you get the picture. Once I figured out that I have to use their file editor at least making some changes didn’t pull the site down.
Once I recover from this, I will try again, but it might be easier just to change hosts.
Hi Karen!
Thanks for commenting. Yes, it was just easier to move my client to another host. Check the comments on here from them, and see if you can get your htaccess file loaded right. I had some issues loading some files before due to the Unix issue. But if it were me, when the contract is up, just move.
I just got off the phone with XO Customer Service about this. I am using CMS Made Simple and can’t get the redirects to work for pretty urls. They offered to send me a quote for their web services. I asked if they receive a lot of disgruntled calls in regard to the .htaccess issues. She said I was the first
, but that they do get a lot of calls about WordPress. I’m looking into switching to another provider.
@stephanie
Thanks for the comment. Yes, I would recommend another provider ASAP. It’s not only cheaper elsewhere, but also easier to get help.
OMG, I just wrote a message to XO regarding their company. Notice I use Host Gator too lol.
“Hi, I work for Pacific Imaging.
The first time I tried to call, after speaking to someone that was in the wrong department I was put on hold for over 10 mins, then because I wasn’t with the owner of the company, he couldn’t give me any help whatsoever (even though he got all my information, and that is why I got this unsolicited email that I am responding to which pisses me off even more.)
So, when I called back the next day with the owners next to me, the guy didn’t even ask me for the owner, but told me that since we were on the mid level service that he couldn’t help me with my problem. So I asked him, “ok, well shouldn’t it be pretty straigtforward to get a .php page working on my website. No help again, just go to the search center in my login blah blah. I know it can’t be that difficult, I just want some general instructions on how the hell to get php pages working. Why would that not be mid-level support? Why is it so difficult in the first place? So that people pay for the high-level support? Especially at $14.95 a month…what are they paying so much for? The only reason we don’t go with a $5 dollar service (like my own at HostGator that has live 24 hour chat support regardless of who you are, and that help you with plenty of technical support,) Is because, you take away email routing support immediately. Another dirty trick, especially when you have already paid for that month…doesn’t make sense.
Maybe you can redeem your company by trying to explain these things, and more importantly giving me some real insight on how to get php pages working? It really is just ridiculous. As of now, I would never recommend your company.”
Thought you might like that I at least let them know how horrible they are.
Oh yea, btw, if anyone can help me with the above issue I would greatly appreciate.
So, has anyone found a solution to writing our own htaccess files for sites hosted on XO? I mean, I would like to 301 redirect multiple URL’s to new ones. Can anyone point me to an example?
I’ve heard about the returns, the Redirect 301/RedirectPermanent, etc. But still have problems. Am I just writing the code wrong or do I really have to hire someone from XO to provide this service?
Thanks!
If you read the comments from XO there are a few tricks, but sadly I don’t have an example. I moved the site to another host within a few days. Sorry I can’t help more than that. Try to move asap. It should not be this hard.
Thanks for writing this. A client of mine uses XO and I have been trying to get a 301 redirect work for better part of the day.
I was getting the 500 error parsing message.
I saved my file as a unix file and now, the server just IGNORES my .htaccess files.
I give up. We are moving hosts.
Thanks for helping me to remain sane.
Hi Kate,
I am not an XO customer, but I am administering a website hosted by XO. I share in your grief trying to get htaccess directives to work properly. Just trying to get PHP5 support has taken me over an hour, and I haven’t even started mod_rewrite testing yet.
Thankfully, my client has given me the liberty to switch hosts if I can’t get my CMS to work with XO. At this rate, I will be playing that card in a day or two.