This is my second post on Blacknight, it won’t be as clinical or as favourable as my previous one.

To surmise, over the past while I’ve found them to be inadequate on so many levels, the company has spent more than the difference between the average insanely expensive provider in Ireland and any Blacknight shared package in my time trying to make their solution work.

Here are the more annoying of the problems I’ve experienced with them.

• Everything you do on the control panel becomes an action to be scheduled, these have become locked at least 5 times, once on a Friday evening. It was a database restore, the database was inaccessible on a production environment for the whole weekend. They dealt with the ticket on Monday.
• As of a week ago, incremental backups of the VPS don’t work, you only find out when you try to restore.
• Blacknight handle all the windows updates of your VPS, you don’t find this out until you file a ticket saying why doesn’t windows update work (service is disabled)
• Its x64 windows 2003 with IIS running in 32 bit mode with plesk running on top of that in 32 bit. Precarious to say the least.
• Installing MSSQL 2005 was a pain in the head, I spent hours and days staring at the same error screen, I tried support on the issue, it took them a long time to figure out. Given that MSSQL is a pretty standard thing to wish to install on a Windows VPS there should really be a doc on this. I explain how its done below
• Support by phone is a myth, they are pretty much just trained to redirect you to the ticket support where they can ignore your ticket for 1 hour minimum.
• Domains are assigned web spaces, web spaces have to be activated in order to ftp files to them, you can only activate one at a time. Whats wrong with a folder you have access to with sub folders where each domain goes. The way they handle your multiple websites per account is stupidly complex.
• Transferring a domain  from one package to another requires you remove it first, you can’t just alter the DNS and point it at your already set up system, it would actually be a lot easier to buy a package with someone else if you want to upgrade.
• Whatever way they have it set up, plesk won’t switch me over to ASP .net 2, have to re-register websites manually.

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