Shinjiru Technology is Horrible Offshore Web Hosting

We have had some bad experiences with web hosting companies, but none of them compare to Shinjiru when it comes to poor quality of service. It all started a little over a year ago when one of the No Limit List prototypes was being harassed by an attorney in the state of Virginia. The lawyer wanted a page deleted from the prototype and we would have had to betray a user in good standing to meet the timetable set forth by Network Solutions to avoid account termination unless we moved the site to different hosting company. At the time we didn’t know if the user was telling the truth or not, so we were not about to sanction someone just because a lawyer called them a liar. The lawyer also was a specialist in cyber law, so we concluded that the best way to protect future hosts from harassment would be to move the site offshore. It worked like a charm for dealing with the lawyer, but led to a whole new set of problems.

Problems with Shinjiru first became obvious in September and October of 2010 when our chief developer would come home from work to discover his prototype offline for no apparent reason at least once a week. In each case he would complain to Shinjiru and they would get site back up with explanation related to "urgent maintenance" and "scheduled urgent maintenance". The last explanation was suspect because people rarely plan on having to do maintenance urgently. He didn’t realize how bad the problem was at first, but it was bad enough keep uptime at a far lower rate than the 99% we had purchased.

In December of 2010 there was a huge disaster just around Christmas time that resulted in 3 days of downtime for the one website hosted exclusively on their server. This problem was so bad that we couldn’t even login to our Plesk Control Panel because it too was down. As our chief developer struggled to get his site back online he received an email notifying him of an error on his home page. That home page error was the result of a Web.Config file being corrupted by Shinjiru in such a way that it produced an IIS runtime error displaying the connection string login data for his database including its IP address, admin username, and password. This gross breach of security by Shinjiru was so shockingly awful that we decided to seek other offshore hosting solutions despite having paid for a whole year of unmetered bandwidth services in advance.

By March of 2011 we had moved all our files away from Shinjiru with the exception of one database because when sites went down in the past databases always seemed to do just fine. Then Shinjiru experienced an ever bigger disaster that disabled our ability to access our database completely and again our Plesk Control Panel could not be accessed. After several days of demanding our data and a refund for the rest of the year we had purchased we finally got both thanks to complaining persistently on Shinjiru’s Facebook page when they were trying to promote a sale. We would constantly bombard their Facebook page with questions wondering how they found the time to promote a sale when their customers couldn’t even login to their admin section or access their data.

In the end we got an apology and a refund for the previous months where they provided such horrible service even though didn’t ask for either. Still the money was not enough to make up for the time we lost due to horrible incompetence. We highly recommend that anyone experiencing an issue with Shijiru post their complaints on their Facebook page (linked to above next to the "Learn More" text).