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This is a hostgator review posted by markb1439@yahoo.com on 04 May 2008

After careful research, I chose HostGator as our new web provider. My wife signed up for a Baby account last night, and I got to work moving our site over. Tonight, the cPanel login stopped working. I couldn’t figure out why until I happened to notice an e-mail saying that it was necessary to call and verify the account to have it set up. Funny, it was already set up last night, and there was no advance warning that this might be required. But now, it didn’t work any more and there was an ugly “trouble” page showing up at our domain.

So she called the number specified in the e-mail. After waiting for a while, she was told that this wasn’t the verification department. My wife explained that this was the number she had been told to call, and after another wait she was connected to someone else. But that person said they couldn’t do the verification because they were having phone problems and couldn’t transfer her.

My wife asked why this was even happening, and she was told that her account was “flagged” because she had a “foreign-sounding” last name. Yes, she is Asian. Yes, she has an Asian last name consisting of two letters. But it’s her name. The HG rep said that this doesn’t happen to all accounts, so my wife was incensed that she was singled out because her name indicated that she is “foreign.” My wife felt that this is racism, and I agree. (BTW, she’s been in the USA since 1975.) But the person still couldn’t actually DO the verification, however she swore that someone would call back and do it within three minutes.

That person did call as promised. He further explained that the account had been flagged because there is a North Carolina address associated with the credit card, yet I had been logging in to work on the site from Ohio. (We are visiting family.) My wife tried to explain that the whole point of a web-based control panel is that you can log in from ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD! Yet we were put through an inconvenience for doing that. As much as we didn’t like our previous host (1and1), they NEVER did anything like this.

So, our HG experience can be summarized like this:

1) Signed up for account using valid credit card.
2) Started working on the site.
3) Account was shut down with no warning or advance notice because my wife is “foreign” and because I was accessing the account via the WORLD WIDE Web.
4) I lost valuable time trying to figure out what was wrong with the account.
5) We were given a number to call, although there was no one at that number who could actually do what we were supposed to accomplish with that call.
6) All of this forced my wife to take time away from her nephew’s First Communion party.

On top of that, the original credit card purchase was refunded because of this issue. So now, if I really want to stay with HG, I have to go to the online billing section and go through the hassle of making the same payment again. Hmm, let’s see…do I really want to stay with a company that locked down an account that was made with a valid credit card, because my wife has a “foreign-sounding” name, or because I actually logged in to the cPanel from a location other than my home? And now I’ll never be sure if it won’t happen again if I’m attending a trade show somewhere else, or if someone else happens to have an aversion to my wife’s name. Stay with HG? It’s not looking very good.

Congratulations, Host Gator. This is how you lose a customer in 22 hours. This is B.S.

Discuss this review in detail or sign up with hostgator hosting

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