Hostgator Review : Inadequate support & Rude Staff

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This is a hostgator review posted by hades20082 on 24 December 2004

I feel it important to share my experience so far with Hostgator.

My company have been using Hostgator’s reseller package for several months and so far I must say that I am less than impressed.

Within a couple of weeks we were experiencing problems. All of our sites would be down for hours at a time and when we contacted support once we noticed the only response we got was “Fixed” or “Problem Solved”.

When we asked what the problem was they wouldn’t tell us.

They even blocked me on MSN Messanger several times for asking for more information about the problem.

From our own investigation it looked as though it had something to do with the \var partition.

Things ran smoothly for a while and I setup a browser based game on the account. The game was called Quantum Star. It is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database.

I have run this exact same software on several other hosts before and since and never had any problems. It even ran on Lycos’ free hosting without a problem.

Once I had uploaded the files I began customising the look of the games pages (basic HTML alterations) and the game ran for about 3 months (crons included) without any problems.

On the 22 November Hostgator suspended the domain that was hosting this game. They did so without any warning and without offering any credible explanation.

I corresponded a great deal with Brent who’s only answer seemed to be that it was “putting heavy strain on the MySQL server” or “it drove the server crazy while it ran” without offering any details of the files that were causing the problem or even exactly what it was doing to the server.

My point all along has been “How can we fix the scripts if you can’t tell us what is happening on your server that doesn’t happen on any others?”

After much frustration Brent eventually gave me Lyron’s email address and advised me to contact him as the “Sys Admin” and he would be able to provide these details.

I emailed Lyron on the 29 November and again on the 04 December and as yet have received no reply. I have emailed Brent again since to inform him of this and request the details be sent to me and again I get no reply.

Sounds like I’ve been blocked again. I can only pity a company that blocks customers that complain. Complaints are what drive most companies to improve, but Hostgator seem to want to just stick their heads in the sand and hope the problems will go away.

Myself, my company and our clients are now researching alternative hosting in an effort to move away from Hostgator permanently. We are also considering legal action for compensation after the poor way that this has been handled and the impression that it has given to our customers who were playing that game.

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