Hostgator Review : My first year review

By web hosting on Aug 15, 2008 in Reviews

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This is a hostgator review posted by Nick_S on 15 August 2008

Well here we are, my first year is almost up with Hostgator and thought I’d give my review on my experience with these guys.

First, a little history…………..

2 years ago now, I founded a car club and set up an BBS/forum for it (my knowledge of this sort of thing is very limited and it was one of the free forum software packages). After looking around, I went with a hosting company called Vodahost, reviews seemed good, price was good, initial impressions very good. Paid my money and of we went.

Well, the first couple of months went by without hitch, I then had someone volunteer their services to help with the technical side of running a BBS, he works in Oracle programming (I think that’s correct lol) we started generating a little more traffic (I’m talking of no more than 2GB bandwidth a month), and that’s when we hit problems.

The forum would go offline, for a day here, day there, with no explanation from the hosting company. Then further problems which they blamed on a bad script (out fault apprently), but wouldn’t tell us what the actual problem was and just say they had fixed it.

This started happening more frequently, and then we started having weekends down, not good for a quiet car club that was trying to grow.

They also had a forum such as this, but believe it or not, my posts would get deleted if I asked why my forum kept going down. My friend who was helping got banned for asking questions, I then got banned for asking why my admin had been banned, amazing customer service there especially as we never ever became rude or aggresive. We just wanted to know WHY???

The final straw to break the camels back was when I got a little shirty on a support ticket, and the main Vodahost guy said “what do you expect for $10 a month”.

So off we went, to a company called Streamline, these were chosen mainly as they had UK support however it was pretty immediate that it was a case of out of the frying pan into the fire.

After a long chat, we decided we had to move again or just pack up, this is where we found Hostgator. We thought it was worth one last effort as it had now been a year and the club was doing good (it’s a very rare car so we didn’t want to throw all the hard work away).

We went for their Baby package.

Well, it was a great start for a week or 2, and then we went offline, you can maybe imagine how we were feeling at that moment
I was straight onto Tech support, who gave it “we are aware of the situation, and it should fixed within the hour”, hadn’t heard that before……………..

BUT it was I then asked what the problem was, and actually got told an answer, whether it was the correct one or not didn’t matter, communication was the key.

I think in the past year, I’ve opened maybe 10 support tickets, 2 of which were not downtime related. I can say hand on heart we haven’t been offline longer than a few hours on any occasion, and my tickets have all been dealt with, in what I consider to be a reasonable timescale. It has been that great lately, I haven’t kept an eye on these forums.

Now coming up to renewal time, I’ve started visiting again, seen a few more negative comments/reviews and started to think whether Hostgator still valued their customers as they had in the past. My recent help from the sales staff has rekindled any dying flame.

I have to publically thank Anthony B in Sales, for me recently, I believe he went beyond what most people would expect. His support in this recent matter has convinced me to stay another year, so those high up on the Gator ladder, give the guy an extra days holiday or something, the guy was a star

I have now stepped away from the car club, and they have started their own account with Hostgator due to the decent service they have supplied them/me with in the past.

So, year 2 starts in a few days time, I hope it’s as good as year 1.

Many thanks to all that have put up with some stupid questions over the last year, both Hostagtor staff and some of the invaluable people there are on this forum who are willing to share their knowledge to the less knowledgable like myself. If you ever have any car problems, I hope to be able to return the favour.

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