Hostgator Review : Oh Hostgator, why do you do this to me?

By web hosting on Apr 7, 2008 in Reviews

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This is a hostgator review posted by joer80 on 04 April 2008

I am the webmaster for the TexarkanaGazette and EldoradoNewsTimes. I love hostgator, but this has been horrible. Please read my story.

Pros:

Live chat is one of my favorite features. Tech support is very friendly also. I have worked in customer service for a few years and overall, these people show me they want to help me. They are friendly and helpful.

Cons:

Too many mistakes.. Your killing me!

Let me explain myself.

We hosted with a scam hosting company for a few years prior to moving to hostgator. They had bad load times, were down for an hour or so monthly, and had 1 hour phone wait times. They even tried to upsell me on a tech support call because my database was over 15mb. (It was around 125mb.)

After coming to hostgator, I had 15 min phone wait times, and live chat which I loved for small issues.

Server speed was at least twice as fast with hostgator. I could especially tell with the ftp response time. (Moving in and out of folders and such.) I love cpanel also, live databasse backups rule.

All was well with Hostgator until about 1 month in. I had just canceled my old hosting, and our site goes down without notice….. (we had a resellers account). A webmasters worst nightmare.

We are a local newspaper, with 6,000 people a day to our website, and 30,000 circulation…. We cant just go down.. I know we should have moved from reseller to dedicated sooner, but it was working like a champ and we had had decent service on shared for years.

Out of no where, a month into our hosting, I was notified that our website was exceeding the cpu limits, not just the required 25%, but the 30 or so % and we would need to correct the issue before we could be placed back online..

Well… no problem.. I figure we were borderline for the first month of our hosting and I would rather move to a stable host that watches there logs than a host that lets slow service go on. (Even though the hostgator reseller server has always been snappy for me?!)

However, in a perfect world, I would rather have had a warning when I am getting close to cpu resource usage on the reseller account, so i can upgrade to dedicated without down time, but no such luck.

I exsplained to my boss that hostgator is a great company, and it was just an automatic thing that turned us off, and we would be back online soon.

I removed my statistics calculations, and banner tracking code on my website to reduce our once a day calculations (that probably sent us to 30% cpu for a short amount of time) and let the admin know to place me back online and I would purchase a dedicated account.

6 hours later he saw my ticket and put me back online…. QAX-2500223 This is the 17th.

Advertisers not happy. I explained to boss we were not paying for dedicated lvl service and convinced them to upgrade us to dedicated.

It would be a few days though before I could get the funding approved with our accounting department, so I asked hostgator to work with me while I got permission for funding for the dedicated server.

19th I go back down. At this point, they are tired of working with my site and leave me down… QHD-2512803

“I have localhost routed the IP for this domain so requests will not be fulfilled, but you can still access the cPanel account. ”

What? Your going to leave my site down? I dont even have the dedicated approved yet, and there is a 24 hour install time after it is approved. We can’t be down for days??? I read on the blog that they would move people that exceed their limits to temporary dedicated servers while they decide but this didnt happen…. not even offered to me…

DGR-2515442 CIW-2504697 I signed up for a dedicated server with paypal, so I could send in a business check. I had to ask on the phone if sending a check is even an option, because it doesn’t say anything about it online.

Sounds good but my accounting department requested to pay a full year in advance instead of month by month like my invoice stated… I ask them to please change my invoice to 12 months so I can send a check for that amount instead of 1 month.

Well when the sales rep updated my invoice to 12 months, he changed my payment from paypal other to my credit card on file, so I got charged $2,000 to my personal credit card!!!

They reversed it after I let them know, but there was a 7+ hour ticket response time to the reversal!

Angry, I asked to just pay 3 months instead while I test the waters, and they did it again! $500 to my personal credit card even though my ticket said “Leave on payment other so I can send a check)

Sheesh.. They appologized because they did not read my whole request which stated, to please leave it on “payment other” so I could send a check for the amount… and I even got a phone call later that day to let me know they fixed the error.

The response time to reverse the personal charges were horrible. 7+ hours on CIW-2504697 and the response time to unsuspend my hosting after the programing changes was 6+ hours. Not what I would have liked…

To get my site live, I had to pay a month on my personal credit card so that i could send a check in for the 3 months dedicated server because they wouldn’t set up my dedicated server until they got payment.

I was setup around the 21st. So the 17th, 18th, 19, 20th, and the 21st where basicly the worst days of my life.

When they got my dedicated server setup, they coped the files for me but the site didnt work. The files were coped but it was giving database errors. I still was paying for my reseller account, so I recopied the databases and it fixed it. Not sure why their copy didnt work, because the tables were there, they just didnt work. I lucked out because I am a database programer and knew I how to do it myself.

My dedicated server was set up on the 21st, and my billing renewed on the 14th of every month. What? Confused, I called tech support and had this corrected in about 20min.

After correcting my renewal, it didnt reflect on my invoice, so i asked him to update my invoice so I could see that a change was made. (No ticket, all on phone. Its much faster this way.)

I was not even sure if I would have time to get them a check because they had my billing date before my server was even qued to be setup!

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1582062 was invoice number that was corrected this time. I had like 5 or 6 through out the process by the time I asked for the 1 month credit card one, and the 12 month check one, and the 3 month check one, and all of the errors made to them.

This whole situation had me pretty embarest to say the least as I am the one that chose to move our sites to Hostgator from the scam hosting. My boss didnt understand because we had no warning and we were down for days… and our traffic was not much different on the 17th than it was the first month of our service at hostgator which was probably exceeding cpu at times, although we had no way to know…

I just hope things improve from here on out!

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