Fantastic Service

[Leslie121]

Hello!

As a veteran of dealing with hosting services (since 1996) I have been through the wringer as it were. Way back when, I lucked out and found a nice one, however they offer only one plan and if you want to resell it is serious money. By 2002 I had pretty much out grown them and wanted to resell so while I left my gaming site up on that account - where it still sits today (only because I haven't moved it here yet) I was in the market for new hosting that I could turn around and resell off of.

That process had been horrible. They were either too pricey, no support or there was a lot of downtime. If you are trying to start a business and want it to live, uptime is crucial and the rest of it well, that tends to fall in place if you don't have to worry about everything dropping.

I hadn't even gotten into reselling yet, but created a small online gaming type community that offers gamers and role players web space for their sites and message boards.

The first one - ehh after paying 600.00 for a year upfront three months later the hosting service literally disappeared and my space and stuff with it.
The second one - downtime at least twice a week. The second of which has the rudest and least useful tech support on the planet earth and beyond. A typical response was "leslie ur site is not down." Well no in the ten hour span of time it took them to reply, the site was back up. I had purchased the annual plan and when that was done, I moved.

We are now into 2004 and I did not know of hostgator at the time. I did extensive research and chose another company with the same 99.9% monthly uptime guarantee, less space than you get here and all the goodies unlimited databases, subdomains and so on. (databases and subdomains are pretty much imperative in a small community) The first few months everything went fine.. then the databases started dropping DAILY after they did changes to the server. (They reported every single change, and let me tell ya, that tech person was obsessed with changing crap). Let me rephrase that, they were being deleted. Yep gone. Just gone. I lost customers that I managed to hang onto through all the other BS and lost them when their boards became unstable.

It must have been an act of fate or for once my luck changed because I found hostgator in my panicked whirlwind state of having to move. By that time I was dissillusioned, ready to throw in the towel. However.. the whole process was nice and smooth, hostgator even offered to help me move the site at no charge. I have had my account since May and have had no serious downtime with the exception of once and hostgator NOTIFIED me in mail there was a problem! I went from uninformed to being informed and let me tell you, I feel I get more than what I pay for.

I can IM their tech support anytime I want and do get an answer. Sometimes it is abrupt, but if I am IM'ing who else is IM'ing? The point is, while possibly worded short (abrupt) it is never rude.

The only thing I have to say about hostgator is that it is fantastic. This hosting service saved my sanity and it saved my little community and I can move my business forward into reselling as I have wanted to do for a long time now.

Thank you HostGator!

Leslie

[PFunk]

Leslie,
Thank you for this post. I've been searching for about a month now... Your words are very encouraging, as is all the posts I've read. I've been jumping from burning ship to ship since 1996 myself. It very stressful and never fun. I've been running it out of my house for the past year because I was so fed up. While I typically stay under 2GB a month of bandwidth, I want to do so much more but can't.

Thank you.

[tiger]

i see im not the only one getting the abrumpt answers :roll: i just left a very angry post, dreams turning into nitemares, where the refusal of talking on the live talk help, then hanging up on me for simply asking for more than a one worded answer, all my sites are still down hours latter and since they refuse to respond to me i guess ill just widdle my time away here, I did notice they added a new tos from hell where they refuse now to accept responsibility for anything!

[jmgb]

Yeah, I´ve also had trouble with answers on LIVE CHATS, but we should realise that HostGator is a BIIIIIG community, and we are not the only ones waiting for support.

Here´s a tip:

IF YOUR ISSUE ISN´T SO URGENT, USE E-MAIL INSTEAD OF LIVE CHAT; THERE YOU WILL FIND A MORE RELAXED ANSWER IN MINUTES. I´ve never had trouble with e-mail support.

We can´t say anything about HostGator, we´ve found a great company with MOST TIMES friendly support, but

I´D LIKE TO EXTEND MY WORDS TO ALL SUPPORT PEOPLE, WE DON´T LIKE THIS KIND OF ANSWERS; a message like "please wait, I´m focused on another problem now" would be better than just leaving us alone in the chats.

THANK YOU FOR GREAT SERVICES, HOSTGATOR

[Leslie121]

Hello!

PFunk you are most welcome Despite some of these other posts, especially the one with the person complaining that their site is down (still down etc. WHICH by the way is silly, because you do have 99.9% uptime guarantee MONTHLY here.. so if your site is down the length of time that post vaguely implied you prolly qualify for a refund.), this is a great service. While it isn't as cheap as some of the others out there, the quality is top notch.

Some of the other reseller plans out there don't give you total control in WHM, for example I had one that wouldn't let me edit the packages. When I asked about it? "Why would you need to do that?" lol.. trust me you need to be able to edit your packages!!! I am not with them anymore, I consolidated it all right here.

When my business takes off, I'll be buying dedicated servers - right here. -

My goal isn't to be treated like a queen it is to be treated like a person, and I realize the difference between harried and rude. I have never been treated rudely here and I IM support a LOT.

Leslie

[3Cell Hosting]

This is my first foray into reseller world, mainly due my previous host of 4 years sold out to a company who have never heard of customer service.

It was a big decision and several weeks of looking around brought me to HostGator. It looked really good for what i wanted to do. More importantly there was tutorials, good faqs, a knowledgebase, and 24/7 support. It must be a mirage!

I can honestly say that it hasn't been quite as tough as I expected but as a newcomer to YIM I felt that the offline/online in the middle of query was rather disconcerting. I had a query that took 3 attempts on IM but they were very forgiving and resolved my user error in setting up packages.

I opted to pay for WHM Autopilot to be installed and I'm glad I did. After a few false starts and more IM support I am now cooking on gas

I still have an e-mail outstanding regarding enom reseller but all in all the experience has been less painful (for me not sure about support though ) than I expected. I would thoroughly recommend HostGator and their team.

I fully concur with Leslie - brief answers but if you want more info just ask. I have always been given more info and this helps me to avoid the same mistakes again. I would not want to see the size of their YIM logs!

Keep up the good work - especially with us simple newbies who make your life hell (unintentionally of course).

Many thanks

David

[GatorBrent]

phplive is the worst program we've ever used. Clients keep thinking we are cutting them off , but it's phplive crashing. We are in the process of switching to css chat which will be done in a few days.

[Leslie121]

Hi

I only tried your chat once and got in there and someone was ahead of me and I left and IMed.. see how annoying I can be? The person I talked to was nice about it too. Anyways.. that chat did look pretty crummy.


Have you looked at the Help Center Live in Fantastico? I installed that and it was really nice. I am not enthusiastic about their FAQ layout, but if you don't use it, it doesn't link it.

It has a nice interface, can be used by multiple people (How many I don't know) and the chat logs etc. I was thinking of using it with my reseller business.

Leslie

"Smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone."

[Leslie121]

Ooh was whm auto pilot a pain? I am installing it myself. LOL What about the enom reseller? I may be able to help if it is a generic type question, I am looking into the domain reseller programs as well.

Wild West Domains offers one, but I am not sure about it, they charge 99.00 a year, then 25% each sale over the wholesale cost they charge.

Leslie

[3Cell Hosting]

Hi Leslie

After posting my forum article I had an e-mail response from Jessica and all is resolved. That's the problem with the time gap between UK and US - it's too easy to forget it exists!

Back to the grindstone if I want to earn anything out of this venture.

David

[GatorBrent]

clickchatsold.com is who we are going with. It's ccs not css. We've tested then a while now and it's amazing. As reliable as aim from what we've seen.

The someone ahead of you and to much time going was one of the bugs phplive keeps having. There will be nobody ahead and the chat to accept never appears for us to take the chat.


I've never tested the one in fantastico. The whole reason we went with phplive was from the good reviews we read. Unfortunatley this wasn't the case at least with ccs we know from experience. Thanks for the suggestion though!

[jmgb]

You should try BoldChat before buying CCS, it´s a little expensive but service is the best.

[GatorJustin]

There will always be debate as to which software is the best. Personally, I prefer Groopz.

I think CCS will suit our needs fine, however.

[jlgreer1]

I am a new customer to HG. The service here has been fantastic. My web pages never get the dreaded "timeout" error like they did with the previous host. I have a reseller account so I can manage several family members web pages. I had a little trouble getting everything going but the support folks pitched right in without making me feel like the newbie I am.

I hope my stay here will "live long and prosper".

Thanks, Jeff

[Leslie121]

Hi,

I actually love this service, even when I make a stupid decision. I was having trouble with whm auto pilot not creating accounts in whm. The error ended up being on my part and after a evening and day of making a BIGGER mistake and asking sales here to change my primary domain to another and changing it back because like nothing worked - (which they did spend the time doing at no complaint or hassle - Thank you guys!) to getting it all back in place to find the original error.

Just a little hint that I missed (probably reading through it too fast )- the whm prefixes the plans, so when you create a package in whm it has user_plan as the name of the plan (package) be sure to use that prefix when you give the plan name in the whm section for a package in auto pilot.

I really like the help center live for a live chat response and trouble ticket system. I am going to use that at first, if I see it isn't working or eating horrible amounts of bandwidth etc, I am going to go with a service so it doesn't tear through my stuff here.

I don't know if anyone is interested in this or not - but I have been browsing through toll free number plans. I wanted to be able to offer a toll free telephone number on the site.

Anyways, I found this place: http://www.tollfreelive.com/
They have different plans and options, but the service isn't horribly expensive. I haven't finished my research yet, but I may go with them, they seem to be the best I have found so far.

[BradCis]

Originally Posted by GatorJustin

I think CCS will suit our needs fine, however.

It is working great!!!

I do have a comment about PHP Live. It is a rather good script as long as you don't have 100s or 1000s of requests.