Good Host, Poor Service

[tds]

Again Hostgator have disappointed by making dramatic (i.e. they stop websites or services from working) changes behind the scenes without informing customers. These changes have resulted in my client's websites going offline.

In the last month alone there have been 2 changes that have resulted in problems...

The first was turning off the catch-all emails on all my hosted domains. So I had my own and clients emails that were going nowhere unleess they had a specific email account setup for that exact name.

Hostgators response was that "there was a message on our forums detailing this!". I'm sorry? You expect your customers to visit the forums daily trawl through all messages to be informed of the service you provide.

And now today, 3 of my clients websites have stopped working because hostgator have updated their server - again without informing their clients. I'm sure if I contacted support I'd get the helpful response that "oh, we told you on our forums".

So another trawl through their forums and the internet trying to gleam the solution to get my clients back on line. The solution presented by another user and not hostgator! Editing the .htaccess file commenting out:
Options +ExecCGI -Indexes
Options +ExecCGI +FollowSymLinks

A simple change, but one that I and all of hostgators customers should have been informed about via email BEFORE ACTUALLY DOING IT!!!

And while I'm moaning, the biggest annoyance with the service is that you have to keep contacting support to do anything useful. You want PHP 5 - no problem, contact support. You want Ruby on Rails - no problem, contact support. Etc. etc.

There's a perfectly good control panel there - shame you can't do everything from it.

Alas I've had enough, and will be moving to pastures greener - Dreamhost have a control panel that you can change the majority of hosting settings with, at a similar price and service, although they keep their customers informed.

On a good point, quite a few customers have complained about poor support. Besides being poor communicators when asking for support (asking them questions that never get answered), hostgator have always been polite and sorted any problems out quickly.

Thanks, but goodbye.

[GatorBrent]

Hello,


Do you have a ticket number I can take a look at?