'Live' support seems clueless

[perrypoint]

I just switched to hostgator two days ago.

The positive: I love the plans and the pricing - since I have 8 domains that are just tiny little things with almost no traffic, the plan structure works well for me.

The negative: The tools are poorly explained/documented and support has some serious issues.

I had two questions that I contacted support about (via IM) today.

First, I was trying to ask about using SSL with IMAP, and if there was some kind of shared certificate I can use to encrypt the stream. Since the purpose of the cert. is for encryption, I don't care about whose certificate it is, I just want the stream encrypted.

So, I contact the guy through IM, and ask him about security in IMAP. He tells me that I can "try checking the box for secure connection in Outlook". Of course I had already done that, and can't connect that way. He then wants to know about what SMTP port I am using. I nicely informed him that IMAP has nothing to do with SMTP. He said "ok" and then never came back, so I just gave up.

Secondly, I created some email lists, which don't seem to be working. I again try the live support. The guy basically takes well over an hour to set up another mail list on my domain, and then asks me for my email name and password so he can send email to it. I told him to send to it via his own account, and so he agrees to try it. He verifies that it doesn't work. Now I've been IMing and waiting for over an hour. He tells me to send email to support@hostgator.com. I said "I thought you were support". He says "yes we are support". So I ask him why I should send him an email about a problem we've already been through for over an hour.

He says "wait I will check again" and then another 10 mins go by - he tells me again to send the email.
So I am left believing that the live/IM support is a front-line of clueless newbies who then send all the problems to someone else after wasting people's time.

I would prefer to be told up front that live support can't help with anything but the most basic newbie questions (assuming they can do that), and just send the email to begin with.

[Stef]

Live chat support is indeed more like a first level support for 'easy' questions that can quickly be answered. If you have questions that need some more research or should be handled by a sysadmin you should indeed contact support@hostgator.com. I agree this is not clearly stated on the site.

Sorry for the inconvenience this caused,
Stef.

[perrypoint]

Okay, once I sent email to support@hostgator.com, my problem was resolved within something like 1/2 hour. I am very happy with the response.

If only the main support page had told me to not bother contacting the chat/IM support unless it was a trivial question, I would have had a great experience.