Lots of good, several highly annoying bad

[davoice]

We began our experience with HG back in September and here's where we stand so far:

The Good
- Stable server (Mustang), haven't had any outage complaints from users. I'm up all hours of the day/night and haven't seen any problems.

- Fantastico is... well... fantastic. (It allows me to be a little lazy... and I like that!)

- The implementation of virtual domains (add-on domains), while confusing at first, is very powerful. I.e. we can easily share the same shopping cart across multiple domains this way.

- Server I'm on is at ~33% capacity and it looks like they've already added more new servers to the network. We were on one of the newest boxes when we signed up and there are already at least a couple more newer than us.

- Backbone in the datacenter where they are located is first class. (The Planet in Dallas.)

- Free WHM AutoPilot license is a nice touch for us on reseller accounts. (Though it can be a bear to configure all the way b/c it has so many options.)

- Affiliate program actually works as advertised. (Which cannot be said for many other hosting companies.)


The Bad
- HG isn't completely honest in the pre-sales material about their "shared SSL" capabilities. They don't have any real SSL certificates to share, just self-signed ones which cause security alerts for visitors. Wish they were upfront about that b/c I expected them to at least have a root signed wildcard certificate for *.websitewelcome.com. This was one of the primary reasons we originally went w/ HG. I'd suggest they remove the reference to it from their features list since a self-signed certificate is basically useless in a commerical environment.

- Tech chat is useless. Used it 3 times for relatively simple questions (the answers were in the FAQs) and in each case ended up teaching the tech about HG's systems and finding the answers myself. I'd personally recommend them just remove the Live Chat option from the support page until they get some slightly more savvy operators. Or at least implement escalation w/in chat so the tech isn't winging it. They need to learn when to say "I don't know".

- I wish they would automatically give each reseller 1 IP address of their own instead of using all shared IPs by default.

Conclusion
Not having the true shared SSL certificate was almost enough to make me leave. And it still may. For basic web hosting they offer a solid product. The edges of their support team are a little rough. The core guys seem competant... but the periphery of bogus level 1 folks makes them look bad.

I've seen better service and I've seen worse. I'd give them 7 stars out of 10. The bad news in that is from what I've seen there is no real reason why they shouldn't be 10 out of 10 except for lack of ambition on their part to be so. These guys are selling themselves short.

- Daniel P.