About a month...

[jeepxj86]

Well.... This is what I have to say about HostGator.

There prices are awesome for what they provide! I currently have 70GB of bandwidth a month. They have all the sripting languages I need.

There uptime is not very good, I had my site down the whole nite I also found it down during the day (about 10 min of downtime) That usually happens every 3 days.

There support seems to have bad reading skills. They seem to skim over the email just to get a reply and not worry about what is wrong and what has happened. I got an email back from one of the many support team members and was told that the one page was working fine. To bad i knew that, maybe the fact that it wasnt working the way it was supposed to, as I stated in the one email. I was told to switch two files which I did and it fixed nothing.

All in all, host gator is good for small time websites if you don't mind less than 99% uptime or "excellent" support team. If your going to run a company website HostGator MAY not be the best option for you

[GatorJay]

Sorry to hear about the downtime issues you had Jeep, have you sent in a ticket about this yet? It is possible that when you joined your server was a brand new server. The first week or two can be a bit rough because we have to filter out the people joining to cause trouble with spam, high resources, bad scripts, etc. We are about 4 servers past yours now, has it been any better in the past few days?

[jeepxj86]

Originally Posted by GatorJay

Sorry to hear about the downtime issues you had Jeep, have you sent in a ticket about this yet? It is possible that when you joined your server was a brand new server. The first week or two can be a bit rough because we have to filter out the people joining to cause trouble with spam, high resources, bad scripts, etc. We are about 4 servers past yours now, has it been any better in the past few days?

Hi,

Iv'e actually switched to a new host with awesome support who actually like to read the emails and tell me what i want to know.. I also feel a lot safer such as me not putting my pass in an email that anybody could read. But hey, thats why I got the free trial! I didn't like the service so i found a more reliable, supportive service. havent had one problem yet! I'm not upset though... sometimes you dont get what you pay for

Originally Posted by jeepxj86

Hi,

Iv'e actually switched to a new host with awesome support who actually like to read the emails and tell me what i want to know.. I also feel a lot safer such as me not putting my pass in an email that anybody could read. But hey, thats why I got the free trial! I didn't like the service so i found a more reliable, supportive service. havent had one problem yet! I'm not upset though... sometimes you dont get what you pay for

Good luck!

Putting your pass in an email is not available to everyone to read though,
Thanks, Ben

[jeepxj86]

Originally Posted by GatorBen

Good luck!

Putting your pass in an email is not available to everyone to read though,
Thanks, Ben

Oh? What means of encryption are the clients using to protect themselves?

Thanks,
Josh

Originally Posted by jeepxj86

Oh? What means of encryption are the clients using to protect themselves?

Thanks,
Josh

I would be happy to elaborate,

Computer usage is always a balance between usability and security, where you draw that line is very important for both your user's security and their ability to actually you your systems without getting frustrated. We have made the decision to provide our welcome email via email and the billing login via email because the risk is very low of a problem. The only way they would have access to either of those is:

1. If they already trojaned your computer and thus it matters not as they have all your logins already.

2. They intercept your email, which is pretty much impossible and ultra ultra rare.

In the 1.5 years I have been here we have never had a problem, and as far as I'm aware since the existance of HostGator we have not had a problem ever. So as you can see we are providing a good balance between usability and security. In addition the billing login is further protected as it can't do anything besides pay bills and a few other functions.

I've never seen a host that didn't send a welcome email out via email but I welcome any suggestions you have that would work in a more secure manner?

Thanks, Ben

[jeepxj86]

Originally Posted by GatorBen

I would be happy to elaborate,

Computer usage is always a balance between usability and security, where you draw that line is very important for both your user's security and their ability to actually you your systems without getting frustrated. We have made the decision to provide our welcome email via email and the billing login via email because the risk is very low of a problem. The only way they would have access to either of those is:

1. If they already trojaned your computer and thus it matters not as they have all your logins already.

2. They intercept your email, which is pretty much impossible and ultra ultra rare.

In the 1.5 years I have been here we have never had a problem, and as far as I'm aware since the existance of HostGator we have not had a problem ever. So as you can see we are providing a good balance between usability and security. In addition the billing login is further protected as it can't do anything besides pay bills and a few other functions.

I've never seen a host that didn't send a welcome email out via email but I welcome any suggestions you have that would work in a more secure manner?

Thanks, Ben

ANYTHING, and I mean ANYTHING is vulnerable! You could have 256 byte 256 byte encryption and someone, somewhere would be able to intercept it. It's the simple fact that most everything can be hacked into, stolen, or intercepted. As long as there are people making security, there will always be the third party who betters themselves further than the current state of security.

Now if this was just about a password in the email, I would be on this forum replying to you. But it's so much more with your hosting. You can't call yourself professional because you add a "If you need any help, please feel free to contact us." at the bottem of your emails. You could call yourself unprofessional and lazy for not taking the time to read the email, look at your options to solve the problem, and consult the client about what was done to solve the problem. Instead you skim through the emails just to get the along there way. You could try to weed through your employees and possibly have more qualified person handle the situation.

I can understand your uptime problems with a new server. That should be handled BEFORE you set PAYING clients on that machine. I see that as a way you operate. You take half effort, it seems... In everything that you do. Customer is more important than how clients you can bribe in. I eventually see this company going out of business eventually unless there are certain changes to make it everything you say it is.

Josh

Hello,

I can understand that when someone believes their experience has been bad enough, that things can unintentionally be exaggerated to where you might believe this company could be out of business in a few years (this is certainly not the case), but for a client to be dissatisfied to the point where they would believe this, is most assuredly rare. While I don't assume this is your case without knowing more about it, it's usually not as fatalistic as the client believes in that situation (for example, putting blame on staff for their web site design issues and becoming unreasonably irate that we aren't taking the time to personally teach them how to do web design or re-code their scripts for them--again, only an example, this is absolutely not to say this was the case with you or that you were being irrational or expecting too much).

If you can PM or email myself or another staff member, or management the ticket numbers, we can certainly review the tickets in question and how they were handled. We have very qualified staff members here, but people are human and make mistakes. If the issue wasn't resolved, it should have been escalated, assuming that was the situation and would have been the appropriate action. Even one dissatisfied customer is not something we ignore, so please feel free to let us know the situation and we'll review it. As for email security, the points of security are your personal system, which if infected/trojaned is an issue regardless how the logins are sent the damage is done, the ISP you use and outgoing/incoming email services, the network between your ISP and our data center (this is virtually impossible), the data center's routers and internal network, and finally, our mail server that receives and sends emails.

Even in plain text, someone would have to have root on the server or compromise the network somehow (I've never seen this happen), on our end or your ISP's end, and while we always encourage secure practices of transmitting data, the time frame between the welcome email and the recipient changing it is a fairly short time frame, and with our admin servers being secure and closely monitored, the chances on this end, and that of most ISP's are slim to none (I've yet to hear of this happening with any provider I've known or worked with or heard about--but I'm sure it does happen). Even with plain text, I've never in my career seen someone sniff packets on a network or server and obtain login information unless the server itself was compromised via a root compromise.

Of course, software and services and protocols do have exploits/holes now and then, but we keep everything up to date and secure, and with that, any type of encryption would be defeated unless someone was only, solely able to sniff packets on the network without root access on the server, and without root, they'd not be able to obtain said data on the server-side. I've yet to see a well admined network have it be compromised on that level, and I've been doing this for 15 years. As it would be unreasonable to expect or demand our clients have something like PGP installed to decrypt the welcome emails, we have to have the balance of user friendliness, as noted above. This isn't because we are uncaring or reckless with the data we send, but it's a necessary fact of the business and the risks are actually very low to none. Again, we wish you luck with your new provider and we are sorry that you didn't have a more positive experience.

[jeepxj86]

Originally Posted by GatorTimGreer

Hello,

I can understand that when someone believes their experience has been bad enough, that things can unintentionally be exaggerated to where you might believe this company could be out of business in a few years (this is certainly not the case), but for a client to be dissatisfied to the point where they would believe this, is most assuredly rare. While I don't assume this is your case without knowing more about it, it's usually not as fatalistic as the client believes in that situation (for example, putting blame on staff for their web site design issues and becoming unreasonably irate that we aren't taking the time to personally teach them how to do web design or re-code their scripts for them--again, only an example, this is absolutely not to say this was the case with you or that you were being irrational or expecting too much).

If you can PM or email myself or another staff member, or management the ticket numbers, we can certainly review the tickets in question and how they were handled. We have very qualified staff members here, but people are human and make mistakes. If the issue wasn't resolved, it should have been escalated, assuming that was the situation and would have been the appropriate action. Even one dissatisfied customer is not something we ignore, so please feel free to let us know the situation and we'll review it. As for email security, the points of security are your personal system, which if infected/trojaned is an issue regardless how the logins are sent the damage is done, the ISP you use and outgoing/incoming email services, the network between your ISP and our data center (this is virtually impossible), the data center's routers and internal network, and finally, our mail server that receives and sends emails.

Even in plain text, someone would have to have root on the server or compromise the network somehow (I've never seen this happen), on our end or your ISP's end, and while we always encourage secure practices of transmitting data, the time frame between the welcome email and the recipient changing it is a fairly short time frame, and with our admin servers being secure and closely monitored, the chances on this end, and that of most ISP's are slim to none (I've yet to hear of this happening with any provider I've known or worked with or heard about--but I'm sure it does happen). Even with plain text, I've never in my career seen someone sniff packets on a network or server and obtain login information unless the server itself was compromised via a root compromise.

Of course, software and services and protocols do have exploits/holes now and then, but we keep everything up to date and secure, and with that, any type of encryption would be defeated unless someone was only, solely able to sniff packets on the network without root access on the server, and without root, they'd not be able to obtain said data on the server-side. I've yet to see a well admined network have it be compromised on that level, and I've been doing this for 15 years. As it would be unreasonable to expect or demand our clients have something like PGP installed to decrypt the welcome emails, we have to have the balance of user friendliness, as noted above. This isn't because we are uncaring or reckless with the data we send, but it's a necessary fact of the business and the risks are actually very low to none. Again, we wish you luck with your new provider and we are sorry that you didn't have a more positive experience.

No, I wasnt expecting anyone to design my webpage or anything for that matter. I was expecting the 99.9% uptime i was guarnteed and the support i was supposed to get such as maybe reading the email. Or, for example... Having to open a ticket just to delete a file I MADE which you wouldnt let me chmod... A empty folder with nothing in it that i made... Yes, I understand I was on a shared account but the guarntee did state 99.9% uptime. I had probably 60% if that!

Plain and simple: I didn't enjoy your service, I don't wish to argue about it and go in circles. Thanks for your time and i'm sorry your service wasn't up to what you were advertising. IF ANYONE READS THIS... PLEASE READ WHAT YOUR GETTING, THEN GO SOMEWHERE ELSE... You won't get it here!

I have serious doubts that you only got 60% uptime on your site, unless there was a site specific cause (which would not relate to the 99.9% uptime of the server and web service itself). Not that I'm looking to put blame on you, of course, but just an example of that. Of course, you didn't outline what was not "up", so this might be something else entirely and I don't want to guess. I'm also not desiring to argue, of course, but was simply outlining some things and request that you send us an email about the issue, with the ticket numbers, so we can review it and ensure that such an issue will not happen again--whatever that issue was. As for the file or directory not allowing you to change the permissions, it sounds like it was either created by a PHP script, which runs as the global web server user "nobody" and thus denied you the ability because of the difference in ownership, or the file was owned by you and a PHP script couldn't chmod it, based on the difference in ownership (this is a security measure on all *nix based servers).

Of course, it might have been due to a script or directory being disabled due to a load issue crashing the server, being insecure and exploited or malicious, but at this point I'm only guessing and that's not too common. So, rather than just guess about the problem, if you would be kind enough to email us the issue and ticket numbers, we could look into it. If you have the intention of just letting the fact that you're not satisfied be known, you've done that. We appreciate the feedback, good or bad, as this can help us improve or avoid a repeat of the issue, if this was indeed a problem on the part of our staff members dealing with your ticket (I don't know this yet), but if you do not intend to supply us with that information (You can PM me here or email me) then I'm not sure what to say, but we certainly would appreciate it. We can't do anything without any information. Again, good luck with your new host and your web venture. Thanks for your candor and openess, once again we're sorry for the experience not being a positive one. Again, if you wish to let us know the information/ticket numbers, we'll be happy to look into it, though I understand if you don't have the interest in further involvement.