My 1 year hostgator review... Sigh

[sneggiwt]

Okay... I have a few different servers with hostgator... and I've been using them for just about a year now.

For the first 10 months, I have nothing but praise for HostGator. Everything was top notch, and if I had any problems, they weren't big. I did notice that tickets took a few hours to get answered, but there were never any issues urgent enough for me to be bothered by that.

This all changed around month 10... at which HostGator became a NIGHTMARE to deal with.

Here are the biggest issues:

Constant High Server Loads causing 10+ second load times on pages... and when I would submit a ticket... every single time I would get a response saying everything looked fine. I've had to send in tickets at least once a week about high server loads.

HostGator blocked googlebot's access to my website. I didn't notice for about a week, and when I figured out what was going on, I sent in a very polite ticket asking them to please fix it.

They sent a ticket back to me telling me that they weren't blocking google and I must be doing it in my .htaccess.

I kept sending in tickets trying to get them to solve it on their end, but they maintained it wasn't their issue. This went on for days.

Meanwhile, I'm losing extremely valuable positions on keywords, and I lost many links on a new page because people were not able to find it on google.

Finally, I posted a thread on the forum detailing the problem. I guess this got their attention because after a few hours they figured something out.

Surprise! HostGator was blocking google. Their response paraphrased "Sorry, we didn't think to look there."

After this incident hostgator lost their credibility, and I moved all of my critical sites off a HostGator to another host.

The latest issue... I had an old server that I was no longer using (I had transferred to another server). I sent in a cancellation request.

Repeatedly in the request, I put in huge capital letters over and over again not to touch my live server (at this point I'm not willing to take any risks of another human error).

Well, I'm doing some testing on my server tonight and all of the sudden everything goes offline. I wait a few minutes and then get on a chat.

After about 20 minutes of waiting, the problem is discovered.

In the process of cancelling an old account that has no domains still attached to it... for some reason someone at hostgator decided to change the name servers on one of my domains... to point back to the server THEY WERE CANCELLING.

My website is now completely offline and unavailable. Now I am losing even more traffic and sales due to the incompetency of someone in the hostgator team.

To make matters worse, there are no sales people around to change the name servers, and I have to wait until someone reads and takes care of the ticket and sets the name servers back.

Then I have to wait for them to propagate again. Thank you HostGator.

[GatorWesley]

The DNS issue was resolved last night and is currently pointing correctly. I'm not sure who told you that we had no sales admins last night, because we did and your issue was fixed within a couple of hours. We apologize about the inconvenience, I am going to have our support manager look into the googlebot and server load issues.

[GatorBrent]

Do you have a couple of the ticket numbers I can take a look at? Thanks!

[GatorBrent]

Moving forums until ticket number is provided. Thanks!

[paulselhi]

can we have some more info on the google issue to check it is not happening on our sites

[sneggiwt]

2575303

Very professional moving a review out of the reviews forum. Wouldn't want to look bad...

[quietFinn]

Originally Posted by sneggiwt

2575303

Very professional moving a review out of the reviews forum. Wouldn't want to look bad...

I find the word "professional" kind of funny in this context...