Nightmare

[oobjvb]

Unless the following responses are acceptable to you, stay away from Hostgator. Things are fine when there are no problems, but you find out a provider's true colors when the problems start. My clients have been without sites or email for 18+ hours now. 18!!!! Over the course of the day, here is what I have heard from Hostgator:

"These mechanical errors happen. Your car breaks down doesn't it?"

"We are working on it, but there is no estimated time for completion."

"There's nothing we can do."

"It looks like we have been having some issues. (after a minute of typing from support)" -- Really? No kidding. I have only been dealing with this for 18 hours, I didn't know! Do you mean to tell me support is not even AWARE of this major issue? They have to look it up every time I call?

Your 99% up-time guarantee is worthless. 15 minutes down during the night is one thing. My clients have lost an ENTIRE DAY'S WORTH of productivity - no website, no emails, etc. Who is going to cover these losses? Who is going to reimburse me for future business lost over this? I have open invoices with my clients right now for web work - Is Hostgator going to cover my (their client's) losses? What about damage to my business? The potential losses are huge here.

Hostgator isn't the one who is taking the big hit on this. It is their clients, and personally I have been hung out to dry by Hostgator today.

[GatorJames]

I'm sorry to hear that you've had a less than optimal experience with us. Could you provide any ticket ID numbers or chat IDs so I could follow up with you and get this issue corrected?

If you don't feel comfortable posting these in our open forum you can PM me directly.

[GatorJames]

I looked up your account and it appears you're on the pantera server. Unfortunately due to a failing hard drive we had no other choice but to take the server offline to complete the repair. You can view a complete breakdown of everything that happened in this post:
http://forums.hostgator.com/showpost...3&postcount=21

Originally Posted by GatorJay

People have been making complaints recently in this forum when their scripts or databases get suspended or when something in particular does not work. This is not the forum to do so in. This forum is for reviews, positive or negative about the service; not for complaints about a single issue you are having. Please post any issues or suspension problems in the forum associated with your hosting account: Shared Hosting Support, or Reseller Support. Otherwise, your post will be moved to the correct forum.

As your post is in regards to a single issue it doesn't meet our requirements for a review. I'm going to move this thread to our reseller peer support forum. I've sent you a private message to follow up with you on this issue.

[EarlyOut]

Originally Posted by GatorJames

As your post is in regards to a single issue it doesn't meet our requirements for a review.

Some consistency is called for. I notice that the "reviews" section is loaded with threads that involve a customer's good experience with a single support call. It's only the "single problem" threads that get moved.

You don't get to have it both ways.

[Abomination]

Originally Posted by EarlyOut

Some consistency is called for. I notice that the "reviews" section is loaded with threads that involve a customer's good experience with a single support call. It's only the "single problem" threads that get moved.

You don't get to have it both ways.

Excellent point.

[oobjvb]

Frankly, this is a joke. Move bad reviews due to a technicality but leave single-issue praise out there. Seedy and manipulative!

There is no way HostGator can compensate me for the losses, real and potential, that they have caused me over the past 24 hours. I can't even quantify everything. But the token amount they have offered me via "credit" isn't even worth the hassle of canceling my PayPal subscription - especially since it took multiple attempts to get that set up and functioning in the first place.

Honestly, a small credit when my potential losses may end up being in the THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS, and by the way also requires that I stay with Hostgator to take advantage of, is adding insult to injury as far as I am concerned.

I continue to await someone stepping up and making this right with me. It may not hurt you a bit to lose my business Hostgator, in fact I am certain it won't. But I will not go quietly because people have a right to know what I and countless others like me have been through in the past 24 hours.

And burying my unhappiness in a different forum will not work.

[gwyneth]

I agree that the standards for keeping/moving a review seem to be elastic...though it may be an example of murky communication ("we know what we mean...").

Functionally, it does work out about the same, and it works against the perception that HG is straightforward enough to allow negative reviews.

Re the single-issue issue, at some points reviews needed ticket numbers; at other points, they were specifically discouraged (the idea being that a "review" was supposed to concern total experience). At the least, it hasn't been consistent over the years.

That said, oobjvb lost me with this plaint:

Originally Posted by oobjvb

There is no way HostGator can compensate me for the losses, real and potential, that they have caused me over the past 24 hours. I can't even quantify everything. But the token amount they have offered me via "credit" isn't even worth the hassle of canceling my PayPal subscription - especially since it took multiple attempts to get that set up and functioning in the first place.

Honestly, a small credit when my potential losses may end up being in the THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS, and by the way also requires that I stay with Hostgator to take advantage of, is adding insult to injury as far as I am concerned.

If you're doing that much business through your HG account, it's neither professional nor realistic to be without emergency alternatives. ALL HOSTING PROVIDERS GO DOWN PERIODICALLY... at least, that's how you should live if your site is mission-critical.

While I'm not defending outages or any aspect of service related to them, IMO, losing thousands of dollars from an outage of five bucks or less of service is an exaggeration or poor planning. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh but to me that math is irrational.

[oobjvb]

Obviously you are either not reading carefully or are not a business owner and do not understand. You are misunderstanding "real" vs. "potential" losses, as is Hostgator. My point is that "real" losses are NOT the only things at play here. Please read more carefully.

I did not state that I lost thousands of dollars yesterday alone. I said that this issue may end up costing me thousands of dollars - because it may. You see, as I explained, I have open development and design invoices with some of my clients. These clients have now lost faith in MY BUSINESS as a result of yesterday's debacle.

One of my major points in all this is, yes, I and people like me are mad at Hostgator - but all of our clients are mad at US. Unless I can smooth this over, I stand to lose several thousand dollars in new development and design work for my existing clients. Further- one of my clients has a completely new site in the planning for this year, a site they are planning on having my team develop. This project alone will be worth a good half-year's income to me - obviously, I am very concerned about that.

My point is that the ACTUAL downtime losses are not the only losses here, and that offering me $100 in credit will neither cover my ACTUAL losses from the event, nor does it consider my potential losses.

As far as an emergency backup, I don't care if I am paying Hostgator $25/mo. (I am) or $2500/mo., their business is hosting websites, and it is their job to have an emergency backup plan. We are not talking about a periodic outtage. We are talking about 24 full hours - not in the realm of acceptable or understandable. Sorry, but you are wrong on these points.

Originally Posted by gwyneth

If you're doing that much business through your HG account, it's neither professional nor realistic to be without emergency alternatives. ALL HOSTING PROVIDERS GO DOWN PERIODICALLY... at least, that's how you should live if your site is mission-critical.

While I'm not defending outages or any aspect of service related to them, IMO, losing thousands of dollars from an outage of five bucks or less of service is an exaggeration or poor planning. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh but to me that math is irrational.

[striddy]

I can understand you are frustrated by your downtime, however:

Originally Posted by oobjvb

There is no way HostGator can compensate me for the losses, real and potential, that they have caused me over the past 24 hours.

And they don't have to. The TOS that you agreed to makes this clear under

9b.) Uptime Guarantee

Originally Posted by oobjvb

the token amount they have offered me via "credit" isn't even worth the hassle of canceling my PayPal subscription

Originally Posted by oobjvb

a small credit when my potential losses may end up being in the THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS, and by the way also requires that I stay with Hostgator to take advantage of, is adding insult to injury as far as I am concerned.

Giving you a credit is the only thing HG can offer you.

Originally Posted by oobjvb

I continue to await someone stepping up and making this right with me.

The only "making right" HG needs to do is give you credit for downtime. What else are you expecting, considering you are only paying $25 per month?

Originally Posted by oobjvb

I will not go quietly because people have a right to know what I and countless others like me have been through in the past 24 hours.

Originally Posted by oobjvb

As far as an emergency backup, I don't care if I am paying Hostgator $25/mo. (I am) or $2500/mo., their business is hosting websites, and it is their job to have an emergency backup plan.

There is always room for a web host to streamline their internal emergency recovery procedures, but for $25 per month on a shared reseller account things like this can happen.

If uptime is essential for you, then you need to take some responsibility yourself, and spend considerably more than $25 per month.

[gwyneth]

Originally Posted by oobjvb

Obviously you are either not reading carefully or are not a business owner and do not understand. You are misunderstanding "real" vs. "potential" losses, as is Hostgator. My point is that "real" losses are NOT the only things at play here. Please read more carefully.

I did not state that I lost thousands of dollars yesterday alone. I said that this issue may end up costing me thousands of dollars - because it may. You see, as I explained, I have open development and design invoices with some of my clients. These clients have now lost faith in MY BUSINESS as a result of yesterday's debacle.

One of my major points in all this is, yes, I and people like me are mad at Hostgator - but all of our clients are mad at US. Unless I can smooth this over, I stand to lose several thousand dollars in new development and design work for my existing clients. Further- one of my clients has a completely new site in the planning for this year, a site they are planning on having my team develop. This project alone will be worth a good half-year's income to me - obviously, I am very concerned about that.

My point is that the ACTUAL downtime losses are not the only losses here, and that offering me $100 in credit will neither cover my ACTUAL losses from the event, nor does it consider my potential losses.

As far as an emergency backup, I don't care if I am paying Hostgator $25/mo. (I am) or $2500/mo., their business is hosting websites, and it is their job to have an emergency backup plan. We are not talking about a periodic outtage. We are talking about 24 full hours - not in the realm of acceptable or understandable. Sorry, but you are wrong on these points.

Not only did I read your post several times, I've owned businesses off and on for almost 30 years. Even more to the point, I've run profit centers for some of the most hellish high-growth startups of the hellish 80s. So I do know something about deliverables and supplier dependences.

The point is that if you have to deliver, it's your responsibility to have contingency plans and alternates (or explicitly accept that doing without is a gamble you won't need them).

"Periodic" wasn't meant to infer anything about the frequency, regularity, or duration of outages, and I clearly said I wasn't defending them or anything connected to them. They're awful and deserve angry reactions.

But the more you stress "potential" losses, the less credible I personally find your argument.

[EarlyOut]

They're at it again. Read this response: http://forums.hostgator.com/vps-host...tml#post209941. I'm predicting that this thread migrates to some non-public spot, probably very soon.

This poster isn't complaining about a single issue. He's tried twice to use VPS hosting, with unsatisfactory results. He's gotten multiple, different errors. When he's tried to resolve the problems, he's been blown off by support.

This persistent "cooking" of the customer reviews section is really, really distasteful. Every positive comment is a "review," and stays there forever. Every negative comment is a "single issue," and disappears.

HG should be ashamed. These are the actions of a company that's too insecure to let their customers express their opinions openly. That HG is so timid really does beggar belief.

[EarlyOut]

The irony, of course, it that this sanitizing is actually counter-productive. Any potential customer who visits this forum and sees nothing but positive reviews knows damn well that it's a setup, and that negative reviews are being removed. No one is stupid enough to believe otherwise - no large company has nothing but happy customers.

Potential customers would actually be more impressed to see some negative reviews, followed by moderator intervention, followed by a happy conclusion. It would tell them that HG takes customer satisfaction seriously, and will go out of its way to fix problems.

HG would really be better off leaving all of the reviews where they are, instead of applying some tortured definition of the word "review" to justify hiding the occasional bit of dirty laundry.

[GatorFord]

First off I'd like to address both of the main issues here.

1. In regards to the problems on the pantera server, I sincerely apologize that this affected a large number of resellers negatively. As most of you that were affected already know, I'll detail what happened perhaps for those who don't. The RAID on this machine became degraded due to a drive failing out of the array, subsequently we scheduled a drive replacement for this so we could begin rebuilding the array to a healthy state. When the drive was swapped and the machine came back online we noticed that the filesystem was not clean and required a fsck. This caused some files to be moved to lost+found which effectively deleted them. We were forced to restore customer files from our backup servers because of this to restore service to customers who were affected. Compounding the issue the RAID rebuild was on a 3ware card and they rebuild much slower than the newer PERC cards. Because of this the disk I/O on the machine was exceptionally high during this period and some services had to be disabled just to keep other core services online (like Apache and MySQL). To compound the issue even further, a kernel update was performed across all our machines during the rebuild, which caused the rebuild to have to restart and go for even longer. We are working on a solution going forward so that kernel updates will not get applied to machines which are rebuilding. That being said we will provide a one month credit for anyone who had to go through the pantera ordeal. I'm sorry that we can't cover your actual client losses or potential income losses but that is not something we can do.

2. The second issue here is what's been described as "cooking" of the reviews section. I want to ensure that Brent has a very honest and "open door" policy when it comes to his business and the forums and would frown upon any sort of "cooking" of reviews. If something is wrong we want to hear about it and try to get it corrected as listening to the customer is a huge part of our success. Looking at the reviews section you'll notice most of them are actually reviews over a period of time and there are some one-shot commendations of employees. The real issue is that these one-time employee feedback forum posts don't really have another section for us to move them too.

What do you guys think about having a "Employee Feedback" section where constructive feedback could be left regarding specific technicians so we can try to get just reviews in the "Customer Reviews" section?

[gwyneth]

EarlyOut, as much as I agree that HG should avoid even the appearance of moving negative reviews (i.e., consistent criteria for what's a review, etc.), I don't think this thread is the place to discuss specific other examples.

[EarlyOut]

Originally Posted by GatorFord

Looking at the reviews section you'll notice most of them are actually reviews over a period of time....

This is what an attorney would describe as "assuming facts not in evidence."

Just from the current first page of the reviews:

http://forums.hostgator.com/great-support-t68020.html
http://forums.hostgator.com/taylor-re-t67628.html
http://forums.hostgator.com/thank-yo...-y-t67369.html
http://forums.hostgator.com/new-happ...er-t67163.html
http://forums.hostgator.com/1st-time...at-t66818.html
http://forums.hostgator.com/thanks-matthew-t61739.html
http://forums.hostgator.com/thanks-n...al-t66754.html
http://forums.hostgator.com/chat-sup...am-t66478.html
http://forums.hostgator.com/great-se...te-t66501.html

There are a couple more that are debatable, but fully one-third of the front-page posts don't meet your "review" criteria. OK, it's less than half, so "most" of the reviews meet the criteria. But that's being a bit literal.

I'm sure you're trying to do the right thing, but there's a natural tendency to want to trumpet the good news, and make the bad news go away. But as in the world of politics, the coverup is always worse than the underlying bit of minor malfeasance.

I think the criteria should be simpler. If a customer has had a problem, and has tried to resolve it through support, the "review" should stay put. If support did a great job, that's fine. If support fell down on the job, and it took intervention from a moderator, that's useful information, as well. A negative "review" should be moved only if the user hasn't given support a swing at the ball.

If, for example, the review says, "I always get timeout errors on my site," and nothing more, it belongs elsewhere. But if it says, "I always get timeout errors on my site. I put in a ticket, and support told me to go make myself a cup of tea," it's a review of customer service, and should be left alone.

[EarlyOut]

Originally Posted by gwyneth

EarlyOut, as much as I agree that HG should avoid even the appearance of moving negative reviews (i.e., consistent criteria for what's a review, etc.), I don't think this thread is the place to discuss specific other examples.

If a real moderator wants to branch the thread, and put it elsewhere, he's more than welcome to do so.

(Hence my suggestion for a forum section dedicated to issues about the forum itself....)

[regentronique]

I completely agree that HostGator staff use inapropriate and hypocritical ways to hidden the disatisfaction of many customers toward the evident incompetence of most of the new staff...

Tactics as asking more than a single issue to keep a review in place should be used as well for good reviews as bad ones. I have started analysing their unfair way of manipulating the huge amount of recent bad reviews for more than a month and on 33 bad reviews, 13 were discarded and most of them for wrong reasons. This is almost half of them and i am not writing about their dishonnest way to change bad icons to good ones without asking the thread owner permission...

HostGator employees you should be really ashamed to be so selfish and superficial!

Mostly because i know many errors and nightmares you have done in the past on all servers and tried to conceal to the HostGator customers even to you own boss...

If you take the time to read the description of the "Customer Reviews" section you will find this:

"Good, bad, or indifferent, tell us how you feel about HostGator. Share your personal experiences or read about the experiences of others."

Also in the sticky it is mentionned:

"...This forum is for reviews, positive or negative about the service; not for complaints about a single issue you are having..."

I am sorry, but a single issue with any member of the staff or any unreasonable unavailability of a paid service can end up in a "negative review about the service". I would recommend a lawyer if you have difficulties with words understanding or a priest if you have morality problems...

For the last two years, the quality of services degradation is more and more evident for the technicaly advanced users and if a user is not a "HostGator Fanatic" he would be honnest enough to recognize that it was not taking 4 hours, few years ago, to get a simple response to a ticket and it was not necessary to send 3 tickets because the staff was not taking the time to read them fully to understand the issue. All this resulting often in 2 to 3 days before an average issue could be resolved...

I was infuriated when i saw the responses from "HostGator Fanatics" here in the "New Potential Customer Questions" thread at http://forums.hostgator.com/new-pote...ns-t67608.html

I really needed to respond there because i felt that it was completely unacceptable to see a very experienced HostGator forum member telling only the good side of Hostgator and a totally inexperienced forum member telling that the support is so great.

@striddy : You should be ashamed to not tell this potential customer about the recent server isssues hundreds of resellers had to face. They were offline for over 40 hours and many of them were complaining on these forums about it and you even responded to one today. So you knew about this, as well as you knew that several other issues occured on other reseller servers for years. The fact that you were unaffected with these issues do not give you the right to hide the fact to a newly potential customers, unless you have teamed with the other HostGators Fanatics here that with dismiss all HostGator staff wrongdoing and always blame the user for its bad review or comments that are now more and more hidden from the publicly accessible forums recently...

@GamerFill : Maybe you are satisfied with the average and poorly technical knowledge of the LiveChat support here because you are not a power user or an advanced software engineer needing real technical help. But if you took the time to read the dozens of recent commentaries about the constantly degrading quality of the LiveChat support you should be more reserved in your own commentaries.

I have been a HostGator reseller for more than 2 years and i can tell that their support is constantly degrading with LiveChat as well as the ticket support. Tickets response time went from 20 minutes years ago to 3-6 hours recently and i do not tell about the multiple replies we have to do to make the technician understand the real issue we have, because most of them do not read completely our ticket before asking unnecessary questions already answered in our previous posts. At the end it could take 2-3 days to solve an issue that would have been resolved in 4 hours with a well trained and competent support technician.

I have discussed these issues privately with administrators and the owner here, to finally be responded that it is quite difficult to find and keep qualified staff. I can understand that quite easily, but i cannot understand the manipulations and lies used to hide the problem.

As many other webhosting enterprises, HostGator is facing a staff quality crisis that will be very hard to solve mostly because expansion is the main target for them. But this is no excuse to hide the facts and the truth to new customers. I know that i will be again lapidated because i had the impudence to tell the truth here, mostly by the HostGators Fanatics, but i cannot silence my heart and soul for the benefit of good relations with people here...

P.S. Striddy i have decided to delete our forum friendly relationship because of the recent events, mostly because you have choosen to side with the dishonest people here.

In conclusion i will tell that my confidence in more than 90% of HostGator staff is almost at zero and for this reason i decided to abandonned my managed reseller account here because i know how badly it is managed...

EarlyOut, oobjvb and the few others who had the courage to speakout about the truth manipulations here, i give you my admiration. Mostly because you will have to face the "HostGator Fanatics" and their shenanigans plus the wrath of the "polite" staff here...

[GatorPatrick]

I'm going to lock this thread, because I see nothing productive being offered here. If you are unhappy or otherwise have an issue please contact me directly: patrick@hostgator.com and I will be more than happy to work through this with you on a one on one basis. Regarding pantera in particular, I personally worked on that server myself so if you have any questions about that I can clear that up for you as well.

One thing we value above all else here at HG is customer satisfaction, and we will do anything within our power to ensure that your time spent doing business with us is positive. That I can assure you.

[GatorBrent]

Hi oobjvb,


I have moved this thread back to the customer review forum as it should have never been moved to begin with. We do move some threads such as customers bashing us for failing to pay their bill, breaking own site, etc.

While I believe we did everything we could to fix this perfect storm hardware failure on this server the fact remains the downtime was there and this is a legitimate review.


I'll be working with a few of the staff members here to come up with a better system of handling reviews. There is some confusion currently on what is acceptable and what isn't.