Not satisfied anymore...

[MonsieurPL]

Hello Gators,

I've been with HG for +3 years now and just had good words for your shared hosting. I even won 1 free year of hosting cause of the ugliest website contest 3 years ago.

However, since I started to rent a VPS hosting, I've been disappointed, especially for the cost my company's paying for. I mean, I don't care about paying more for a good service (which means good connection speed, uptime and customer support). But this is no longer possible for me to do business with you guys, cause of that kind of situation :

Before Xmas, we decided to copy our HostGator account to another host company to do connection speed tests, but the Backup function on Cpanel was running in circle and I had to backup all the stuff by myself with the FTP, except I haven't been able to backup the awstats, mails, etc. Then, cause of Xmas, we forgot to pay the VPS account and it's been suspended. Fine. But after we paid, I asked the customer support to reactivate it as soon as possible cause I had a meeting with my partners later on day about the website we're developping. +24 hours later, the server's still not back and we had to cancel the meeting. Not really professionnal, in front of our guesses.

Here's how the situation's been handled :

- The fact is I had to give to the Gator support my paypal transaction ID, which serves to nothing finally, cause I had to give more informations to proove that I paid (4 last digits of CC...).

- After this, the support guy told me that my account will be reactivated in 20-30 minutes... which never happened. Why does he never assure this procedure from its beginning to its end ?


It's the second time this same situation happened this year. Of course, forgetting to pay is my problem, but when I pay, I'm waiting to get the services back in a normal delay (few minutes, max 1 hour)...

Actually, I'm waiting for almost a hour now on the Gator chat with a technician to get this situation fixed (which is still not) (UPDATE : after 1 hour, the support gator decided to send for me a ticket to a server administrator, which means I'll have to wait AGAIN). I lost money cause of that cancelled meeting yesterday, cause I cannot use my server while I'm paying for it and cause I'm waiting online on a chat instead of working on my usual stuff. Head ache.


Now I just wanna be able to make my backup and go to Iweb, a canadian company that is more professionnal and that makes its proofs with the dedicated hosting. And cheaper for more, as I know them since 5 years.


I still encourage you, Gators, to help organisms and foundations, but please don't forget you have to bet on quality on each steps of the hosting services before making bonus things.

It's been a pleasure to do business with your shared plans, but not anymore with the VPS and this is why I'm gonna move all to my dedicated server on Iweb. More simple that way.

Thanks,
Pierre-Luc, Montréal

[GatorJoshL]

Good afternoon Pierre-Luc,

I just tried to give you a call regarding this, however I received your voicemail.

I want to thank you for sending in this request, as there seemed to be a glitch between our billing system and the unsuspend script. I have enabled your VPS now, and if you would like would be more than happy to write a loop to package all your accounts for you.

The unsuspend script is ran on a cron, the front line techs that you speak with when you call in do not have access to the cron to make sure it is running. However, if you called a second time about this, then they should have had the call escalated right away to make sure your VPS was turned back on. I will be looking into this for you.


I do apologize for the issues you've seen here and would like to speak with you regarding the issues so that we can work to get anything on our end that is incorrect, corrected. We value all our customers and the feedback we receive. I will be sending you an email shortly, please get back to me as soon as possible.

[MonsieurPL]

Fed up, frustrated and sad. A one-week long story with no end.


First, I've been a customer for +3 years now and the 2 first years, with shared hosting accounts, were charming ! But VPS and dedicated changed everything.

Few months ago, I bought my first VPS with Hostgator. In the beginning of january, I forgot a payment cause of Xmas time (my bad!) and when I paid to reactivate my account, it took +24 hours to see my sites back. For sure, this was caused by a technical problem in the HostGator VPS auto-reactivation system. But I must be a good player and say that HostGator did the job, made apologies and took his responsabilities (2 months credited) to convince me to stay with them, as they wanted to become a better company each day. In fact, Josh Loe gave me his email address to speak directly with him and I loved that, cause he solved my problem with a simplicity, even tough he forgot to reply to make last email... anyway.

Now, my boss had new projects for his business and needed a dedicated server QUICKLY for what he wanted to do. So, I convinced him to go with HostGator, as I tought it was a good choice. But is wasn't that much.

First, I needed to transfer my stuff from a temporary HostGator shared account to my new dedicated server : HostGator says this is free. I mean, as any visitor, when I'm on the home page, I see that :

Coming from another host?
We know how difficult it can be moving to another web host.

• - Free Domain Transfer!
• - Free File Transfers!
• - Free Database Transfers!
• - Free Script Transfers!

We handle the entire transfer process for you!



No asterisk, no notice of any possible other fees. Great ! For the first time (+3 years and 5 accounts later), I'm using that free transfer service that would really help me, as I have a lot of job. So, I'm writing an email to the transfer support to get more informations and a tech replied to me (IKX-14769***) : "We can handle your transfer and you shouldn't need to worry about Outlook email settings as they should be the same once the DNS name server changes are fully propagated. We can also schedule your transfer to start whenever you'd like."

So, I went to the Live chat to get a last information and the tech online gave me that link for the transfer to me dedicated server : https://secure.hostgator.com/resellertransferdedicated.php. As you can see, still no informations about restrictions and fees with transfers stuff.

Then, I filled the form, as I needed the transfer to be done quickly, and I finally received an answer (QAR-14825***) : "Hello,

I'm not sure if this was explained in advance and my apologies if it was not. I need to inform you that the free transfer service does not include the conversions of Addon domains to full cPanel accounts due to the extensive amount of manual work involved in the process and there is an administrative services time charged at the rate of $75 per hour in 30 minute increments charged for this service.We can get this conversion done for you at $37. If you wish to proceed, we need your agreement to the provided quote of $37 to process your request"


Yeah, for sure, it wasn't explained to me in advanced..! I bought the dedicated server, I talked by email and live chat, and nobody tought I need to know that before ??!!?

So, I'm going back on the live chat, explain my situation to the tech and that one tells me that he'll put a notice in my first ticket and that I will have to wait for a response. But, now one week later, I just NEVER received an update for that ticket and another tech told me, this morning, that is was normal cause the notice from the tech before him has already been answered in the first ticket post. So my questions are : what did the first tech say in his notice (I mean, did he at least read the post of his partner before writing that notice ?) and who was supposed to keep me up to date in that story ?!?! Seems like it has a communication problem between the tech and the transfer department and that nobody tought I'd need to get involved ? So, I've been waiting many days for NOTHING ! And, finlay, the last tech i speaked with told me that the restrictions are written on https://secure.hostgator.com/transfer.php, but why the first tech gave me https://secure.hostgator.com/resellertransferdedicated.php and why the restrictions are not CLEARLY specified on each concerned page ? Avoid confusion, please.

So, please, wake up Gators, because, this morning, my boss was frustrated and I looked stupid to have convinced him to go with HostGator and pay 139$/month for a server we haven't use yet ! And this is not a question of money (37$, not a lot for a business), but a question of principes and organization, considering that I already have to convince my boss that even tough HostGator is more expensive, it compensates by its easy and free[of mind] customer support. Have i been wrong ?

Anyway. HostGator rocks the house for shared hosting, but is clearly not mature enough to play with dedicated stuff and handle the customers for. I'm worry and I will have to check elsewhere. It makes me sad, cause I will have to move 5 accounts from HostGator and I will have to make a big hardwork day to do everything within times. This getting me frustrated and I think HostGator think too much about Growing-growing-growing and not enough about keeping his good customers in good hands.


I'm only getting problem since VPS/dedicated and, considering all the money given to HostGator, I wouldn't think that. I had no problem in the 2 first years and that make me really sad to go away from HG, but I think my boss won't continue with a team that don't make the update to his customers and a company that is not clear on all points.

Sad...


Pierre-Luc

[GatorBrent]

Hi Pierre,

I'm sorry the transfer process wasn't originally explained to you. Our transfer department is huge and costs us a fortune to offer this service. We are currently modifying some of the transfer policies to be more generous now that we've added many more staff members to this department.

Unfortunately due to the nature of transfers we have to have some restrictions in place. Obviously for what you were trying to do it doesn't sound like this restriction should have affected you.

We have many customers with hundreds if not thousands of addon domains that request the addon domains to be seperated out into full cpanel accounts. This is a very manual procedure that does in fact take a ton of time to complete. We have to manually create the new cpanel account, mysql databases, email accounts, ftp accounts, etc etc.

With many of these transfers we'll have a single employee working on it for weeks costing us thousands of dollars on an account that will take years to re-coop the cost on!!

I'm sending an email to you to verify you're once again happy and that everything is running smoothly.