Oh Hostgator, why do you do this to me? [RESOLVED]

[joer80]

I am the webmaster for the TexarkanaGazette and EldoradoNewsTimes. I love hostgator, but this has been horrible. Please read my story.

Pros:

Live chat is one of my favorite features. Tech support is very friendly also. I have worked in customer service for a few years and overall, these people show me they want to help me. They are friendly and helpful.

Cons:

Too many mistakes.. Your killing me!

Let me explain myself.

We hosted with a scam hosting company for a few years prior to moving to hostgator. They had bad load times, were down for an hour or so monthly, and had 1 hour phone wait times. They even tried to upsell me on a tech support call because my database was over 15mb. (It was around 125mb.)

After coming to hostgator, I had 15 min phone wait times, and live chat which I loved for small issues.

Server speed was at least twice as fast with hostgator. I could especially tell with the ftp response time. (Moving in and out of folders and such.) I love cpanel also, live databasse backups rule.

All was well with Hostgator until about 1 month in. I had just canceled my old hosting, and our site goes down without notice..... (we had a resellers account). A webmasters worst nightmare.

We are a local newspaper, with 6,000 people a day to our website, and 30,000 circulation.... We cant just go down.. I know we should have moved from reseller to dedicated sooner, but it was working like a champ and we had had decent service on shared for years.

Out of no where, a month into our hosting, I was notified that our website was exceeding the cpu limits, not just the required 25%, but the 30 or so % and we would need to correct the issue before we could be placed back online..

Well... no problem.. I figure we were borderline for the first month of our hosting and I would rather move to a stable host that watches there logs than a host that lets slow service go on. (Even though the hostgator reseller server has always been snappy for me?!)

However, in a perfect world, I would rather have had a warning when I am getting close to cpu resource usage on the reseller account, so i can upgrade to dedicated without down time, but no such luck.

I exsplained to my boss that hostgator is a great company, and it was just an automatic thing that turned us off, and we would be back online soon.

I removed my statistics calculations, and banner tracking code on my website to reduce our once a day calculations (that probably sent us to 30% cpu for a short amount of time) and let the admin know to place me back online and I would purchase a dedicated account.

6 hours later he saw my ticket and put me back online.... QAX-2500223 This is the 17th.

Advertisers not happy. I explained to boss we were not paying for dedicated lvl service and convinced them to upgrade us to dedicated.

It would be a few days though before I could get the funding approved with our accounting department, so I asked hostgator to work with me while I got permission for funding for the dedicated server.

19th I go back down. At this point, they are tired of working with my site and leave me down... QHD-2512803

"I have localhost routed the IP for this domain so requests will not be fulfilled, but you can still access the cPanel account. "

What? Your going to leave my site down? I dont even have the dedicated approved yet, and there is a 24 hour install time after it is approved. We can't be down for days??? I read on the blog that they would move people that exceed their limits to temporary dedicated servers while they decide but this didnt happen.... not even offered to me...


DGR-2515442 CIW-2504697 I signed up for a dedicated server with paypal, so I could send in a business check. I had to ask on the phone if sending a check is even an option, because it doesn't say anything about it online.

Sounds good but my accounting department requested to pay a full year in advance instead of month by month like my invoice stated... I ask them to please change my invoice to 12 months so I can send a check for that amount instead of 1 month.

Well when the sales rep updated my invoice to 12 months, he changed my payment from paypal other to my credit card on file, so I got charged $2,000 to my personal credit card!!!

They reversed it after I let them know, but there was a 7+ hour ticket response time to the reversal!

Angry, I asked to just pay 3 months instead while I test the waters, and they did it again! $500 to my personal credit card even though my ticket said "Leave on payment other so I can send a check)

Sheesh.. They appologized because they did not read my whole request which stated, to please leave it on "payment other" so I could send a check for the amount... and I even got a phone call later that day to let me know they fixed the error.

The response time to reverse the personal charges were horrible. 7+ hours on CIW-2504697 and the response time to unsuspend my hosting after the programing changes was 6+ hours. Not what I would have liked...

To get my site live, I had to pay a month on my personal credit card so that i could send a check in for the 3 months dedicated server because they wouldn't set up my dedicated server until they got payment.

I was setup around the 21st. So the 17th, 18th, 19, 20th, and the 21st where basicly the worst days of my life.

When they got my dedicated server setup, they coped the files for me but the site didnt work. The files were coped but it was giving database errors. I still was paying for my reseller account, so I recopied the databases and it fixed it. Not sure why their copy didnt work, because the tables were there, they just didnt work. I lucked out because I am a database programer and knew I how to do it myself.

My dedicated server was set up on the 21st, and my billing renewed on the 14th of every month. What? Confused, I called tech support and had this corrected in about 20min.

After correcting my renewal, it didnt reflect on my invoice, so i asked him to update my invoice so I could see that a change was made. (No ticket, all on phone. Its much faster this way.)

I was not even sure if I would have time to get them a check because they had my billing date before my server was even qued to be setup!

:\

1582062 was invoice number that was corrected this time. I had like 5 or 6 through out the process by the time I asked for the 1 month credit card one, and the 12 month check one, and the 3 month check one, and all of the errors made to them.

This whole situation had me pretty embarest to say the least as I am the one that chose to move our sites to Hostgator from the scam hosting. My boss didnt understand because we had no warning and we were down for days... and our traffic was not much different on the 17th than it was the first month of our service at hostgator which was probably exceeding cpu at times, although we had no way to know...

I just hope things improve from here on out!

[GatorWesley]

I deeply apologize about the billing problems that happened with your dedicated server setup. I have completely removed that cc number from our system so this will not happen again.

Unfortunately with the way our shared servers work, if one account is causing a high load, there is a good chance that the server could go down because of that one site, which would cause multiple other resellers and their clients to go down as well. So we have to find the problem and eliminate it as soon as possible to save the uptime of the server. Luckily you will not run into this issue on a dedicated box.

As far as ticket response times go, it appears that this happened in the middle of one of our billing audits when sales tickets were higher than usual, again we apologize about that and we are working on hiring as many people as possible right now to reduce ticket response times.

If you ever run into an issue like this again in the future, please call and ask to speak to a supervisor and we will do anything in our power to make things right on your account.

I did notice that your Aluminum account is still active, if you are completely finished with moving all of the files over, you will need to submit the form at http://www.hostgator.com/cancel.php to close it out and avoid further billing. Since you paid annually, you can request a credit for the remaining balance to be applied towards your next dedicated invoice.

Let us know if there is anything else we can do for you if you.

[joer80]

I have other shared hosting accounts with my other clients. Is there anyway I can prevent this from happening again? Like maybe get a notice if I hit 20% cpu usage so I can upgrade my account? Or a way that I can check it myself? Or a temp move to an old machine until I can pay?

[GatorWesley]

The only problem with sending notifications is it may take hours to get a hold of a client to find out what they would like to do about the account. While this is happening the server may be constantly crashing putting hundreds of sites offline for this one account that is causing a high load.

Because it is a shared server, we have to jump in and stop the problem before it escalates to the server going down.

We would highly recommend that you move all of your sites over to the dedicated server if that is an option for you.

[joer80]

The idea of a notification, is not to send it when it is crashing the server, but when you are getting close to border line.

Having a few old dedicated servers p3 or p4 sitting around would be a second option for people that have to be moved asap and didnt respond to the first notice.

30 days of time on an old server with a few other people, or a courtisy notice while I was on shared when i was at 15-20 % would have been awsome.

30 days would allow me to get you a check, or get a business credit card and the purchase approved, would have made you world class in customer service with no down time at all.

But you may not even need the old server idea if people knew they were using alot of cpu.

[GatorWesley]

We actually used to have a system like this setup, we would move high resource accounts over to a temporary server, but that didn't really work out either because all of the high resource accounts on a single server pretty much lead to constant downtime.

[joer80]

How many people need this safety net on a regular basis? How long did you give them to move?

Would 20 old machines, with 2 people for 30 days each each do the job? Or do a ton of people get put into this situation?

A Safety net like this would be worth a decent investment in my eyes because it would take you from 7- to 11+ on 1-10 scale of customer service. Just make sure to not keep them on for more than 30 days to keep your cost down.

And, if more than 20 people a month run into this downtime, it makes it even a better idea, because that is alot of people down while they upgrade.

I would have given my right foot to be up 2/3 of the days I was down. Which you may have got with your old setup.) If you put me on one with 5 people for 30 days, i bet you would get 95% uptime which beats the heck out of 0%.

[The uptime I am referring to, is the time you are up between the time you get disabled, and the time your upgraded account is functional. Can be days to buy, pay, 24 hour install, and copy over files, databases, and ssl if needed.]

Just trying to help.

[joer80]

"all of the high resource accounts on a single server"

That was probably why it didn't work out. haha. I think it warrants more attention than a single server if that is the case. Especially if its just temp.

[joer80]

I would pay an extra $5-10 a month on all of my shared hosting accounts for a low to no downtime resource usage saftey net plan like this.

If you did it for free, you would be the man.

We both know that most people are not going to need a planed bandwith or hardrive plan upgrade. Most are going to need an upgrade after being blindslided like i was due to cpu usage. So please help us make it a smooth upgrade and give us a heads up when we are starting to out grow our hosting.

[GatorBrent]

I just sent you a pm. I want to make sure everything has been taken care of for you. thanks!

[joer80]

I wanted to give everyone an update on how everything is going on my new dedicated server.

While the move to dedicated was very rocky for me, everything has been running great since the move. It looks like I have been up without reboot since I moved.

Here are some of my stats:

Server uptime: 22 days 16 hours 21 minutes 57 seconds
Server Load: 0.51 (2 cpus)

The server they set me up on was also more powerful than what I ordered. The specs on my basic plan say pentium 4 - 2.4, but I got duel processors clocked at 2.8 each. I don't know if everyone is going to get this or if it is just while supplies last, but its good to know!

For the bad experience I had, I also got a free month of dedicated hosting.

Even though I got some free hosting, I feel like getting 2 personal emails from the owner of the company was a very good way to show that they care about their customers experience.

There is no doubt in my mind they will figure out a way to stop this from happening asap.

Now that I have moved, I still think Hostgators dedicated prices are the best value for small to medium sized companies. When you consider the fact that you are getting a managed dedicated server behind a firewall and support that speaks english for around 25%-50% less money than other companies managed dedicated plans, I can put up with some ruff spots.

Thanks!

[GatorWesley]

Great to hear it! Can we change this to a positive review?

[joer80]

Sure. Even though it was a bad 4 days, you still offer a good service for a great price overall.