Staying with HostGator, but frustrating experience

saiff · #1 08-28-2006, 11:22 AM

I have been with HG since 2/06 and joined based off the reviews and the quick response time from their support team along with phone access. Their pricing is great and the support is relatively quick. For minor issues, they are quick to resolve them and respond quickly. Since I have moved from a reseller plan to a semi-dedicated plan, I have had a few issues.

First we had email issues where clients could no longer email us as they would either get rejected or lost in cyberspace. The first response from HG is always that it is the senders problem and that HG has nothing to do with because the DNS and mail settings at HG are/were correct. I contacted the senders tech folks and we determine all was well on their end. After some research on my own, I figured out the settings at HG were not correct for the add-on domains I had. I pointed this out to HG, they fixed the problem, and then emails worked ok.

Next problem, certain locations using certain ISPs could not see our websites at various times and for some ISPs, all the time. For each ISP as we were made aware of the problem, we contacted the ISP to see if there were any issues and there did not appear to be any on the ISP end. We contacted HG again (this was also around the time we switched to the semi-dedicated in may) for each instance, we were told it was an issue with the ISP and all the settings at HG were fine. Well, this problem has been lingering and we had no idea where the problem was. Recently, an employee of mine was working at home and she could not access the sites. I talked to the techs at their ISP and they did all sorts of tests and nothing turned up on their end. They could hit the IP, but could not access the domain names. I contacted HG again and was told the same thing about it being an issue with the ISP. I did some of my own research and went to the theplanet forums to see if anybody else had similar issues and I found a topic with the same problem. I referred HG to that topic in the forum and from that they determined that "
It appears that an alc/bogon list was needing an update, as the 72./8 range is an IP range that was not allocated until the last year or so. This has been updated and you should not face this issue again."

Everything works perfectly now. I am sticking with HG because the reliability is good. My frustration is that when there is a serious issue, their first response is to blame the other end until I can prove them wrong. We get a webhost so we dont have to learn about managing our servers but I have now done tons of research on server related issues learning about things like bogon lists so I can point HG in the right direction and try to figure out where the problem lies.

I understand their is a balance between resolving issues as fast as possible and not spending time trying to fix customer issues that are issues outside of HG, but it feels like HG goes way to far on the side of closing out issues as fast as they can.

Thanks for letting me vent.

***GatorBrent*** · #2 08-28-2006, 01:06 PM

Hello,

Could you provide me with the ticket numbers on these 2 issues? I'd like to look into them a little more for you.

saiff · #3 08-28-2006, 01:45 PM

Thanks for the followup Brent. All the problems have been resolved now, it was just very frustrating trying to get them resolved. If you follow the ticket trail, a couple times you'll see I got frustrated as your support team seemed to ignore previous posts and ask the same things again. I welcome your feedback and feel free to email me directly with any questions you might have on the experience I have had. I appreciate you also taking a look at this.

Related tickets: BVV-421796 , ZBD-860160 , MCT-774602

I found one tech support in particular who seemed to never fully read the ticket trail as he often times asked me to give him information that had already been posted. Feel free to email me if you would like the name of that person (for brent only) but you will most likely be able to figure out who I am talking about after reading the tickets. He shows up a couple of them.

Thanks,

***GatorBrent*** · #4 08-30-2006, 10:35 PM

Reviewing the tickets it the problem did in fact lie on the sending server for the email delay. (possibly was dns hard to tell since it resolved itself)

As for the one ticket they were def blocking the mail which would have nothing to do with dns.

At least everything is working now. =)

I hope it stays that way!

saiff · #5 08-31-2006, 08:01 AM

Brent,
If you are referring to ticket ZBD-860160. The emails started coming through only after HG fixed the bogon list issue so it had something to do with the HG end. They said they were not blocking the IP but I guess somehow because of the bogon list, a trace gets partially routed .I'm guessing here since I dont understand the ins and outs of these things but I know for sure it fixed itself once the bogon list was updated.

Actually, if you read further on the ticket, there was not a delay on the sending server. The HG tech support acknowledged that the add-on domains needed some DNS changes which could have affected the the receipt of the emails after I pointed out to him how the domains did not pass some DNS tests. Considering the emails came in right away after he made the DNS changes, the problem did reside on the HG side and not the sender.

Also, keep in mind, these problems arose when we move from a reseller to semi-dedicated account.

I find it hard to believe that after reading the tickets you would lay blame on the sending server for 2 of the issues when things started working only after HG made changes on the HG end after I had to research and point HG in the right direction.

Anyhow, thanks for the feedback.

Thanks