Internet Marketing with Josh SpauldingMaking Money through Ethical Marketing.

45 comments

1. Vern (17 comments.)
   26th February, 2008 at 5:53 pm 

   Hi Josh,

   Its been sometime since I’ve posted anything on your blog. Nice make over by the way!

   In anycase, its just too bad that the way Hostgator handles customers is rather embarassing. I think thats already pretty polite of me to say so.

   But I do know that hostgators reseller plan is pretty lucrative. Now that I’ve read your post, I’m feeling a second thought about ever using or becoming a reseller with Hostgator… ever.

   Best Regards,
   Vern

2. mattg (1 comments.)
   26th February, 2008 at 7:22 pm 

   Hi Josh,
   if you’re looking for a fair price on a dedicated server I can highly recommend LiquidWebHost.com, I’ve had a dedicated server with them for almost a year and their service is spot on, and it’s under $200 a month..
   hope this helps.
   
   Matt Garrett

3. Tuppy Glossop (1 comments.)
   26th February, 2008 at 7:23 pm 

   Funny coincidence … I just ended a support live chat with Hostgator about ten minutes ago. I found them extremely helpful, as they have been with any other trouble tickets I’ve had in the last couple of years I’ve been with them.

   But of course, I may have been unusually lucky. Anyway, my two cents.

4. kevin (1 comments.)
   26th February, 2008 at 7:26 pm 

   Hey dude,

   You should check out Dreamhost. I got a great deal with them and have yet to have a serious problem (though the web panel did go down once or twice, not bad if you use remote logins to ftp and cmd line). thought you might like checking them out.

   K

5. Josh Spaulding
   26th February, 2008 at 7:35 pm 

   Glad to see you stopping back by, Vern

   I just went with theplanet.com and so far everything is great. The plan I went with is either equal to or greater than what HG offers for the equivalent package.

   Thanks for the recommendations. I would have taken a look if I would have seen them about an hour ago

   @ Tuppy - I was with HostGator for about 3 years. They do have some very knowledgeable people, but they have a fair # of reps who need alot more training than they’re given.

   Anything even remotely complicated has to be dealt with via their ticket system. 9 times out of 10 tickets take far too long to be replied to and most of them aren’t very personalized.

   If they really wanted my business they would have taken care of everything over the phone.

   I’m glad you’re happy with them though, that’s great.

   However, after this months fee (SEOhosting) they will never see another penny from me.

6. Yebot (1 comments.)
   26th February, 2008 at 7:39 pm 

   I hate stories like these. This sounds almost as bad as 1and1.

   http://www.google.com/search?q=1and1+internet+sucks

   I’ve had good experience with The Planet. (<- not an aff link)

7. Josh Spaulding
   26th February, 2008 at 7:59 pm 

   @ Yebot,

   Funny, 1&1 was the first host I went with, back when I didn’t know any better.

   I wrote a similar review for them on the Warrior Forum a while back.

   I also went with the Planet for the dedi today.

8. Chuck (73 comments.)
   26th February, 2008 at 8:20 pm 

   I’ve had my fill of dedicated hosting with it price and need for a server admin. Just too expensive for what I was getting. Currently, I have shared hosting with Bluehost, IX Web Hosting and NameCheap Hosting…

   I also have a VPS account with Solar VPS. VPS is a step between shared hosting and a dedicated server (can also be referred to as a “partial server”). It’s appropriate when you need a lot of control over your sites, but not a lot of bandwidth or disk space. I use it for my most critical business purposes. It’s pricy, but worth it if you need that kind of root-level access.

   I’ve had a lot of experience with various hosting companies over the past 10 years or so (probably 40-50 of them…at least a dozen in the last year alone), and for the most part, I find them to be self-absorbed and unprofessional. IX Web Hosting has been a breath of fresh air for shared hosting for me recently. 24/7 phone or chat support, incredibly affordable for shared hosting… responsive when I need support. But there aren’t many that I really love.

   Check my link if you want to see more specifics on my recent experiences.

9. Chuck (73 comments.)
   26th February, 2008 at 8:23 pm 

   By the way, Josh…my gravatar seems to be set up correctly, but isn’t correctly displaying on your site. Not sure why that would be…but it’s been in place every since you mentioned gravatars the first time…yet has never kicked in. Just thought you should know.

10. Ruck (9 comments.)
    27th February, 2008 at 12:30 am 

    Blasphemy!

    That sucks man. I got 3 dedicated servers and 3 smaller packages to mask some landing pages with them and never ever experienced a problem like this.

11. Josh Spaulding
    27th February, 2008 at 1:22 am 

    @ Chuck - Anything beyond the obvious is Greek to me when it comes to hosting, but dealing with the few hosting companies I have, I can see I agree with most of what you say. I’ve definitely had my fair share of grief with them!

    Not sure if you heard back from Gravatar or not? Seems like it’s within your Gravatar account.

    @ Ruck - Yeah it’s hit or miss I suppose. This isn’t the first time they’ve screwed the pooch though.

12. Kyle Eslick (1 comments.)
    27th February, 2008 at 2:25 am 

    Josh,

    Sorry to hear about your problems with HostGator. I’ve had them forever now, and I call them a LOT with questions. They’ve always been great at helping me and even offered to set things up for me if I want (I usually decline so I can learn how to do them myself).

    Hopefully this gets resolved soon.

    P.S. If you want a shorter SEO URL, let me know. I’ve got 5-6 tucked away that are 10 digits or less.

13. Josh Spaulding
    27th February, 2008 at 3:16 am 

    Hey Kyle,

    You’ll learn alot more if you have them switch sites over because you’ll have to end up doing it yourself after they screw up your config files, MySQL etc. I know from experience

    Man, I just registered CrackerjackSEO.com or I’d take a look. Thanks for the offer.

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15. Kyle Eslick (4 comments.)
    27th February, 2008 at 1:26 pm 

    @ Chuck - With the Gravatar thing, make sure you are setting it up correctly, as it is case sensitive. You need to type your e-mail address to match exactly the same as your Gravatar account (usually all lower case).

    The other problem some people have is they upload their avatar, but then forget to go in and actually assign it to there account, so you may want to confirm you’ve done that.

    @ Josh - I think HostGator works very hard to try to fix any issues that come up, or avoid them, but that can be said for most web hosting companies. I think no matter who you end up going with, you are going to find both positive and negative stories about their product, their service, etc.

    No problem on the SEO domains. I saw you hadn’t developed it yet, so figured I would throw it out there. I have a few that are looking for a good home:

    SEOBall.com
    SEOFetish.com
    SEOMountain.com
    SEOOasis.com
    SEOTicket.com

    Once you’re hosting is switched, let us know how they are working out!

16. Chuck (70 comments.)
    27th February, 2008 at 1:41 pm 

    Yeah, as near as I can tell, I’ve done everything right and so have you. I have written Gravatar. We’ll see if I get a response.

    SEOfetish…???

17. Terry Heath (2 comments.)
    27th February, 2008 at 2:03 pm 

    I’m in the market for a new host myself. My SEO site had some great traffic Sunday, until around 11pm when HostGator suddenly shut it down because it was taxing their servers. No warning, no effort to solve the problem without shutting things down. How self centered can they be? Don’t they realize I lost readers who got a 500 error instead of my site?

    I’ll check out some of the recommendations in this comment thread. Thanks for a timely post!

18. Chuck (70 comments.)
    27th February, 2008 at 2:14 pm 

    It’s true, Terry. A problematic host can cause untold damage. LunarPages cost me hundreds of dollars in late November and early December simply because someone at their end decided to go all “cowboy” on me and shut down some of my sites for supposed copyright violations…without even letting me know they were doing so. Two of my busiest sites were down for days. Idiots.

19. Josh Spaulding
    27th February, 2008 at 3:10 pm 

    @ Kevin - I’m sure I did overreact and I’m sure 99% of all other hosting companies have issues like this as well, but they have some issues, which I consider major, that could easily be fixed.

    For instance, about 75% of their 1st level support have about as much knowledge of hosting as my 12 yo nephew. I mean, I’m extremely non-technical, but 9 times out of 10 I feel like a hosting guru after talking with one of their 1st level techs. Many of them are extremely rude as well.

    Another thing - I’ve had them switch over a few sites on two different occasions going inbetween plans. BOTH times they screwed up at least one site and the first time this site (ez-onlinemoney) was down for nearly 24 hours!!

    24 hours for their screw up. It wasn’t even a server issue. That’s TRASH!

    So, yeah, I may have overreacted, but is theplanet gives me as much trouble as HG I’ll be OVERWHELMINGLY AMAZED!

    lol I like seofetish looks like Chuck might grab that one haha

    @ Terry - Join the club, bud. There are alot of supporters out there, but there are also alot of us who have been screwed multiple times by them. Hopefully I can get everything switched over in the next few days so I don’t have to pay SEOhosting (sister company) another penny.

20. Chuck (70 comments.)
    27th February, 2008 at 3:17 pm 

    You’re in for a whole different experience with a dedciated server, Josh. I would never have one without a server admin. I hope you don’t have major problems with it, because I’m not sure you’ll get much help other than restarting the box. Normally you need to pay an admin separately, unless you’re paying them The Planet to manage your server for you.

21. Josh Spaulding
    27th February, 2008 at 3:21 pm 

    Hey Chuck,

    It’s supposed to me 100% managed, we’ll see what happens.

22. Chuck (70 comments.)
    27th February, 2008 at 3:24 pm 

    Oh good. You’ll probably be fine, then.

23. Josh Spaulding
    28th February, 2008 at 4:21 pm 

    Looks like you were right, Chuck. Got my server set up, logged into WHM and it wasn’t configured, although the salesperson told me it would be completely managed and there would be no configuration or set up required on my part. Would have had to pay a server admin to set it up.

    Going with LuquidWeb now. ThePlanet was very professional with everything though. The refunded me and apologized for the confusion.

24. Chuck (70 comments.)
    28th February, 2008 at 5:49 pm 

    Sorry to hear you had another hassle, Josh. I had a feeling that you might not want to be at that level.

    My previous experience with LiquidWeb was very good. Superb support. My only problem with them was that one of my clients could not reach their servers thru the firewall at his work, and that ended up being a deal-breaker for me. But, other than that, their support was really good…although I had a VPS with them, not a dedicated server.

25. Josh Spaulding
    28th February, 2008 at 6:26 pm 

    So far they’ve been excellent (all 6 hours I’ve been with them lol)

    Extremely fast replies to my ticket and if what they say is true they manage every little aspect and will set up and configure any hardware or software I request at any time.

    I’m getting a little less bandwidth as compared to what I was going to get with ThePlanet (promotion) but everything else is about the same including the price.

    I’ve heard alot of good things about them, so I have a good feeling about this one.

26. Chuck (70 comments.)
    29th February, 2008 at 12:21 am 

    I used to hear pretty good things about Site 5…and in fact, referred a friend to them. But he’s had a few horror stories, including a multi-day outage last week. I wouldn’t go near them, personally.

27. Hope Wilbanks (2 comments.)
    1st March, 2008 at 2:32 am 

    Wow! I’ve had a great experience with HostGator ever since I switched to them. Sorry to hear you’ve had such a difficult time.

28. titan (2 comments.)
    3rd March, 2008 at 2:55 pm 

    I need to agree that hostgator realy good. Many people from my country use it always. Its also give many coupon..:D

29. Josh Spaulding
    3rd March, 2008 at 4:04 pm 

    If you’re all happy with HostGator that’s great! I’ll stick with LiquidWeb who responds to tickets within the hour, sometimes just minutes later, and actually seems to care whether or not issues are resolved.

    Of course this is after only a few days with them, but so far I’m extremely happy with them.

30. Ottawa Search Engine Optimization (3 comments.)
    5th March, 2008 at 6:57 pm 

    Hi Josh,

    I had an account with Host Gator last year and I had six sites hosted with them. One day I checked my domains and found them all down at the same time. When I tried to contact them their phone was dead and they were virtually unreachable. I quickly decided to move my account to another hosting company and was glad that I did. They had a major failure and did not know how to tell customers and just left people hanging without any explanation on their site or phone messages. They made no apologies whatsoever and when I checked their site about a month ago they were back online and acted as if nothing had happened. I actually managed to get a refund from them and was glad that I moved on. I had never seen anything like them before not responding in any way to their customers at all just leaving everyone hanging for a couple of months before they fixed their problems. Just this past week Globat had a similar major failure with switches and redundancy and emailed all their customers and let them know what happened and I thought here we go again, but they were back online in a couple of days, thank god.

31. Chuck (70 comments.)
    5th March, 2008 at 10:25 pm 

    All your sites down for DAYS? Man, I couldn’t live with that. Too much money lost.

32. Josh Spaulding
    6th March, 2008 at 12:20 am 

    ouch, yeah, what Chuck said. An hour would make be angry, but I’d get over it. Days is just unacceptable. I don’t care if you have shared, VPS or Dedicated, your server being down for days is just trash!

33. Maurice (TheCaymanHost) (61 comments.)
    9th March, 2008 at 8:13 pm 

    Hey Josh

    It seems that the bigger a lot of companies get, the worse their service becomes. Not sure that correlation applies to all hosts but it does seem to be a common factor.

    Glad to see you found yourself a good deal eventually

    I’ve reproduced your post at my directory and included a link.

    Mo

34. Josh Spaulding
    10th March, 2008 at 2:08 pm 

    Tha’ts the truth. Hopefully LiquidWeb doesn’t go that route. I don’t think they will. They seem to be growing pretty rapidly and all continue to get amazing support.

    Thanks for the plug.

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36. Hosting Reviews (1 comments.)
    18th March, 2008 at 5:12 am 

    Hey Josh,

    I was searching for a “natural” and unbiased testimonials with hostgator and found this post. As you mentioned that we can post it, just to let you know that I will post this review on webhostingreview.biz with a backlink to your site of course.

37. HostGator Review - Great Plans, Horrible Service! | Webhosting & Hosting Reviews
    24th March, 2008 at 1:17 am 

    [...] to be true so at least I have found a customer that is not happy with them. The review came from Josh who had a horrible service with hostgator, I am trying to be neutral in hosting reviews and the [...]

38. Stephen Cronin (34 comments.)
    6th April, 2008 at 5:47 pm 

    Hi Josh,

    I’ve been with Hostgator for almost a year and had virtually no problems - but I find their service a little slow lately. Maybe they are having trouble keeping their support staff up with with their number of customers they have….

39. Josh Spaulding
    7th April, 2008 at 2:43 am 

    @ Stephen - Nice to hear from you

    My main gripe is with their support, which in my mind is horrible. Of coarse I’m spoiled now with LiquidWeb, so having to wait any longer than a minute for support would be crazy LiquidWeb techs actually care about your problems too, which is a NICE change!

40. Simply Jim (1 comments.)
    4th June, 2008 at 12:42 am 

    Hostgator SUCKS!
    They were great to begin with, but that didn’t last long! cPanel configurations went to *ell on a haywagon! By the beginning of month two, every single day I would encounter a different problem! Their level one support knows far too LITTLE about what they are doing to assist anyone. Last straw for myself was when Brent Oxley took upon himself the decission to change my password during Labor Day week end WITHOUT my consent or permission and then provided me a NON-WORKING URL to obtain my new password! If I do not change my mind, I will be meeting with my attorney to file a lawsuit for a full refund, damages and loss of time and production! Now, I will Proudly Reccommend Hostgator to ALL my enemies! and anyone that i do not like!

41. Josh Spaulding
    4th June, 2008 at 1:32 pm 

    “Their level one support knows far too LITTLE about what they are doing to assist anyone”

    That would be the best thing to take from that probably. Their 1st level support would be better run by children.

    A buddy of mine went through the same crap with his cpanel password.

    No warning just changed it and sent him an email with a broken link.

    MAN I love LiquidWeb

    Anyone who is still with HostGator, come on over to LiquidWeb and see how professional web hosting is supposed to be run!!!!

42. Momo
    27th July, 2008 at 3:13 pm 

    At first I was caught by their spectacular deals, and I even tried their support chat a couple of times; and yes they were helpful…

    Until I processed my order with them…

    Just thought of trying that aluminum reseller plan for 1mo., if I like it, I can upgrade later anyway… So off to checkout with them and paid them through paypal… So far so good… Emails were sent I tried my WHM, CHM, configured the DNS of the domain I got somewhere else…

    And then hell broke lose!! I get this freakin’ email telling me to verify myself… I go over to their support chat and talked to 3 personnel, asking why do I need to verify myself, I paid through a verified paypal account right?!? But no I got told that coz the IP I’m using does not match the country I’m registering! So I say to myself WTF!!! This is the freakin internet right!?! I told the agents 1-3 the same thing, I’m currently OVERSEAS, that’s in plain english right! They’re asking me to call them, or if I can’t, send them a copy of a photo ID, billing statement, or passport or the copy of my creditcard!! So ok just to get this over with, I sent them a copy of the paypal statement since it was online and a took a snapshot of my drivers license and with a little optimization from PS, sent the file to them… Then, this guy Allen from sales replied to my ticket saying that it was unacceptable… Send them a copy of my utility billing statement… So I said again, that I was OVERSEAS… I don’t exactly go abroad carrying my billing statements now do I !?!? I am not applying for a US Greencard here remember!?! WTF!!

    Anyway, I’m sure alot of people have good experiences with this Reseller, but my initial thingy with them sucked bigtime!! So after a few hours monitoring them my patience ran out… And asked for a FULL REFUND!! what’s freakin me out right now is, they can’t even refund $15- back to my paypal account! Yes, $15- freakin dollars (price due to coupon discount)…

    You be the judge…

43. Josh Spaulding
    27th July, 2008 at 3:20 pm 

    @ Momo - That’s horrible. Don’t given those idiots your money! They obviously don’t even want it.

    Go with a real host like LiquidWeb!

44. Momo
    27th July, 2008 at 3:27 pm 

    Still waiting… And waiting…

    After my full refund demand of $15- their customer service wouldn’t reply back to my support ticket anymore! What gives!?!

    I don’t know if I should laugh or be more pissed off coz of the delay… $15- is still $15- and if I try calling them my Roaming charges will be equivalent to months of hosting already…

    Caveat emptor - REALLY!!

45. Momo
    27th July, 2008 at 3:32 pm 

    Thanks Josh, I have bookmarked your site… I’ll be back in a few hours, hopefully with updates.