Saturday, June 23, 2007

Hostgator - is this a sign from above?

I have had a reseller account with hostgator for several years and I have been relatively happy with the service. I have a side business doing web design and I resell hosting to several small businesses and one of my clients is a real pain in the neck. He would notice the minute his email would go down for 2 seconds and call me obsessively. A few years ago there were email outages on a regular basis ...nothing major ...but this one client would always be very put out by it all. Anyway, fast forward to today.....I'm moving across the country and thought it would be a great excuse to get rid of this particular pain in the neck client even though hostgator has had no problems for about a year and it has been pretty painless.

I've got to say, Hostgator has been absolutely impossible to work with. Moving this host (from my reseller account to a new account set up also at hostgator) has forced me up the food chain to "adminstrator support" which means no phone, no chat, just email correspondence. The kicker is that I have to wait 24 hours between each email. It goes like this:
I email hostgator
24 looooooong hours later hostgator responds with a lame question like: this is going to cost $10.00 is that okay?
I respond to hostgator in 2 minutes flat
24 looooooong hours later hours later hostgator responds.

In addition, I don't think I have ever experienced this much miscommunication and bumblings in my life!! They just now emailed me to tell me that all my files were running on my domain. LIKE DUH!! ...the ticket was to MOVE the files to a NEW domain. I guess they didn't get that part....where they still don't work.

Anyway, I have the month of July off ....do I spend the month, finding a new host and moving 50 or so sites/domains over to the new host? That is NOT how I want to LIVE MY LIFE!! I'm am stomping my feet like a teenager!!

However, I feel like if there were ever a truly serious problem with my sites and I was stuck in this email 24 hour response time hell, I would totally blow a gasket.

Feel free to leave me host suggestions in the comments. (with affiliate links if you like)

2 comments:

Jennifer said...

I'm getting concerned about hostgator too - I recenlty started a new account with them (I have another one with about 25 domains on it) - and went through the same email hell you're talking about - I ended up cancelling the whole thing and losing my site because I got so frustrated with them - I hope I don't have to move my others :( And hope your move is not too painful!

Dave "30 Hours a Day" Navarro said...

I use Midphase (on the recommendation from Brian Clark of Copyblogger, who has a pretty high-traffic site).

Here's a link:
http://www.midphase.com/?A=0.469523851367743&C=1&R=HOME

Dave