Hostgator Customer Service and Hosting Review

I’ve hosted sites in the USA with Hostgator for getting on for 5 years years now. First with their Babycroc Hosting and more recently VPS. In all that time I’ve been a loyal brand ambassador and affiliate. I believed in their product, loved their customer support and was very happy with the service provided.

A couple of months ago all that changed. Sites were disabled without any prior notice for ‘cashe’ plugin issues.

After this happened 2 or 3 times I decided to move from babycroc to a more robust VPS hosting package. So I went from paying less than $200 per annum to investing over $155 per month. I though this premium service and price would give me the robust platform I needed for my business and that of my clients sites too.

Hostgator had to set up the install of the VPS twice as the first had no functionality at all (obviously no one there end tested it).

A week or so later they added a Quickinstall feature at my request that was missed off the original install. Again they had to do this twice. A simple test would of shown the fist attempt didn’t work and showed a 404 message.

Then the sub-domain feature proved not to work and another call, ticket and live chat went in.

Then 2 weeks ago, Hostgators data centre went down along with most of their sites. Communication was impossible so I took to twitter with much of their customer base. They repeated the same mantra about everything will be up soon etc. This went on for best part of the day. Needles to say I and many others were not impressed with their service or the cowardly way they mismanaged it.

This week after only talking to them the day before as to why I’d been invoiced for the same amount for the VPS two days apart, I woke to find my account had been suspended. After another lengthy wait on a telephone call and live chat did I discover my payment was applied to another account.

After 20 minutes of waiting for a response from ‘Live Chat’ (do me a favor!) and calling their telephone number simultaneously, I turned on my Camtasia screen recording software to record the proceedings that consequently kept me hanging on the line listening to some inane jazz for best part of an hour before I got to speak to a ‘live’ Hostgator customer service representative by the name of Albert.

I’ve asked for compensation for this clusterf**k of events from the last 4-6 weeks but they don’t take any responsibility and are somewhat arrogant in their stance. I only want my site to have close to 100% up-time as possible and be able to talk to someone in Hostgator customer services without loosing valuable hours of my life, is that to much to ask?

What’s really laughable about Hostgator is their promise of 24/7 customer support and live chat that at best is over 30 minutes just to answer the phone to over 90 minutes waiting for a live chat representative. I’ve calculated I’ve wasted over 15 hours over the last month waiting for their response. With all that being said, the people I’ve eventually spoke to have been very good, just wish I could have got hold of them sooner.

More Honest Reviews on Hostgator

I took to the net to see what other people have been saying about Hostgators customer services and hosting and finally after wading through dozens of BS affiliate reviews that are not worth reading, I eventually found some interesting articles and insightful comments from the likes of Joost de Valk of WordPress SEO fame and Nicole Henderson at WHIR amongst others.

I’d be interested to hear your experience with Hostgator customer service and hosting. I’d also like to hear from anyone who knows of an exceptional hosting company in Singapore of Hong Kong. I’m sure if the NSA are all over Google, Yahoo, Facebook and the like, they will also be snooping into the data centers of the large hosting companies like Hostgator in the land of the free.

Hostgator Customer Service and Hosting Review