Host Nine Review
I was a customer of HostNine.com for around a year, and during that time I experienced a massive decline in the quality of customer service. My story is far too long to explain in detail and quite frankly I am tired of talking about how crap the company is, so please excuse me whilst I make my points short and sweet.
KhalidsLife.com
The old, established version of KhalidsLife.com was completely lost after Host Nine experienced a hard drive failure. Both their daily and weekly backups were seemingly corrupt and the company did not have any record of my account when I telephoned them.
Kortaz.com
Their downtime and the fact they suddenly decided to suspend my account as it broke their TOS meant the site was pushed off Page 1 on Google, losing me 2,000 unique visitors per day! This was despite me asking them if it was ok to have the site hosted with them and it running on their server for several months.
Downtime
The server my accounts were on had received numerous attacks. The support for this was shocking, I was simply pointed to a forum post rather than given an answer to my specific questions. My thread reply, which was removed, stated…
“If the Host Nine website can stay online during these attacks, why can’t their customers? Surely you should put your customers first and ensure they are satisfied?”
Hosting Payments
I signed up three people via my affiliate link, earning me $75. When I checked my invoices they were $0 but I was still paying via Paypal Subscription. The balance in my affiliate account was diminishing, thus I assumed they were taking this as hosting payments, however they were also receiving money via my subscriptions and never informed me or pre-warned me of this.
I requested a refund two months ago for the $75, which would be easier than me cancelling my subscriptions then re-subscribing when my affiliate balance was $0. I am still waiting on that refund despite chasing it up…
Date: 25th Sept
Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: FYF-937634
Department: Billing
Priority: Urgent
Status: Open
Hi,
Putting this in Paypal refunds, now you will need to allow up to 1 business week for this to complete, as the owner has to do this. No reply is necessary here.
Regards,
Joshua
HostNine Technical Support
Testimonials
After having the phone put down on me by technical support, no replies to numerous tickets, no refund, no specific answers to my questions, I decided to post a testimonial on their forums. It was deleted and I got the following PM…
Hi,
1) The post will be deleted - No questions asked
2) Phone courtesy is two way. I explained multiple times what was going on, and you refused to take it, I can’t help you didn’;t like the explanation
3) Regardless, you WILL get your backups.
__________________
Regards,
Joshua Brown
HostNine Support
Backups
I had to fight to get my backup for Kortaz.com after they suspended the account without notice. I never received a backup of KhalidsLife.com
Summary
You may think I am being biased and my case is a one-off but I’d advise you to even read their testimonials on their support forums (ones that aren’t deleted). I e-mailed the owner twice with no reply. In the end I gave up, have cancelled most of my subscriptions and moved my major sites to Liquid Web.
Host Nine destroyed what I had built, why shouldn’t I tarnish their reputation with a factual, accurate, fully explained testimonial?
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Comments
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Ben Gabler of Hostnine is nothing more than a common thief check google for hostnine scams and you will see for yourself. I’m disgusted with this company. Their phones are off. They don’t answer tickets. The emails aren’t answered either. The live support is a joke i think that company is just josh and ben. Josh is always making excuses for ben.
[...] over spilt milk and some onus was on me as a webmaster to take my own backups. My full review here explains it [...]