KhalidsLife.com

Building up a new network is a great feeling, especially when you see a return on your investment. The only difficulty with expanding quickly was that I had to purchase a new $14.95 per month hosting plan for each domain.

This was great because it stopped me making stupid mistakes and creating sites without thinking them through. On the downside it was time consuming and quite costly. Don’t get me wrong, Liquid Web are a fantastic host with great staff (touch wood!) so the $14.95 is well worth it, but if you want to run a network you’d really need to think about something biggar.

After shooting a quick support ticket to a sales advisor, they checked out my sites and advised me on the $60 per month VPS. Whilst I am fully aware you can get hosting for a lot cheaper, after my troubles with Host Nine I don’t think I’ll ever risk quality for price. If you are going to do a job, do it properly.

The staff quickly migrated all my sites over and helped me through the process of domain parking etc so a big thank you to them! I did have to wait about 48 hours before I could update my sites again due to some minor complications with my domains (my fault!).

Now I’ve got everything in one place and making one payment per month which is good. Things are expanding here, so if you haven’t already, subscribe to my RSS feed for the latest news coming soon!

Good luck with your persuits,

Khalid.

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?