HostGator (bad guarantee, bad support)

[Nate]

I've been with HostGator for about a year and a half.  Within that time, there have been many support issues.  Here's what I've learned.

When dealing with HostGator support, it has been my experience that you must first convince the support team that it's not an issue on your side, it's an issue that must be resolved by them.

As soon as they determine that, they will tell you to put in a support ticket or that they will put in a support ticket to an admin.  You can never speak with the admins on the phone, only by email which causes for slow interaction in getting the problem solved.

On a few occassions, HostGator has upheld their 99.9% uptime guarantee.  Each time, it takes a few emails arguing back and forth and a few phone calls.  Once you're credited for that billing cycle, any other downtime during that billing cycle isn't under their 99.9% guarantee.

On this past incident, my forum was down for over 7 hours.  I was up late trying to convince  HostGator support that I had not done anything on my end to cause the problem.  It took from 12am to 7am to convince them that I had not forgotten my database password and then the problem was finally resolved by them and my forum was back up.

As for the uptime guarantee, they are now arguing that because it was a software error that caused my site to be down that it's not covered in their guarantee.  I'm not sure what that means.  I suppose it means the guarantee is only guaranteeing that their hardware will be plugged in and running... If they mess up their software, sorry.  There's no guarantee that they won't mess up the software.

As of right now, we are still emailing back and forth over the guarantee.  I hope to post the results here of how HostGator deals with this.

For the entire time that I've been on a semi-dedicated server with HostGator, the longest run I've had without my site being down was 2 months.

I hope this info is useful to someone making a decision about who to host their site with.

[ldcdc]

The definition of uptime, from their TOS (http://hostgator.com/tos.shtml):

The uptime of the server is defined as the reported uptime from the operating system of the server which may differ from the uptime reported by individual services.

Strictly speaking, they're covered by the TOS if the OS was running OK.

You can never speak with the admins on the phone, only by email which causes for slow interaction in getting the problem solved.

On the live chat and the phone, only level 1 techs are available. There aren't many hosts around that have level3 techs manning the live chat or phone, and those who do, tend to price their services accordingly.

It took from 12am to 7am to convince them that I had not forgotten my database password and then the problem was finally resolved by them and my forum was back up.

That doesn't sound good, but without details it's hard to say why it took so long. It could be a lack of knowledge, but it could just as well be that the issue was quite obscure and/or hard to solve.

For the entire time that I've been on a semi-dedicated server with HostGator, the longest run I've had without my site being down was 2 months.

Sorry to hear you're not satisfied. A semidedicated should in theory have a relatively  higher uptime. I have my sites on a shared hosting server of theirs, and uptime has been way better than what you're describing.

[hostgator]

Hello,

Do you have a ticket number I can review? Thanks