Hostmonster A Weak Choice

A few weeks back, I signed up one of Uncommon Reviews’ sister sites for a web hosting account with Hostmonster after seeing some ratings that showed them to have above average support.

I have to say that this rating didn’t match up with my own experience with their support. I had a couple of problems with my Joomla installation and contacted Hostmonster support via email. The first email I would get would be the standard “we received your ticket and will get back to you within xx hours” email. The second email I would get would invariably come within 4-6 hours of the first saying “please provide details” even if I provided all the details in the ticket — i.e., a standard “stalling email” technique to artificially boost the responsiveness measure for their support team, while actually stalling for more time to work on the problem.

The third email that told me that they were actually working on the problem would usually come within another 4-6 hours later, either telling me it was fixed, or giving me a work-around.

So, by the time my problem was fixed, about 8-12 hours had passed. Definitely not what I would call Monster numbers; actually pretty feeble if you ask me.

Imagine running an online business and your site goes down during the middle of the day. This means you’re done for the day — or even more, if you got the second “stall” email and didn’t respond until the next day when you saw the email.

Although Hostmonster was able to resolve both problems, this use of bogus “stall” emails left a very bad impression of their support. I canceled my account and got a full refund. (They do stand by their 30-day money-back guarantee.)

Hostmonster’s weak support rates it a thumbs down as a choice for web hoster.

Tag: hostmonster