HOSTGATOR WEB HOSTING BOYCOTT SUIT
Good day,
If you landed here I am assuming that you have ran into a ton of dead ends with the hosting company Hostgator. I have started this blog with the hope that we as a community can unite and take them down once and for all or at least give them payback for their unfair practices and theft of traffic. I would like for everyone that comes here to go ahead and write their bad experiences with this bully.
1St incident:
For me this has been an on going problem going back to March of this year 2015. I had a very basic site that went viral. I mean basic, the site only had a couple of pages with just basic info. I kept getting 500 errors with a Hostgator picture on my Domain. I kept calling over and over and spending hours on the phone. Impossible to get a hold of a higher tier agent or even customer service. They stated I was using too much traffic and I should upgrade plan. I did, and i still had the same issue. Then, my site was hacked and I was passed to a company by the name of Sitelock. I had to pay around $300 for them to clean my site and setup their software/Firewall on my site. They told me everything would be ok with my site. Two months later, Google had taken my site out off their Index due to Spam. Mind you, the spam came from the Hack and they promised me my site was going to be ok or I would have not spend all of this money for nothing.
2nd:
As time went by, I created a few more sites since I became pretty good at getting up and coming niches. I even purchased two other accounts this way I could distribute the load. I am still getting all kinds of errors. From 500,502,400 Sh@t I cannot even keep up.
They always had an excuse for this and recently several of my friends were running into the same issue. Their sites would be down for bogus reasons and no higher tier would get on phone. Hostgators answers to all their problems is either you have a lot of traffic or your site is compromised and you need to contact sitelock to clean or a professional.
They will never give you an exact answer as to what is wrong with your site. I mean, they had taken my sites down and sent me an email stating that according to Spamhaus blacklist, it had spam. They pointed the issue to a folder: images/social.png. I asked them for the details that they received from spamhaus and all they could say it was that my site had sent out a spam email. BTW, I do not even have emails that I use under these accounts. They said that if I wanted more details I would have to pay for them to investigate. They just wanted a detailed clean report from either sitelock or any "reputable"cleaning company.
Email I received:
"Hello,
As your account was found to be related to the Spamhaus blacklist, you are now required to professionally clean your account before restrictions can be removed. This service may be performed by SiteLock or another third-party company of your choosing. We will be happy to help you provide access to any third-party service which cleans your account.
If you choose to opt-out of having your account professionally cleaned, we will be forced to terminate your reported hosting account. A backup will be provided upon request. If we receive a second notification from Spamhaus that your account has caused a blacklist, we will be forced to close your account.
Once you have obtained a professional cleaning, and have removed the reported content, please reply back to this ticket to request review. We must receive evidence of the professional cleaning taking place before we can perform any review or remove restrictions. "
I did go to Spamhaus
https://www.spamhaus.org/lookup/ and used my IP address and Domain names and they all passed. I even had the Hostgator Tech go in there and check for himself. I want some prove that this is true and more details as now I have several friends that suddenly ran into the same issue and hostgator had them go through the same shenanigan. The tech stated that all of my sites showed to be ok. At the end of the day, the tech at least what straight forward and said that the only way for me to get it back was to hire 3rd party to clean. I then told him that my site had backups and since this just surfaced, my assumption is that my 10 day old backup should be good as their system did not flag it then. So he had me reset my entire cpanel with the backup. 10 hrs later my sites are still down and those F@ckers still have there MONETIZED adds on my site.
Exibit A:
There goes over 10,000 views for the day straight to them and i am paying them. WTF!
I told them to take their crap off Right Now and they said that I should have made that change in the error section of the cpanel prior to this happening. What in the world? I insisted that this is my domain and my traffic and to take down at once. At least put a blank page and not monetized ads for them and their hostgator logo.
At this point I know for a fact what this company is about. They pull you in with a good offer, then take your site down due to any bs excuse and then offer better plans and their infamous sitelock to keep it safe.
Not sure what their liability is when it comes to them keeping their sh@t safe. I mean by this that they have full control of my site. So if they are getting hacked or not keeping good safe practices, at the end of the day it is our problem not theirs. Just hire Sitelock and everything will be ok!
funny thing is that I have 2 old sites at Godaddy and not once have I had an issue. Sure it is a more expensive system and I only used them because at the time i did not know wordpress. But, I have never ever had an issue.
Just great how my site is just great advertising for
- The Lord of the Rings
-
Mud
-
Arwen
-
The One Ring
-
Rohan
-
LOTR
These people have absolutely no shame in their game. We need to get a class action suit going. Please leave comments below so that we can get a big enough group to let them get a taste of their medicine. Pass it along you blackhat sites as well and just dos attack their main servers.
