In I worked with Netfirms to address customer services issues that resulted in them updating my account and applying SiteLock to it for protection moving forwardSiteLock was working as promised, and kept many of my websites clean over the past monthsRecently, service was stopped and I have been told that the service was never meant to apply to my account, despite me having records to the contraryThis was an agreed resolution with their compliance teamI am now being extorted again to pay high fees with little support to get the service I was already promised and paid forThe service is dishonest and not as promised and is resulting in damage to my businessesOnce my point of contact left the company, the service returned to poor quality and they reversed the resolution we had come toShadyI want my sites cleaned and restored and I want SiteLock put back on my account as it was promised and done previouslyI want Netfirms to pay for my accounts to be moved to a different host who can provide the stability, support and service I pay and am promised
We will cancel the account and provide the customer with a prorated refund of the time remaining left on the accountWe will begin the cancellation process once the customer is ready to transition to another web host
Revdex.com:
I have reviewed the response submitted by the business and have determined that the response does not satisfy or resolve my issues and/or concerns in reference to complaint #***Please add your rejection comments below.
[Since this time the business has not refunded the $as I am in receipt of email saying as soon as I stop the unauthorized charge claim that the company will immediately turn around and refund back to my accountThis company has not, my bank said there is no letter or communications with this company because they do not communicate with 3rd parties as its against privacy policiesThe bank states it released hold and nothing else is to be doneThe bank states it never was in possession of $as it was under investigationThis company is stalling.]
Regards,
*** ***
Revdex.com:
I have reviewed the response submitted by the business and have determined that the response does satisfy my issues and/or concerns in reference to complaint #***I understand that by choosing to accept the business response that my complaint will be closed as resolved. Only one think I would like to mention: I started the cancellation on Nov instead of Nov
Regards,
*** ***
Our Records indicate this customer initially created their account on2/1/2014, and paid $for a two year hosting planThe service renewal thiscustomer was concerned with was related to their Domain Registration Renewal,which was to rebill on 1/17/Although we do understand this customer
hadinitially intended to cancel their service on 1/12/2015, the actualcancellation was not to be until January 30th, per thecancellation request submittedIt would be for this reason that the domainservice renewal took place on 1/Ultimately this appears to be a simple misunderstanding, and therefore theaccount had been canceled on 1/19/2015, a prorated refund of $for hostingservice was issued, and on 1/we have issued a full refund of the $thathad initially charged on 1/for the domain registration renewal
I should not have to buy my domain name back when I paid already for itI did not tell them to cancel the accountThey did that on their ownIf I have to pay for the domain I want them state the fee to you here.
Regards,
We apologize for the delay in our response.According to our records, we show the domain suitehotelrates.com was set up as a stealth domain forwardGoogle stated they could not reach suitehotelrates.com/robots.txtWe advised the customer that we do not host the site and he did not have a robots.txt
file setup with the host he forwarded to.With regards to the issue in June of 2014, we still could not find any issues with this domain and were able to reach the robots.txt file without issue We offered additional support and even asked the customer for his Google Webmaster login but he declined.With regards to the outage, we discovered the customer’s websites were offline due to a permissions issue on his accountThis was not related to the previous issues with Google and was resolved with a permissions reset on his account.With regards to the SSL renewal issue, the customer is correct that two Positive SSL certificates were past dueWe started charging the customer for these products on 11/26/and the charges were declinedSince the products were past due, the customer’s account was eventually suspended on 12/11/Upon careful review of the calls to our support regarding the SSL renewals, the customer did not specify that he wanted to cancel the services, which would have prevented suspension of his accountOur support agent did offer to cancel the SSL services (which would resolve the past due issue) but the customer wanted to think it about it furtherOn 12/11/2014, the customer asked us to cancel the products and the past due issue was resolved and the account was reactivated.With regards to the malware issue, our network operations team found malware on the customer’s account on 04/14/ Due to the severity of the issue, the account was suspended to prevent further damage to the customer’s web siteThe customer was notified via email on 4/15/about the issue and asked to remove any malware from his accountWe apologize for the delay in sending a notification to the customer about the issueWe will be looking into ways to eliminate this delay in notification in the futureOn 4/15/2015, we were contacted by the customer and we advised him to delete the malwareThe files were removed and the customer’s account was unsuspended the same day.With regards to the email issue on 4/17/2015, the customer was storing in excess of 10,emails and could not receive or send any mailThe customer deleted 1,emails and our team tested the functionality of his mailbox on 4/18/and did not note any issues with sending or receiving email.Regarding the WordPress install issue, we see a ticket was created on May 12, regarding an issue with a Wordpress installThe customer was sent an email advising the issue was resolved and we did not receive anything back.We’ve reached out to the customer but the customer declined to speak with our Executive Response Manager
The continued presence of files containing malware is aTerms of Service violation and we reserve the right to suspend accounts withmalware presentIn fact, as a web host, it’s our responsibility to make suremalware is removed promptly from our serversThe best practice for handlingaccounts with malware present is to immediately take down the website, whichwill prevent hackers from continuing to compromise the account/web site inquestionThis step also prevents further damage to the customer websiteItalso prevents visitors to the site from getting infected with malwareThecustomer may want to review ***’s take on malware:***(note first step is to take down the website)If the website was compromised in January, we wouldrecommend the customer to contact us so we can scan the entire account formalware and provide a report of any infected filesInstead, we found out thatthe website was hacked during a routine scan for malware in April, which led tothe suspension of the account.All this being said, we do think that there is room forimprovement with regards to our handling of the accounts with malwareWe willbe looking into ways to make the experience more customer friendlyHowever, it’sa difficult balance for us, because we also have to consider server securityand the security of visitors accessing customer websites.We thank the customer for his feedback and hope he willcontinue to host with us
Revdex.com:
I have reviewed the response submitted by the business and have determined that the response does not satisfy or resolve my issues and/or concerns in reference to complaint
1. Endurance Brands - We engaged in a
vetting dialog with all of the Endurance Brand subsidiaries that we spoke withEach brand adamantly denied either verbally, in writing or in some cases both that they were not in any way, shape, form or fashion affiliated with any of the other companies the companies that made these denials are as follows: iPages, Bluehost, Hostgator, JustHost and A Small Orange.2. Downtime - There have been multiple downtime occurrencesThis is inclusive of iPages, Bluehost, Hostgator, JustHost and A Small OrangeThis is how we were able to determine not only were some of these companies were affiliated but in addition, they to some extent share the same infrastructureIn addition, at one time we even attempted to hedge our bet prior to making this discovery where our quality assurance server was on Hostgator, our production system on JustHost and a contingency system was on A Small OrangeIt was at that time we encountered several issues with the packaging that existed on JustHost for the WordPress installationWe knew it was an issue of script configuration because the exact same site was running just fine on our quality assurance server on HostgatorWe even went as far as to invite the techs of JustHost and A Small Orange to review the configuration on Hostgator which is well documented in support chatsThe techs for both companies respectfully declinedIt is also important to note what gave us the final details of the affiliation is a system crash that occurred that impacted both JustHost and A Small Orange simultaneously. 3. Uptime Guarantees - There are people on our staff that were in upper tier IT management for companies like *** *** ***, ***, and some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world and have run and configured infrastructures that supported over 140,people simulratneously and moved trillions of dollars a day around the worldThey are well versed in Service Level Agreements which generally include uptime guarantees and they were appalled when certain guarantees that were written guarantees by some of the affiliates were reneged upon by Endurance Brand organizations. 4. Website and Email Issues - It was appalling to our compare that one of the support people from an Endurance Brand compare after weeks of aggravation and discussion with technical support actually confided that they were well aware of the email issues and that the issues were in fact relative to the infrastructure that existed internally within the Endurance Brand companiesIt was reaffirmed via discussions our technical people had with a member of support just last week and when the tech representative from Endurance fudged the length of time that the issue existed and was confronted by our technical guru, the Endurance Brand representative shared that the length of time that the issue existed was actually exponentially longer than was initially stated.5. Billing - Endurance was given the e-mails that included the documentation back in SeptemberEndurance also in their letter shows what happened in their e-mailIf you notice the refund from Host Gator (months), i-pages (month) those were from the bank overchargesThe JustHost (month) was just given due to the fact my site has been down more than it has been up in DecemberA Small Orange is a lie because we never received that refundWe can not transfer out of this company until it stays up long enough to fix and move what little we can and until this problem is solved.After I filed with the Revdex.com I found the parent company of Endurance, *** *** out of NY and contacted themBecause my site was down for over hours we contacted Just Host and managed to get our IP addressIn the course of doing this we managed to find out our site was not being hosted in America as we were told, but ***See proof in the attachmentWe have several of these attachments done at different times and dates saying our site is hosted in ***This means that this is international fraud because Endurance is claiming that we are being hosted in UtahEven when we brought them the proof, we were told this was not true, but the amount of evidence that we have is beyond reproofI even have this in e-mails from Endurance.The problem with this being hosted in *** was they repackaged my website and destroyed it before it was ever launchedWe spent the entire summer creating a brand, a new site, hiring a PR team and getting ready for a TV launchDue to what happened to us, we could not launchWe have spent sinceSeptember 1st trying to solve this problemIn the meantime the outage that lasted over hours was during our Christmas season and stopped us from a December issue as well as a new TV contractWe are a print and on-line newspaper and the amount of money we have had to return to our advertisers for the November issue is over $thanks to EnduranceWe could not put out a December issue and as I write this we are trying to put out a January issue but without our e-mails and our contacts this is impossible. All of our business e-mails were frozen and then destroyed since mid September which has made this an even bigger issueAll of our contracts were in these e-mailsAll our promotional material had these e-mails embedded and nobody could and can reach usWe lost clients at an alarming rateAfter talking to Endurance I was able to get into my e-mail which had my bank accounts being hacked into and had warnings from my bank which I didn't see for over monthsThank-God I have an amazing relationship with my bank and have several security measures in placeWhen Endurance finally addressed this issue I was told in a e-mail that their servers could not handle Safari and that was part of the problemThis is a outright lie because when I tried to open my co-owners e-mail in Firefox it was still corruptThen I was told that we had not set up four of the e-mails which were the marketing and information and I have proof of e-mails prior to the e-mail shut out. Endurance did offer us $to go away but at this point without the money to pay back advertisers, to re-build my website and to re-launch the website we can not settleThe amount of what we have truly lost is approximately $354,and it grows monthly.I am cc'ing the people with whom I have been dealing with at Endurance, so this is fully out in the open. If you need proof of all of this I am more than happy to make hard copies and mail this to you or if there is a dropbox I could start uploading all the documentation that wayThere is an extensive amount of material. As for the fact that they are claiming to have their businesses in America but have falsified this information and it is *** do you need what we have or do I need to present this to another agency?
Regards,
*** ***
We do apologize for the issues experienced by the customerWe were not trying to be defensive about the issues; we are simply providing our side of the story and we apologize if our response came across that wayWe will be looking into ways to improve communications with customers regarding outages and email issues.Also, our offer of having a member of our Executive Response Team (ERT) reach out to the customer still standsMembers of the ERT are able to discuss compensation and other topics, and they will consult with senior management if necessary
Our Corporate Support Team had been working with this customer since June ofthis year to first address pricing concernsThrough support ticket ***,it appears this customer had made mention of pricing concerns as it relates toEcommerce packagesOur team as seen through attached “Exhibit A”,
hadaddressed these concerns to the best of our abilityUnfortunately this appearsto be a case where the customer had not been elaborate with the details totheir concern; therefore there was some confusion from our end as to whatexactly the customer had been referring toOur team did request additionaldetails from the customer; however we should note this customer had not been cooperativewith our staff, and simply continued to write into the support ticket with condescendingremarks towards our teams, versus focusing on supplying us with enough details tofully understand the customer’s issueIf this customer does still have pricingconcerns, we will be more than happy to address those, however the customerwould need to elaborate on the pricing discrepancies or concerns of which theyhave so that we can address the inquiries more appropriatelyMore recently, our senior support Technical Tier team along with ourCorporate Support Team had both reached out to this customer to address theiremail concernsOur technical team had already explained to this customer what washappening when sending from their ***.com email (which isactually sending from their *** account)Now that our teams areaware of how this customer is sending or forwarding email, we do now “require”full email headers to be provided in order to diagnose this issue furtherThishas been brought to this customer’s attention on multiple occasions; howeverthis is another case where the customer is simply unwilling to cooperate withour staffWe are essentially unable to diagnose this issue further unless thecustomer does provide those much needed email headers for further assessmentPlease see attached “Exhibit B”, which was an email sent to the customer onSeptember 15th from our Corporate Support Team requesting thecustomer’s cooperation as the customer continued to be abusive towards ourstaff Unfortunately we are simply notin a position to provide compensation for loss of business, loss of potentialbusiness, or for other damages accrued during the potential downtime of thiscustomer’s emailWe should also note that on September 14th, ourteam was able to receive an email at the forwarding email address with noissuesSince this customer continues to have issues with their email, it iscritical that we are provided these email headers
I have reviewed the response submitted by the business and have determined that the response does satisfy my issues and/or concerns in reference to complaint #***I understand that by choosing to accept the business response that my complaint will be closed as resolved
In a review of this customer’s concerns, it appears this customer currently has two active accounts and one deleted account established on our platformThe deleted “***” account appears to be the account surrounding this customer’s complaintTo begin, please understand
that pricing featured on our website is reflective of introductory rates for the first initial year, which will then defer to the regular pricing thereafterThe “***” account was first created on 6/4/2009, and was officially canceled on 10/11/On 5/20/2014, the customer was charged for the renewal of their .com domain, hosting service, and Domain Privacy totaling $Our records indicate a chargeback was received from this customer’s bank/financial institution on 6/6/in the amount of $for these two products/servicesWe should note that prior to this action taking place from the customer’s end, no cancellation notice or request was receivedIt was not until 6/24/the customer had contacted support requesting for the account to be canceled and refunded as the customer had not intended to renewOur records do indicate that we did dispute the customer’s chargeback andhad won that dispute with their bank/financial institution as services paid hadbeen renderedIt was for this reason the account had remained active on our platform until 10/As a gesture of good faith, we processed a full refund of $120.37on 11/for services paidThese funds were processed back to the customer’scredit card on filePlease allow up to to business days for the refundsto be fully processed back
As we previously outlined in our initial response, once a domain has been registered or renewed, this process cannot be reversedWith regards to this customer’s feedback, it does indeed appear that Domain Registration Services were rendered for the two domains this customer had registered, and then renewedPlease see attached Exhibits A and B which outlines proof of registration services taking place.Unfortunately the domain service is not something that a customer can simply abandon and generally expect a refund for at any timeAn exception to this would be if a domain error took place from our end during registration, or if a domain was involved with a legal case requiring the domain registration service to be revokedWith this case, the above situations do not appear to applyIf this customer simply chooses to abandon their domains, they may do so however no refund will be providedWe would once more like to emphasize that this customer may contact us directly, and we will be glad to provide their domains to manage, maintain, or transfer if they choose
Our Corporate Support Team hasreached out to work with this customer directly to resolve their outstandingissuesIn a way of background, this customer had initially signed up theiraccount on 4/28/During that time they had also signed up for the “SiteBackup and Restore” feature billed at
$for the month periodOnDecember 13th this customer had subscribed to the ***Essential package to coincide with their hosting serviceThis package is meantfor customers that typically have a more complex or robust *** databasedriven website, as this apackage is used to help with the management oftheir database, and more efficientlymaintain server resources for that database With regards to the refund request,on 12/a prorated refund of $was issued back to the *** account onfileWe are in the process of issuing the remaining $back to the ***.Should this customer choose to cancel their hosting service with our company wewould issue a prorated refund for the unused service remaining within the customer’scurrent term. With regards to this customer’stechnical issue, we first should emphasize the website appears to be activewith no current issuesThe customer has expressed that they occasionally experiencean issue where a “Country select” screen appears or a re-install ***screen shows up when trying to access their siteThis is actually caused dueto the customer’s database reaching their *** query limitsIn reviewing the customer’saccount, it would appear they are using an abundant amount of resources forenabled *** plug-ins and widgetsWe have advised this customer todisable any unnecessary plug-ins and block the IP addresses of bots orpotential bots from accessing the site/databaseWe would also like toemphasize this issue is fixable, however does require customer involvement as thereis no issues with the platform, or the servers of which hosting this customer’ssite
Our records indicate this customer had initially purchased the Monthly SEOLink Building Keyword package on 11/and was charged $for thisserviceAdditionally, the Monthly Target Traffic starter package was alsopurchased in the amount of $242.33, both initiatives being billed monthly
Bothservices had renewed on 12/for the amounts of $and $for theMonthly Target Traffic plan and the Keyword Link Building packagerespectfullyA full refund of $and $was issued back to the customeron 12/19, and all SEO services have since been canceledWe do apologize forany misunderstanding or confusion that may have been caused
Revdex.com:
I have reviewed the response submitted by the business and have determined that the response does not satisfy or resolve my issues and/or concerns in reference to complaint # ***Please add your rejection comments below.
ALL the pricing is NOT transparentWhen I saw the publicity there was a certain price which did not clearly explain what it includes! Simply gives you the only option to go ahead and make paymentOnce you made payment you realise that all services have to be paid extra.I do not have to explain what I clearly explainedCompany should fix the problemChat people shut down the windowCompany and CEO DO NOT REPLY TO EMAILS.COMPANY SHOULD PAY THE COSTS, AND THE MONEY OUR BUSINESS IS LOSING!!!*** IS NOT A RELIABLE OR TRANSPARENT BUSINESSCUSTOMER SERVICE DOES NOT WORKTHEY CREATE PROBLEMS INSTEAD OF HELPING
Regards,
*** ***
Our Corporate Support Team had made an attempt to contact this customer viathe phone number provided within this complaint, however we kept gettingdisconnected when attempting to leave a messageTherefore our team sent afollow up email to this customer so that we can address their concerns one
ononeDuring our research of this customer’s concerns over the “Reseller” program,we were able to locate multiple accounts listed under this customer’s emailaddressWith this being said, since this customer does have multiple accountsactive on our platform, we could see where our Reseller program may be abenefit to this customer in terms of account managementWith this being said,We are more than happy to refund this service back to this customer, however werequest this customer to follow up with our team through the email sentproviding the account Username of the Reseller account so that we can issue afull refund as promptly as possibleWith regards to this customer’s weebly issues, we also request this customerfollow up with our email outlining exactly what their issue is so that we canengage our Engineers and possible the actual developers of the Weeblyapplication if neededIf we are unable to correct the issue during theappropriate timeframe, we will be glad to issue this customer a full refund ofthis specific account
Our Corporate Support Team has reached out to this customer to morethoroughly address this matterIn a way of background this customer hadpreviously signed up for a day trial of the EmaiBrain service, which is anemail based marketing aof which we offer to our customersUnfortunatelywe had
not seen a prior cancellation request documented for this product, whichultimately renewed on 1/30/2015, and the customer was billed $for theannual subscriptionOn 2/the customer had contacted our phone support team to cancel theEmailBrain service and obtain a refund for the recent renewalOur recordsindicate that our team did indeed cancel the product as requested, however itdid appear that the $refund was actually processed as an account credit,meaning that this amount was added to the customer’s account as store credit tobe applied towards future service renewals versus being processed as an actualrefundOn 2/we received a chargeback from this customer’s bank/financial institutionfor the $transaction.Unfortunately because of the chargeback, the customer’s account was placed in a“past due” status. In a good faitheffort to resolve this matter our team had re-enabled account services for thiscustomer on 2/11, and had informed that in order to resolve this matter we wouldeither need the amount of $paid back with the chargeback fees waived sothat we could re-issue the refund appropriately, or have the customer’sbank/financial institution process a chargeback reversal so that we couldre-issue the refunds appropriatelyEither of these options would resolve thismatter, and allow us to clear any billing flags still imposed on the customer’saccountAs of 2/we have yet to see the chargeback reversal posted in our MerchantaccountTypically a chargeback reversal can take several weeks to postToaddress this more expeditiously we have asked this customer to forward us aletter or physical proof from the bank showing that the chargeback reversal hasbeen engagedThis will allow us to issue the refund at a quicker rate
Our Corporate Support Team had already responded to a support
ticket this customer had open requesting additional explanation on an outage as
well as addressing compensation. This customer has indeed been with us for
a number of years as we have already addressed previous outages and
concerns
that had already been brought to our attentionIn review of the account notes,
this customer appears to not respond back to us when our Escalated Teams offer assistance
for resolutionTo more appropriately address this customer’s ongoing concerns
with our organization, our Corporate Support Team has provided direct contact
information for this customer to contact us directly if any issues should
arise
With this particular case, as a gesture of good faith, we
have issued three months of goodwill credit to this customer’s accountUnfortunately
we are unable to provide a year of free hosting as requestedWe kindly ask
this customer to review our Terms of Service and Limitations of Liability,
which are located at : http://www.hostgator.com/tos
Section of our Terms of Service State:
Uptime Guarantee
If your shared or reseller server has a physical downtime that falls short of
the 99.9% uptime guarantee, you may receive one (1) month of credit on your
accountThis uptime guarantee does not apply to planned maintenanceApproval
of any credit is at the sole discretion of HostGator and may be dependent upon
the justification providedThird party monitoring service reports may not be used
for justification due to a variety of factors including the monitor's network
capacity/transit availabilityThe uptime of the server is defined as the
reported uptime from the operating system and the Apache Web Server which may
differ from the uptime reported by other individual servicesTo request a
credit, please visit http://support.hostgator.com to create a
support ticket to our Billing department with justificationUptime guarantees
only apply to shared and reseller solutionsDedicated servers are covered by a
network guarantee in which the credit is prorated for the amount of time the
server is down which is not related to our uptime guarantee
In I worked with Netfirms to address customer services issues that resulted in them updating my account and applying SiteLock to it for protection moving forwardSiteLock was working as promised, and kept many of my websites clean over the past monthsRecently, service was stopped and I have been told that the service was never meant to apply to my account, despite me having records to the contraryThis was an agreed resolution with their compliance teamI am now being extorted again to pay high fees with little support to get the service I was already promised and paid forThe service is dishonest and not as promised and is resulting in damage to my businessesOnce my point of contact left the company, the service returned to poor quality and they reversed the resolution we had come toShadyI want my sites cleaned and restored and I want SiteLock put back on my account as it was promised and done previouslyI want Netfirms to pay for my accounts to be moved to a different host who can provide the stability, support and service I pay and am promised
We will cancel the account and provide the customer with a prorated refund of the time remaining left on the accountWe will begin the cancellation process once the customer is ready to transition to another web host
Revdex.com:
I have reviewed the response submitted by the business and have determined that the response does not satisfy or resolve my issues and/or concerns in reference to complaint #***Please add your rejection comments below.
[Since this time the business has not refunded the $as I am in receipt of email saying as soon as I stop the unauthorized charge claim that the company will immediately turn around and refund back to my accountThis company has not, my bank said there is no letter or communications with this company because they do not communicate with 3rd parties as its against privacy policiesThe bank states it released hold and nothing else is to be doneThe bank states it never was in possession of $as it was under investigationThis company is stalling.]
Regards,
*** ***
Revdex.com:
I have reviewed the response submitted by the business and have determined that the response does satisfy my issues and/or concerns in reference to complaint #***I understand that by choosing to accept the business response that my complaint will be closed as resolved. Only one think I would like to mention: I started the cancellation on Nov instead of Nov
Regards,
*** ***
Our Records indicate this customer initially created their account on2/1/2014, and paid $for a two year hosting planThe service renewal thiscustomer was concerned with was related to their Domain Registration Renewal,which was to rebill on 1/17/Although we do understand this customer
hadinitially intended to cancel their service on 1/12/2015, the actualcancellation was not to be until January 30th, per thecancellation request submittedIt would be for this reason that the domainservice renewal took place on 1/Ultimately this appears to be a simple misunderstanding, and therefore theaccount had been canceled on 1/19/2015, a prorated refund of $for hostingservice was issued, and on 1/we have issued a full refund of the $thathad initially charged on 1/for the domain registration renewal
I should not have to buy my domain name back when I paid already for itI did not tell them to cancel the accountThey did that on their ownIf I have to pay for the domain I want them state the fee to you here.
Regards,
We apologize for the delay in our response.According to our records, we show the domain suitehotelrates.com was set up as a stealth domain forwardGoogle stated they could not reach suitehotelrates.com/robots.txtWe advised the customer that we do not host the site and he did not have a robots.txt
file setup with the host he forwarded to.With regards to the issue in June of 2014, we still could not find any issues with this domain and were able to reach the robots.txt file without issue We offered additional support and even asked the customer for his Google Webmaster login but he declined.With regards to the outage, we discovered the customer’s websites were offline due to a permissions issue on his accountThis was not related to the previous issues with Google and was resolved with a permissions reset on his account.With regards to the SSL renewal issue, the customer is correct that two Positive SSL certificates were past dueWe started charging the customer for these products on 11/26/and the charges were declinedSince the products were past due, the customer’s account was eventually suspended on 12/11/Upon careful review of the calls to our support regarding the SSL renewals, the customer did not specify that he wanted to cancel the services, which would have prevented suspension of his accountOur support agent did offer to cancel the SSL services (which would resolve the past due issue) but the customer wanted to think it about it furtherOn 12/11/2014, the customer asked us to cancel the products and the past due issue was resolved and the account was reactivated.With regards to the malware issue, our network operations team found malware on the customer’s account on 04/14/ Due to the severity of the issue, the account was suspended to prevent further damage to the customer’s web siteThe customer was notified via email on 4/15/about the issue and asked to remove any malware from his accountWe apologize for the delay in sending a notification to the customer about the issueWe will be looking into ways to eliminate this delay in notification in the futureOn 4/15/2015, we were contacted by the customer and we advised him to delete the malwareThe files were removed and the customer’s account was unsuspended the same day.With regards to the email issue on 4/17/2015, the customer was storing in excess of 10,emails and could not receive or send any mailThe customer deleted 1,emails and our team tested the functionality of his mailbox on 4/18/and did not note any issues with sending or receiving email.Regarding the WordPress install issue, we see a ticket was created on May 12, regarding an issue with a Wordpress installThe customer was sent an email advising the issue was resolved and we did not receive anything back.We’ve reached out to the customer but the customer declined to speak with our Executive Response Manager
The continued presence of files containing malware is aTerms of Service violation and we reserve the right to suspend accounts withmalware presentIn fact, as a web host, it’s our responsibility to make suremalware is removed promptly from our serversThe best practice for handlingaccounts with malware present is to immediately take down the website, whichwill prevent hackers from continuing to compromise the account/web site inquestionThis step also prevents further damage to the customer websiteItalso prevents visitors to the site from getting infected with malwareThecustomer may want to review ***’s take on malware:***(note first step is to take down the website)If the website was compromised in January, we wouldrecommend the customer to contact us so we can scan the entire account formalware and provide a report of any infected filesInstead, we found out thatthe website was hacked during a routine scan for malware in April, which led tothe suspension of the account.All this being said, we do think that there is room forimprovement with regards to our handling of the accounts with malwareWe willbe looking into ways to make the experience more customer friendlyHowever, it’sa difficult balance for us, because we also have to consider server securityand the security of visitors accessing customer websites.We thank the customer for his feedback and hope he willcontinue to host with us
Revdex.com:
I have reviewed the response submitted by the business and have determined that the response does not satisfy or resolve my issues and/or concerns in reference to complaint
1. Endurance Brands - We engaged in a
vetting dialog with all of the Endurance Brand subsidiaries that we spoke withEach brand adamantly denied either verbally, in writing or in some cases both that they were not in any way, shape, form or fashion affiliated with any of the other companies the companies that made these denials are as follows: iPages, Bluehost, Hostgator, JustHost and A Small Orange.2. Downtime - There have been multiple downtime occurrencesThis is inclusive of iPages, Bluehost, Hostgator, JustHost and A Small OrangeThis is how we were able to determine not only were some of these companies were affiliated but in addition, they to some extent share the same infrastructureIn addition, at one time we even attempted to hedge our bet prior to making this discovery where our quality assurance server was on Hostgator, our production system on JustHost and a contingency system was on A Small OrangeIt was at that time we encountered several issues with the packaging that existed on JustHost for the WordPress installationWe knew it was an issue of script configuration because the exact same site was running just fine on our quality assurance server on HostgatorWe even went as far as to invite the techs of JustHost and A Small Orange to review the configuration on Hostgator which is well documented in support chatsThe techs for both companies respectfully declinedIt is also important to note what gave us the final details of the affiliation is a system crash that occurred that impacted both JustHost and A Small Orange simultaneously. 3. Uptime Guarantees - There are people on our staff that were in upper tier IT management for companies like *** *** ***, ***, and some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world and have run and configured infrastructures that supported over 140,people simulratneously and moved trillions of dollars a day around the worldThey are well versed in Service Level Agreements which generally include uptime guarantees and they were appalled when certain guarantees that were written guarantees by some of the affiliates were reneged upon by Endurance Brand organizations. 4. Website and Email Issues - It was appalling to our compare that one of the support people from an Endurance Brand compare after weeks of aggravation and discussion with technical support actually confided that they were well aware of the email issues and that the issues were in fact relative to the infrastructure that existed internally within the Endurance Brand companiesIt was reaffirmed via discussions our technical people had with a member of support just last week and when the tech representative from Endurance fudged the length of time that the issue existed and was confronted by our technical guru, the Endurance Brand representative shared that the length of time that the issue existed was actually exponentially longer than was initially stated.5. Billing - Endurance was given the e-mails that included the documentation back in SeptemberEndurance also in their letter shows what happened in their e-mailIf you notice the refund from Host Gator (months), i-pages (month) those were from the bank overchargesThe JustHost (month) was just given due to the fact my site has been down more than it has been up in DecemberA Small Orange is a lie because we never received that refundWe can not transfer out of this company until it stays up long enough to fix and move what little we can and until this problem is solved.After I filed with the Revdex.com I found the parent company of Endurance, *** *** out of NY and contacted themBecause my site was down for over hours we contacted Just Host and managed to get our IP addressIn the course of doing this we managed to find out our site was not being hosted in America as we were told, but ***See proof in the attachmentWe have several of these attachments done at different times and dates saying our site is hosted in ***This means that this is international fraud because Endurance is claiming that we are being hosted in UtahEven when we brought them the proof, we were told this was not true, but the amount of evidence that we have is beyond reproofI even have this in e-mails from Endurance.The problem with this being hosted in *** was they repackaged my website and destroyed it before it was ever launchedWe spent the entire summer creating a brand, a new site, hiring a PR team and getting ready for a TV launchDue to what happened to us, we could not launchWe have spent sinceSeptember 1st trying to solve this problemIn the meantime the outage that lasted over hours was during our Christmas season and stopped us from a December issue as well as a new TV contractWe are a print and on-line newspaper and the amount of money we have had to return to our advertisers for the November issue is over $thanks to EnduranceWe could not put out a December issue and as I write this we are trying to put out a January issue but without our e-mails and our contacts this is impossible. All of our business e-mails were frozen and then destroyed since mid September which has made this an even bigger issueAll of our contracts were in these e-mailsAll our promotional material had these e-mails embedded and nobody could and can reach usWe lost clients at an alarming rateAfter talking to Endurance I was able to get into my e-mail which had my bank accounts being hacked into and had warnings from my bank which I didn't see for over monthsThank-God I have an amazing relationship with my bank and have several security measures in placeWhen Endurance finally addressed this issue I was told in a e-mail that their servers could not handle Safari and that was part of the problemThis is a outright lie because when I tried to open my co-owners e-mail in Firefox it was still corruptThen I was told that we had not set up four of the e-mails which were the marketing and information and I have proof of e-mails prior to the e-mail shut out. Endurance did offer us $to go away but at this point without the money to pay back advertisers, to re-build my website and to re-launch the website we can not settleThe amount of what we have truly lost is approximately $354,and it grows monthly.I am cc'ing the people with whom I have been dealing with at Endurance, so this is fully out in the open. If you need proof of all of this I am more than happy to make hard copies and mail this to you or if there is a dropbox I could start uploading all the documentation that wayThere is an extensive amount of material. As for the fact that they are claiming to have their businesses in America but have falsified this information and it is *** do you need what we have or do I need to present this to another agency?
Regards,
*** ***
We do apologize for the issues experienced by the customerWe were not trying to be defensive about the issues; we are simply providing our side of the story and we apologize if our response came across that wayWe will be looking into ways to improve communications with customers regarding outages and email issues.Also, our offer of having a member of our Executive Response Team (ERT) reach out to the customer still standsMembers of the ERT are able to discuss compensation and other topics, and they will consult with senior management if necessary
Our Corporate Support Team had been working with this customer since June ofthis year to first address pricing concernsThrough support ticket ***,it appears this customer had made mention of pricing concerns as it relates toEcommerce packagesOur team as seen through attached “Exhibit A”,
hadaddressed these concerns to the best of our abilityUnfortunately this appearsto be a case where the customer had not been elaborate with the details totheir concern; therefore there was some confusion from our end as to whatexactly the customer had been referring toOur team did request additionaldetails from the customer; however we should note this customer had not been cooperativewith our staff, and simply continued to write into the support ticket with condescendingremarks towards our teams, versus focusing on supplying us with enough details tofully understand the customer’s issueIf this customer does still have pricingconcerns, we will be more than happy to address those, however the customerwould need to elaborate on the pricing discrepancies or concerns of which theyhave so that we can address the inquiries more appropriatelyMore recently, our senior support Technical Tier team along with ourCorporate Support Team had both reached out to this customer to address theiremail concernsOur technical team had already explained to this customer what washappening when sending from their ***.com email (which isactually sending from their *** account)Now that our teams areaware of how this customer is sending or forwarding email, we do now “require”full email headers to be provided in order to diagnose this issue furtherThishas been brought to this customer’s attention on multiple occasions; howeverthis is another case where the customer is simply unwilling to cooperate withour staffWe are essentially unable to diagnose this issue further unless thecustomer does provide those much needed email headers for further assessmentPlease see attached “Exhibit B”, which was an email sent to the customer onSeptember 15th from our Corporate Support Team requesting thecustomer’s cooperation as the customer continued to be abusive towards ourstaff Unfortunately we are simply notin a position to provide compensation for loss of business, loss of potentialbusiness, or for other damages accrued during the potential downtime of thiscustomer’s emailWe should also note that on September 14th, ourteam was able to receive an email at the forwarding email address with noissuesSince this customer continues to have issues with their email, it iscritical that we are provided these email headers
I have reviewed the response submitted by the business and have determined that the response does satisfy my issues and/or concerns in reference to complaint #***I understand that by choosing to accept the business response that my complaint will be closed as resolved
In a review of this customer’s concerns, it appears this customer currently has two active accounts and one deleted account established on our platformThe deleted “***” account appears to be the account surrounding this customer’s complaintTo begin, please understand
that pricing featured on our website is reflective of introductory rates for the first initial year, which will then defer to the regular pricing thereafterThe “***” account was first created on 6/4/2009, and was officially canceled on 10/11/On 5/20/2014, the customer was charged for the renewal of their .com domain, hosting service, and Domain Privacy totaling $Our records indicate a chargeback was received from this customer’s bank/financial institution on 6/6/in the amount of $for these two products/servicesWe should note that prior to this action taking place from the customer’s end, no cancellation notice or request was receivedIt was not until 6/24/the customer had contacted support requesting for the account to be canceled and refunded as the customer had not intended to renewOur records do indicate that we did dispute the customer’s chargeback andhad won that dispute with their bank/financial institution as services paid hadbeen renderedIt was for this reason the account had remained active on our platform until 10/As a gesture of good faith, we processed a full refund of $120.37on 11/for services paidThese funds were processed back to the customer’scredit card on filePlease allow up to to business days for the refundsto be fully processed back
As we previously outlined in our initial response, once a domain has been registered or renewed, this process cannot be reversedWith regards to this customer’s feedback, it does indeed appear that Domain Registration Services were rendered for the two domains this customer had registered, and then renewedPlease see attached Exhibits A and B which outlines proof of registration services taking place.Unfortunately the domain service is not something that a customer can simply abandon and generally expect a refund for at any timeAn exception to this would be if a domain error took place from our end during registration, or if a domain was involved with a legal case requiring the domain registration service to be revokedWith this case, the above situations do not appear to applyIf this customer simply chooses to abandon their domains, they may do so however no refund will be providedWe would once more like to emphasize that this customer may contact us directly, and we will be glad to provide their domains to manage, maintain, or transfer if they choose
Our Corporate Support Team hasreached out to work with this customer directly to resolve their outstandingissuesIn a way of background, this customer had initially signed up theiraccount on 4/28/During that time they had also signed up for the “SiteBackup and Restore” feature billed at
$for the month periodOnDecember 13th this customer had subscribed to the ***Essential package to coincide with their hosting serviceThis package is meantfor customers that typically have a more complex or robust *** databasedriven website, as this apackage is used to help with the management oftheir database, and more efficientlymaintain server resources for that database With regards to the refund request,on 12/a prorated refund of $was issued back to the *** account onfileWe are in the process of issuing the remaining $back to the ***.Should this customer choose to cancel their hosting service with our company wewould issue a prorated refund for the unused service remaining within the customer’scurrent term. With regards to this customer’stechnical issue, we first should emphasize the website appears to be activewith no current issuesThe customer has expressed that they occasionally experiencean issue where a “Country select” screen appears or a re-install ***screen shows up when trying to access their siteThis is actually caused dueto the customer’s database reaching their *** query limitsIn reviewing the customer’saccount, it would appear they are using an abundant amount of resources forenabled *** plug-ins and widgetsWe have advised this customer todisable any unnecessary plug-ins and block the IP addresses of bots orpotential bots from accessing the site/databaseWe would also like toemphasize this issue is fixable, however does require customer involvement as thereis no issues with the platform, or the servers of which hosting this customer’ssite
Our records indicate this customer had initially purchased the Monthly SEOLink Building Keyword package on 11/and was charged $for thisserviceAdditionally, the Monthly Target Traffic starter package was alsopurchased in the amount of $242.33, both initiatives being billed monthly
Bothservices had renewed on 12/for the amounts of $and $for theMonthly Target Traffic plan and the Keyword Link Building packagerespectfullyA full refund of $and $was issued back to the customeron 12/19, and all SEO services have since been canceledWe do apologize forany misunderstanding or confusion that may have been caused
Revdex.com:
I have reviewed the response submitted by the business and have determined that the response does not satisfy or resolve my issues and/or concerns in reference to complaint # ***Please add your rejection comments below.
ALL the pricing is NOT transparentWhen I saw the publicity there was a certain price which did not clearly explain what it includes! Simply gives you the only option to go ahead and make paymentOnce you made payment you realise that all services have to be paid extra.I do not have to explain what I clearly explainedCompany should fix the problemChat people shut down the windowCompany and CEO DO NOT REPLY TO EMAILS.COMPANY SHOULD PAY THE COSTS, AND THE MONEY OUR BUSINESS IS LOSING!!!*** IS NOT A RELIABLE OR TRANSPARENT BUSINESSCUSTOMER SERVICE DOES NOT WORKTHEY CREATE PROBLEMS INSTEAD OF HELPING
Regards,
*** ***
Our Corporate Support Team had made an attempt to contact this customer viathe phone number provided within this complaint, however we kept gettingdisconnected when attempting to leave a messageTherefore our team sent afollow up email to this customer so that we can address their concerns one
ononeDuring our research of this customer’s concerns over the “Reseller” program,we were able to locate multiple accounts listed under this customer’s emailaddressWith this being said, since this customer does have multiple accountsactive on our platform, we could see where our Reseller program may be abenefit to this customer in terms of account managementWith this being said,We are more than happy to refund this service back to this customer, however werequest this customer to follow up with our team through the email sentproviding the account Username of the Reseller account so that we can issue afull refund as promptly as possibleWith regards to this customer’s weebly issues, we also request this customerfollow up with our email outlining exactly what their issue is so that we canengage our Engineers and possible the actual developers of the Weeblyapplication if neededIf we are unable to correct the issue during theappropriate timeframe, we will be glad to issue this customer a full refund ofthis specific account
Our Corporate Support Team has reached out to this customer to morethoroughly address this matterIn a way of background this customer hadpreviously signed up for a day trial of the EmaiBrain service, which is anemail based marketing aof which we offer to our customersUnfortunatelywe had
not seen a prior cancellation request documented for this product, whichultimately renewed on 1/30/2015, and the customer was billed $for theannual subscriptionOn 2/the customer had contacted our phone support team to cancel theEmailBrain service and obtain a refund for the recent renewalOur recordsindicate that our team did indeed cancel the product as requested, however itdid appear that the $refund was actually processed as an account credit,meaning that this amount was added to the customer’s account as store credit tobe applied towards future service renewals versus being processed as an actualrefundOn 2/we received a chargeback from this customer’s bank/financial institutionfor the $transaction.Unfortunately because of the chargeback, the customer’s account was placed in a“past due” status. In a good faitheffort to resolve this matter our team had re-enabled account services for thiscustomer on 2/11, and had informed that in order to resolve this matter we wouldeither need the amount of $paid back with the chargeback fees waived sothat we could re-issue the refund appropriately, or have the customer’sbank/financial institution process a chargeback reversal so that we couldre-issue the refunds appropriatelyEither of these options would resolve thismatter, and allow us to clear any billing flags still imposed on the customer’saccountAs of 2/we have yet to see the chargeback reversal posted in our MerchantaccountTypically a chargeback reversal can take several weeks to postToaddress this more expeditiously we have asked this customer to forward us aletter or physical proof from the bank showing that the chargeback reversal hasbeen engagedThis will allow us to issue the refund at a quicker rate
Our Corporate Support Team had already responded to a support
ticket this customer had open requesting additional explanation on an outage as
well as addressing compensation. This customer has indeed been with us for
a number of years as we have already addressed previous outages and
concerns
that had already been brought to our attentionIn review of the account notes,
this customer appears to not respond back to us when our Escalated Teams offer assistance
for resolutionTo more appropriately address this customer’s ongoing concerns
with our organization, our Corporate Support Team has provided direct contact
information for this customer to contact us directly if any issues should
arise
With this particular case, as a gesture of good faith, we
have issued three months of goodwill credit to this customer’s accountUnfortunately
we are unable to provide a year of free hosting as requestedWe kindly ask
this customer to review our Terms of Service and Limitations of Liability,
which are located at : http://www.hostgator.com/tos
Section of our Terms of Service State:
Uptime Guarantee
If your shared or reseller server has a physical downtime that falls short of
the 99.9% uptime guarantee, you may receive one (1) month of credit on your
accountThis uptime guarantee does not apply to planned maintenanceApproval
of any credit is at the sole discretion of HostGator and may be dependent upon
the justification providedThird party monitoring service reports may not be used
for justification due to a variety of factors including the monitor's network
capacity/transit availabilityThe uptime of the server is defined as the
reported uptime from the operating system and the Apache Web Server which may
differ from the uptime reported by other individual servicesTo request a
credit, please visit http://support.hostgator.com to create a
support ticket to our Billing department with justificationUptime guarantees
only apply to shared and reseller solutionsDedicated servers are covered by a
network guarantee in which the credit is prorated for the amount of time the
server is down which is not related to our uptime guarantee