HostGator.com, L.L.C.

We were sorry to hear about Mr. [redacted]'s concern in regards to his billing account.In reviewing the account we did see that Mr. [redacted] had selected the [redacted] Payment Agreement rather than the one time [redacted] payment option when paying a recent invoice.  When the hosting invoice that Mr. [redacted]...

references was presented to his account it was addressed using the [redacted] Payment Agreement that had been created.  Mr. [redacted] has canceled that agreement through his [redacted] account and we have attempted to reach Mr. [redacted] by phone and e-mail to offer to refund the invoice and re-invoice the account to allow Mr. [redacted] to address the the invoice directly.   For clarification the following information is provided on the sign up page at the time a client signs up  for hosting services."Qualified packages include instant activation and 24 hour support. Introductory prices apply to the first term. Money-back guarantee applies to hosting and domain privacy. All plans and products automatically renew for the same term length at regular rates, which will be available in your control panel. Unless you request a change or cancellation, the payment method provided today will be used for renewals"This is also addressed in the Terms Of Service that each client is required to agree to when signing up for service with Hostgator and can be reviewed at https://www.hostgator.com/tos  Section 11. subsection b."Unless otherwise provided, you agree that until and unless you notify HostGator of your desire to cancel the Services, you will be billed on an automatically recurring basis to prevent any disruption to your Services, using your credit card or other billing information on file with us."At this time the invoice in question has been reversed and re-invoiced for Mr. [redacted].  We have not received any follow up questions or concerns from Mr. [redacted].  If any should arise we ask that Mr. [redacted] please respond to our recent e-mail communications or contact our management team directly at [email protected] and we will be happy to offer assistance.

[A default letter is provided here which indicates your acceptance of the business's response.  If you wish, you may update it before sending it.]
Revdex.com:
I had to contact them again to remove all inactive domains, but they have finally done it.  I will accept this as closed. Thank you,[redacted]

Good Morning,Thank you for alerting us to the troubles you experienced last week during our Reseller outage.  Though it’s unfortunate you didn’t reach out to our management team directly via [redacted] to discuss your concerns, as the Revdex.com site outlines should take place prior...

to a complaint being filed, I understand your frustration, and appreciate the opportunity to address your concerns regardless of whether it’s through our own channels or the Revdex.com.Looking over your account I see that you’ve been a customer for many years, so I’d like to first and foremost offer a credit towards the troubles per our 99.9% uptime guarantee.  Though that specific guarantee only provides a months credit based on the downtime experienced, and the fact that we didn’t meet the 99.9% uptime promised, I’d like to go one further and offer you a few extra months towards your reseller server.  I’ve applied a credit for 3 months at this time, which is available through the billing system for future invoices.In regards to the losses you note may have been experienced, though we do sympathize with the plight the outage caused many of our resellers, at the same time our Terms of Service does outline that we unfortunately cannot be held liable for such damages.  I wish there was more we could do to help our clients who did suffer from this, though that’s indeed why our 99.9% uptime guarantee exists.  The reality is, that we simply cannot compensate every single reseller involved to the degree you mention losses may have occurred, as we are a business just as yourself and need to keep our own costs during compensation in mind.  Hopefully the couple extra months of service gestures our interest in righting the situation, but please let me know if I can address further concerns in regards to the credit or compensation.Finally, in regards to the noted concern with staffing, though it is true we’ve continued to grow over the years since you joined us, we’ve also continued to recruit and hire new staffing in an effort to keep up with the ever increasing support volumes, going as far as starting to employ contract workers this summer and fall to further help the situation.  The simple fact here is that it lamentably just wasn’t possible to keep up with the huge increase(several times over our normal volumes) in support requests that resulted, even after calling in unscheduled staff and offering OT to keep people in the office working as long as possible.  This also takes a toll on our staff which needs to be kept in mind, as they can’t help if we burn them out entirely, but we’ve done what we could to push staffing and move as quickly as possible through support requests during this time. Best Regards,[redacted]Director of Customer Service[redacted]

Good Afternoon,We've since had a chance to review this rejection as well as double check the information provided and would be glad to go over our findings. First, we have audited the account and have double checked the payments but still have not found that [redacted] had been in use on the account prior to April. We've reached out to [redacted] to request proof of these payments but have not heard back in a few days.Regardless of whether or not the account was paid using [redacted], there seemed to be an implication that the suspension for late payment somehow caused the security issue. This is not actually the case and to the contrary, when the site was suspended, it would have actually been safer from the types of compromises we found on this account. The cause of the compromises were not related to suspension but instead related to out of date installations. Please note that when signing up for service, our customers agree to take responsibility of the security of their accounts, meaning maintaining current versions of all software to avoid known exploits. Finally, unfortunately there seems to have been an oversight in reviewing our statement following the security work we performed. The rejection states that we only provided a list of compromised files without cleaning them. There would of course be little point in our security department providing a list of compromised files and not actually cleaning them, and if necessary we are able to furnish documentation showing that we did inform [redacted] that the files we listed had been removed.As mentioned earlier, we do now have an e-mail thread as direct line of communication between [redacted] and our management and although we do not guarantee response times on security tickets, we have made her an offer as a courtesy for her time with us. We have yet to hear back but the offer is above the few days of service requested so we'll keep an eye out for her response and hope this resolves the concerns raised.

Hello,We were sorry to hear about the confusion that Ms [redacted] had in regards to how to cancel her hosting services and the steps that we request our clients follow in order to ensure that the proper account is cancelled and there is no miscommunication in this process which could result in a...

client's content being lost.This is documented in our Terms Of Service that our clients agree to at the time of the hosting order athttps://www.hostgator.com/tos in Section 13, paragraph e.  Cancellation Process.You may terminate or cancel the Services by giving HostGator written notice via the cancellation form provided. In such event: (i) you shall be obligated to pay all fees and charges accrued prior to the effectiveness of such cancellation and (ii) HostGator may, in our sole discretion, refund all prepaid fees for basic hosting services for the full months remaining after the effectiveness of such cancellation (i.e. no partial month fees shall be refunded) less any setup fees, applicable taxes and any discount applied for prepayment, provided that you are not in breach of this Agreement.We did review the interactions that Ms [redacted] had with our live support team along with her billing and hosting package.  In our review we did find that Ms [redacted] was still using the email services of the hosting package and were not able to locate a request to cancel the services through our ticket system or in any of the interactions, however we did see that Ms [redacted] did believe she had taken steps to cancel her hosting services.With this information we worked with Ms [redacted] to clarify the situation and worked to come to an amicable solution to resolve the concerns that she had brought to our attention and have followed through with that agreement.At this time we have not received any follow up concerns or questions.   If any should arise that we can assist with we ask that Ms [redacted] please respond to the recent e-mail communication or contacts our management team at [email protected] and we will be happy to continue our conversation.

Revdex.com:
I have reviewed the response made by the business in reference to complaint ID [redacted], and have determined that this proposed action would not resolve my complaint.  
Hostgator's response to my complaint contained numerous errors. There was an automatic subscription for Hostgator to be paid from my [redacted] account for over a year. I have numerous records of the automatic payments being received by Hostgator from my [redacted] account until the last couple of months. I hired help myself because Hostgator failed to respond to several of my emails over the course of several days. I run a business and cannot afford to have my sites down for as long as they would have been if I left Hostgator to handle this ticket. It took 6 days and a complaint to the Revdex.com to get them to take appropriate action, as noted that they finally replied with action steps on April 29th. The ticket was created April 23rd. I noted in a response to an automated reply to Hostgator that if my sites were not sufficiently cleaned, I would take them elsewhere. I let them know I wanted the sites cleaned, a detail they "overlooked." Hostgator did not clean my accounts just a list of security holes that need to be patched and malicious files that was found and that wasn't until after I filed a complaint with the Revdex.com.  I have never filed a complaint on a company with the Revdex.com before and until this incident occurred, I was a happy customer with Hostgator. However, their excuse-filled and customer-blaming response leaves me highly unsatisfied with Hostgator as a company and I will be moving to another hosting company before my next bill comes due unless Hostgator makes a better attempt at resolving this issue. 
Regards,
[redacted]

Good Morning,Thank you for reaching out to us regarding the recent support delays.  I'd like to first and foremost offer our sincerest apologies for any frustration or inconvenience this situation has caused you, though we do appreciate you reaching out and letting us know so we can hopefully...

address the matter with you as promptly.  In regards to our delays, we do acknowledge staffing has been an issue this year, which we’re working as quickly as  we can to address.  We’ve been quite excited for our tremendous growth these past several years, but the reality on the flip side is that we’ve honestly had difficulties keeping staffing inline with support demands.While our service level from a quality stand point hasn’t diminished as we continue training and adding new staff to our support team, we do ultimately recognize that the speed by which that we’re able to get through queues has dropped as you noted, simply due to volumes.  We have ramped up recruiting and training efforts however this year in an effort to get ahead of the issue once and for all, and though progress is steady, it’s unfortunately quite slow as we continue to combat our growth.Moving to your downtime concerns, I’d like to point out after reviewing your ticket history that it appears you’re simply not reporting issues to us when they occur, as it’s been several months since a ticket regarding downtime was opened.  You mention in the complaint itself that your server has been down recently, though the ticket you mentioned as delayed is regarding adding SSH to a domain which you would have had access to perform yourself through WHM.  Though the delay is obviously unfortunate, at the same time you did have appropriate access to perform this quickly through WHM, and as such I cannot reason providing the requested credit.  As was explained in a prior Revdex.com complaint requesting credit per our 99.9% uptime guarantee, that’s offered specifically towards shared and reseller platforms, not towards your dedicated environment, which is covered by a network uptime guarantee.  As I’m not aware of any network downtime to your server  recently we’d be unable to provide credit as requested.  We were also extremely fair to you earlier this year after you requested a downtime credit, having provided several times what our Terms of Service and the network guarantee promise, which I think requires some extra consideration given you’ve returned once more requesting compensation with little to no details regarding the problems.Finally, it’s also concerning that I previously had contact with you through the Revdex.com, providing you my own contact details if you needed them in the future which you neglected to make use of.  Though I’m happy to address your issues personally, without contact as you’re experiencing issues it’s impossible to assist you otherwise.  With these points made and my prior explanation regarding the network uptime guarantee on your server, it’s our decision that we’ll be unable to provide you the requested credit.  If you have further concerns or would like to provide details on downtime, which I may in fact be able to consider towards a credit please feel free to reach out directly in [redacted] which I’ll keep assigned directly to myself for this purpose.Best Regards,[redacted]Director of Customer Service[redacted]

Hello,We were sorry to hear about the confusion in regards to Mr. [redacted] domain renewal.For clarification if a domain is set to auto renew in the domain control panel the domain is invoiced 30 days prior to the domain expiration date and the payment method on file would be used to addressed the...

invoice 10 days prior to the renewal date. The automatic billing and invoicing dates can be reviewed at the following helpful link:https://support.hostgator.com/articles/articles/pre-sales-policies/billing-...⇄ Mr. [redacted] was kind enough to forward the email communication that he had received that was contrary to how domain renewals are processed by the billing system and although domains are not normally a refundable service we have provided a credit to Mr. [redacted] billing account for the cost of the domain renewal.At this time we have not received any follow up questions or concerns from Mr. [redacted] and the invoice in question has been addressed with a credit to his account.  If any should arise that we can assist with we ask that Mr. [redacted] please respond back to the recent e-mail communication or contacts our management team at [email protected] and we will be happy to continue to offer assistance.

Revdex.com:
I have reviewed the response made by the business in reference to complaint ID [redacted]. The company finally cancelled the account after 6 days of trying to cancel. However I find it unacceptable that in HostGator's response of blaming me for not contacting them on the first day of form failure is not correct. I DID submit a ticket to BOTH BILLING AND SUPPORT after submitting the form two times. In those tickets I specifically mentioned I had submitted the form not once, but TWO TIMES. The response from billing was to move it to another department. The response from Support was to tell me to submit the form again. That is after I had already submitted the form TWICE. So if you have a form failure you are supposed to try to submit the form again because nobody in support will help.  This company used to be a decent company to deal with and I personally recommended them hundreds of times over the years since 2002.  However their poor support, lack of customer service, and constantly trying to market new products to customers in a very "spammy" way is unacceptable to me and apparently the many long time customers that are leaving.I'm glad to be free from this company and will be passing my experiences on to my clients, web design colleagues and others. Good Riddance!

Good Morning,My apologies for the delay in response over the holiday, however I'll be happy to ensure this gets resolved and you receive a full refund as requested.  Regrettably I've been unable to locate your account with the contact information provided initially.  So that I can resolve...

this for you as promptly as possible, can you please provide either the primary email address on file and/or a ticket # relating to the account?  With those I can pull this and get a better idea of what's taken place, how to solve it and then move this forward.  I'll look forward to your response and please feel free to email me directly with the information at [email protected] Regards,[redacted]Director of Customer ServiceHostgator.com

THis does still not resolving the money loss we had for not making sales for the 2 day downtime
Revdex.com:
I have reviewed the response made by the business in reference to complaint ID [redacted], and find that this resolution would be satisfactory to me.

Greetings, We regret to hear about these issues related to our refund policy. We did attempt to call the phone number provided to the Revdex.com to further discuss this matter. Also we have sent a follow up to a ticket that is assigned to the customer service management team. [redacted]. We...

did find that we were working on this with the customer through the ticket before this complaint was raised and we never heard back from them. We will be glad to resolve this issue by providing a pro-rated refund in relation to the cancellation request but we do require confirmation of the cancellation in [redacted] before we can proceed any further.

[A default letter is provided here which indicates your acceptance of the business's response.  If you wish, you may update it before sending it.]
Revdex.com:
I have reviewed the response made by the business in reference to complaint ID [redacted] and find that this resolution would be satisfactory to me.

Revdex.com:
This letter is to inform you that HostGator.com, L.L.C. has carried out to my satisfaction the resolution it proposed for my complaint, filed on 1/18/2017 and assigned ID [redacted]
Regards,

Revdex.com:
I have reviewed the response made by the business in reference to complaint ID [redacted], and have determined that this proposed action would not resolve my complaint.  
[Provide details of why you are not satisfied with this resolution.]
Regards,
  Host Gator's characterization of the case is not what the Host Gator rep last told me over the phone when we spoke.Host Gator's rep said he saw an enormous amount of emails (incoming) to me at [redacted] that were not being delivered because my email was deemed spam as a result of the IP address.Host Gator has these records of bounced emails that never made it to me at [redacted] but has never given them to me. The IP address at HostGator for its customers has nothing to do with me and everything to do with Host Gator.Turn over the information on the data related to my incoming emails not delivered as confirmed by the Host Gator rep I spoke with the last time I called. I am entitled to see all incoming emails (or attempts thereto) related to the websites I host at Host Gator.Respectfully,[redacted]

Good Afternoon,
Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention for further review.  I'd like to first and foremost offer our sincerest apologies for any frustration or inconvenience this situation has caused you, however after investigating the situation myself, I have in fact confirmed...

we have access logs to the server which show our staff in fact did not modify or damage your site as you allege here.  I realize it’s easy to point fingers and request what’s quite a bit of compensation without offering any evidence to support the claims, but at the same time the logs do provide evidence to show this is not in fact the case.
These findings were also explained to you in great detail through ticket [redacted] by my Customer Service Manager [redacted], though I wanted to follow up here as well and ensure you received his explanation and the matter is resolved.  Due to our findings, in that the changes were actually made via an IP address in [redacted](which you partly acknowledge awareness of during a reviewed call log) and not from our office as you describe here in terms of the events leading to this, we’ll be unable to provide the requested compensation in the amount of $2500.  In all honesty, though unfortunate, given our findings it seems you were likely aware of how this happened, so it’s troubling to see the request for compensation, however if you wish to contest these logs I would be happy to provide the access logs here directly through the Revdex.com for their review.
I would like to also make clear, that while it’s unfortunate to ever see a customer experiencing troubles of this nature, we did at one point restore a backup for you from our backup servers, which was later discovered to be broken as well.  The timestamp of our backup and the time above directly correlate to this not involving our staff, but furthermore I’d like to also add that while we did offer a backup restore as a courtesy to try and help straighten this out, it is ultimately you’re responsibility as the customer to keep a local copy of your data for safe keeping.  This would also mean ultimately that you’d be able to simply provide a backup to restore, and not have to request $2500 to rebuild the site, which is the case here.  If you’d like to review the portion of our TOS covering this it’s available from the following location and below for your convenience:
[redacted]
“Section 27. Backups and Data Loss
Your use of the Services is at your sole risk. HostGator’s backup service runs once a week and overwrites any of our previous backups. Only one week of backups are kept at a time. This service is provided only to shared and reseller accounts as a courtesy and may be modified or terminated at any time at HostGator’s sole discretion. HostGator does not maintain backups of dedicated accounts. HostGator is not responsible for files and/or data residing on your account. You agree to take full responsibility for all files and data transferred and to maintain all appropriate backup of files and data stored on HostGator’s servers.
Any shared account using more than 20 gigs of disk space will be removed from our off site weekly backup with the exception of databases continuing to be backed up. All data will continue to be mirrored to a secondary drive to help protect against data loss in the event of a drive failure.“
Please let me know if there’s anything further we can do to assist you, though at this time given my findings we cannot provide you the requested compensation nor assume responsibility for damage to your site which resulted through another party and not our staff.  If we can help to restore anything further if you do find local backups, please let us know via the open ticket with [redacted] and I’ll ensure we do everything we can to help.
Best Regards,
[redacted]
Director of Customer Service
[redacted]

Good Afternoon,We were very sorry to hear [redacted] had such a frustrating time with purchasing and canceling his services and have now spent time reviewing the interactions for a better understanding of his concerns. In regards to the feedback that we should request identifications prior to...

purchase, we do need the purchase to first be submitted at which point we evaluate orders for higher risks of fraud. Should we allow a system that will automatically prompt for this type of information up front, this is a good way for malicious individuals to test out our many factors to know exactly how to work around the request for further documents to verify purchases. That said, we do make sure to include information in our terms of service so customers know that these requests may be made following purchase : http://hostgator.com/tos==================================================2. Account EligibilityB. It is your responsibility to provide accurate, current, and complete information on the registration forms, including an email address that is different from the domain you are signing up under. If there is ever an abuse issue or we need to contact you, we will use the primary email address we have on file. It is your responsibility to ensure that the contact information for your account, including any domain accounts is accurate, correct and complete at all times. HostGator is not responsible for any lapse in the Services, including without limitation, any lapsed domain registrations due to outdated contact information being associated with the domain. If you need to verify or change your contact information, you may utilize the HostGator Billing and Support Portal to update your contact information. Providing false contact information of any kind may result in the termination of your account. In dedicated server purchases or certain other cases, you may be required to provide government issued identification and possibly a scan of the credit card used for verification purposes. Failure to provide the information requested may result in your order being denied.==================================================Next, we were sorry to hear about the delay in getting a supervisor or loyalty agent and although we certainly want all of our supervisor or loyalty agent requests to be handled as quickly as possible, we have found that the initial call was at 1:00 AM where our availability in all departments is much lower, meaning these requests may be delayed depending on how many other requests have come in around that time.From the complaint we also understand there was an impression that the cancellation request would be handled within 24-48 hours, however during the call we did not find that our agent stated such a time line, but instead stated that the refund would be received 24-48 hours after our confirmation of a refund was sent. We apologize it sounds like this was not clear for Mr. Wilson and appreciate his patience while our cancellations team worked through the requests submitted ahead of his. Moving on to the concern that the domain was not immediately refunded, it is unusual for a HostGator customer to request a refund for a domain in conjunction with completely dropping the domain registration as domain registrations are often prized, and we do not force customers to keep the domains with us. As the domains can be transferred, almost all cases of cancellations such as this, the customer will cancel their hosting package then transfer their domain to a new registrar to ensure they can maintain the registration as opposed to having the domain released and hoping to re-register it elsewhere before someone else. As such, our cancellation agents are instructed to reply back stating that the hosting packages have been canceled and if the domain registration is not needed, to reply back to let us know. Unfortunately this section was missed in Mr. Wilson's case so we do apologize for the additional delay in fully refunding that purchase and will be addressing this with our agent.At this time all money paid has now been refunded back to the PayPal account used. If we can be of any further assistance we ask that Mr. Wilson please contacts our management at [email protected] and we'll be more than happy to assist further as needed.

Revdex.com:
I have reviewed the response made by the business in reference to complaint ID [redacted], and find that this resolution would be satisfactory to me.  Thank you HostGator staff for resolving this matter quickly

Hello,We were sorry to hear about the concern that Mr. [redacted] had in regards to a dedicated IP.In reviewing Mr. [redacted]'s account and hosting package we were not able to locate a cancellation request for the dedicated IP and cancelling another service or product such as a domain would not cancel the...

dedicated IP with out that request also being submitted. These products would not be inclusive to each other nor would our agents be able to cancel a service without the clients express permission.Mr. [redacted] has been a valued client since 2013.  Although addon services such as a dedicated IP would not normally be eligible for a refund in order to resolve this amicable a credit in the amount of $48 has been placed on Mr. [redacted]'s hosting account.Mr. [redacted] has confirmed agreement to the credit and we have not received any additional questions or concerns.  If any should arise we ask that Mr. [redacted] please reply back to the recent e-mail communication or e-mail our management team at [email protected] and we will be happy to offer assistance.

Good Afternoon,We certainly understand customer's concerns on their information but unfortunately there seem to be a few misunderstandings here that we'd be glad to help clarify. First and foremost, during our checkout process, we prompt customers to inform them that if they do not enable domain...

privacy, that the customer's personal contact information will be publicly available. Also, domain privacy is selected by default for domain purchases, so a customer will have to specifically deselect this service for their information to be public. In the complaint there is also mention that the domains were not activated, however once a domain is registered, the associated contact information will be immediately available unless domain privacy is purchased. In regards to the concern that our agent stated there was nothing he could do, our agent did mention to Ms. [redacted] that if the function wasn't working at that time, that there may be a need to wait 30 minutes to try again, rather than stating that there was no way for the service to be enabled. Unfortunately our agent was not aware that our billing administrators can manually add this service if there is any issue from the customer's account, so we've made sure to address this with our agent and his supervisor.While we understand Ms. [redacted] wanted the information to be immediately protected, the reality is that there are databases around the web that cache domain information so even if the privacy protection was immediately enabled at the time of the conversation, it is unlikely that this would have removed all instances of her information from 3rd party sites. Moving on to the request for a refund of $140.00, we have found that the amount paid was actually $112.35. We've now refunded all services except for the two domains ending in .biz and .me which are unfortunately not eligible for refunds. That said, we did go ahead and provide who.is privacy on all four domains free of charge. If we can be of any further assistance with this matter we ask that Ms. [redacted] please contact our management at [email protected] and we'll be glad to help in any way we can.