One of my first posts on this blog was in praise of Hostgator and their services. Many Many moons ago I had switched my hosting over to Hostgator and I was in love with them. They were helpful and and support request was resolved in hours.
Well I hate to say the honeymoon has ended. Now this hasn’t happened over night. Their support had steadily declined for the past few years with support requests taking longer and longer. Response times to questions could be measured in days. Then came the nickel and diming of simple tasks that in my mind should be part of the service, and used to be so. Then came this latest incident that was the final straw that has broken this camels back.
I have a site ( or should I say had, but don’t want to spoil the ending) that was doing quite well. Even though I haven’t done a new post in a year it had great traffic and was earning me a nice income from ads. Well a little Over 2 weeks ago one if my posts got picked up and linked to by a much larger site and the post went viral,for a bit. I was jazzed, but with great traffic comes trolls and the site was hacked.
I noticed because like shutting of a faucet my ad revenue dropped big time. I immediately noticed Hostgator that the site had been compromised and requested a restoral from back up. This was most likely with in 6 hours of the hack. After a few hour of no response yet I went to live chat and he escalated the support request to some other team. I got an email at that point that they were investigating and to not touch any of the files.
Two days later a get an email stating their scans were complete and malicious files have been removed, thanks and have a nice day. But wait the site is still missing and showing the hack message?? So I respond that what about restoring my site ( I happen to know that they are backing the space up weekly as it is and they re-write over it each time). I also explain how I’m losing revenue and followers every hour the site is down. No response.
I would send a new reply every day and not get a response. I even went back on live chat and that dude said it is still under investigation and that these types can take weeks. Weeks? Mean while my SEO juice is going to hell and I’m not making my money. So time goes on and each day I sen a “what the hell is going on id like a status update” message, in nicer terms of course, and still no replies.
Till today
Thank you for contacting Hostgator Security and I do apologize for the delay in our response to this issue. I also apologize for any misunderstanding or misinformation regarding our cleaning policy. At this time I have reviewed the account and I am not seeing any backups we may use to restore the site with. Our current backups of the account only contain the defaced content. The attackers appear to have replaced all of the files so it is simply not a case of removing the defacement and the whole site will need to be restored from a backup. If you do have a backup of the account you wish for us to restore we can do so without a restore fee.
Oh thank you for waiving the restore fee and if you would have done this at the time I made the request I know you would have had a good back up. Now site is gone unless I can find one of my older backups.
Yes I take responsibility for not doing my own back ups (practice what I preach) but it does not excuse Hostgator for providing, excuse my language, very piss poor support.
UPDATE 1: I got ahold of their ‘restore dept’ and so far was able to get the database restored. So with a clean install of wordpress I now at least have all my posts, just without the plugins and all the images. Its a start.
Want to see me ranting? Watch the video
As an ex employee, who saw EIG’s buyout of HostGator and the few years of fallout after, I can say that HG has gone down hill. After the buyout, there were a massive staff cuts and increased advertisement. In addition, there was also a massive migration to a crappy new data center (something everyone knew from the get go as we were inundated with tickets about slower site speeds, down times and other issues). To say the least, it was clear that EIG was a horrible change for the company.
When I left, a few year later, we were still massively understaffed. The people you reach on calls and chats, are also working with other customers as well. There were still lots of hiring, however the working conditions were so hectic that most people quit (and those who couldn’t hit their numbers were fired).
So yeah, you have a system where there are not nearly enough staff available to support clients. Agents who are paid on par with your local store cashier. A massive amount of misinformation (either inadequate training or dumb staff) that results in customers having to reach contact us back. Massive ticket queues that are several days long. A broken system that can sometimes push your ticket to the end if you reply (new last updated time). An attendance system that promotes people to come to work sick (as the penalties can cost you your job).
The thing is that the staff at the support and call center know it is all shit and horrible, but none of those people can do anything to change things (including the managers). And those who can change things are so protected from the clients, that they don’t care.