Why I’ll never use hostgator again!

Yesterday was very frustrating and very expensive!

Thanks Hostgator!

First, the background…

December is our second biggest revenue month of the year. Our affiliates love us big time during December (and other months too…), but we do a LOT of business in December. We take many of the best products we’ve created during the year and drop the prices for a 24-hour period significantly.

It’s called the 31 Days of December Deals. And it’s very popular, which means we get a lot of traffic. That’s a good thing as long as we’re getting a lot of conversions too…

All year long, we’ve been reinforcing our security and our infrastructure to handle tons of traffic. We’re in the top 10,000 sites consistently in the US on Alexa, so we get traffic.

We moved our major sites to Liquid Web in the summer. And have LOVED the service and the price. We moved those sites from Hostgator in late spring to Rackspace. Rackspace was really good, but really expensive. I was paying nearly $1000 per month for a dedicated server.

Liquid Web offered better pricing (a reduction of $500 per month) and almost identical hardware, and even better support.

But I kept a reseller system on Hostgator mainly for sentimental reasons and because I wanted to refer other business owners there for smaller projects. And on that reseller account, I had a domain called NAMS.ws. It’s only use is for redirect software we have from Gotrythis.

Yesterday, I was traveling. I was headed to a place where the internet grid was bad and the closest wifi spot was about 90 miles away. At 6:30 am, I had a message from Cindy Bidar, one of our technical assistants.

“Call me. The links aren’t working.”

I called Cindy. Then, I called Hostgator who said my account had been put on hold because my Gotrythis software was at 78% CPU usage.

Now, I’ve been around the block a time or two. I know that when a hosting company says, “Unlimited domains, unlimited databases, unlimited bandwidth,” that’s mostly unlimited crap. The fine print will get you.

And Hostgator wasn’t budging.

None of our links were working to any of our December Deals – remember, everything goes through a redirect link which is NAMS.ws – on Hostgator.

I believe in business boundaries. And even hard and fast rules, but I don’t believe in NOT Talking to customers before you do something drastic.

This would have been a great opportunity for them to say – “You’re getting too much traffic for your account. Can we upgrade you to the next level?” “Uh, YES!” would have been my answer.

But instead, we needed a different solution. Liquid Web to the rescue.

Regina Smola – my infrastructure saviour and technology rock – stepped in (on Saturday) and had us set up on Liquid Web in no time.

Then, it was back to Hostgator to get them to turn on the site so we could move it. That took about 6 hours – until someone who could do it came in…

Within 48 hours, everything was off of Hostgator and I’ll never look back.

What happened to them?

They used to be the standard! Everyone used Hostgator.

As with most good businesses, they get purchased by bigger companies who get mired in processes. Instead of growth (which means better products and great support), they begin looking for cost savings and more profit.

That’s the difference between entrepreneurs and large corporations. I’ve worked in both.

Liquid Web. That’s where you’ll find me.

PS: ALL of my redirect links to Hostgator for hosting will be changed to redirect to Liquid Web. I no longer recommend Hostgator for anything.