HostGator Lies About Uptime

HostGator is losing more and more clients each and every single day.  Ever since they were acquired by EIG the company uptime, support, and customer support has slowly but surely started to dwindle.  If you are hosting with them, you should consider migrating away from them.  Below in this article, I have worked out a deal for free migration.  Even server response times are getting slower and slower by the month (not just poor uptime)!  Are they loading thousands of single sites on a single shared server?  I think they are.  Possibly they are not updating their hardware to the latest and greatest, as well.  Not, that I host with HostGator anymore, but I have worked on many sites that are still using their service.  I finally got sick of the circus show and decided to migrate my VPS server away from them (this was two years ago).  I have already moved 14 sites away from HostGator now.  But if there is one thing a lot of webmasters can agree on, it’s that HostGator’s 99.9% uptime is a complete lie!  It’s just a marketing tactic.

I honestly consider HostGator to be like buying your favorite game like Elder Scrolls Online.  When you get it, you’re so pumped.  But, as soon as you start to play the game you find out that it doesn’t work right, and your high hopes slowly die.  You soon find out that you have to upgrade everything on your computer to get the game to work correctly.  Just like a game, HostGator will try to tell you to run your site with no problems or issues you need to upgrade.  Once, you do it still doesn’t work right, and you’ve already wasted more money!

I have been doing a lot of reading lately and found a ton of screenshots showing HostGators uptime statistics.  The sad part is a lot of them have shown that their sites were only down about 15 minutes or so year.  I suspect that a lot of them are just affiliates that are saying whatever and anything they can to get you to purchase their service.  That is complete bullshit!  See the screenshot below.

Ok, so according to this screenshot HostGator hasn’t had any downtime since June 2013.  That is almost a year from now.  Maybe, you’ve been fooled by this false claim and are hosting with them.  It doesn’t mean you’re stuck with them, though.,  You can do business with whoever you want to.  I monitor the Twittersphere (almost to the point where it has become an obsession).  Yes, I am not going to argue the fact that their dumb affiliates spam the living shit out of Twitter to get you to buy their service.  You might find the results I have found to be shocking.  Please see the image down below which shows all the reports of downtime in just this past month:

HostGator’s Twitter

But, wait there is more!

On October 29th it looks like HostGator is having issues again?  So once again I am putting up some screenshots from unhappy customers of theirs.  See the image (tweets) down below:

HostGator Facebook

Facebook is blowing up from outraged HostGator customers.  And there is a good chance that if you have problems or issues with them and leave them a response on their Facebook wall, it will get deleted!  They announced on April 17th that they have finally restored service, but yet don’t care to abide by their 99.9% uptime policy.  So I guess it’s safe to say anyone that has Photoshop can easily make a uptime policy and not abide by it.  HostGator certainly knows a thing or two about that smoke and mirrors trick!

As you clearly see the Twittersphere and Facebook are blowing up like crazy with lots and lots of angry webmasters with their company.  To add insult to injury I even received an email from Craig Scott that shows he is thinking about filing a class action lawsuit against them:

But, the downtime happens again!

Their Facebook was blowing up, yet again (October 29th).  Over 350+ people left a are comment wanting to know why their website was down.  Just take a wild guess; how many people do you think got a response from HostGator on their Facebook wall?  The answer is ZERO!  How is that for excellent support?

If this isn’t proof enough that HostGator has some more major problems that webmasters are extremely unhappy with; I have searched the internet to find out what other webmasters were saying about their recent experiences with them.  To my surprise, they weren’t exactly ranting and raving about their excellent uptime.

Yoast Hates On HostGator!

 Yoast.com, you know the popular WordPress SEO plugin no longer recommends them.  After having a run in with their customer support team about a caching plugin that did nothing to solve the issue he has had enough with their horrible customer support.  Please note this isn’t the first time HostGator has disabled something from his site, it has happened several times.  I guess the change in leadership isn’t properly trained!

This post from Nile Flores, a long time Kim year customer of HostGator shows that after 15 hours of downtime straight she has had enough with HostGator and their antics.  She has spent over 18,000 dollars on dedicated servers.  The HostGator team installed memchache, but it was not installed correctly.  .” cost her business 10,000 dollars.  Customer service was of very little assistance to her and would just send her cookie cutter responses.   They had cost Nile thousands of dollars before she finally just said to hell with them.

Actually, Kim Castleberry’s site was completely deindexed do to HostGators negligence. I have been stating this for years, and Kim clarified it, “If you’re hosting with any EIG owned company you should be watching them very carefully.” EIG owns tons of web hosting companies and has put a ton of dirt on about 75 once good web hosting companies names!  HostGator’s tech team told her to make some changes that proved to be detrimental.  It’stwoa sad story, but at least we are starting to uncover what people are saying about their experience working with them.

Gregory Schoppe recently had a problem with HostGator once they upgraded to PHP 5.4.  Their team went into their code and put a commenting PHP script into the site.  Any newbie webmaster knows that the commenting language won’t change anything on the site.  He has lost all faith in their service.  Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t a tech team supposed to be able to fix problems, rather than making them worse?  He went on with his day and trusted that HostGator had made the necessary changes to his problem, only to be let down.  He states that they are unprofessional and don’t abide by their 99.9% uptime.  In fact, you’ll never be compensated for your downtime, and ever since EIG bought them out, they have moved their data center to Utah which has been nothing but a complete nightmare.

Not too long ago there were even a bunch of angry webmasters that wanted to share their experience about outages with HostGator.  There have been a record high number of outages in half a year in 2013 (26).  Is more than double than the reported outages in 2010, 2011, and 2012 combined.

This thread shows that HostGator is experiencing performance issues.  One comment shows that her site now takes 1 minute to load or 45 seconds if she is lucky.  Are you kidding; get your act together HostGator!

A Petition To Refund!

People are so outraged by HostGator and their new EIG ownership.  I have been stating this for two years now, and it’s starting to go down in flames for them.  If you’re hosting with them, you have been warned you’re in for a long tiresome battle.  Something surely needs to be done because they are losing tons of customers each and every hour.  Did you know people are even blogging and protesting that HostGator starts issuing refunds to webmaster’s sites that have been down?  There have been five reported blackouts!  Yes, people are even signing partitions to get the higher ups to address the problem and stop apologizing to people on Twitter.  But, do you think anything will be done soon?  Probably not!  I suspect that there will be more to follow!  Some of these blackouts have even lasted 31 hours.  HostGator hasn’t even offered a “shut up” fund to those webmasters who were affected.

I have reached out to Hostgator on Twitter about this article and here is what they tweeted back to me:

Do I think they will even address my post or concerns?  Probably not!  Do I care?  Not really; I will just keep spreading the word on their downtime issues.  They are probably just going to stick with their .01 web hosting campaign and pull in as many customers as they can; knowing that a lot of them will be dissatisfied with their service and eventually leave.  It’s the sad part of the business, and a lot of companies have used this tactic over the years.  They spend loads of money on advertising and then fail to listen to what people are saying about them.

HostGator for the love of God stop taking on new customers and make sure the ones you have are happy, because obviously they are not!

So if all this isn’t proof enough that HostGator is bad news, I don’t know what else will convince you. Do you want to keep dealing with their downtime? They have a ton of issues they need to iron out. Sadly, I see no indications that anything is going to change shortly. Their customers on Twitter and Facebook are very unhappy with them, and webmasters are tired of working late nights and stressing over their sites uptime.

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What Can You Do?

Honestly, it’s time to move your site to a web hosting company that will treat you right. You don’t have to deal with every time you sit down at the computer to work on your site it’s either A down or B running like a turtle that got ran over by a car.

I suggest that you switch your site to InMotion because they have 100% free migration. I have been hosting two VPS servers with them for four years and haven’t had one single issue with them. They have excellent customer support, and you won’t have to sweat bullets about your downtime like you do with HostGator.

I have provided a special offer for you, which you can click on down below to get started hosting with them.  Could be the day you just said “enough” and moved on.   Did I mention you even get a free domain name with InMotion?: