Green Geeks negative review #12746 by AC (andrew@t...) on Sep 2010
Green Geeks got a negative review on and one official response on
3411 Silverside Rd. Tatnall Building #104
Wilmington , DE 19810 US
☎ Phone 1-877-326-7483
📧 sales@g...AC ( andrew@t... )
I really wanted to like Green Geeks. REALLY REALLY wanted to.
But, I'm just disappointed.
I was attracted to GG because of the 300% carbon footprint offset statements, great pricing, advertised 99.9% uptime, and the fact that they are colocated closer to me than my other host (hostgator).
My problems began almost immediately after signing up. Clients were calling me with complaints about unavailable sites, I was getting site unreachables (some network-based, some server-based), and sporadic slow response times. I emailed support, and they told me it was an abusive user who had been dealt with. I thought, "Okay, good, they must be on it!"
But, the problems were not resolved. More outages, more complaints. More emails to support. More "abusive users". I figured I just needed to give them some time, but just to be sure, I decided to engage a 3rd party monitoring solution to help track response time and uptime.
What I found there was not encouraging. Frequent outages lasting 5-15 minutes, high latency responses, and an aggregate uptime over 3 months that looked more like 99.6%. That's 4 times more downtime than advertised (175 min/mo instead of 43 min/mo). They didn't promise snappy response times, so I can't really hold them to much there, but an average application response time of 300+ ms when the network latency is only 60ms isn't very good.
I contacted support again, and communicated my findings, concerns, and offered to help improve the service, expecting at least some understanding. I was really disappointed with the response (from a supposed manager, no less):
We strive for 100% uptime, but we can't control abusive users. This is how it is everywhere. Try upgrading to our premium cloud-based service.
They avoided questions about stated SLAs, they skirted direct questions about their setup (this is a little bit understandable, no one wants to give away the secret sauce), they pointed to their in-house proactive monitoring, but they couldn't offer any real help for my issues. It felt like they were saying, "We know our service doesn't live up to what we said it would, but stop complaining already. Thanks for your business!"
If I felt heard or understood, if someone would have taken some ownership in the issues, or said "yeah, that's not right, let's work together to make it better", or if anything would have given me the indication that this company intended to keep its promises or live up to it's potential, I'd be thrilled, but this has been the second worst customer relations situation in web hosting I've ever experienced. I hope they can figure it out and be the great company they have the capability to be.
So, If your website isn't critical, and you don't really expect the 99.9% uptime they promise in their SLA, and you don't mind consistently slow response times, and you don't mind support technicians who don't take ownership of your complaints, then maybe GG will be right for you. Otherwise, my experience with Hostgator has been absolutely fantastic, and I will be moving my business back there as soon as I can find the time and energy to migrate back.
Just a bit of background: I ran a hosting company for 6 years before offloading to a managed offering (this ain't my day job), I'm an IT security consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I have worked at hosting providers, ISPs and other tech-centric companies over the last 12 years. I know, "yay, good for me". I just wanted to help validate my opinions above. I know what of I speak.
But, I'm just disappointed.
I was attracted to GG because of the 300% carbon footprint offset statements, great pricing, advertised 99.9% uptime, and the fact that they are colocated closer to me than my other host (hostgator).
My problems began almost immediately after signing up. Clients were calling me with complaints about unavailable sites, I was getting site unreachables (some network-based, some server-based), and sporadic slow response times. I emailed support, and they told me it was an abusive user who had been dealt with. I thought, "Okay, good, they must be on it!"
But, the problems were not resolved. More outages, more complaints. More emails to support. More "abusive users". I figured I just needed to give them some time, but just to be sure, I decided to engage a 3rd party monitoring solution to help track response time and uptime.
What I found there was not encouraging. Frequent outages lasting 5-15 minutes, high latency responses, and an aggregate uptime over 3 months that looked more like 99.6%. That's 4 times more downtime than advertised (175 min/mo instead of 43 min/mo). They didn't promise snappy response times, so I can't really hold them to much there, but an average application response time of 300+ ms when the network latency is only 60ms isn't very good.
I contacted support again, and communicated my findings, concerns, and offered to help improve the service, expecting at least some understanding. I was really disappointed with the response (from a supposed manager, no less):
We strive for 100% uptime, but we can't control abusive users. This is how it is everywhere. Try upgrading to our premium cloud-based service.
They avoided questions about stated SLAs, they skirted direct questions about their setup (this is a little bit understandable, no one wants to give away the secret sauce), they pointed to their in-house proactive monitoring, but they couldn't offer any real help for my issues. It felt like they were saying, "We know our service doesn't live up to what we said it would, but stop complaining already. Thanks for your business!"
If I felt heard or understood, if someone would have taken some ownership in the issues, or said "yeah, that's not right, let's work together to make it better", or if anything would have given me the indication that this company intended to keep its promises or live up to it's potential, I'd be thrilled, but this has been the second worst customer relations situation in web hosting I've ever experienced. I hope they can figure it out and be the great company they have the capability to be.
So, If your website isn't critical, and you don't really expect the 99.9% uptime they promise in their SLA, and you don't mind consistently slow response times, and you don't mind support technicians who don't take ownership of your complaints, then maybe GG will be right for you. Otherwise, my experience with Hostgator has been absolutely fantastic, and I will be moving my business back there as soon as I can find the time and energy to migrate back.
Just a bit of background: I ran a hosting company for 6 years before offloading to a managed offering (this ain't my day job), I'm an IT security consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I have worked at hosting providers, ISPs and other tech-centric companies over the last 12 years. I know, "yay, good for me". I just wanted to help validate my opinions above. I know what of I speak.
This is Trey Gardner CEO of Green Geeks.
This comment and the one above by John Atkins has been investigated. They were both on the same reseller server at the same time of these comments and there were some issues according to our admins around the time of these reviews. I do apologize to anyone else on that server who may have been affected at that time. There were no outages in the logs however server loads were high due to a few clients the admins had let a little too mush leeway for usage and it caused an issue with the server.
I am not in the business of losing clients due to slow servers. I make a point to have the highest quality hardware and software and have a 24x7x365 team to make sure that everything is working properly and that our clients are receiving the support that they need.
As hard as we work sometimes we make errors but our team has always learned from those experiences and I assure you that we will continue to invest in making sure your experience at GreenGeeks as a shared or reseller hosting customer is as great as you should expect. if you ever have a serious issue with any of our team I would appreciate hearing about it at Trey@GreenGeeks.com
Thanks,
Trey
Marketing representative (trey@greengeeks.com, ).
This comment and the one above by John Atkins has been investigated. They were both on the same reseller server at the same time of these comments and there were some issues according to our admins around the time of these reviews. I do apologize to anyone else on that server who may have been affected at that time. There were no outages in the logs however server loads were high due to a few clients the admins had let a little too mush leeway for usage and it caused an issue with the server.
I am not in the business of losing clients due to slow servers. I make a point to have the highest quality hardware and software and have a 24x7x365 team to make sure that everything is working properly and that our clients are receiving the support that they need.
As hard as we work sometimes we make errors but our team has always learned from those experiences and I assure you that we will continue to invest in making sure your experience at GreenGeeks as a shared or reseller hosting customer is as great as you should expect. if you ever have a serious issue with any of our team I would appreciate hearing about it at Trey@GreenGeeks.com
Thanks,
Trey
Marketing representative (trey@greengeeks.com, ).
103 out of 113 users found this review to be helpful!