WebhostingPad negative review #4382 by Charles (admin@c...) on 2009
WebhostingPad got a negative review on
415 West Golf Road, Suite 5
Arlington Heights , IL IL 60005 US
☎ Phone +1 847 346 1801
📧 reviews@w...Charles ( admin@c... )
Let me preface this review by presenting my opinion: Web Hosting Pad (webhostingpad.com) has been the worst overall hosting experience I have ever had, and I have had many.
I signed up for one year of service at Web Hosting Pad ("WHP"). I was enticed by the huge space and bandwidth promises. I was naive and I soon found that it was a big mistake. Somehow I didn't think through the fact that hosting companies like WHP don't have the resources to really offer such huge space. They offer such huge space for marketing reasons and if anyone actually took them up on their feature list, they would be in trouble.
I was pissed off two months in - past the 30 day money back guarantee. I got the hint that they are running hundreds of different people's shared accounts on each server after speaking with a tech support agent. The equipment is underfunded, inefficient, and slow. My sites were down at least half the time during one month with no explanation for the downtime. After repeated attempts to fix the issue, I was told there wasn't one. Ha - "99% uptime guarantee." Try 49% uptime guarantee, if you're lucky. I have had many, many webhosts. I can test connections through multiple networks, more than ten PCs, etc. I know when my site is down. I could not upload via FTP because the server was so spotty. At one point, my MySQL latency (lag time) was over 10 seconds. This was ridiculous and unacceptable.
My troubles bring me to my next topic: WHP's support and customer service. I can sum it up with the following: GOD-AWFUL. At first I thought that the many tickets I opened to try to fix issues such as downtime, moving servers, screwed up domain transfers, etc were being responded to by people on the Asian continent, due to lack of proficiency and courteousness in the English language. But, after doing a little looking around, I found that all of WHP's people are based in the United States. This was good. They just weren't successful enough or big enough to hire people in Asia for tech support. But it was also worse: instead of hiring people with English as a second language (which would have been better in this case), they chose to hire idiots. American dimwits who have minimal, if any, technical knowledge, no grammatical concepts in English, and never had a business class on how courtesy and how to treat a customer. They are lazy and it takes days to get anything done, not to mention the fun time you have on the phone listening to hold music for hours while the line is busy.
After another month I was fed-up. I asked to transfer my four domains away from WHP. Not only was I charged $14.95 each domain to transfer away, the tech representatives from WHP had no idea how to do a domain transfer correctly - one of the fundamental practices in web hosting. They did not know to unlock the domain and it took them a long time to give me the authorization codes. The tech support reps spew ICANN regulations like they wrote them, though they are blatantly wrong time and time again.
Like I mentioned, I signed up for a one-year account. I do not like auto renewals but I didn't see that buried in their TOS, they say every account gets auto-renewed. Wahoo! Not. So a couple of days ago I got an email saying my credit card had been charged for another year of hosting. "That's odd," I thought to myself, “I thought I cancelled my account seven months ago.” I had submitted a ticket asking to transfer my domains away. After that nightmare was over, I replied in the ticket and said something along the lines of "Now that my domains are gone, you can close my account and delete my information." I never received a response and the ticket was closed on their end, so I assumed it was a done deal - my account was cancelled. But unbeknownst to me, and more importantly not given to me as a link, I had to fill out a trivial cancellation form in order to officially cancel my account. The thickheaded imbecile of a “Billing Manager” told me that my account was never cancelled. "Fine," I said, "I don't have any domains here and I sure as hell don't want another year of hosting, so please refund my credit card for the auto-renewal payment." After lots of arguing, the billing manager refused to fully refund my payment. He said that I needed to pay a "late cancellation" fee of $25.00. Bullshit. Let me get this straight - you hide your cancellation form behind a maze of links and even if your people give the impression that my account is closed and I no longer have any hosting here, I still need to pay you money. No. The BBB is going to hear about this.
If WHP is not a company using reseller hosting, then I don't have any advice for whoever is running things there other then fire everyone and start over. I mean it.
Is this review fraudulent? Am I an employee of a competing company out to discredit Web Hosting Pad? Think about it. This review is legitimate and genuine. Why would I spend this much time to write lies? This was my real experience at WHP. Don't make the same mistake I did.
-A former Web Hosting Pad customer
I signed up for one year of service at Web Hosting Pad ("WHP"). I was enticed by the huge space and bandwidth promises. I was naive and I soon found that it was a big mistake. Somehow I didn't think through the fact that hosting companies like WHP don't have the resources to really offer such huge space. They offer such huge space for marketing reasons and if anyone actually took them up on their feature list, they would be in trouble.
I was pissed off two months in - past the 30 day money back guarantee. I got the hint that they are running hundreds of different people's shared accounts on each server after speaking with a tech support agent. The equipment is underfunded, inefficient, and slow. My sites were down at least half the time during one month with no explanation for the downtime. After repeated attempts to fix the issue, I was told there wasn't one. Ha - "99% uptime guarantee." Try 49% uptime guarantee, if you're lucky. I have had many, many webhosts. I can test connections through multiple networks, more than ten PCs, etc. I know when my site is down. I could not upload via FTP because the server was so spotty. At one point, my MySQL latency (lag time) was over 10 seconds. This was ridiculous and unacceptable.
My troubles bring me to my next topic: WHP's support and customer service. I can sum it up with the following: GOD-AWFUL. At first I thought that the many tickets I opened to try to fix issues such as downtime, moving servers, screwed up domain transfers, etc were being responded to by people on the Asian continent, due to lack of proficiency and courteousness in the English language. But, after doing a little looking around, I found that all of WHP's people are based in the United States. This was good. They just weren't successful enough or big enough to hire people in Asia for tech support. But it was also worse: instead of hiring people with English as a second language (which would have been better in this case), they chose to hire idiots. American dimwits who have minimal, if any, technical knowledge, no grammatical concepts in English, and never had a business class on how courtesy and how to treat a customer. They are lazy and it takes days to get anything done, not to mention the fun time you have on the phone listening to hold music for hours while the line is busy.
After another month I was fed-up. I asked to transfer my four domains away from WHP. Not only was I charged $14.95 each domain to transfer away, the tech representatives from WHP had no idea how to do a domain transfer correctly - one of the fundamental practices in web hosting. They did not know to unlock the domain and it took them a long time to give me the authorization codes. The tech support reps spew ICANN regulations like they wrote them, though they are blatantly wrong time and time again.
Like I mentioned, I signed up for a one-year account. I do not like auto renewals but I didn't see that buried in their TOS, they say every account gets auto-renewed. Wahoo! Not. So a couple of days ago I got an email saying my credit card had been charged for another year of hosting. "That's odd," I thought to myself, “I thought I cancelled my account seven months ago.” I had submitted a ticket asking to transfer my domains away. After that nightmare was over, I replied in the ticket and said something along the lines of "Now that my domains are gone, you can close my account and delete my information." I never received a response and the ticket was closed on their end, so I assumed it was a done deal - my account was cancelled. But unbeknownst to me, and more importantly not given to me as a link, I had to fill out a trivial cancellation form in order to officially cancel my account. The thickheaded imbecile of a “Billing Manager” told me that my account was never cancelled. "Fine," I said, "I don't have any domains here and I sure as hell don't want another year of hosting, so please refund my credit card for the auto-renewal payment." After lots of arguing, the billing manager refused to fully refund my payment. He said that I needed to pay a "late cancellation" fee of $25.00. Bullshit. Let me get this straight - you hide your cancellation form behind a maze of links and even if your people give the impression that my account is closed and I no longer have any hosting here, I still need to pay you money. No. The BBB is going to hear about this.
If WHP is not a company using reseller hosting, then I don't have any advice for whoever is running things there other then fire everyone and start over. I mean it.
Is this review fraudulent? Am I an employee of a competing company out to discredit Web Hosting Pad? Think about it. This review is legitimate and genuine. Why would I spend this much time to write lies? This was my real experience at WHP. Don't make the same mistake I did.
-A former Web Hosting Pad customer
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