HostNine reviews – Page 2

Fraudalent Billing - Check your billing!

After accusing me of overloading their server, they cut me of without any proof. Now they are chasing and for money never owed from next billing period. Cheap criminals shysters!! AVOID

Biggest Pro: Appear professional
Biggest Con: Worst customer service and billing fraud

I lost my face in front of my Clients because of HostNine

I took a reseller account from Hostnine shifting from Godaddy's VPS account. I expected that medium company would provide good service for small webhosting/ webdesigning companies as I had felt some problems from Godaddy (compare to Hostnine, Godaddy's problems were nothing). First 2 months I thougth I got a reliable host. But then problems started to appear - Outrages!. I said clients it is temprary everything will restore soon. This phenomenon became routine. Regarding websites nobody will not care if it is down for few hours. But 'Email's are real Problems. Often my clients start call me complaining about emails. Few my close clients left me. Now I started to shifting my clients to Hostgator. I have tested my few accounts which using email communication lot, and no problems reported after their accuount shifted to Hostgator, By 2010 I will transfer my clients account to another safe location.

Majority of IPs hostnine using are blacklisted. So your emails will get blocked by SPF. They are not providing any security from hackers. I didnt face any delay in getting answer for my tickets, but once one of my account got terminated. They said one of my websites that ever crossed 500 hundred visitors in a month used over CPU. (the real reson : it was hacked and used for spreading spams by some spammers)

HostNine Reseller Account offers great value and service

I signed up with HostNine when I first started my online business, and took out the reseller account so I could add unlimited new domains. Actually HostNine were recommended to me by a company who already had a large internet presence.

The Reseller Centre interface shows me all my sites at a glance; I can make changes to each site here or log in directly to CPanel.

On the very few occasions I've needed support, which HostNine offer 24/7, the response has been rapid, direct, and effective - which is exactly what you need if you are an online marketer!

I'd recommend HostNine to anyone or any company serious about an online presence.

Peter, Founder
www.etayla.com

Biggest Pro: 24/7 customer service with "time to respond" indicator

Don't make the same mistake we did.

Originally we chose this company because they offered 50% off the first year. As they say, you get what you pay for. The staff have managed to screw up just about every aspect of hosting: billing, MX records, DNS records, backups -- if it's important to you, they've probably screwed it up. Their servers are regularly blacklisted, which means that you can't send mail to any mail servers that rely on blacklist information. It's not uncommon for no one to answer the support telephone number, even after you've waited on hold for 45 minutes. Messages to staff go unanswered, and help tickets routinely take more than a week to receive a cursory answer. Solutions, if they come at all, take much longer. The frontline support staff are pleasant, but are extremely limited in their technical knowledge. They will try to help, but in our experience, often make the problem worse because they don't pay attention to details or they simply don't understand what they're doing. If your problem gets escalated to Level 3 support, you might as well go on vacation because you won't be getting a response for weeks. We stayed with them for a year because we kept thinking that the support couldn't possibly get worse. We were wrong.

Biggest Pro: The price
Biggest Con: The lack of technical knowledge and customer service.

Worst Customer Service Ever!

I had a problem with my account where they accused me of fraudulent activity and I contacted their customer support to receive the most horrific customer service. First of all, they could not help me out over the phone. So I emailed them. I gave them what they asked for to verify proof of non-fraudulent activity and that was still not accepted. They would not give me a reason for denying me access on the several occasions where I sent them emails asking for just one explanation, one answer to 10 of my questions. They did not help me at all! Did not answer any of my most simple questions that I had a right to know! The most horrible customer service ever!

Working out so far...

Iv only been with hostnine for a few weeks no. but the servers are fast with very minimal server overhead. I like that you have the option as a reseller to place your customers website over 10 different data centers which in terms doesn't just fill up one server. their customer service is doing a great job. when i first signed up i had about 9 tickets open for website transfer and billing software and all got resolved in a good time frame. I have had alot of problems with other hosting company's but hostnine seems to know what there doing. I hope my review of them will still be the same in the upcoming months and years

Biggest Pro: Choose your datacenter
Biggest Con: Reseller Central needs a little work on some of the options.

Up's and downs but getting better

I have been with H9 for approx. 3 years now, for my part have always had good service, there have been periods when I have been frustrated with the service and I think mainly is not the fault of their service but miss-understanding in interpretation of questions asked when trying to get an issue resolved, the staff have been more than helpful on occasions even when my patience was wearing thin.

I think that one of the main reasons that there has been a few negative feedback regarding H9 is that over the past year H9 has made so many positive changes in regards to availing hosting all through the world has probably put a lot of pressure on their staff, I have noticed however that their service has improved remarkably over the past few months, downtime hardly noticeable, pricing just right for my budget, don't sell much myself, my sites are mostly non-profit, I do make a little for their upkeep.

Here's one way to get really good service if you are experiencing problems, that is to detail questions separately to support, for example 1, 2, 3, etc. even if you are not so proficient in English it's easier for support to interpret your meaning.

I have never needed to call H9's hot-line, as the expense would be to great, have been able to come to some other arrangement with H9 when they have needed Docs authenticated and all this through normal email, their Chat service is now solely used for new clients, in the past anybody could start a chat, problem here was that, chats were taking to long, and people with real issues were getting put on hold, now only support tickets and they can be answered in a few minutes or take a little longer, depending on the support queue.

H9's forum and blog are also available, you can get a few answers to general question on the forum, but if you have a real issue you are advised to contact support, it has been stated the H9 staff do not monitor the forum, this is untrue, H9 take great value from what is written there, you can see from reading threads and posts that most questions are answered by H9 staff. (I am not a Staff member)

Well summing all up, I can say that I am quite satisfied with HostNine's Service and will continue to grow with them in the future.

Jan Edmund

Biggest Pro: Very friendly staff and CEO + good service

Hostnine - Excelent Support & Security

We 've been working with hostnine for almost 2 years.

We are a company that develops web based applications and corporate websites. Most of our developments use PHP & MySQL. All our customers get their site hosted in Hostnine, and we are vall ery happy with them.

I think the best thing they have is their customer support. Ben and Alex have always been there for helping us when we need them.

The security of the servers is excelent, never had a security issue with them. Their uptime is also very very good.

I like their reseller plan and i think their prices are good.

The only negative thing i cant state from hostnine is they have some problems sometimes with the spam filters.

I don't like a 250mail/hour policy they have because in a particular project it was a stone in the road for me, because those emails were not spam.

Another big point for them is that servers are always updated which was the thing that made me choose them at first time.

I remember i bought a reseller plan at hostgator which didn't have InnoDB databases, so i switched to HostNine.

Hostnine is one of our keys of success for my company (www.solcre.com).

Biggest Pro: Customer Service
Biggest Con: Their email limit 250mails/hour per host

One of the best web hosting provider ever!

I've been hosting with HostNine for 2 years and I've tried different web hosting companies before. Nothing compares with the customer support that Hostnine provides.

One thing that I really love about their customer support is that all of their employees live in United States. In other words, you're sure that whoever it is that your talking to on the other side is an American employee of Hostnine and not just a call center agent from somewhere.

Also, unlike other web hosting companies, you can talk directly to the managers for your concerns, which means you're talking with the decision maker.

Aside from the excellent customer service, the control panel is easy to use and uptime and reliability is excellent as well.

I definitely recommend Hostnine to anyone who wants excellent web hosting!

Biggest Pro: Great customer support

HostNine.com Won Me With Amazing Customer Support

I first signed up for HostNine last year before the election as a place to put my political blog (I won't link here as much of the language is unprofessional, and potentially offensive). I registered what could be, to some, considered a fairly offensive domain name (nothing sexually explicit or anything bad like that, just offensive in general) and after I had made the payment through paypal I still had no services showing. I figured there might either be a setup timeframe between payment being received and services being activated, or somebody at the company didn't like the domain, so I opened a ticket for the matter. It did take them awhile to resolve this, there were issues with the server they had placed my account on, and eventually moved me to a different server and resolved the billing issues I had been having. The level of support however was excellent, they kept me updated throughout the entire process and I was pleased with their customer service, although displeased with my lack of a website. Then, after that issue was resolved I was very pleased with the service as well and had no further contact with their customer service.

Soon after the election was finished I lost my job, and since it was mainly a political themed website I so no need to make sure I continued to fund it, and let the account go into arrears, still owing another $20-ish. This was an ***-hole move on my part, which I take full responsibility for.

Recently I've gone back to school, and am taking several classes in web and graphic design to freshen up some of my skills that have been lost due to me not actually designing or coding anything in a few years. I decided that in order to make this class easier for me, and any classmates that would like to have a small website on my host, that I would simply re-activate my account and buy a new domain for it. At first I thought of just finding a new, very cheap, 'unlimited' hosting provider but since I happen to have a few extra dollars in the bank account right now due to some refunds on my student loans I figured I would make good with H9.

The process started on 8/29, I paid what was showing as the outstanding balance via CC, no further statements showing, so I opened a support ticket asking to have my account opened back up. Almost a full 24 hours later (23 hours and 5 minutes to be exact) I received what I thought was a somewhat short, unfriendly, response to my ticket stating that I still had an overdue balance. To this I responded in an equally short and unfriendly matter that as soon as they bill the amount to me I will be most willing to pay it to get my services reactivated. I had gone out last night so my response wasn't until sometime early in the morning my time.

I will insert a side note here: after being in arrears for 6 months I do not expect the staff to be overly friendly with me, at this point I was not a paying customer of theirs and had owed them money for quite some time, and the response, in my opinion, does not reflect in any way their customer service. I simply wish to make this a full written-review since I see so few of them on here.

At this point this was becoming slightly time sensetive to me, I want to have at least a bare-minimum site up and running before my class starts today at 6. The ticket response average time was about 4 hours for their billing department at that time so I, eternally impatient, decided to make a post on the forum. I understand they are busy, their ticket reporting software shows the queues so I'm very aware I'm not the only customer asking for help, and normally would not do something like this, but as I said I wanted to try to get this working by tonight.

In the forum I posted it in I had seen several other threads with billing related issues that had been very promptly resolved by staff members, so I made a post there namely to get more information as to how long the resolution might take rather than to try to push my ticket ahead in the line (as I said, at this point I still wasn't a paying customer of theirs and still owed them money, and obviously the customers maintaining a current account should be ahead of me in line). My thread was then locked by a forum moderator (however not an employee of the company) saying that I should not post billing questions there and to open a ticket instead.

I decided to open another thread in the Customer Testimonials section, which I knew would be read by a member of the staff, stating that I thought it was incredibly unprofessional to let non-employees make actions such as that to a customer that is attempting to make good on payments to the company, and attempting to upgrade their services (read: more money to the company) when others had done the same and not been treated in the same way.

This is when my customer service experience turned from somewhat poor to what has made me decide to recommend H9 to anyone that asks me. Upon creating that thread I got an immediate response (as in 3 minutes after I posted the ticket numbers) and my site was once again up and running, with a personal apology from the H9 staff member for my problem not having been resolved originally.

To summarize:
Most hosts have roughly the same products and services, if you can offer me CPanel and Fantastico (yes, I am willing to write my own web applications in PHP but I am not willing to install my own blog software because I'm lazy) and good uptime you are good in my book. I've never once had a problem with uptime with H9, all of their products and services have operated exactly as advertised. Where a host stands out to me (and between me and several people in my family we have gone through a bunch in the last 5-6 years) is the level of customer service that they provide. For this HostNine has been second to none for me. I will be ugrading to a reseller account as soon as I get my web and graphic design site finished (I've always hated designing sites meant to advertise designing, they have to be that much more perfect) and will recommend HostNine to any of my friends, colleagues, or fellow students that are looking for affordable hosting.

Biggest Pro: Excellent customer service, very friendly and responsive employees
Biggest Con: None