Just Host reviews – Page 21

Allowed my domain to expire despite assurances to the contrary...

I transferred my domain to Just Host several weeks before it was due to expire and require renewal. I was assured by Just Host that they would take care of the transfer and renew the domain name. I provided them with the necessary information and received a confirmation that "all was OK" and that "I shouldn't worry" about the renewal.

JustHost at some point received a cancellation of the transfer BUT NEVER NOTIFIED ME!! Recently, I tried to access my email and web site only to find that the domain name HAD expired and was in redemption!!

JustHost refuses to take responsibility for the expiration of the domain name despite their email assuring me that the transfer and renewal was "OK" and for ruining my business presence on the web. When I disputed the issue with them, they said I should redeem the domain and let them know so they could transfer it. It will cost me $160 plus and additional $10.95 to redeem the domain name that JustHost let expire!

Their support people do not talk to each other and apparently do not keep any records of the issue I opened with them where they confirmed that the domain name was renewed. The billing department also keeps sending me notices that they will add an additional three months free if I continue with them. I signed up for 4 years but after this experience, I just want OUT.

JustHost is the WORST for service and the word "incompetent" immediately comes to mind when it comes to administration. Although I canceled my account through their web site, I continue to get notices about whether/not I want to cancel.

I was initially locked out of the admin tool that would allow me to cancel my subscription online. I emailed support, who sent me my login username and password. The password was incorrect. Fortunately, I found the correct password in my records and proceeded to logon to the cancellation UI.

I have been trying to get them to confirm that my cancellation actually was processed by their server and have not been successful. I have no confidence in their administrative abilities and hope that I will get a refund in a timely manner. They seem to excel in putting obstacles in the path of what should be a no-brainer cancellation transaction.

You will eventually regret using Justhost

Looks like users here have a good sense of JustHost, as of this writing they have <15% overall rating and nothing higher than 2.9 on the rating scales. Not sure how they get such great reviews on other sites, other than they must have employees filling out reviews or pay sites for editor reviews.

To start, they give very little control over domain features, everything has to be requested through email to support which takes forever. For anyone beyond the most novice user, their cPanel implementation is useless, most features missing or disabled. Can't even get a phone number for billing.

If there's an issue prepare to be down for days as you go back and forth in email getting no answers. Tech support was friendly when you got someone that you could understand, but not helpful at all. Most definitely outsourced Indian support. If you let a domain expire (shame on me) it's nothing short of EXTORTION to get it back (charged me for a 1 yr renewal more than GoDaddy charges for a 10 yr registration. Have emails from them and the payment transactions to prove this. Billing would not even tell me what I was paying for other than to have my domain back, not how long the renewal was, when they would do it, nothing. And this was after asking repeatedly over about 4 email interactions that total took all day. Would say you get what you pay for, but there's plenty out there that even beat their prices.

One of the worst, most unethically predatory companies I've ever had the misfortune to deal with. STAY AWAY.

Biggest Pro: You can eventually escape and go elsewhere
Biggest Con: The money and time you will waste dealing with them

Very long but READ THE FOLLOWING BEFORE SIGNING UP!

Anyone who thinks they should sign up with these idiots should be strongly warned! DO NOT use them as they are just scam artists and I can give you the reasons why. I know people think "Oh this guy just had a bad experience an is now bashing them for no reason". Everything I will tell you is documented and makes for a great read. Have fun.

1. Anyone notice they state 24/7 Phone Support in their features? Where is the phone number? Try and find it. The only place it's listed is in their terms of service. WHO LISTS THEIR TECH SUPPORT NUMBER ONLY IN THE TERMS OF SERVICE??

2. Call the number. It's a joke! This is what your will here: "For sales, press 1. If you do not recognize a charge on your statement, or need to request a refund, press 2". Really?? The first 2 options are to either give them money or request it back?

3. Fill out the online order for but don't submit it. Close your browser window. You'll get an email a few minutes later saying "I can see from our records that you attempted to place an order with Just Host today, but for some reason you ran into difficulties and the order was not completed. To apologise for any problems you may have experienced, here's a special link to receive 50% off the usual cost of our unlimited Just Plan! So to receive Half-Price hosting please go to: (url removed). Note: This link is only valid for 24 hours, and can only be used once."
How do they know your email address? They are running a snooping server to get your email address without even submitting it! Imagine what they do once you sign up with them.

4. They say their support is all based in "Chicago US". Every last one of them is in "Chicago US". Here are some chat excerpts:

Me: and where is technical support located?
Shawn: Chicago (US)
Me: all of it? You don't have any support in say India?
Shawn: No, all our Support is located in Chicago

Me: what city are you in?
Samuel: We are located Chicago(USA)

Me: you are in India correct?
Victor: We are in Chicago,
Victor: 223 W.Jackson Blvd. #600
Victor: Chicago, IL 60606
Victor: USA

Yet when I asked one guy to log into my account to look into an issue (after blocking a few IP's I found in my access logs) I got:

Me: let me know when you are in
Charles: The page is not showing the login screen here.
Charles: It is showing 403 Forbidden error
Me: what is your IP address and I'll check the IP Deny Manager
Me: go to www.whatismyip.com and it will tell you your IP
Charles: It is
Charles: 203.193.165.78
Me: Ahh, you are in India
Me: one moment
Me: try now
Me: let me know when you are logged in
Charles: I am in now.

At the end of the chat:

Me: ok, can I add the IP ban again for India or do you still need access?
Charles: You can ban it again.

Me: I need to show you something but must remove your IP from IP Deny Manager
Samuel: 220.227.236.18
Me: your IP is 220.227.236.18? Are you sure?
Samuel: Yes
Me: what city are you in?
Samuel: We are located Chicago(USA)
Me: But that IP address is from India
Me: http://whois.domaintools.com/220.227.236.18
Me: so you are in India correct?
Samuel: Our Main office is in Chicago(USA)
Me: I am asking where YOU are located, not your main office
Me: YOU are in India correct?
Samuel: Yes, I am from india working for Justhost

GOTCHA!!! I even complained to a manager about this and got the following:
"We have never asked our outsourcing staff to lie about where they are from, I guess that they want to make any transition for customers a seamless as possible - I will speak to all of our support functions and discuss this with them..
Kind regards
Jamie
Jamie Irish
General Manager"

Notice the words "outsourcing staff". Yet the last email I got from his said, "Kind regards, Jamie Irish, Technical Support Manager"

Any time anyone from Just host logs in the IP's are either from India, Russia, or California. What happened to poor Chicago?

5. No one there seems to know just how many customers they have:

Me: how many customers do you have?
Shawn: more than 95000

Me: how many customers does JUSTHOST have
Victor: We have more than 5 lakhs
Victor: customers
Me: you have more than 5 customers?
Me: and what is a 'lakhs'?
Victor: We have more than 500000 customers
Google 'lakhs', it's Indian for '100,000'

But the site says they have 200,000 "March 17th, 2010
I am over the moon to be able to write this blog post announcing that Just Host has reached the amazing milestone of hosting websites for over 200,000 customers." This is found in the Blog link in the bottom menu.

6. Basic features are listed with a big checkmark on their Features page, but actually are considered "Extras" when you try an use them
Awstats....$19.95/year
SSH accesss...$19.95/year
Daily backups...$19.95/year
Priority Support...$19.95/year
Domain Privacy...$9.95/year

They want you to PAY for backups, yet put this in the ToS, "Backups - We will make every attempt to retain nightly backups. However, as with any data storage systems, backups can fail. We encourage you to perform your own backups on a periodic basis or sign up for our daily backup service."

Sounds to me like you can either get free possibly failed backups, or pay $20/year for them to possibly fail.

I think this is enough to scare anyone away. If you still want to give them your money don't say you weren't warned!

justhost = ignorant nazi bastards - do not use

Piece of ****, do not use these idiots for you hosting. All I ever had with them was problems. To begin with their first server was slow, so I upgraded only to find that they messed up my DNS and my website was down. Their customer service people don't know ****, don't even waste your time speaking to them, go directly to their support department and even then it might take several emails to get them to look at the problem. I put my website on Amazon Cloudfront and justhost messed up the DNS pointing and trying to get them to change it was like talking to a child. Later I had been uploading backups to the server and it turns out that you don't have unlimited storage space, you have almost none, they sent me an email and before I could download all of the files, they blocked my account over night, shutting my website off. Seriously, a couple of days to resolve things would have been nice, but apparently they are just a bunch of ignorant nazi bastards. Do no use these guys. Oh and I found out that my website wasn't even on a justhost server it ended up at singlehop. ~ Wyatt

No Trouble Here

Pretty tough reviews here. Frankly had I read them before I signed on, I probably wouldn't have. That said, I've had pretty good luck with the company. I found their idiot-proof build a site a bit unwieldy to work around, but it's just because I was unfamiliar with their file structures. (I build mine locally, then upload via FTP).

They got me set up, I transferred a domain in from another host, frankly just so I'd not have to redirect to a subdirectory in my base site, they helped set up an SSL (a bit pricey, but what the heck, it seems to work). I did have one 'odd' situation in that when logging on to the admin site, it indicated the terms and conditions needed to be agreed to (I did that at initial sign up, read every word) but when you clicked on the link, it rolled back to 'click to agree and proceed'. After an email to support indicating that I could not agree to something I had not read, the problem stopped and I get into the files manager just fine.

Of course, looking at some of the reviews, the house may come crashing down in a few months...we'll see. Until then, I'm satisfied.

Biggest Pro: Price is right (so far)
Biggest Con: A bit difficult to figure 'add ons' correctly

JustHost- the Anti Christ

With JustHost, the first six months were just fine. Then someone (that's what they said) placed a trojan on my site that transferred everyone to a porn site. I downloaded the site, scanned it with three programs and found nothing. Because of their insistence, I deleted the website and uploaded the original files. A couple of days later, my site goes down. Internal server error. I get an email from support stating that they think I have a virus in the website. I jump on support and they fix it and they denied sending me an email about a virus. (if they would check their support tickets, they would see it there) Today my site goes down again for the same reason, so I go to login to the cpanel and my password was denied every time. I got them on live support and ripped them a new hole including threatening with legal action. After fifteen minutes of ranting and going nuts on them, the guy tells me that it looks like my website is fine now. He also made a statement that proves that they are the ones that are screwing with peoples websites. He said: I promise you that your website will not have any more problems. How in the world can someone promise that unless their the ones causing the problems? In conclusion, run while you can and stay away from JustHost like they were a communicable disease.

Biggest Pro: If you never have a problem, they love you.
Biggest Con: If you have a problem, they will screw with you and make your life miserable .

BAD! STAY AWAY!!! DON'T CHANCE IT!!!!

Just Host started with a discount and a great support system. They mislead me and I had to change host. They would not refund they money, did not give me the perks I paid for, and at the end they did not transfer my domain name and only agreed to allow me to keep it if I paid 10 times more. They are great until you pay and after that it is all over. I was not given the option to renew my business name within the 30 days they are suppose to give me. My site was shut down because of them and they were rude and did not respond until my 30 days were up. I contacted another hosting company that is amazing. No concern for customer satisfaction, just greed.

Biggest Pro: located someone else
Biggest Con: lied to

Can't seem to set up Email using Outlook 2007

After 10 emails and 4 different people and each not knowing what the other person did to get my email set up they told me to just use the Webmail to check my email.

I have used other hosting companies to set up email accounts no problem. I thought I would give these guys a shot - worst decision ever. As mentioned, I was trying to get Outlook 2007 set up and no luck. It simply wouldn't accept the information.

So I asked someone what to do. I followed exactly what they wanted - they asked for screen shots - I provide them. Then someone else took over the issue and asked for the exact same screen shots again. I said I've already sent them to someone else - in previous emails - why should I go through all the exact same thing again.

Some one else then took over the issue and asked for a cmd run and I did that and provide all the screen shots again.

The answer I got back was check your email using Webmail

What I'm outraged - why should I use the webmail based when other email accounts are fine with Outlook 2007. Oh we can't figure this out - just do it this way

Technical service I think is, and this is just my opinion, is farmned out to a call centre and they can only go through a menu of problems - if it falls outside this menu or problems and answers they end up just throughing their hands in the air and telling you to use Webmail, basically meaning we have no idea why this isn't working with Outlook 2007.

GEt on the ball guys what a way to run the business at least I only signed up for 3 months to see what they were like.

I wish there was a number lower than 0 as they don't seem to want to figure out the problem

Biggest Pro: not a thing
Biggest Con: everything

JustHost will say anything to get you to sign up

I don't know how on earth JustHost.com got so many positive online reviews on other review sites unless they paid for them. They have EXTREMELY poor tech support and their sales agents will say anything to get you to sign up with JustHost even if it is untrue. We were told unequivocally that if we paid the $50 for JustHost to transfer our website, we would then be able to use JustHost's website builder tools to modify the website. After waiting over a month for them to finally transfer our domain names, we discovered that this information was completely false. A website built with another web host cannot be edited using JustHost's website builder tools. Both the billing department and sales department admitted that we were "unfortunately just simply told false information" by the sales department. “Unfortunately” this meant that we would have to rebuild our entire website using JustHost’s website builder tools if we wanted to be able to update our website. Also contradictory to the information provided by their sales agent, the website development tools included in the JustHost package are absolutely NOT for the novice website builder. Even if you’ve used FrontPage or other simple tools to build and maintain website, you will not have enough expertise to use JustHost’s tools. You need advanced training to be able to do anything beyond building the most basic webpage that you never modify or update. There isn’t even a way to copy page formats so that you don’t have to rebuild each and every page. There is also no way to even insert more than one picture into their website templates without linking to an outside photo gallery page that requires the use of another very complex program. The difficulties using JustHost’s website builder tools and, in fact any of their services, are compounded by their horrible tech support. Both phone and chat tech support are considered “Level One.” I’m not exactly sure what this means, but after holding for OVER AN HOUR EACH TIME to even get tech support on the phone (x8 calls= over 8 hours in two weeks), we were repeatedly told to simply look at the tech support videos on their website or to then email tech support since Phone and Chat support only dealt with the “simplest” issues. Their online tech support videos are completely useless. You have to watch all the way through a lengthy and slow video to get information only to discover that these “helpful” videos only provide the most basic information and are not at all helpful. Any search for tech support information brings up “no information found.” Even though we have ONE primary contact email on our account, JustHost tech support would sporadically (and for no apparent reason) decide that they wanted requests for tech support to come from one of our other emails. They also asked for credit card information to “confirm” that the tech support requests were in fact coming from us. This is all extremely shady, highly suspect, and scary when you’re dealing with work emails and website data. Do not trust JustHost. They will promise you the moon to get you to sign up and then you will rapidly discover that their promises are false, their tech support barely speaks English and are impossible to either get on the phone or to get any useful information from either by email or chat. You had also better be an expert on both domain transfer procedures and website development, because you will be expected to know how to do both without their help. Needless to say, we are transferring our domain names away from JustHost as soon as the 60 days pass, and we do not recommend JustHost.com to anyone.

Biggest Pro: If you are a trained expert in website development, you might like their website tools
Biggest Con: HORRIBLE tech support & sales agents lie to gain customers

They lie and they charge you too much

They constantly try to up-sell you and/or even prevent you from canceling the services. Not only do they try to trap you with them, but I had a customer service person tell me that it didn't matter what I did, they were still going to take the money out of my account, and this was after they signed me up, without my permission, for additional services I didn't even order.

Fortunately, I've changed banks and they have no access.

Don't give these guys your credit card info.

Biggest Pro: Nothing
Biggest Con: Everything