WebHostingPad reviews – Page 5

Unprofessional Behaviour Lost Me a Job

Every time I contact Webhostingpad about downtime, it's either a schedule maintainance that they didn't feel it was important to warn anyone on the server about (how hard is a mailing list?) or, even more often, a few hours later when it comes back up I immediately get the "Your site seems to be working" as a way of closing the ticket. Thanks, jerks. I know I'm not crazy. My site was down. You're slow.

But this last experience is exactly why I will switch hosts when my service contract expires next June. My site was suspended without Webhostingpad so much as sending me an email. Twelve hours later when it was discovered, I started trying to contact someone to find out why. When I thought maybe it was because my domain had expired, Billing got back to me in less than five minutes. It wasn't billing, I had three weeks left on the domain. When I tried to get support to tell me where my site was, I had to spend the next four hours stalking them to get any reply. Finally someone on phone service (which the hold cue on phone service plays the same 2 two-minute songs on loop) he said that I had been hacked by Nigerians and therefore suspended and that I would have to contact the admin.

I emailed the admin, by now letting him know that his service people had been blowing me off and that I was not pleased with wasting my whole day on this issue, and minutes later my site was back. At the exact same time 3 support tickets saying "Your site seems to be working" or some variation of that (one even had the nerve to ask if I had hit refresh) came in. I mean exact same time. Not kidding. They were all time stamped 3p on the dot. A little coincidental to me.

Well the next day I wake up, eat breakfast, come back out to my computer, and my site is gone again. I sent in a support email: nothing. Finally at 8p I sat in the cue long enough to get someone and explained everything I had gone through the day before and he patronized me for being upset. I informed him I knew he, as an individual, had nothing to do with this, but his company really had me on edge. He told me that in an hour he would be able to either reset my site or have it back up.

Nearly two hours later I get an email saying I have to erase everything (databases, emails, everything) and start over. Then I get an email another hour later asking if they have permission. Did I have a choice? No. I couldn't even get into any files at that point, so why did they need to ask? Was I going to pay for a year to have a suspension notice as a web site?

I went to bed by the time that they actually did the reset, which I was originally told would take an hour. I had some pages backed up, but MySql databases were lost and galleries had to be rebuilt.

Here is the ultimate best part. Because of those two days of lost emails, I lost a two week freelance job that I really needed to break into that community in a new home and pay some bills. Thanks WebhostingPad. I'll be sure never to bring you another one of my web design gigs again. I'll direct them to someone else.

Biggest Pro: Cheap
Biggest Con: Terrible Support

Worst support I've ever seen webhostingpad

Buyers beware - the differentiating factor between hosting companies these days is service. Webhostingpad has none.

These guys don't care about your issues. I needed support on deleting old mail that was accumulating on their servers - this is the transcript - note that they refused me support after this...

Brent S. : Welcome to Web Hosting Pad. How may I help you today?
198.54.202.130 : Hi Brent - my users are accumulating mail. How do I create some sort of policy to...
198.54.202.130 : ...delete all email over say 6 months old.
198.54.202.130 : Across all user accounts.
Brent S. : You can delete from webmail or using outlook
198.54.202.130 : But we have about 50 users. I, as administrator, need to force all mail over 6 months to be deleted on the webhosting pad server.
198.54.202.130 : I couldn't create 50 email accounts on my computer - I don't even have their passwords.
198.54.202.130 : I'm also not allowed to view employee emails as it's against our company policy.
Brent S. : Sorry, we do not store any emails on our servers.
Brent S. : You need to do it manually.
198.54.202.130 : I host with you guys - you do store emails on your servers. I have a 20Gb storage allocation for the whole company. I'm not sure why you think you don't store emails? !!!
Brent S. : Please note that, we do not store email on our servers. We only backup site content and databases only.
198.54.202.130 : Then why are you giving me a warning when I log onto cPanel that lmorum has exceeded his mail storage quota of 600MB ?
198.54.202.130 : I'm afraid you don't know what you're talking about here. I use your pop servers to collect mail for our company. This means you are storing our email! The old mail just collects and takes up more space - I want to delete that old mail as I mentioned earlier.
Brent S. : That is email quota, which you need to set from cPanel itself.

*** At this point the support agent closes my chat window and refuses me support - in addition to speaking to the next agent who also refused to support me ***

Biggest Con: Worst customer service

BEWARE of Webhostingpad.com

Please do not give these guys your credit card number. During registrations they ask you sign for TRIAL FREE stuff and then after a month they charged my credit card without my knowledge!!!!!! When asked about it they gave a me a "tough luck" answer. I never approved it and now waiting till my year is up to MOVE OUT!!!! Really disappointed!!!! I would never recommend these guys or even sign-up my clients with them.

Biggest Con: Horrible Provider. No ethics what so ever!!!

FAIL

Went to these folks for a while - that was a big mistake.

Uptime was not 99.99% - it was probably 99% or so, but the site would still go down for a few hours at a time.

The final straw was when of their servers crashed, bringing my site down. It takes them several days to bring it back up, but they've lost all of my data, and don't even have a back-up for my data. No thanks.

Would not recommend

Webhosting pad, 99.9% uptime not true at all

Despite a 99.9% uptime guarantee, their server crashed and all my sites were down for more than a day, they did not even bother to notify me, my customers were calling and saying the website was down!

They have a Better Business Bureau lising, however when checked in details, their participation ahd lapsed. They also let my domain registrations expire without even giving me a notice, thus had another day of downtime. They seem to be a very low-end service provider, I would not recommend at all.

Biggest Con: Server downtime

Website suspensions withouth warning which is bad for business

I've been using webhostingpad for nearly 2 years, Ive had some annoying experiences:

[1] My website was hacked last year and a hacker added a phishing site. Instead of the webhost helping me remove the phishing site and protecting my site, they instead permanently disabled my site where i invested my time and money. Essentially shutting down my online business for that site. Their excuse was instead of helping me and protecting me or offering security tools, they would rather shut me down than get lawsuits. I dont think there are any sites only that are hacker proof, so that was an unfair assessment. For low cost these guys are ok, but as soon as you have money, I would suggest going to a more reputable webhost that will protect you and fight for your rights.

[2] My sites unexpectedly went over their disk server usage, so instead of contacting me first by a phone call or email to upgrade to a higher server, they suspend my entire account. Which is again unprofessional. Same recommendation, good for basic sites, but as soon as your business picks up, I suggest going to a webhost that has courtesy and will work with you before suspending your account which shouldve been the last resort.

Biggest Pro: cheap
Biggest Con: suspends accounts withouth warning. Would rather suspend you if your sites get hacked.

Mailing List Does Not Work

One of the features that attracted me to Webhostingpad was the mailing list feature. This was the first thing I tried to get operational. After several days of exchanging email with their tech support and many test messages, it was clear that I was not going to get a reliable mailing list. I have canceled the account.

The web hosting features seemed fine. As a point of information, they gave me 10GB of space and 10GB of monthly transfers.

broken e-mail

The host is a decent host, but their e-mail and support were terrible.

Sometimes (50%) of the time IMAP server will not respond. I can't e-mail some domain, some domains can't e-mail me. When I asked about it the tech support said my registrar wasn't pointing to me....but that wasn't true, after I pointed it out they "changed some settings" and that just made it even worse. I can't call the number on their home page either.

Good hosting, broken e-mail. Good prices, but a hassle overall.

Biggest Pro: fast
Biggest Con: e-mail and support are broken

WEBHOSTINGPAD.COM IS REALLY BAD NEWS!

I used them for the last year. Their service was OK although I experienced many times when the site ran realy really slowly. I usually took a couple of back and forth exchanges with tech support to clear it up which meant the site was running poorly for several hors at least. Either that or sit on hold for 30 minutes waiting to speak to someone.

SO, here's where it gets REALLY BAD.

I decided after a year of this that I had prepaid for that the company wasn't suiting my needs, so I did not want to renew. When renewal reminder e-mails came in I tried to reply saying I wasn't interested in renewing. They bounced back.

12 DAYS LATER I STARTED RECEIVING COLLECTION CALLS AND A LETTER FORM A COLLECTIONS AGENCY. YES, THIS COMPANY SENT A COLLECTION AGENCY AFTER ME FOR SERVICES THEY HADN'T PROVIDED AND I SAID I DIDN'T WANT.

The billing department rep was rude and unresponsive to any discussion about trying to resolve this in any other way than paying this full years prepaid fee.

My attempts to reach the president of the company to try and discuss this have been blown off.

JUST FYI.

Horrible Service

I chose this provider just because they were cheap, I learned me lesson very quickly about what you get for what you pay. Their control panel is horrible, there customer service is terrible, after I canceled my plan for a 'full refund' I was charged close to $20 for my 'free' domain. After updating my site there were files missing and their upload speed was sooo slow. None of my uploads worked 100%. When I called customer support and the guy was giving me attitude because it had taken him over an hour to solve a simple problem of changing my CNAME