Hosting Shop customer experience

Well, I have finally managed to move all my web sites that were hosted with Hosting Shop. At one stage I had three web sites hosted through them.

My reasons for moving to a new web site hosting provider included:

  • e-mails delivered up to four (yes, 4!!) months late
  • undelivered e-mails
  • web sites often down
  • incredibly slow web sites
  • very high spam levels.

In response to my requests to look into the problems, I either got no answer from Hosting Shop, or was advised that the problem had been fixed … but the problem would reoccur a short time later.

The silly thing is, when I advised that I was not going to renew one of my web sites, Hosting Shop offered to move me to a different server in their server farm. Apparently the server this particular web site was on had known problems!! In other words, Hosting Shop knew what the problem was all along, but failed to fix it until I threatened to leave!!!

The final icing on the cake was that I received a renewal notice for the last web site I had with Hosting Shop in the lead up to Christmas. When it was automatically renewed and my credit card charged in early January 2009, I advised that I did not want the hosting renewed. In fact, the web site had been moved some weeks earlier. However, the accounts department at Hosting Shop stuck to the letter of their terms and conditions rather than the spirit of good customer service. Because I had not given two weeks notice, they would not refund my money.

This final act exemplified my experience of Hosting Shop’s poor customer service and unreliable hosting service. I guess I should not have expected anything else.

Perhaps you could subscribe to the theory that you get what you pay for — and I only paid Hosting Shop $125 per year to host each web site. However, Jumba offers excellent personal web site hosting starting at only $29.95 a year. When I changed over, I realised what a poor hosting service Hosting Shop had. Jumba includes up to date Cpanel and other installed software, including WordPress which runs this blog.

Update June 2009: Hosting Shop has been taken over by AussieHQ, who owns also owns Jumba.

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