HostMonster Reviews

I had my web site, “www.orange-papers.org”, on Hostmonster for over 3 years, and it was a nightmare. First off, they do throttling. They have patented technology for throttling the number of CPU cycles a customer’s web site may use, and they use their throttling technology heavily. When your web site takes off and becomes popular, you will get email messages from visitors complaining that your site is down, and inaccessible. That’s Hostmonster at work.

Hostmonster is an over-seller. Meaning: they do not have the resources needed to give you what they sold you. They promised you the moon to get you to sign up with them, offering free and unlimited everything, but they do not actually have enough computers or bandwidth to deliver on their promises. So they throttle your web site, and don’t serve out the pages, or just serve them out very, very slowly.

They have, or had, when I was on it, a hard limit of 50,000 files. They promised unlimited storage, but the gotcha is that you could only have 50,000 files. Now that sounds like a lot, but it isn’t. EVERYTHING counts as one or more files. Every piece of spam email that you receive is a file, and if it has little graphics in the email, each image is another file. Each attachment is another file. You can receive a bunch of spam email, and suddenly you are over the 50,000 files limit, so Hostmonster stops accepting email for you – they just throw your email in the trash can. It doesn’t matter if it was really important and not spam – into the bit bucket, never to be seen again. NOT retrievable.

Then they will try to guilt-trip you when you have problems with their limits, complaining that you are using more than “your fair share” of the resources, and taking services away from somebody else. That’s to cover for the fact that they are an over-seller. If using the services that you paid for causes pain to somebody else, it’s the hosting company’s fault, not yours. They sold you the services, and they are supposed to deliver, which they cannot do because they are an over-seller without enough resources.

Speaking of which, tech support sucks. No matter what the problem is, it’s your fault because you are stupid and greedy. Or your code isn’t optimized. Or you have too many files. Or your cgi-bin scripts are doing something wrong. Or you are doing something wrong. I have heard from many people, including ex-employees, that Hostmonster employs “tech support” people who are required to just read scripts that explain how all problems are caused by the customers. They always say that everything looks fine at their end, so the problem must be at your end of the network.

DO NOT register your domain names with Hostmonster. They will register your domain name IN THEIR NAME. They OWN your domain name. (They say that they are “keeping it safe” for you. That’s like letting the local junky “hold” your money for safekeeping.) If you decide to leave Hostmonster to move to a better hosting system, Hostmonster won’t let you have your own domain name back. They will hold your domain names hostage. (I use OMNIS.com for my name registrations. No problems, even after several years. I thank my lucky stars that I had already registered my domain names with Omnis before I moved my web site onto Hostmonster, so they couldn’t claim my domain names.)

When I decided to leave Hostmonster, they were peppering me with notices to renew the hosting for another year or two, which I ignored, because I was getting a new host. They lied and told Paypal that I had authorized auto-renewal, which I most assuredly had never done, and they tried to suck a couple of hundred dollars out of my account (which wasn’t in there). So Paypal tried to pull the money out of my bank account and caused overdraft fees, twice. It took me a couple of months of phone calls and getting letters and statements, to get the overdraft fees reversed. I’ve heard this before. Hostmonster routinely claims that it is authorized to auto-renew customers when they have not agreed to that. They sometimes hide fine print in the sign-on form, so that when you pay for the first time, they can claim that you agreed to auto-pay. They are just money-grubbing.

By the way, Bluehost is the same company, just using another name, and they do the same throttling. It’s the same people and the same racket. Avoid both of them.

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I have been with host monster for 10 years. Up until about 7 months ago they were great. However now they are something out of a horror story.

I host very large sites with them and i literally have about 7 days of down time each month and they really could care less. Their support is a joke. They transfer you to person after person who tells you the same thing… that they dont know what the problem is and that it will be fixed soon (soon = days). If you have even a semi serious website that earns any income you know how bad that is.

The last straw for me probably tops the worst of the worst stories you have heard about them. One day all my sites went down at the same time. checking my cpanel it said i had run out of space. well looking at my drive i had more than enough space. so i contacted tech support and they told me that the extra data i pay for every month for the past year was never added! They said there was a bug in the system that prevented it from being added (BS). So they said it will take 3 days to fix and that i should contact billing if i wanted to get a credit for the years worth of payments that were for a service they never gave me. fast forward to a day later when i was actually able to get the so called “billing supervisor” on the line that all the billing people said i needed to talk to. After reviewing the account they confirmed that i had been paying for a service that they never provided and that the cause of my sites (and money lost from down time) was their fault. However they were not the one that i needed to speak to and that they would send the information to a person higher up. then they asked for an email to contact me at …..(Blood boiling) i said i dont have one because my main email is attached to the sites that you messed up and are currently down, so i cant even access my email. after that she said well there is nothing we can do for you and immediately sent the call to some survey about call quality and if i would recommend hostmonster.

Here is my recommendation of host monster. If you value your business and your sanity run away from this company and never look back. Also do your research about other companies as they own several other hosting companies and you will just be getting the exact same service.

Previously Hostmonster was very good, but about 5 months ago they have steadily gone down hill. With regular and lengthy outages occurring to my site. When i try to find out why I just get told that it will be forwarded to someone else who will let me know … but that never happens. I have asked for compensation for the time my site has been down and the fact that they quote an up time of 99% (which is nowhere near the case) and after 6 days now I have still not received a reply.

Unless they come up with some very good answers and some compensation i am cancelling my hosting with them and moving to someone else.

Pros: Was once good.

Cons: Numerous. Increasing number of down times Often lengthy down times Poor communication

I can’t even get to the CPanel. If you call you may get one of their “tech” people who claim you need their Super X service to even do Y. It’s way past the point of being ridiculous. They were really good until they were bought out by BlueHost.

Pros: Not much: I suppose it isn’t run by ISIS

Cons: Constant upsells for everything.

I have been with Hostmonster for a long time, and have hardly had any reason to complain about them. The service was great, and I thought it was excellent value. However if I look back over the last 18-24 months it seems like a different company. The support wait times have been long, and the techs don’t seem to be as helpful or knowledgeable as they used to be. Furthermore, they constantly try to upsell a new feature or package and it is almost as if I am talking to sales.

One of the worst issues has been the email deliverability probably caused by all the spammers that sign up to them. I have issues with emails being blacklisted and I had to use personal gmail accounts because it is so bad. Definitely time to shop for a new host.

A few months ago I decided that I needed to start earning more money, so I thought that starting my own online business would be a good idea. I knew that I needed my own site if I wanted to avoid a lot of problems, so I started looking around for a good hosting service. I looked at a number of different companies, and then I learned about HostMonster.

They seemed like they were offering a good deal, so I decided to take the plunge and sign up with them. They made it very easy to create my site. I was able to register my own domain name and get my site up and running within a few hours.

I do not have a lot of experience with web design, so I was a little worried that I would find it too difficult to create a site. However, they made this job a lot easier. They gave me all of the tools that I needed to create a functioning website. It may not have a lot of bells and whistles, but I did not really need a lot of fancy features.

Their pricing is also quite competitive. I even was able to qualify for a discount off of the first six months. This made my hosting costs very affordable. Even after the price goes up, it will still be very reasonable.

So far I have had no real complaints about my experiences with this company. I have not had any unexpected downtimes. On a couple of occasions, they have had scheduled downtimes, but they have given me plenty of advance warning, and these have been late at night on the weekends.

I would definitely recommend this service to anyone who is looking for a hosting company. They seem to offer all I could need.

Hostmonster might be one of the best known hosting sites, but I feel like there is a good reason for that. I have never had anything but a positive experience with their service. I’ve gone through a lot of different hosts trying to find something that works within my budget.

I have a few sites here and there, mostly projects I’m trying to get off the ground. Because of this I don’t want to pay a huge amount for hosting. I found that hostmoster allowed me to have my sites up for a reasonable rate so I gave them a chance. I’m really glad I did because everything has been amazing ever since.

First the up-time is amazing. I rarely ever go to work on something and find myself without the ability to access whatever I want. This makes it easy to work on those ideas I get at 3am. I also feel it is really important because I work a weird schedule and when I have time to work on projects I don’t want to wait.

Secondly they have really good plugins. Wordpress is really easy to use which makes moving from idea to idea really easy. I actually find myself using more plugins because they sound interesting. This makes my life a whole lot easier because I don’t have to do as much by hand.

Their customer service is amazing. They seem really dedicated to making sure my identity is protected as well. I guess this might be frustrating if I was in a hurry when contacting them but as it stands I feel comforted. I feel like I can trust them with my information.

Overall the company gets 4.5 stars from me. I feel like I will stay with them for a really long time. I also think that they will keep getting better making them a better choice over time.