Everyone please take the time to read this

[Joe2209]

Hi, I'm Joseph and I've been with Hostnine for almost a year. I would just like to share with you my experiences with this host. I don't expect to see this topic still here 24 hours from now; it appears the host usually deletes or locks unwanted or negative reviews quite often.

When I first came to Hostnine, my experience was excellent - I couldn't ask for a better host. My tickets were always answered within a few minutes, a couple hours at most, techs were always friendly, and so on. Within the last few months, I've been very aggravated with this host. I can't tell you how many tickets I've opened in need of support and all the support team does is take their time with answering your questions. I had very frequent downtimes, about 2-3 times per week; averaging to be roughly 8 hours of downtime each week. I opened tickets, no one was able to give me an explanation as to why my site was down, and when I kindly asked for some kind of credit to my account to make up for the downtime, my request was refused a couple times. I finally received a free month of hosting, but to me, this wasn't enough. I can't be picky, and I do thank Hostnine for giving me that, but it's the fact that I went so long with no explanations as to why I was being hit so frequently with the downtimes, and why some of my tickets were left unanswered.

The downtimes started to become less frequent, then finally stopped at one point. Now I'm having trouble getting Hostnine to migrate an account I've been asking about for a couple weeks now. They lied to me; told me the account was moved which it never was, told me that I had to wait 2-3 hours to start seeing the changes, but a week went by and no changes were made. I mean, come on - if there's a problem or something, don't lie to me and say you've done something when you haven't.

Then I look at the forums - quite frankly it's depressing to see how many H9 clients have left or are so disappointed with the support team, and how it takes so long for something so simple to be done. They started to get very lazy and removed the live chat - not completely however, it was only stripped down to only being able to inquire about sales-related issues. I also see that when clients call H9, techs suddenly "hangup" on them. What the heck is that, seriously? What kind of company lies to you, gives you false information, denies to answer your questions, refuses to help you with any issues you may be having, hangs up on you when you call, etc.?

The support team here really sucks. Pardon my words, but this is completely unacceptable. You'd think that H9's most concern is making sure that clients who have been here the longest are taken care of. I don't mean how that sounds; I don't want people to think we who have been here longer deserve more or better support in a faster time period - I'm just saying, with the amount of money we spend monthly on this host, you'd think H9 would do everything in their power to keep us from leaving, especially us clients who currently pay for the more advanced services. But instead, they've gotten their share apparently and don't care about us clients who have been here for a while. They're good to you when you first come, but after a few months of being a client of H9, things start going downhill.

I don't want anyone to think, "well, I don't like the sound of this host, I ought to go elsewhere". No, no, I don't want to persuade anyone into leaving - I just want new clients to realize how this host works. I want you to look at testimonials on the FORUMS before ordering; I want you to see how satisfied people really are with this host.

In my opinion, people should get what they pay for. If I'm not mistaken, it does say right in the package that 24/7 support is included, and somewhere on this site, it does say techs have a max. of 24-48 hours or so to reply to an inquiry, but I must've missed the fine print saying "we will provide you with support, and we may reply to your ticket within a 24-48 time period but cannot guarantee any issues will be resolved during that time". Apparently we're not getting what we pay for, so I've come to the conclusion there is a company where you do get what you pay for. This being said, I will most likely leave this host soon - I'm tired of the support, and I'm tired of the laziness these techs suddenly have. I'm finished with opening tickets; what's the point? The techs will only do what they do best, and that's sitting on their butts getting paid by the hour.

Goodluck to everyone - I wish you all the best.

Regards,
Joseph Bronson

[Joe2209]

Might I also ask how these statistics are calculated?

Average Response Times
Sales: 4 Minutes
Support: 27 Minutes
Abuse: 48 Minutes
Managers: 0 Seconds

That's a complete lie - I don't even recall so much as getting a response to any of my tickets within a half hour.

My latest ticket was created on: 28 Jun 2008 10:48 PM
My latest reply was posted on: 12 Jul 2008 12:55 AM
Current status: open
Priority: high
TicketID: ROC-199350

I can understand your frustration but this is not fair in my eyes. Your ticket is a level 3 ticket where you're requesting PDO. The only person that assisted you on that ticket was Joshua because the ticket was assigned to him. When tickets are assigned to a staff member no one else can see them. Unfortunately I did not even know about this ticket until I saw this post. If you're that upset you can contact a Manager, submit ticket feedback, or do something to let us know Joshua is not helping you properly.

The fact is no one is perfect. If you look at the customer testimonials you will see our support as a whole as improved. I gave out my extension for this exact purpose. I'm here to help. Normally I work Monday-Friday but here I am Saturday morning at 9:25 AM EST trying to assist you and satisfy you as a customer.

As stated in your ticket I am moving the site to node44 so you can have the feature you wish to use. I am not sure at this time why Joshua did not move it to node44 but I am going to speak with him ASAP and get to the bottom of this.

As for the hangups I narrowed it down to a software issue as some of the techs use Eyebeam to connect to the phone system and one employee was having issues with it crashing on incoming calls. If we just hung up on customers we would not be in business. If we just ended chats, we would not be in business. I'm not sure what happened with the chats yet as I have not received a response from that customer but I will be updating the thread with that as well.

When you say look at the customer testimonials you will see our amount of satisfied customers is extremely large. I truly believe this situation is an isolated situation and am doing everything I can to resolve it and ensure it never happens again.

If you have any questions please call me: 877-251-4678 ext: 501

I am also available via the ticket, forums, email, and chat.

Originally Posted by Joe2209

Might I also ask how these statistics are calculated?



That's a complete lie - I don't even recall so much as getting a response to any of my tickets within a half hour.

My latest ticket was created on: 28 Jun 2008 10:48 PM
My latest reply was posted on: 12 Jul 2008 12:55 AM
Current status: open
Priority: high
TicketID: ROC-199350

Those are calculated in real-time for the tickets received in that department. We will be making an announcement about those figures this week as we want customers to know just how hard we do work for them. That is for Sales, Level 1 Support, Abuse, and Managers at this time.

It calculates the average time it took us to reply to a customer reply on the tickets.

[Joe2209]

Not fair to you? Oh my, you have no idea how I feel about this. I didn't know tickets were "assigned" to techs, but even so, I think they should be assigned to a dept. of techs instead of individuals, especially the ones like Joshua that you cannot guarentee will provide any support. It's unfair to me that my tickets were left unanswered, even though only one or two people can view the tickets. I don't care if only one person can see it or if the entire team can see them, the point here is that someone should always be there to help which apparently they are not.

These section are no longer a place to argue about stuff. Nor for you to advertise your hosting company. This whole section is not even being used the way it should. Joshua and myself will be watching this thread deleting / closing threads if this is done. This is a place to post and leave. No to debate about good or bad customer service it is simply a place to post your review. Users found doing this have one strike then they are removed from our forums for good.

I can't completely understand what Alex said, but it appears as if every negative review is simply deleted or locked, which is why it appears to you as if more people post positive comments. The last time I check the testimonials forum, I seen many topics in which clients were completely unhappy with this service. Now, all you see is the positive comments on the forums -- that's also unfair to clients and myself; the fact that our bad reviews aren't heard because a tech "doesn't like the way we word our negative reviews".

[Joe2209]

I see, he's saying we should only post our review and leave. Well in my opinion, these ARE testimonials believe it or not. Even though we may be "debating", we're still discussing the positive and negitive sides of this service, which is what a testimonial is. Why can't we discuss our problems? Instead we have to post and forget all about it - there's another "unfair" thing to us clients.

[Joe2209]

Also, I appologize for spamming the topic, but I figured I'd ask you here as the forums appear to be a better place of support than using the ticket system.

In the readme to the script that requires the PDO, it says if I get the below error, then PDO is not installed.

Fatal error: Class 'PDO' not found in /home/lvrcr/public_html/mirc/sys/functions.inc.php on line 7

Are you sure this server has PDO installed?

I never said you couldn't discuss or express your feelings. I'm constantly on the look out for testimonials such as yours as it allows me to fully understand where we need to improve. As you said tickets should be in departments not for individual staff. I agree, and as soon as I hear back from Joshua I'll know why he personally assigned himself that ticket. Obviously I cannot change the past but what I can change is the future. The reason you see so many positive reviews in our forums is because people are happy with HostNine. We provide top notch service and support to thousands and thousands of customers. No one is perfect and people do make mistakes.

Obviously this is a perfect example of that. Unfortunately it affected you and your website so I can understand why you're frustrated. However, I'm sure there are plenty of tickets/issues where we came through fast and efficiently to provide you with a proper resolution. This situation is unfortunate as it was a mistake on Joshua's end and it's affecting the company as a whole.

I have since resolved your ticket once I had knowledge of the ticket number like it should have been resolved in the first place but please, just because we have a large amount of positive reviews does not mean we delete bad ones. We have just been improving our customer service and support which is causing more positive reviews. I put those figures on support.hostnine.com for a reason and that reason is so everyone knows how hard we're working. Your ticket was in Level 3 Support which can take more time than normal but once again it should not have been handled the way yours was.

Once again, I deeply apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and I will be speaking with Joshua about this today.

I'm showing the following:

[root@node47 ~]# php -m
[PHP Modules]
bcmath
calendar
ctype
curl
date
dom
exif
filter
ftp
gd
gettext
hash
iconv
imap
ionCube Loader
json
libxml
mbstring
mcrypt
mhash
mime_magic
mysql
mysqli
openssl
pcre
PDO
pdo_mysql
pdo_sqlite
posix
pspell
Reflection
session
SimpleXML
soap
sockets
SourceGuardian
SPL
SQLite
standard
tokenizer
wddx
xml
xmlreader
xmlrpc
xmlwriter
Zend Optimizer
zip
zlib

[Zend Modules]
Zend Extension Manager
Zend Optimizer
the ionCube PHP Loader

[root@node47 ~]# php -v
PHP 5.2.5 (cli) (built: Jun 9 2008 23:35:21)
Copyright (c) 1997-2007 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2007 Zend Technologies
with the ionCube PHP Loader v3.1.32, Copyright (c) 2002-2007, by ionCube Ltd., and
with Zend Extension Manager v1.2.2, Copyright (c) 2003-2007, by Zend Technologies
with Zend Optimizer v3.3.3, Copyright (c) 1998-2007, by Zend Technologies

I believe it may have been your php.ini in public_html causing this all along. Please try once more and be sure you're using the default PHP which is PHP5

When I run:

[root@node47 public_html]# php /home/lvrcr/public_html/mirc/sys/functions.inc.php
[root@node47 public_html]#

I do not receive any errors so it appears to be working now.

http://lvrcr.com/mirc/2

Appears to be working on my end. I did copy a brand new php.ini to public_html for you fresh from this server. If you need different settings in there for your site simply modify that one and you're good to go.