Hostmonster Sucks?
- Author: admin
- Filed under: Cheap Web Hosting
Nov 1,2008
Heard Host Monster giving customer problems? Some say 
Hostmonster scams? Can these negative reviews be trusted? Host monster got issues, complaints and customer service problems? Heard some stories about their limitations? These very few whiners could be wrong.
If you are considering to get a hosting account from Hostmonster, you may want to (or probably have tried) searching for the keywords “Hostmonster Sucks” on Google. However, the result may confuse you. You must also have read tons of good stuff and rave reviews about Hostmonster thus far, did you? So the negative comments are holding you back?
Hostmonster experiences and stories like below may make you think twice to signup with Hostmonster:
- “Hostmonster sucks, deactivated my account for no reason, and customer support sucks, their abuse dept phone has been disconnected…”
- “Just today they suspended my site for embedding videos from youtube that they referred to as porn… ”
- “Hostmonster SUCKS!! especially when it comes to php scripts. I have a shared account with them, and let me tell you, my site gets shut down… “
If you go through each of Googles result pages, it seems there are dozens of unsatisfied customers who have been through some sticky situation with Hostmonster. If you search for the keywords “Hostmonster sucks”, you see that there are more than 100 results by Google. That is a lot of bad things said about one hosting (assuming all those result pages talks about why this hosting provider really sucked), you thinkg? To make it worst, there may be a few more result pages when you search for “Hostmonster scam”, “Hostmonster issues“, or ”Hostmonster problems“. Did the hate or complaint sites worry you after you have read so many positive reviews? Did the hate sites kept you from making up your mind?
The truth
| Hosting | Total Pages About Host |
Total Hate Pages About Hostmonster |
Hate/Pages Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hostmonster | about 950,000 | about 400 | 0.0001 |
Think again. Do not dismiss the fact that Hostmonster is one of the top known web hosts in the industry and has been involved with more than 600,000 web domain registration. You have read the other Hostmonster reviews. HM does what a hosting company should do. That is, Hostmonster actually answers their phones, replies to their emails, doesn’t rip you off, and provides quality cheap hosting. So among the millions of satisfied clients, surely they will be a few who disagree. Let us look at the numbers above.
From the above number, only 3 out 10000 pages about Hostmonster says that this hosting sucks. This is very good considering other hostings have way worst ratio. The hate pages are not significant enough to be reliable.
If you are still in doubt whether to choose Hostmonster or not, here are some more great reasons to not delay your website development plan. Follow the discount link below and get Hostmonster account at promo price (lesser than the normal $6.95/month). You also get $25 Free Yahoo Credits and $50 Free Google Credits to start your PPC web marketing. Hostmonster allows unlimited domains to be hosted so you can go to the best domain registration service and get those domains you have always wanted and get them hosted at the same convenient place. You can also get started with your website instantly today with Hostmonster:
Tips: You may have heard some people getting their account suspended because they use the ‘unlimited storage’ to store their mp3 files, archives from desktop, backup for their work, and many unrelated files not being used for the website(s). We agree that the term ‘unlimited’ can be deceiving when you cannot really use it for unlimited purposes. So to be save, use one the best online backup solutions such as Mozy or Carbonite for archiving and backup or something like ElephantDrive or 4shared for file storage and file sharing. Those services will not fuss about the types of files you put.
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Yeah they do have good customer service but their server fail to much, it damage some of my sites and told me it was my fault or that it have nothing to do with their server, I have to update my php forum manually when it need it but in other hosting services they do it for you for free. Hostmonster is not good for php websites. Also they said unlimited bandwith or space, and they stop my sites a few times a day because to much bandwith (can’t afford to lose hits with this type of hosting service). I have a website that gets over 60,000 a hits a day and it was ban from hostmonster(because to much traffic) and so I move to goddady and now I get over 80,000 hits a day on a regular hosting with godaddy and I have not get a complain from godaddy it all.
I agree if you have high hits (WOW 80,000 hits per day? – congrats), you should not host with them. For everybody else, there is Hostmonster.
If you have hits in the tens of thousands, make sure you check out our review about Godaddy and see the numbers with Godaddy.
I’ve been with HM for several years and have nothing but good things to say about them.
I stay fully active with several domains, including an Internet Radio service, a web-design site and tester site, including a full PHP site.. all without a single hiccup.
When first starting out, I biffed the entire tree structure, rendering my domains and pages useless (including DBs).. rookie errors to say the least. Customer Support had me back up and running within an hour, all the while talking me through each step they were taking (free training?! how can you beat that?!)
A recommendation I have, purchase the pro package. It does cost quite a bit more, but if you in to serious design/server load/hits/multiple active domains/etc, its the way to go.. and still a steal at under $20/mo, considering the support and features.
One thing I wish they would bring back (as of Mid 2011) were some of the promotion their Affiliates carried (free templates/code/media sets/etc).. they’ve all switched to discounts (w/ the economy, I really cant blame them) and promo sign ups.
Use their customer service phone number or submit a ticket when you have problems, and for G*d’s sake, read the TOS and Support forums before you gripe.
There are a few things you can do, on the shared hosting, (PC backups, over 80k files, unreasonable bandwidth, pirating or storing/sharing pirated material, etc) that will cancel your service, no notice, no questions asked.. etc. It’s all in the TOS. For $6/mo (on shared), you really can’t blame them.
I will remain a loyal HM customer. As long as you fly right and not do anything illegal or overzealous, HM is definitely (at least in my book) the best out there.
Host Monster sucks!!!!! I emailed their ‘support’ desk to cancel my hosting and they didnt reply and they tried to take the money!!!
Tim, if you are new to using web hosting services, you need to know that most companies have this thing called ‘Support Ticket’. You can follow the ‘Help Center’ link from Hostmonster website and open a ticket.
This is how they (and you) keep track of their helpdesk support. You need to queue or take a number when you need a service at a counter, don’t you? Same here.
If they don’t respond to your support ticket, then you can complaint here.
I’ve been using HM for about 4.5 years now and I’ve renewed for another 3 years. Their support is excellent. As far as 60, 000 hits per day and full php websites, I’m not sure. However, I do have Gallery 2 installed and it uses PHP, and I’ve had no problems with it. Whenever I hit my site it co,mes up fast. The gallery take a bit longer, but that’s a G2 problem. This is ONE of the BEST hosts, if not the best host, I have ever had.
I agree with you Doug. We have been with Hostmonster since 2004 and they have never given us any problem. Their support, as you said, is very fast and responsive. We installed custom php scripts and the server is still fast. We hosted and parked about 90+ domains in a single account. We really cannot complaint much about Hostmonster.
Hostmonster.com review: they suspended my account because they said there were “performance” problems. This was bs and that is why I am writing this hostmonster.com review. They took my money, never wrote or called, but suspended the account – I suspect because I got too much traffic. Recommend you find a different host than hostmonster.com. If you have a problem with hostmonster.com I suggest you write a hostmonster.com review so others will know they are not a good company if you have a successful traffic website.
Hi GIsham, is this another I-have-60000-hits-perday-but-I-dont-want-to-move-to-dedicated-server problem?
Sounds like sour grapes to me … whenever i have a problem, Hostmonster expeditiously resolves it. Member since 2006 and totally satisfied.
I am fed up with hostmonster and actualy looking for a different hosting company. my websites go down for at least 5 to 8 hours a week invariably. I understand that some users abuse their accounts causing other users accounts to go down. but that is hostmonster responsibility to take care of that. my account was on host43 and my friend’s account on 48 didn’t have any of the problems I was having.
whenever I call and try to get them to fix the problem they always said that is a performance issue arguring that network uptime doesn’t means website availability.
I have a problem that some photo a nudity.
so they suspend and deactivate without notice plus first time they report it’s from mailling system from my script and then second time is a nudity photo.
I’m not happy and I think they are another server which they can accept a website which some photo is a some nude but not xxx styles.
suck HM !!!
Sure there are some other providers that will allow your nudity website, but definitely not Hostmonster. Please take your nudity, porn and spam somewhere else. Bravo Hostmonster for such filter.
Problems,
Well they shut my website down when I used to much bandwidth, I ask about unlimited bandwidth and they just said, you had to may connections open. I laughed and said well how else would you use tons of bandwidth, without connections. They said your only allowed so many, well that was 3 months ago, they basically disabled my account.
Unlimited Disk Spaces: (LOL)
————————————
I had a few backup files uploaded and they said the site was not a storage space for any files. They started asking about the files my users uploaded and said are they actually needed. Then they started with will some of the files may or maynot have copywrites and should be taken down. Basically I used about 8GB of space for my entire site and that was to much for them.
There hard drive for the server was full and instead of starting users on another server they make you delete files to lower the space used.
As one person has already commented, once your site uses to much space or bandwidth they find excuses to disable your site. I would imagine so you the owner will move, saving them the space and bandwidth. Hell they already have your money, which is no refundable, so why would they care.
They where good for about a year, when they had 100,000 sites, now with 450,000 sites they are there for pure profit and don’t care if they loss a few large users.
Hostmonster is for small time websites nothing more!!! Don’t waste your money!!!
BS HM…
I think I have to agree with Hostmonster in this case. Why would you use their service for storage space? There are many other online backup services for that purpose such as Mozy, Carbonite etc.
I hope you don’t take the word “unlimited” diskspace to mean infinite storage solution. Realistically, it just means that you get enough space more than you will ever need or it is an unreachable limit for a normal usage. Read their TOS. If are hosting a file/movie/photo/zip sharing, get a dedicated server or get an account at Carbonite!
The “abusers” make life of decent users like us much harder than it should be. This is because the web hosts will put more and more constraints on what we can do on our hosting account.
I agree with Tom wholeheartedly.
In the TOS (which I read, because I wanted to see if I could to a PC backup [Drive failing]) it states that Unlimited Storage does not constitute a Backup service. Unlimited Storage is “Unlimited” so long as all the files on the server are –for use within a hosted website/domain– now, unless you are packaging backup files from your PC for distro /sale to your visitors (you know..”used within your site!”), there is no reason you should try and take advantage of a Shared Service.
Allowing clients to use their servers for Backup would get them sued by every Online Backup service out there. They charge $8-20+/mo for online backups, while HM charges $6!? The massive rush of ppl running to take advantage of that would 1) crash HMs hosting and server farms.. there’s just no way to keep up with that large an influx, that quickly (not in any financially reasonable fashion, anyhow) and 2) could place them under federal charges for not only trying (whether intentionally or unintentionally) to Monopolize the online backup market and trying to undercut Fair Pricing laws.
Kudos to HM. It’s not just about profit, it’s about sustainability.
“Shared” hosting is just that “Shared”. Doesn’t mean Joe Blow can run around taking advantage of the service… screw everyone else.
If that’s what you want to do, you’re right, HM’s not the hosting option for you.. Build your own server, host your own DNS, get your own Dedicated Trunk and flood your hardware and network with crap unrelated to websites. Guaranteed, the cost of Online Backup services won’t look so bad after all. Not the “limitations” you are so adamant about, will even look so bad.
So… just like ed says.. Why say unlimited and then make reasons, and disable accounts? Why not give notices, warnings before deleting an account? You know, people work hard to do what they do at the website, and a click of the mouse at HM.. all is gone? Give the people a chance to move, find alternatives etc. Then even sour grapes will not be able to badmouth HM. I like HM.. wish they would deal in better way even with the rouge Webmasters..
You’re afforded the change, at the time of sign up, as well as any time there after, to read the TOS.. HM keeps strict rules about Backups and type of media/files allowed.. You were given the chance.. by having the TOS available to you Before, During and After you signed up.
Signing up means you agree to the TOS. Means you agree to have your account shut down if you are found in violation. That’s your notice.
Pretty standard if you ask me (and if you look at just about any other hosting service)
Kudos HM
What rubbish! Hostmonster is a terrible hosting company. They keep their passwords in the clear, disable accounts without notice, trawl through the files stored in your account, change their “fair use” policy without notice, and disable accounts for using storage for “storage”!
Definitely stay away – they stay in business by hosting for people that can’t tell good service from bad.
Well I think you are taking the terms “unlimited storage” too far. Realistically, it just means that you get enough space more than you ever need for “your website” i.e it is an unreachable limit. If you are hosting a file/movie/photo sharing, get a dedicated server! Even worst if you are using the web hosting account for archiving files. I have never heard any web host allowing people to use their “unlimited storage” as a place for archiving your unused files on the PC or for storing those downloaded musics.
We have used Hostmonster too and had no problem with uptime nor their TOS. The “abusers” make life of decent customers like us harder than it should be, when the web hosts put more and more constraints on what we can do on our hosting account.
* We predict that the “unlimited” bytes hard-drive will never be invented, but all web hosting will offer unlimited everything in the future – go figure…
by reading all the great reviews about justhost i thoughed they were gonna be great and selected them for my most important site.
i been with them for about maybe 2 months now and my site keeps going down like every day. right now its been down for already more than 15 minutes and not coming back up. sucks to think im paying awdords to direct ppl to my site but these suckers cant keep it up jesus christ.
at the moment even the justhost.com homepage takes like 2 minutes to come up half correct. so forget about that chat support. oh yea and they have no phone support only chat support…
seems like my plan at hostmonster does not have these problems..
im used to run on my own servers i thoughed i could expect as good uptime from a company such as just host but apparently no, their shit keeps going down for long periods and whenever i contact the chat about it they always make me wait until it comes back up and then tell me it works fine….
You need to Call HM. Unfortunately, the Live Chat service is through a secondary vendor, they do have full accessibility and modification rights, but, they are not as concerned about YOUR uptime and experience as the reps on the phone (which are, by the way, Hostmonster/BlueHost reps).. they do have a means to transfer you to another server, it just takes patience and politeness and they will definitely go the extra mile (<<<personal experience with this very issue)
Good Luck!
I work as the webmaster of my company. Since Hostmonster is giving unlimited disc space with their plan, I am thinking of using this extra space to share some office files with my colleagues. Anybody tried this and had any problem? How would they know if we are using their space for storage lets say?
I don’t think that is such as good idea. Although Hostmonster may not detect in the beginning, you still should not be using their service to store non-related files or even sharing the files around. We have heard stories about them suspending accounts because the users put backup and archive files on their ‘unlimited’ server space. Well, why say unlimited if you cannot use them you ask? They can promise the moon when we signed up but better-not-argue and not-take-the-risk is our approach to this issue.
Let us also be fair to the others on your shared hosting server and we would strongly suggest you use ElephantDrive if you need Unlimited disk space for storing and sharing other work files.
Hello, I am HM customer for 3 years, and I am very satisfyed with them. I have many websites, and there was no problems at all for this 3 years. Before them, my sites was on IXWebhosting, but I always had some problems and questions. HM is much faster, easier and stable, and I will surely continue to use their services in the future.
I got notified that my my account got suspended because of “spam/phishing”. After checking with the customer service, the reason was some “suspicious” files were found in my web site content.
I immediately asked for the reason of suspension. They explained that there are viruses found in the executables, blah, blah, blah… After I explained the purpose of my files and verified the MD5 were the same as in my computer, they re-activated the websites.
1. Why did they suspend all my websites? The files are only in one website.
2. Why the whole web sites were get suspended at all? The suspicious files can be redirected to some other safe URL.
3. Why spam/phishing turned out to be a possible virus notification? Why I had to ask to know the real reason of getting suspended? If they cannot distinguish the difference between phishing and virus, it is very unprofessional.
4. There was one statement in the last email I received made me very angry: “The report that we received was from a reputable web security company, so we did take action based on their report.” Why couldn’t they send me the report to let me take action before suspending my account (thus, suspending all websites)? The action taken is not customer friendly. Suspending account should be the last measure, not the first.
Wow! I’m concerned about getting a 3 yr agreement with Hostmonster if they can cancel my account anytime w/o at least a weighted refund. I am doing pricing for a site for my new drafting and design business. Ideally I’ll be working with at least 5 clients who will daily/weekly use my ftp site to upload/download CAD files. I’ll need to keep those files (storage) available for them to access for a few days while we go back and forth on design issues. I’ll also be communicating with the architects/land surveyors/mechanical/plumbing/etc contractors who will need to add their own piece to the puzzle. These files will by no means stay for more than a week at a time, but they will be bouncing back and forth and many clients will be accessing. I cannot in my wildest dreams expect 60k hits/day (more like 20-100), but each hit will definitely mean an upload/download of maybe 12mb-1gb.
My main purpose for getting a website with huge storage capacity/bandwidth is specifically for the ease for my clients to FTP CAD design files. Why would I want a host that will force me to delete my product because they do not have the capacity necessary to support their advertisement claim? This appears to be fraudulent and misleading. Thank you all for setting me straight. Even those who seem to be defending Hostmonster appear to agree that their claim of unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage capacity is not truthful. Oh and thank you for suggesting Godaddy and Carbonite, I’ll go check them out right away.
Pro Package (<$20/mo) is the way to go with this unique situation.
CAD files are extremely large, and if you will be saving them on the hosted server, for anytime, anywhere access by your clients, you're not going to want to have a Shared service anyways.. the bandwidth and server load alone would slow down any/all websites on the server.
Pro alleviates this by putting you on a Dedicated structure w/ a dedicated IP (no IP bouncing on a shared server)
i just started an acount with hm and by reading your coments im hoping im not doing a mistake. im pleaning on allowing my members to upload pics. and that would be about it. but my hits will increse if my site does become a real. and it becomes what im hopping. well im going to try and figure out how to start my web page. lol. im only an 18 yearold boy who is trying to make his online buisness. just one question, if my site gets a great amount of hits and i dont want to risk HM to deleat it. can i move my site with another companny. and is gooddaddy realy that good.
If you get members to upload files via the web-interface or your website, you should have no problem. But if you ask members to upload and share files via other means such as FTP, you may encounter problems. HM can say you are paying for a web hosting service, not for FTP/file sharing/file upload/download service…
Sure you can move anytime you want. Always keep a backup copy of your files on your PC. Godaddy is okay but inMotion hosting is good too especially when dealing with audio and video hosting.
Good luck with HM. Hopefully you will not have any problem with them.
I think that there may be some confusion between hits, visits and visitors above. 60,000 ‘hits’ is not a lot. Yesterday my low-traffic site had 83 visits who viewed 477 pages which resulted in 4314 hits.
When people speak of 60,000 ‘hit’s above are they getting confused with visits?
I have an account at HM ,HM very reliable before February 26, 2010,but when they take my site to new hardware,my site often down with unkown reason,hope HM become to normal as before.
I suppose it depends entirely on your site(s), are they dynamic (PHP/MySQL) or static (HTML)? There is surely a limit because of resource usage, there’s probably some fineprint in the TOS?
I have a account at “ipower web” for about ten years, that started at 500mb of space ten years ago, mean while there getting new customers and offering unlimited space, so i complained that it was absurd that im only allowed 500mb and then they fixed it for me.
point being they were taking me for my money untill i saw what was going on, and later they threatened to shut me down for using to much space.
So now im at HM with about 10gigs of video files so far and after reading this im freaking out, and forget dedicated servers that will run 2, 3 hundred dollars per month, that might be worth it to youtube but not me.
I did ask them before i signed up if they allowed flv files and if they had a problem of using 7gigs of space, and they told me as long as its for your website content it was ok so im probly pressing my luck to add more videos to my site at Host Monster.
it is important to read the terms of service agreement before signing up with Hostmonster. They also have a FAQ that hits upon several of the key issues.
As you mentioned, they do not try to sell their basic web hosting packages to large sites. Hostmonster / Bluehost has only ONE package.. the ENTIRE service is designed for small sites. Once you pass that criteria, they will ask you to leave. If this happens to you, demand a refund and then comply with their request.
THE most important thing.. can’t stress this enough. INODE LIMITS!
Every big host has them so WATCH OUT. Hostmonster / Bluehost is notoriously low with a soft inode limit of only 50k! This means that beyond 50,000 files, you are no long included in weekly backups.
After 100k they suspend your account.
DO NOT assume that this is difficult to approach. Installing Mediawiki and Roundcube will bring you to around 10-15k files, instantly. For this reason, the current inode limitations of typical big hosts are sadly scam-grade. It is not unlimited if it’s limited, yknow? I hope this shady marketing trend ends soon and we can actually have good hosting packages for a good price.
For $100 a year you should be able to do more than run a couple of wikis.