Hostnuke Review, User Reviews of Hostnuke

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Date Submitted :

October 27th, 2006

Length of time hosted by this company :

6 - 12 months

Overall Rating :

1 out of 5

Reliability :

1 out of 5

Support :

1 out of 5

Pricing :

2 out of 5

Verdict :

These miserable miscreants have shut down my business website due to an expired URL Registration fee and they will not respond to repeated e-mails, phone messages or trouble tickets. I paid them the $18.00 fee but my site is down and they will not respond. Avoid them like the plague. October 2006

Submitted By :

Abused by Hostnuke

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

Submiter IP :

69.203.115.81

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Date Submitted :

August 29th, 2006

Length of time hosted by this company :

1 - 3 years

Overall Rating :

2 out of 5

Reliability :

1 out of 5

Support :

1 out of 5

Pricing :

5 out of 5

Verdict :

I started off using Hostnuke for an OS Commerce site several years ago. The first few years were ok.. a few billing problems and a few outage problems here and there. The last few months their service has dropped tremendously. I now have 5 sites hosted with them. The small sites are fine.. the oscommerce site has been shut down multiple times now with no warning or anything. They inform me, after I pester them for days, that the account is suspended because it's causing their server to crash and there is something wrong with the site (the same site that's been working fine for years, without any changes to it). I couldn't find anything wrong, and they were COMPLETELY unwilling to assist. Eventually I took the oscommerce site files off, loaded a few html pages in it's place, had them delete all the database stuff. The site was working fine again (although now it's not dynamic). Now my site has been down for 5 days, and I still haven't received any word from them.. I checked all my sites yesterday, and have found that another is down as well. Unfortunately for me, I had recently renewed my hosting on a yearly plan. I will not use HOSTNUKE for any other sites, and I will transfer all my existing sites when they come up for renewal!

Submitted By :

Karen

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

Submiter IP :

72.165.49.154

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Date Submitted :

August 3rd, 2005

Length of time hosted by this company :

1 - 3 years

Overall Rating :

3 out of 5

Reliability :

2 out of 5

Support :

1 out of 5

Pricing :

4 out of 5

Verdict :

Hostnuke started out very strong! When I first signed up with them my site was up and accessible in just hours. Several months went by and everything was going fine. The few problems I had were immediately handled by their support guy James. He was awesome! I joined their hosting service when they were just getting started and seemed to really care about their customers. It was back when they used paypal to collect payments. I consider myself a founding member..

Since then they improved their support systems, moved to automated billing, put in a real nice trouble ticket system and automated many of the ways that you can deal with them..

I started to migrate other websites to their hosting platform.

The trouble Starts:

They decided to do a server upgrade (which is very noble indeed and much appreciated) but they neglected to tell a sole. I had multiple sites hosted on their servers and as you know postnuke is a dynamic platform. When you have tons of users posting to the message boards the data changes hourly. Well when they did the upgrade they put one of my sites on a new server with a new IP address. This caused an IP propogation problem. I had some users still resolving the "old" site and some resolving the "new" site. Tons of messages were ultimately lost as users continued posting to the"old" site.

When I inquired about it and got the scoop as to what was happening they defended their actions by saying "we posted the server changes on our message boards"! Gee I don't know about all of the other busy web masters out there but I don't go trolling the message boards of my hosting providers on a regular basis.. How about an email guys???

The Billing nightmare:

Since they switched away from paypal handling their subscriptions they can never seem to bill at the same time each month. That wouldn't be too bad if it was off by a day or two or even a week. But they regularly advance bill and then skip a month, then sometimes they skip and play catch up. It's aggravating and doesn't allow their customers any consistency.

Uptime:

Their servers are now regularly going offline, email goes down constantly. I will say that I haven't had a problem getting their support team to fix the problems I just wish there wern't any.

And it gets worse and worse...

Early this year I get an email that my service for one of my sites is being shut down immediately. No warning. No nothing. My site has become too busy for their server. The site didn't become too busy overnight, it had been this way for months. How was I to know? I can understand their predicament, but how about a little customer loyalty? I litterally BEGGED for them to give me a few days of service to allow me to overlap and get the site on a new server. I mean here I've been a long standing customer from their early days, reccomended them to a lot of folks, moved numerous sites to their service and Wham!! no sorry about that, no apology just an email saying:

At this time the Apache service for your site has been disabled as it's unfair to other users of the server to have to expect a daily downtime issue due to an incoming traffic flood. Your site has outgrown a shared server environment; you should immediately look into a Dedicated Server or Semi-Dedicated server (we recommend Hostik.com, ServerMatrix.com and AIT.com as affordable dedicated server solutions).

Thanks Hostnuke!

Well I'm still in the process of moving the rest of my sites.

If your a hobbiest and you uptime doesn't matter then they are your service. If you are developing a site that you hope no one will visit then they are the service for you. If you are developing a website and hope to attract a lot of users to it, then be warned if you get to big they'll pull the plug without warning.

With the way this company's service and reliability is declining I imagine they will self destruct on their own and this posting will be just a electronic stamp in the history of the web reminding the former owners that they once had loyal customers who they just mistreated until they too abandoned them.

Submitted By :

Disappointed

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

Submiter IP :

66.82.9.61

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Date Submitted :

July 10th, 2005

Length of time hosted by this company :

1 - 3 years

Overall Rating :

2 out of 5

Reliability :

3 out of 5

Support :

1 out of 5

Pricing :

3 out of 5

Verdict :

Don't do business with these guys -- there are better out there.

I wanted to experiment with PostNuke so these guys seemed like the best way to go --- once you sign up, they install it for you. There were some sporadic outages, and eventually they suspended my service without notice of any kind. When mentioned to them that my site was down, they told me they suspended it because someone took over the site as a result of my failure to install all of the postnuke security patches. As you might expect, I was unaware of these, even though I signed up for their email notification service. I renewed for another year, and three weeks after that they *cancelled* my service and refused a refund, saying pretty much the same thing as before.

So, I lost a little over $100 for services I didn't receive.

Submitted By :

Jeff

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

Submiter IP :

24.24.240.216

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Date Submitted :

June 9th, 2005

Length of time hosted by this company :

Less than 1 month

Overall Rating :

1 out of 5

Reliability :

1 out of 5

Support :

1 out of 5

Pricing :

4 out of 5

Verdict :

This has got to be the worst company I have EVER had the displeasure of doing business with. From the moment my site went up I had problems accessing it. In fact, I couldn't access it the majority of the time from either of two different computers. Moreover, I had a friend in a different state attempt to access it with the same pathetic result.

It has now been days and they have yet to rectify the problem. All they tell me is that it's resolving fine at their end. I have lost the better part of three weeks of income and am deeply frustrated and quite livid. Now I have to find a new hosting company and will have to get my web designer to once again construct my site for me.

You're crazy if you even think of using this company.

Submitted By :

Templar

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

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Date Submitted :

February 7th, 2005

Length of time hosted by this company :

6 - 12 months

Overall Rating :

1 out of 5

Reliability :

1 out of 5

Support :

1 out of 5

Pricing :

3 out of 5

Verdict :

Deciding to use Hostnuke to host our website was the worst mistake we've ever made. The site is down on a very consistent basis. Sometimes its just an hour or two, sometimes longer. For us this means no email, which our most important form of communication. Today for instance, a busy Monday, has been ruined once again because our website is down. Since about 10:30 am, we've sent Hostnuke three helpdesk requests and have gotten ZERO responses besides the automated one. Our critical, time-sensitive work, is completely interrupted and we can't get even a peep from Hostnuke. Frankly, I don't think they care. So if you are considering Hostknuke, I strongly urge you to reconsider.

Submitted By :

John

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

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Date Submitted :

December 9th, 2004

Length of time hosted by this company :

1 - 6 months

Overall Rating :

2 out of 5

Reliability :

2 out of 5

Support :

1 out of 5

Pricing :

4 out of 5

Verdict :

I started using Hostnuke back in July, 2004 because my site uses PostNuke CMS and they specialize in hosting this particular CMS. The price seemed pretty good and they met all of the requirements that I needed in order to use all of the features I wanted on my site. I decided to pre-pay for a year of hosting.

The site was up and running without incident and at first I was pretty happy with them. After the first week, however, the site started going down on a regular basis (usually around 3:00 MST) and would stay down for several hours at time. This happened 1-3 times a week with no response to trouble tickets that I had submitted.

Then I had problems accessing my database through MyAdmin and was unable to make backups or do general maintenance. I submitted a ticket on this problem and the only response I received was that the database was accessible from their end (BIG help).

My site started doing really well and received alot of traffic. This required me to make two upgrades to the account within a few days. Since I was prepaid with HostNuke and was still giving them the benefit of the doubt, I figured it would be easier to make the upgrades with them instead of switching to another hosting company. The first upgrade was fine and was paid for with my credit card. When I made the second upgrade a day or two later, they tried to bill me for the new upgrade PLUS the first upgrade again. Thankfully, I had not transferred any more money onto the card than the amount that I should have been charged. When they tried to bill for the first upgrade the second time, the card declined. I sent them an email stating that there was a mistake in the invoice for the second upgrade and instead of actually checking into it, they denied that there was any mistake. There is a copy of the correspondence I had with them here (http://www.ourgayborhood.com/HostnukeMail.html).

During the time I was trying to explain that there was a problem with the invoice, I received an email stating that my acount had been suspended for non-payment. This was actually the best thing they had done with my account because not only was my site still up after the supposed suspension but I actually experienced less down time (how weird). At this point, I decided to go ahead and cancel the account because dealing with these people was too much of a headache.

Since I had no admin access to my database, I was unable to make a backup. When I wrote to cancel my account, I asked then to make a copy of the database and make it available to me. I made it clear that I could not get in to make the backup myself but their response was that I needed to make my own backups and then let them know when it was completed so they could wipe out the files. I wonder if they even read these tickets before they respond. Dealing with this company is like trying to talk to a chat bot.

They must have read the ticket when I responded again because they did make the backup and made it available for me to download.

Now, they are giving me a hard time about getting a refund. A few days after the account was cancelled, I wrote them to ask when I should expect the refund. I was told that their merchant will only allow them to refund for four months of service and they asked if I had a PayPal account. I gave them my paypal info and was told that the issue was handed off to someone else and they would respond when the refund had gone though. I still have not received any refund from them and they will not answer me when I should expect one. I think that's a pretty simple question. There is a copy of this correspondence here (http://www.ourgayborhood.com/HostnukeMail2.html).

This company is unbelievably bad. I am now using Surpass Hosting which is less expensive and 1000 times better all around.

Submitted By :

Mark

Submitted From :

Web Hosting Jury

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