Here’s my little experience with HostGator service and support.
Well, let me say first that I moved to Hostgator after finding that someone’s e-commerce site was totally flying in terms of speed of contents delivery and she was hosting it all off hostgator’s lower end shared hosting plans. So I decided to move few of my domains to hostgator and even opened a reseller account with them to get a bit of boost in performance.
Yesterday I was working to update my WordPress Membership Plugin (MemberWing allows to build free membership sites) – and it was supposes to send an email when new user is paid and signed up.
Everything was working but that piece – sending email. It was kinda annyoing to me to deliver software that works but no one get notified that it works. In other words sending email part of script didn’t work. So I decided to blame Hostgator and send them email asking it to fix sending email from PHP. My perception was that their security settings was over elevated.
Just to let you know – Hostgator has phone and email support. Phone support may or may not take long time because of time of the day. Sometimes you’re #17 in the line, sometimes you’re #2 and it get quicker. Although their email support is quite impressively fast.
While 1and1 (my current hoster) tends to give you 24-48hrs ETAs for any meaningful email answer (and you still have a chance to get Paypal-ish type of email reply nonsense fluffed at you) – I was pleasantly surprised to get very fast and technically helpful and detailed responses from HostGator guys on pretty much every email. Bear in mind it often happens that they been very patient to describe detailed solution in email instead of RTFM-ing and FAQ-ing.
So back to my email issue – I sent email to support@hostgator and pretty soon asked by them to provide a source code that i use to send email. This was like 7pm.
I sent them code – they replied again within an hour asking me to clarify some issues. Apparently I setup redirection that confused everyone – so I fixed that part and send them updated script with the source code.
That was 9pm+
Something good happened overnight and early in the morning I received email from Hostgator’s
Linux Systems Administrator Matt S. who actually found a bug in my code and found a problem in the way I setup DNS at my other provider’s space.
He managed to do something good at Hostgator’s backend to make sure that my emailing started to work (even though the way I setup DNS at 1and1 was still problematic) and pointed out on bug in my script that generated an errors.
Really, when was the last time *you* had helpful technical guys to spent nighttime fixing *your* problems, looking at *your* code, adjusting their backend to accomodate issues that *you* created, staying *polite and professional with you* and finally delivering complete working solution so that *your* business will kept running?
