Complaint Review: Just Host

a. Never ever go for Just Host. They focus only on marketing and they do so in most unethical manner. Continue reading for examples.

b. They have an automated selling system which will offer you some price. The moment you try to close their site, a message will come that they are willing to give a special discount of 50%for a short time. So only those who refuse to accept the deal first time are benefited. A chat window then opens where you chat with a virtual operator (a script).

c. After few days you would get a message that you have been specially chosen to be Platinum customer from thousands of customers. Then they offer a list of stupid offerings that have actually little meaning (some videos to download, faster servers, backups etc) for a good price which they claim to be discounted. Interestingly, you can type justhost platinum in google and directly go to this static page. So its just an unethical marketing gimmick.

d. They offer faster servers on additional price. They will refuse to tell you what exactly is the configuration of this 'faster' server.

e. For most of the time I was with them (4 months), site was wither slow or down. Whenever you contact first, they would say that site is working fine and problem is with my browser or machine. On second message, they would admit that something is wrong on their side.

f. A new person handles each ticket on every reply. And the staff is extremely untrained. Each time, you have to explain the entire story to new support person. And then he is gone and new one comes to understand the problem from beginning.

g. They never close any ticket even if you write to them that the problem is resolved. The only time my ticket was closed was when I quit them. I then got a message from them for close of each of my earlier tickets that spammed my mailbox.

h. Their server would always run slow and enter into some problem now and then. I did not realize this until I took Downtownhost and saw a significant jump in site load speed despite it being a much heavier site.

j. Two times their server went down due to what they called was a hardware problem. Once after that my site got affected with trojan. Next time the server went down, some files got corrupted and deleted. Hence all my uploaded media was not accessible to wordpress backend and all the pages got deleted. When I asked them, they put the blame on me that my security must be breached. When I asked for log of site access, there were no access from any other machine. Still they refused to accept the blame. They simply said that I myself might have deleted the files. From my side, I don't even know how to delete so many files in one go! Moreover how could I delete the files when I was unable to access even the backend?

k. Thus I suspect that security and privacy is a concern with them.

l. Once after they broke my site, I asked them to restore from their night backups. To my surprise, the oldest backup they had was 2.5 months old! And they claim to take backups at least every week and mostly every night! Since I had taken a backup myself, I requested them to restore that backup. It took 2 days and innumerable number of support people to understand this simple request.

l. They claim to offer faster servers at additional cost which is a hoax.

m. When I decided to quit after all the ordeals, I was offered 2 years of continuation at half the price along with many other gizmos that they normally give to platinum customers. Again this was an automated page! So if you want reduced price, simply decide to cancel the account and they would give you a much lower price without even discussing with you the cause for quitting. Its a webpage afterall!

n. Finally I took my paltry refund minus double the cost of web domain, faster servers, domain privacy and host of other things that are non-refundable.

o. I forgot to mention that while my site was down due to their hardware failure, and I had requested them to restore my backup that I had uploaded by ftp, which they agreed to, the next thing that happened was that my site got suspended due to some alleged high CPU usage. This was when they had changed my cpanel password for backup restore (i dont know why) and there was no way one could access the site that was down as per them. So the site was supposed to have extremely high CPU usage while it was down and no one had access to it! I had to raise another ticket for this and take pains to explain that it is technically impossible for CPU usage to be high when all controls of site are with them. They can callously apologized and said that it would be restored after a couple of hours. And when it was restored, they restored it as per 2.5 months old backup! I had to again upload the latest backup, explain to another 5 staff that I need latest backup, while they confidently insisted that the backup they have restored was actually the latest one one day old and I am mistaken to consider it to be 2.5 months old!

In brief a horrible experience. I had been so scared of shared hosting that despite not so great usage requirement (basically articles on wordpress and no other gizmos) with not too many visitors, I was mulling about having a VPS.

Would strongly recommend to NEVER EVER go for Just Host and instead choose another host who is more humane (you dont chat with outsourced reps and at times automatic scripts), and dont give false 'unlimited' promises. I would also suggest that never ever register your domain with your webhost. These large hosting services specially just host seems to have paid reviews and rankings to fool people. It looks like a completely fraud company with no ethics in business.