Hostmonster Sucks – Hostmonster Review and Warning

After 4 years of suffering and apologising to my clients about hostmonster’s downtime, I am moving my sites out of there, and I am leaving  Hostmonster for good. In this article I will explain why that is, and why you should stay away from Hostmonster.

This it a professional site, so I apologise for the language in the header, but most people look for ‘hosting-company-name sucks’ when they are looking for a review for a hosting company.

I have been using Hostmonster to host about 6-8 sites I own for the last 4 years (never for this site – spacebug has a dedicated account somewhere else)

Here are the reasons you should not consider Hostmonster as a hoster:

Low availability

Since day one my sites had more downtime in hostmonster then other hosting compenies I have worked with. There are some good weeks, but on average you get very low availability. You see it in downtime in the site, bounced incoming email, and flaky FTP connections.

Horrible performance

Sites run slowly on Hostmonster. This problem becomes worst with time (my guess is they overload the servers). This happens on plain HTML sites as well as PHP and MySQL driven sites.

Poor and unfriendly support

Contacting Hostmonster support is a waiting game, it takes forever for them to get back to you. what is worst is that when they do come back to you, they are never helpful.

Major security issues

This is not a joke – Hostmonster servers have been compromised several time. These have been a server-level attacks which affected multiple accounts. Personally speaking, it is a terrible feeling to have your site hacked into. The company required all accounts to change their passwords to strong password and two weeks later the attack happened again. If you do not want your site to be a place for virus distribution – stay away from hostmonster!

No communication of issues

They have never communicated any security/downtime/other (planed or otherwise) issues. They never admit it is something that they do wrong. When you tell then your server is down for the last 8 hours, they will say “it was done to improve future performance” or something like that.

Conclusion

I do not want to make any recommendation about other hosters, these things change from time to time. I have yet to find the perfect hosting company. But all the other companies I have worked with were, by far, much better.

Recommend Hostmonster only to your arch-enemy.

Share the love...Tweet about this on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Google+Share on Facebook

Amir Shevat

Amir Shevat is the global Startup Outreach lead in Google Developer Relations (g.co/launch). Previously, Amir Led Google Campus Tel Aviv and was the co founder of several startups.

You may also like...

15 Responses

  1. Abba Bryant says:

    Seconded. Nothing but the run-around on support. Always some excuse for their downtime that is either a) not their fault or b) for my own good.

    I ran away a long time ago – and I also haven’t found the best hosting company – but I know I found the worst.

  2. Jeff says:

    Our company had 25 websites hosted with them before. After downtimes 2-3 times a week we moved our sites to hostgator.

  3. Ryan says:

    I totally agree, I just transferred away, from the P.O.S (not meaning Point of Sale) they call a hosting company. I just uploaded over 2000 files to my host gator account, it took less than 3 minutes, that would have taken at least 5 minutes on host monster. Also, the fact they want to charge, charge, charge and never give an inch is enough to switch. I’m lucky and haven’t experience downtime on hostmonster but the servers have incressly gotten slower over the years, probably to promote their pro hosting plan. Transfer your regitar to GoDaddy they have a special going on at the moment for less tahn 4 bucks they will transfer it for you and give free for each domain transfered. Go Host Gator!

  4. Tom Schwindy says:

    I AM HAVING THE SAME ISSUSE! I hate HM and the fact that they are SORRY but I seem to loose things everytime I come back to my email page. I wish I had better cmp skills to be able to make a better choice. My contract is running out in the end of June and I WOULD LOVE TO MOVE!

  5. Ashok says:

    Worst service . I was their customer , i wont recommend Host monster.
    Host monster gives Fake promises
    Host monster provides worst services

    i moved to Host gator after 2 years of unbearable painful service

  6. Peter says:

    Hostmonster continues to get worse I am afraid. Now to be given technical support, they want you to disclose your top level password. Mmmm that makes me feel good… not

    • Peter says:

      Sorry I should have added that I was contacting them because they lost all emails for a full 12 hour period for all accounts on my domain. It was only after spending an hour with customer support that they admitted it was “emergency repairs” – but I never got the emails back: four business relationships impacted. No apology, no admission of guilt from hostmonster.

  7. We are trying to weed out these so called “top host”.. If you have any experiences with a host, be it good or bad.. drop us a line! http://www.hostinsight.com

  8. Waqas Hasan says:

    I am also a victim of this **s*ole company. They always throwing viruses in all my sites, running ghost servers and affecting other websites. I often receive emails from my clients that they have been facing virus and abuse issues from their customers (because clients websites were sending spam and virus to their customers).

    On a weekly basis I scan whole of my server directory and sites, myself, manually. I sometime tried to report to HostMonster’s support, but those assholes are dumb or seem to be jerks…

    And even sometime (even often – 3 to 4 times a year), they take my server down, block all my sites and even remove my sites – claiming that there was virus and abused activity.

    I am 100% sure, it’s HM’s staff or HM itself doing this shit, and when they get caught, they put it to their customer, whose site they have been using.

    They are ass-holes, finally (after 4 years) I have decided to move away. This time I am going with some better one, even if it costs me higher than HM.

    Beware of HOSTMONSTER and BLUEHOST. :-(

  9. I am so sick of over-shared hosts with fake reviews making them out to be the best thing since sliced bread!

  10. Mike Street says:

    I completely and utterly despise this company. They say unlimited domains. I have 30 and I am now maxed. I originally had 100 sites. They changed the amount of space I could use three times. Which means that I was over the limit three times, and they booted me off the server on all 100 sites I had hosted with them until I called terms of service to find out why. They then gave me the awful news that they lowered the amount of space by a whopping 30%. So before they allowed all of my clients to be back up and running, I had to remove about 30 sites and get another account with them. So me being the moron that I am, I did. Then they did the exact same thing again a few months later. Again lowering the amount by another whopping 30%. Which again, call TOS, remove another 30 sites, get another account. Well now I figured they cannot possibly do it a 3rd time, and they did. Forcing me to buy yet one more account in order to host all of my clients. See the reason I didn’t leave was because my clients would be hurt in the huge move of all of my wordpress and joomla sites taking about 4 days to move.

    The moral of my story is Please do as I say, not as I do. And NEVER host with this miserable POS company and do yourself a big favor.

  11. kevin says:

    I have my domain hosted with them and I got locked out of my account because I forgot my password. No problem right? I called and they were very nice….but I needed to give them the last four digits of my credit card number from seven years ago, which I did not have. NO OTHER OPTIONS EXISTS I was told by everyone at Hostmonster. I tried four times to get someone to listen to me and work with me. Nada. Bunch of drones. They will take your money, but after that they aren’t much help.

  12. Lois says:

    so, who do you recommend? I have just had the worst 2 weeks with them but don’t know who to move to.

  13. Lois says:

    I have been with them over 10 years, and have several clients with them – but what has happened lately is unacceptable.

  1. May 13, 2013

    […] under 12 seconds.  Thanks a lot, HostMonster. I know I’m not the only person to experience similar problems.  I’m surprised to see so much obvious propaganda extolling their virtues — […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *