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Date Submitted :
May 14th, 2011
Length of time hosted by this company :
More than 3 years
Overall Rating :
1 out of 5
Reliability :
1 out of 5
Support :
1 out of 5
Pricing :
1 out of 5
Verdict :
I started using HostOnce in 2002 to host Scithe.com which is where it was until the end of 2007. It was very no frills but the price was right. 4.95 for unlimited hosting with the promise of the price never being raised on me.
Customer support was useless. At the time they had never heard of phpmyadmin and when I needed help setting up a database, they were useless. The autoresponder for their e-mail never worked either. When I contacted them for help I was again left out in the dark. On one occasion they wiped out years of saved webmail I had when they upgraded their servers. No backup was given--how does anyone do that?! 99.9% uptime was advertised but I noticed a few hours every month or every other month where my site was inaccessible. I get that maybe once or twice with other webhosts. Once hostonce had my domain down for an entire 18 hours!
The only thing I could count on them for was billing, which they would do earlier and earlier each year. My domain name would expire in October and in 2007, they tried slapping me with a renewal for hosting in June. I disputed the charges and at the time I was not aware they would be hit with chargeback fees. I won the dispute and in August they shut down my website and mail completely. When I complained they brought it back up but a very unfriendly woman was chastising me in e-mails for the chargeback. In September the site was taken down again. I was told this is because of the chargeback. They were cancelling me as a client. I tried to transfer the domain to an honest host and they would not allow me to do so. I argued that my domain and hosting was paid for until October but they did not care. They wanted $100 or I would never be able to transfer my domain again.
So I let the domain name go. I've been using 1and1 and bluehost to host my domains and I now have nearly 200 under my belt. It's a shame hostonce had to be the way they were. I would probably still be using them today and still trying to install MySQL!
This is the first time that I've done this sort of thing,so if there is any body out there that can
give me some real solid advice on this problem,I'd really like to know? Is there is anything that
I can do to get my Domain and website away from these ( what I call thieves ). I should say
right from the getgo that I'm not that computer savvy and that my website is not High Tech.
I built it with Adobe PageMill 3 and my upload program is Fetch. It's an art site that I use for
showing and selling my work. I started with HostOnce in 96 mainly because they were less
costly and they had more room for my website. I've been using both of the same programs
to add work and update my site since it was built and,they have never let me down. But about
6 or 7 weeks ago I paid my yearly registration and hosting fee not knowing that I'd be unable to
update my site or change the registrar of my domain ever again. I can't get in touch with them
or communicate with them in any way. So ( what I'd like to know ) is there someone out there
that has made contact with them and if so could you please send me an E-mail on how you
did it? Now,as for this Hosting company being of value to any one, I'd have say NO WAY
SHOULD THEY BE ALLOWED TO CONTINUE ON THIER MERRY WAY. I'd like to know is there some
kind of watch dog or bureau that looks into these kind of problems. There has to be some
way of getting our property out of their hands and shutting them down? Please ( if you can )
HELP! This company or any other that can not keep the promises that I've or we've paid for
should not be in business and as far as I'm concerned if there is no recourse then it's fraud.
THANKS Noel ( How can you review something that is not there.)
I have had no access to my website for over a year. The "support" people would not respond to any requests whatsoever to have the ftp username/password reset (rudimentary for them to do). They then took my annual subscription fee. Their billing department at least replied to my emails, but did nothing about the situation. I gave them a deadline prior to commencing legal action, which resulted in a refund of my subscription, but still no access to my website. Avoid at all costs.
Websites are down so often I have lost most of my business from this terrible web host. I am changing my host and may even bill them for damages, for the false advertising they claim more uptime than they have.
The servers are not dedicated. My email is down 70% of the year. FTP problems across the board. My stats logs have been stagnant for 6 months. Customer Service is non-existent. They rarely respond to support tickets. I had a problem with my email again today, and when I went to the support site, it was down. Hostonce.com was down too. And there is no way to reach service & support. This host is ridiculous. If there was an easy way to transfer the entire site without having to reprogram everything to PHP, I'd do it. This host has caused me nothing but trouble mostly.
To say they are horrible is being kind. They are bottom of the barrel leaches that won't give you a solid way to contact them...no phone number and they will not respond to your Customer or Technical Support cries for help. In 2009 I have been down more than up and with no way to contact them. Do not use HostOnce.
I guess I will have to say they are the worst host I've ever used.
When I started with them it wasn't too bad although it took a long time for them to get back on the support issues.
However the last couple of years have been a real problem. I should have left before but instead, I purchased more domain names. BAD GIRL. Should have listened to my brain.
Now, I'm trying (in vain, I might ad) to get my domain names transferred to GoDaddy. They are not answering ANY emails or support desk helps and their phone is disconnected.
They DID take my renewal money however, with neary a blink of an eye. I still can't get ahold of them. They are theifs plain and simple. DONT host with them if you want any control over your domain names. They will take them (since they are registered in their name--not yours) and you will play hell trying to get them back even though you are the one who paid the bill.
I hope I can get my domain names, but I have a feeling I am out of luck. Take our advice--try GoDaddy or one of the bigger hosting companies.
HORRIBLE CUSTOMER SERVICE!!! Billing dept must consist of one individual who is rude and very uncooperative. She has won the award, folks. Our email stopped functioning on 8-23-08 and she will not let me renew until she "verifies" our domain exists! I am still waiting for a response and it's been three(3) days. Isn't Hostonce in the computer technology business? How long does a look-up take? What kind of company refuses to sell their product? Supposedly, their billing is done on a subcontract basis and there is no supervisor you can speak to. I hope the CEO of Hostonce realizes how much the billing department is costing them in sales! This has been the most unbelievable attitude I have ever witnessed in a company representative. We would like to retain our domain name, but it's not like we are a national company! We are a small business that can easily tweak our domain name with little aggravation. I can't for the life of me understand their logic. NEVER, EVER do business with Hostonce!
I had my account with Hostonce for several years, probably 5 or 6. Attracted by the cheap cost, I was willing to put up with occasional downtime and no "real" support, and somewhat questionable performance on email (sometimes taking 12 hours or more to come through).
There has been a constant deterioration in performance and customer service over the past couple of years. In the past few months the situation had become intolerable. Email was inaccessible for days at a time on a regular basis. The whole site was down for several days, came back up, but not a single word of explanation or apology to any customers. Fortunately, I had transferred ownership of my domain, allowing me to escape their clutches and move my domain to a new provider. I encourage anyone still stuck with them to immediately, if not sooner, take ownership of your name and get out.
Support requests are routinely closed with little or no comment, like did they even look at the problem? No reply from customer service, billing, or sales. No telephone support.
If I could give them a 0 out of 5 I would. Customer service is poor. There is no way to contact them via phone. They're response to emails is now slow if at all. They were a fantastic service many years ago when I first joined (probably about 7 years ago), but over the last two years, I've had more problems with my site and email being down, including the last week that my site has not been up at all.
I'm in the process of switching hosting companies, but because hostonce finally came back up (their site, not mine- NOTE: their own website was down for an extended period of time recently), they now have a holding page on my site in a directory I can no longer access because the control panel is under subdirectory of your site.
I've contacted them to cancel my account- I don't care about a refund. I just want out!!! I'm losing business and credibility as we speak.
I have been with hostonce since 2001. In the beginning their service and support were terrific. In the last few months, not so much. I have had e-mail issues and control panel issues. As of today, I cannot log onto the webmail site, my control panel site or hostonce.com. Does anyone know if they are still in existence?
Please find another hosting company!
I have a few websites hosted by hostonce. Today my sites are down. I'm not able to create a support ticket because hostonce.com is down too.
I agree with all the comments about slow responses when tickets are opened, the fact that you don't get email confirmations, and that it's like trying to talk to a wall. Customer service is very poor. And it seems their service is becoming less and less stable.
I'm fairly new to all of this and am wondering how easy it is to change hosting companies? The one thing I like about hostonce is they offer the Windows hosting package so I can use ASP pages to interact with an Access Database. I'm sure there must be other companies that offer this as well. Anybody know a good hosting company that offers the Window hosting?
what a surprise. hostonce is down again. Even their main webpage is now off line. It make me wonder if they are gone for good. if that is the case then there is going to be alot of legal probs for them.n I have been with them for several years and this past year thier service has gone down the tube. I have lost countless emails and my website has been down for weeks at a time without any help from them. My domain name was no longer vailed and it took me 2 weeks to find out that they screwed and then another week for them to give me the name back.
They are the worse webhosting company on the net. I would never never tell anyone to use them. and if and when they get back up running i'm pulling all of my sites off of them.
DO NOT GO NEAR THESE JOKERS
Unreliable email servers. Long delays with customer support replies.
Some days you can't even get into their own website because it is down....great advert for their service, huh?
As soon as they respond to my request, I'm moving from them and starting a legal action to recover my subscription. Please stay away from this hosting service
STAY AWAY FROM HOSTONCE!!
I've lost months of email and maybe a job, My sites down all the time. They take a week or more to answer email and ticket requests. No phone support. They took my money then failed to pay the registrar and my site was on a porn link parking site for a week and a half. Email link for domain service comes back undeliverable Debbie@hostonce.com. After three weeks Domain@hostonce.com still hasn't answered my request for registrant pass code so I can get the keys to my URL. TOTAL NIGHTMARE STAY AWAY FROM HOSTONCE!!
Wow! Talk about a poor experience. I use to use HostOnce back in 2001 - 2004. Back then it was a decent server. I discontinued my website, and this year when I decided to play around again my default choice was HostOnce. What has changed since then? Nothing! Same old technology. Well the customer service is a lot worst.
So the experience:
1. Send a request for a site creation, 3 emails confirming the creation
2. A billing email to confirm that my Credit Card has been billed (don't trust the Australian flag on their webstie, they bill from the US so there is a fee, they use to charge in Australian dollars)
3. 3 days past no news
4. After 4 days of checking the site is finally up, no email notification.
5. I upload my files (slowest FTP connection on earth)
6. File permissions are not shared with the FTP.
7. I upload a file manager and discover all the files permission is 666
8. I email tech support, 3 and half days latter after threatening to close my account I get a response (no email notification) - they close the ticket with the terms about closing your account rather then the solution to my problems.
Basically they are quite poor. I feel really silly not researching them and just being loyal.
I've been with Hostonce for 6 years now, partially because my account automatically renews, and for a while because I didn't realize how bad they really are (they were my first host). Things have steadily gone downhill since the beginning with nearly useless support, an unreal amount of down-time for email, too often email's somehow seem to get lost in cyber space, and there is typically a delay of a couple of hours to several days for those that go/come through. My wife has been using Godaddy for her site for about a year now, and that's when I realized how bad Hostonce is... after numerous problems over the past few weeks, I decided to move elsewhere, since my contract is up next month...
Well, problems didn't end there. Despite numerous attempts to contact them through various emails, support tickets and invalid phone numbers, I have yet to be able to close my account or get my domain transfered (domains are registered in their name, not yours!). Finally, I've had to resort to doing a charge-back through my credit card company to kill the account, and I've contacted Dotregistrar regarding the domain; the only help they could give was to provide an email address to 'Debbie' (debbie@hostonce.com), which turned out to be an invalid address!
I have been with HostOnce since 2003 and just recently wanted to transfer to GoDaddy because of all the down time. Took forever to get any response out of them it is like talking to a machine. They apologized for the down email but are doing very little to make it up to there customers. In essence they care less about their clients, I have one conclusion in that they are too fat to care. I’m in the process of pulling my domain out and so far they have put one obstacle after another in my path. I have yet to get the authorization for transfer code. What a joke stay away if you are smart, also search who is there subsidiary and stay away from them also. There has got to be a way to find out who is the manager "CEO" and black list them in way that they never work in that type of a position again. I have lost a lot of money and thinking about a few thousand Dollar law suit.
I, like many other people whose comments appear here, have had (and am still having) a nightmare with this company recently. For the first few years things ran smoothly, though the infrequent problems were inefficiently dealt with by the 'Support' department.
This has deteriorated into more frequent problems, longer down times and even slower response. I have now, inevitably, had enough and have requested that my domain be released to me. This was 13 days ago at the time of writing and I am still waiting for the authorisation ID that will enable me to have my domain hosted elsewhere. I think I am being ignored now - it is difficult to tell.
No web site, no e-mail, no response, no telephone number to call, no action I can take. Do yourself a favour - avoid this company at all costs.
My website has been down for over a month now. This is not the first time it's happened. So I decided to transfer my domain to another registrar. However, numerous attempts to obtain a transfer code have been futile. I have many important emails pending my attention and it's just ridiculous that they can take over 2 weeks to give me a transfer password. I have emailed every department but to no avail. As many people have commented, they have terrible customer service and I truly wonder why I've been with them for as long as I have. They weren't exactly cheap either but my domain just kept being automatically renewed. But now I've just had enough of it. DO NOT sign up with them!
WORST HOST I HAVE EVER DONE BUSINESS WITH. Free sites offer more support than Hostonce does.
Crashs, lost email address, lost databases, hacks, and other issues.
And prey you don't need any tech support. You have to go into a control panel, and email them your question or support request. Usually in 48 to 72 hours you get a reply asking for one more small piece of information, and have to wait another 48 hours. I have NEVER been able to call someone with Hostonce to get support. The support I did get was amaturish at best.
They are a cheap hosting server, and with them you get what you pay for.
I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND THEM TO ANYONE. EVER. FOR ANY REASON. NONE.
The website has been down again for three days. Trouble tickets have been submitted but no one as been "assigned" to the problem yet. No phone number to call customer service; no email response to emails. Horrible customers service.
I was with HoceOnce for about 6 years.... I keep asking myself why? Of course this was the first host service I ever had and wasn't to bad at the start but as time went on things just seemed to go downhill. Support is about 50/50. sometimes you could ge a quick answer or reply, other times you waited for days. Email sucks. Half the time I couldn't even connect to the mail servers and I don't know how many times people asked if I got the email they sent, I didn't, what happened to it? Web pages were really slow loading, so slow a lot of times I get time-outs. I just went to install a message board for the past two days and can't because of time-outs in about 15 seconds. I don't know what is going on at HostOnce but they need someone there whjo knows what they are doing. I wouldn't recommend to this host to anybody... stay away from it like the plague if you know whats good for you. After the last two days of nothing but headaches I notified HostOnce I'm moving my website to a new host... will see how they deal with that.
Hostonce is a prime example of a part-time (or just cheap) web hosting company that cares little for customer retention. I had no problems with the web hosting (except for a occasional server disruption). However, when attempting to renew my hosting, the problems began. Their support is deplorable and cumbersome. After months of frustrating back-and-forth about my renewal, I decided to change web hosting accounts and move the domain. Unfortunately, they will not permit me to renew the domain or to change the nameserver without verifying the last four digits of the credit card I used to establish the account. Since I no longer have this card, I have been unable to make any headway with the renewal or a change in nameserver. There is no phone number to call and their billing department appears to be staffed by one marginally competent person. Please do yourself a favor and avoid hostonce.com. Until they invest in a staff and technology to function as a legitimate business, they will remain an example of business ineptness.
Quite possibly the worst web host on the internet. They made so many mistakes and never once apologized. They would "upgrade" e-mail accounts by deleting all of my stored mail. Twice they lost all my files due to a server crash--I learned to keep backups at least. In the last year they got into the habit of charging credit cards 4 months in advance. When I told them no, they killed my hosting even though I was paid up until October. They told me my web domain would be auctioned off and that I would have to pay big bucks to get it back. STAY AWAY FROM HOSTONCE.com! BAD BAD BAD!
These guys SUCK!!! Their admin interface is very poor, very limited features, very slow servers, very bad performance on anything that uses a database connection. The service just plain and simply sucks, BAD!!! They recently sent me a bill for the past 3 years, even tho I had already paid, claiming their old accounting company did a bad job so they switched and somehow i had gotten away without paying for 3 years. It is complete BS and they would rather loose a customer than work with me to continue doing business. I only ever stayed with them because of the dirt cheap price I was able to lock in, but now it isnt even worth dealing with them to host 6 domains for $60 a year. DO NOT USE THEM FOR A HOST, you will be sorry you did.
I would give this hosting company less then 0 if possible I have had my website deleted 2 times in the last 5 years once on 9/23/2002 and again 1 sep 06 both times by hackers who got into their system. Both times I had to re-ftp my data up as I was told they do not maintain backups of the servers. I finally decided to leave them, even after notification they still charged my credit card. When I filed a fraud alert with my cc company they threatened to have all charges they incurred in the process charged back to my account. They have been unreliable at best with uptime some where around 75%. E-mail is unreliable at best. Some e-mails go and some disapear. They do not have a phone number to contact them (this was provided by my cc company 1-910-402-4678 good luck making contact) and the only way to get a post-sales question answered is to send them a help ticket. The only reason I stayed with them as long as I did was because I was living over seas and did not want to ftp my site to another company over dial up when you pay for the call by the second. I wish I would have believed the reviews for the company and never signed with them. If you read this and still pay them you get everything you ask for. the price is right but the you get what you pay for; non-functioning features, no support, unreliable service. help ticket sent from me to them regarding the lasttime my sight was defaced by hackers:
Once again your servers were hacked and my website was replaced with someone elses crap. Now my site says "You are not authorized to view this page". What is the problem. The first time it happened was Call ##-#####-##### 9/23/2002 8:28:33 and your response was "We have checked our network and can find no trace of any system compromisation. Therefore this appears to be an isolated case." And once again this has happened to my site. I am once again, as I stated in the trouble tickes 3 years ago, interested to know what happened and what measures you are putting in place to prevent this from happeneing again. I also look forward to a true, not "canned" response on this issue". When will my site be back up? And if your security measures have failed once again then will you be restoring my site from backup? I await your response.
Their reponse:
This ticket has been closed. Please do not hesitate contact us again if you feel that any issues still exist.
I'd say that about 1 of 40 times I check my email I can't access it. E-mails have most certainly been lost by them for this reason. At the moment I am writing this my site is not up...I'd say my site is up about 95% of the time, which if you think about it is not so good. If the service for the people who are getting into it now is as bad as it is for us older customers I would definately not recommend HostOnce as the prices have gone up since I signed up.
Hostonce started off ahead of the pack many years ago. Shortly after the introduced multi-domain hosting at very comepetitive packages.
However, like most companies they go dead in about 3 years for a few very common factors that have affected them from my experience.
1. They go to sleep on the degree global competition.
2. They either ignore customer feedback or give emolient responses.
3. They do not appreciate the need for speed. Their silly ticket system is archaic and response times dropped dramatically.
4. They did not appreciate the complications that could arise from database driven content (that increased the need for speed because sites can't be left hanging dead for hours while someone merrily corresponded by their ticket system)
5. They lacked proactivity.
6. Their marketing strategy became transactional instead of relational. They distanced themselves from their customers.
7. They gave responses that suggested they knew best.
I had good experiences with Hostonce early on but not many in the last 18 months. The bad experiences out numbered the good. But I'm sure some one out there will find Hostonce quite lovely. It might well be if you just want a few basic webpages, but once you get into more specialised stuff thats what really tests a host.
What matters most is consistency, determination, speed, reactivity and proactivity in this fierce global market. I ain't seen that recently with Hostonce.
If you're looking for hosting and good reactive/proactive support I'd try Godaddy. One night I spent and hour on the phone with a very hard-working technical support chap at Godaddy. We fixed the problem. It would have taken Hostonce two weeks via their ticket system.
The competition has marched ahead. Hostonce has promised improvements but has failed to deliver on time. There appears from a customer's perspective to be a lack of leadership and strategic direction. The perception is that they are going bust - but pigs do fly on occasion.
I agree with most of the above reviews. I just want to ass that there were no problems for me while Hostonce was just in Australia. I dont know if they were chased out of there or are still there or not, But i do know they have registe3red as Limited Liability company here in the USA, and since they did that, it has been nothing but problems. I have lost designer and hostong customers due to their problems. As soon as I recover, I am going to find a different hosting service
Where do I start? I have been with Hostonce for some time now and as with all other customers found them to be ok in the beginning. More recently I have found that all my sites are up and down on a daily basis and email for all my domains has been a total waste of time.
The ultimate disaster happened just recently when one of my main customers domains stopped functioning all together for almost a week. After many visits to their online support system I received a simple answer that they had somehow managed to currupt the entire domain and had to reset it so I should re-up the website. The only problem was they did not provide the new control panel settings for several days as yes you guessed it my email was down.
To cut a long story short my ecommerce section of the site was created online using a PHP script therefore this side of the site (which took over 12 months to develop) was not backed up on my system as Hostonce do not provide backup services within their control panel. When I eventually got the domain active again and reset the email accounts and repaired the website I had lost over 2 weeks trading. I was now faced with legal action from my customer which I informed Hostonce and all they said was that they did not provide a backup service and were not responsible for customers websites. Ok fine I requested a transfer to another provider. I still have had no response and guess what my clients site is down yet again and again there is no email on any of my domains.
Summary: Hostonce has got to be the most unreliable hosting provider out there. I spend more time in their support system (when it is available) than I do conducting future business. They have cost me and my clients great financial loss to which they do not seem to care. My advise is steer clear and avoid the nightmare.
Since the change on their email system, it's a hit and miss to access my emails, causing problems with my clients and business in general. Right now I can't access my email since 11/22/06 and today, 11/28/06 I still have no answer for the problem.
I really liked Hostonce but in December of 2005 they changed their email system and it has caused me business, problems and tons of headaches. Emails never get to me, clients get notifications that delivery is delayed and some take days to get to me, no way to run a business. I've been patient but I'm changing, I can not take this anymore. They answer questions well but I'm fairly sure they farm out the mail system and it's pathetic. I've waited for them to get their act in gear but 11 months is long enough!!!! I'm GONE!!!
I would have rated a 0 on all categories above if I could have. Pricing WOULD be OK, but it is WORTHLESS since the service rarely works.
Service reliability is ABYSMAL (Servers in Australia = SLOW thruput). The customer service and e-mail only tech support is EVEN WORSE. 3 years of a recurring nightmare for me. I would have gotten out sooner, but it wasn't worth loosing the $85+$52 to end the yearly contract for space and multiple domain control panel. Yup, that is right! Try ending your contract at the end of a billing cycle! Can't do it. They will still charge the next year's service, and you will have to dispute. Oh, I forgot...I lost one of my donains in the process (isn't that special?) since they paid the registration, even though it was late EVERY year & I didn't find out til my domain stopped working every year.
It finally became too much and I switched to IXWebHosting.com. They are cheaper and very reliable. $150 got me 3 new domain regs and much faster connectivity. Not to mention a total of 8 domain CP's.
My web site is www.quality-fitness.com and my email is webmaster@quality-fitness.com if you have any questions about this piss poor company.
-- Chapter 1: Customer Support, In the beginning:
I've been using HostOnce for about 7 years. During that time I have learned quite a bit about HTML, PHP and MySQL amongst other things. In the beginning their customer support seemed great, they could answer any of my very elementary questions, which at the time seemed complex, and get me back on track. The more I learn, the less their customer support can help.
-- Chapter 2: Customer Support, The Midyears:
Once I started learning how to use PHP and Databases Hostonce started failing miserably in their ability to help or answer any questions. In many cases I could not get information on their own servers and what versions of software they were running. I had to find this out on my own using scripts I found on google searches and such. I learned from the prior years that waiting for an answer from HostOnce can sometimes take more than an entire day, So using their support helpdesk is always a last resort now.
-- Chapter 3: Customer Support, The End of Days:
If you think getting technical help is bad, just wait until there is an actual problem that is not your fault. This can take days, sometimes weeks to be resolved.
My latest problem involves one of their upgrades to the web mail system, which by the way HostOnce has not ever sent out notification of server changes, downtime, upgrades etc. None of my web mail accounts can be logged into. they still function (forwarders and auto-replies) but the ability to log into the actual web mail itself is non-functional. I report the problem with the various ways I've tried to fix it, and how to duplicate the error being received, and even set up a test account for them to troubleshoot with. They cannot fix the problem after almost 48 hours. which brings me to the next topic....
-- Reliability:
Any software using a database (phpBB for example) hangs horribly and randomly from 10 seconds to 10 minutes sporadicly through out the day. During these bouts of downtime, their helpdesk also will not load. This problem has been reported Many times over several years and the only answer I get is that there is no problem and that I must provide a means to duplicate the error for study. I have since disabled the forums (for several reasons) but the problem was never fixed on other sites I have hosted with them either.
While normal web pages and websites that are just pages of data to be read or viewed work fine, having a site with any type of interactivity with it is very difficult with this host due to what I believe is a severe lack of ability to handle the workloads that are being requested of them. By interactivity I mean Anything. A storefront, a Forums, email. I have lost more email than you can imagine and recovering saved emails in their system is just not possible. I've had my user's emails mysteriously disappear and have to recreate the accounts.
I became a reseller at one point in time doing web development for small businesses. As a reseller I've had my Customer's business emails up and leave existence and recreate them, making me look like the bad guy, and with a 24+ hour response time to get things fixed, I look even worse. When tickets are logged to them to have this fixed, after 24 hours or more of waiting on a resolution, I am instructed to recreate their accounts and that they are "sorry" for the inconvenience. All of my Customer's emails were lost and never recovered. This is absolutely unacceptable. I decided to shut my doors for business, and cancel the reseller service when my last surviving customer's term expired.
-- Pricing:
The prices are competitive. When I signed up the prices were ridiculously cheap. It became easy to sign up for even more things they offered that ended up being harder to sever myself from in the present.
IF you want something affordable this can be a solution, but thanks to this website I've seen many other hosting services for the same price as HostOnce with many, many more options for the less technical inclined.
**** YOU MUST know how to build a website on your own, know how to upload/FTP on your own to be able to use HostOnce for a service. They provide a pictorial Novice FAQ for a minimal amount of help on basics. You will receive absolutely no help from their helpdesk on any type of personal questions, and questions regarding technical difficulties as a result of their own problems will be vague and non-descriptive. You will never know about an outage in advance, you will only find out when your site is down and find out their site is also down.
So now I am nearing what I predict to be the end of being their customer. I found this website and see that I am not unique in receiving poor service from HostOnce. I've found similarly priced hosts with much more to offer, much more responsive, and all around appear to be better experiences and I hope to get on board those hosts soon.
I am not going to score HostOnce with a manic Depressive All "1s", as my experience has not been a total nightmare. I have learned a LOT on my own, due to the fact that they either do not, or can not help in many situations. Regardless it has still been unpleasant. They are fine for the person who runs the most basic of websites, does not need help, provides all their own coding, software, and knows what they are doing. If you would feel comfortable to host your site on Yahoo/Geocities free service, then HostOnce is a reasonable upgrade from that, but not by much.
Hostonce are pathetic.They are an embarrassment. DO NOT GO WITH THEM. They run out of a house with teenagers. Only 3 people reply when they aren't on high school field trips. mikey,scott and debbie. Don't get sucked into their claims of uptime, reliability etc.
I am officially registering a complaint with the Australian Better Business Bureau and the Canadian Business Bureau.
2 words - Absolute shambles.
I found hostonce after looking for an unlimited service. Mainly the idea of unlimited bandwidth and webspace attracted me. At the time I thought I'd found the right one for me. Not long after signing up, funnily enough it was right after my 30 days money back no hassle guarantee period.
My website was down every single day nearly, I issued more than 200 help tickets in the space of 4 months. My email wasn't coming through because of their under par webmail service and when contacting customer support you were often waiting 5 days for a response.
My site was down for over 14 days a few months ago, I received no word to why this was the case and they never answered my ticket for that period. No apology, no reason to why this happenned.
Personally, I think Hostonce is a novice company run by a group of inexperienced students who have set-up shack in their home. It's the only way to try and explain the service you get from these people. It's the same people that deal with you all of the time and most replies via the help desk are always a ‘copy & paste’.
They refused to refund any funds for any downtime, even for 2 weeks at one time and they have the cheek to charge you a fee for cancelling your webspace. Personally, their customer service is a disgrace and they should without any doubt refund their clients for lost business rather than charging us for their under-par service.
They may be cheap but do not do business with them. You'll only lose money.
Worst hosting company ever come across, customer service is a joke, mistakes made from day one right through to now, inital hosting was setup on Linux after Windows hosting was requested, also started out by charging me for a reseller plan, and lately apon request of closing down a hosting plan they totally ignored that and charged me for 2 years more hosting and it only took 5 months for them to get a refund started minus $40 for their fees.
I have requested more than four times on a period of several days for a cancellation on my account because I can not afford the excessive times that my websites have been down... My email, my websites and my business have been severely affected. I tried to reach their support team and I have found out that the company at the highest level is composed of three people, yeah the tree stooges. If you have got any luck reaching them, the answer is always one excuse after another and nothing is being done to prevent this from happening again. I have had it, after a long time trying to work with them I have got to the conclusion that it is better to try someone new. This time I have reached for a hosting company that do business from this country... at least I would have some kind of legal protection from this kind of unethical way of doing business. My recommendation if you ask me, is do business with anyone else but Hostonce. There are a lot of reputable companies that offer more for your buck, and more important of all with a lot of less headaches and embarrassing downtimes...
The pricing should also be 1 out of 5! It is cheap if you think about the hosting alone. But you have to factor in the man hours you need to get any sort of response from them and the cost of days of down time.
they charge domain prices that are 3 years old. .com domains are much cheaper now than 3 years ago but they still persist charging as much as they can.
I have stopped using them for hosting long ago but i still use them for 1 domain (because to transfer a domain from them is so tough i admit they wear me out so i reluctantly pay for another year). And this means that every year there are days of down time of my site and my email while my domain redirects to a domain expired page full of pop ups and ads.
i beg you to stay away from hostonce.com there are much better cheap hosts i recommend webhost4life.com!
They do not notify us of maintenance been carried out. Lack of customer service with no contact phone numbers. Email service is constantly down without any prior warning or notification of maintenance or upgrades been carried out. their turn-around time on our queries is more than 24hrs on most occasions.
Most of the time they did not know what is the problem with their domain. Some time even hostonce.com site not open.
As they are an Austalian-based company, frequently they are non-responsive to problems during business hours.
Currently, my email and web has been down, and we do not know what is the problem with the company.
I started off with them about 3 years ago and thought they were good, then last year started having all types of issues and there ticketing system is horrible the same person always responds and nothing is ever done. My main issue with them now is that I have registered 3 names with them and I don't no if I trust them in getting my domain name transferd seeing as they don't give you access to change your own dns if anyone has cancelled with them before and can give me some addvice it would be helpful info@finalcreations.com
Low cost hosting is not for the timid or weak, and Hostonce proves that with a passion. The other reviews here cover the problems very well, so I would like to point out another important issue - Terms & Conditions. When you sign up with Hostonce (or any hosting company for that matter), you agree to be bound by a legal contract called the Terms and Conditions. Hostonce has a very smart clause in theirs regarding cancelation. It essentially states that if you ask for a refund, they will tack on enough fees and charges to render the refund useless. For example, under the price freeze guarantee (which, in itself is a nice idea) I pay about $65/year. If I cancel now (about 6months into my year) I would expect about $32.50 of refund. But, there's a $20 cancelation fee and another $16 for the domain name (if I want it), which means that my net refund would be -$3.50. The bottom line is, read the T&C very carefully before signing up for any hosting company - especially the low cost guys who try to make their money on the back end of the contract. Oh, and I can think of very few instances where Hostonce could possibly be worth the pain and suffering - just stay away.
I recently sent an email to the registrar for hostonce and here is what I received back:
Thanks for your email.
Our policy is to help domain Registrants in any possible way if there is a problem with our Resellers. If you have a complaint about any domain in particular and appear listed as it's Registrant, please tell me the name of that domain and I will make sure.
Additionally, you might want to include in your website that DotRegistrar will help the Registered Holders of any domains registered thru Hostonce.com.
Should you need any further assistance, do not hesitate to let me know.
Best Regards,
--
Trevor Garrett
Customer Service Manager
support@dotregistrar.com
http://www.DotRegistrar.com/FAQ.html
These guys take useless to a whole new level. My site goes down daily, with some outages lasting for more than a day. Their response time is pathetic, and when they do respond you get the same email each time and the call is closed just like that. I would NOT recommend these people to anyone, they may be cheap but you are better off hosting your website on a piece of paper then using these guys.
I, too, have been experiencing reliability problems with Hostonce.com, with weekly service outages from 12/05 until now. I am running 12 domains on their service. While once their uptime was as advertised, recently it has been sub-par.
I, too, have been very irritated with their behavior of "closing" problems without fixing them.
Currently, my email has been "down for maintenance", oops, that was "problem with our spam filter" for more than 24 hours... though the problem has been Closed on their system, Everything's A-OK.
As they are an Austalian-based company, frequently they are non-responsive to problems during U.S. business hours.
I would NOT (and DO NOT, to customers and students) recommend this company.
They do not notify us of maintenance been carried out. Lack of customer service with no contact phone numbers. Email service is constantly down without any prior warning or notification of maintenance or upgrades been carried out. their turn-around time on our queries is more than 24hrs on most occasions.
Pllleaseee do us a favour..dont support these guys.
I've been with hostonce for about 4 years. I signed up with them because their price was cheap! I should have known better. Within a few months I was having serious reliability problems. Ok, they did sort it out but it took a few days, and it worked fine until recently when reliability and response have completely gone down the pan. I've resisted changing provider because I knew it would be a pain to try and deal with these guys, but i'm changing right now !!
The only problem is - i can't even access their own site to contact them and cancel my account. Very unprofessional. And, they've already billed me for next year. Ha! I can't wait to try and get my refund.
Host ONCE, more like Host NEVER.
My advice - don't touch with a barge pole unless you like pulling your hair out.
I host about 8 sites with this company and will be migrating away from them AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. This company was good when I first started using them a few years ago but in the past couple of years the reliability and service has gone right down the drain. It is awful, I have not been getting any emails from my domains and everytime I submit a trouble ticket they respond back the next day saying it is fixed and it has not been fixed. I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND this company to anyone anymore.
HostOnce is garbage. I strongly urge you to consider a different host service. Their servers are as unreliable as toilet paper in the rain. They provide crap service and then had the nerve to charge me a cancellation fee. Stay FAR away from this stinker.
My experience had been good with HostOnce until recently. They are unwilling to communicate by email. Their customer service is non-existant as it is apparently run by someone named "Mikey". If Mikey ever worked for me and treated my customers as he treats me the only job that person could ever have would be the grease-trap cleaner at McDonalds.
I am going to migrate away from HostOnce as they apparently do not want any more business.
My suggestion to anyone considering HostOnce is to keep looking.
I registered with Hostonce.com almost a year now. Downtime eversince and then. Customer Support took too long to response to your matters. I lost customers a lot.
Below is a copy of the letter sent to the IP registrar for Hostonce:
FYI:
I have requested to move my registrar and DNS from Hostonce.com to Network Solutions.
I have entered this request a week ago as of today, which is February 26, 2005.
I have tried to abide by all the instructions given.
I just want IHOLDINGS.COM, INC. D/B/A DOTREGISTRAR.COM to be aware of the problems I have had.
I make a living on the web, I have been with Hostonce since 2000. I only had one website up with them that was only a personal hobby until April of last year and
at that time I added a multi-domain account with them with an additional 4 domains.
I was getting an average of 2,000,000 hits per month at the time of the transfer. From the data for the month of January of 2005 my hits have dropped to 545,617. This is a drop of over 75%. I believe that Hostonce.com is responsible for this. Last weekend (Friday/Saturday) for example and again last night (February 25, 2005), I Lost approx. $600.00 in sales due to the constant server problems at Hostonce.com. When logging on to the problem desk to submit a problem, it would state "All Servers running with no problem." That is not verbatim, but still the same thing is being said.
There is one person there who I highly commend: "Debbie". Debbie has been a great support person, and I don't feel like any of this should be reflected on her. I have dealt with another however, by the name of "Mikey," who has been rude and makes a person feel inadequate when writing to the help desk. This would in turn cause the situation of anybody who has a problem being very apprehensive on asking in the first place.
I realize that how Hostonce does business is none of your concern, but this company does use you as a registrar for domains. With that being said, it is also reflected on you how this company deals with their customers. I personally do not have anything against IHOLDINGS.COM, INC. D/B/A DOTREGISTRAR.COM. But there are databases out there on the web that score businesses, and your company will come up as one of the businesses that Hostonce.com register with.
Bottom Line:
I need a resolution. I want to finish the transfer of my domains to Networks Solutions. I would appreciate if this could take place so I can continue to do business.
Thank you for your time and attention to this matter.
Been a member for 5 years, constantly going down without contact, and when you do contact technical support you are treated rudely. When you tell them of a problem you are told everything is fine. I have five websites on this server (only temporarly now). Six hours at a time down time a the minimum. I lose at an average of $300.00 every time they are down. No phone support; only rude emails emailed back to you with the reply that everything is fine, which is not. I do not recommend this host server for anyone.
for the one year i was wit this host, the ftp hardly worked, the http often was down. Not to exagarrete, i would put the uptime at around 90%, with downtime at days at a stretch.
i use my creditcard only for buying hosting. and this was my first host. the day after i signedup, i was called up by my bank that a lot of amount was been swiped. def someone got hold of my credit no. over their insecure signup page, i was novice then to look for https
the support is 100% nonexistant, for all the downtime, they never responed to my emails and this is no exxageration.
