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Date Submitted :
June 13th, 2008
Length of time hosted by this company :
1 - 6 months
Overall Rating :
1 out of 5
Reliability :
1 out of 5
Support :
2 out of 5
Pricing :
5 out of 5
Verdict :
First, their ticket system doesn't work, they don't use it. You can pay 10$ (I think) for a "asap ticket". My site was not responding (it happened a lot, I used a tracker) and putting "free" tickets or "paid" tickets didn't help. And by the time I had an answer, like 1 day later, the site was up. They tried to move my site to another server, but it didn't help.
I had a normal blog with wordpress and I used the 5$ plan. Well, you have what you pay for. If you want to host a blog with wordpress, don't go with that hosting company. Anyway, I had no traffic (it was a new blog) and it was really slow to display the home page... so I just gave up.
I've been with this host a long while. I DO remember when their credit card numbers were stolen, but the service was working OK (other than resulting in me getting my only credit card declined at the mall!) and so I stayed with them. Recently, though, their quality has seriously declined.
Their prices are only adequate. I've been there for years and far from getting a loyalty discount, I'm paying twice what a new user pays.
Uptime is all right, but at least twice a year there are several-hour-long downtimes (that I know of) and probably at least one period of downtime every month. Their own forums indicate some servers have very long downtimes and even security problems. http://forums.hostrocket.com/forumdisplay.php?f=31
Recently, they performed an upgrade which rendered an add-on to my site (installed via their control panel) inoperable. I submitted a trouble ticket explaining the problem, giving the URL of the add-on and a sample error message, and asking for help. It took 24 hours before I received a response, asking where the problem was. I re-explained and another 24 hours later, they said this was outside their scope.
Should it really take 48 hours (all on weekdays) to tell a customer you can't help them?
That add-on was the only thing keeping me at this host. Since it's dead, I see no reason to stay. After 4+ years, I'm moving on.
HostRocket is a great host if you never have to deal with their support team. Unfortunately, you'll have to do that quite a bit with the way things are set up.
For whatever reason, a lot of the cPanel functions require you to contact the HR staff and have them manually set it up for you. If you create a subdomain, for instance, you'll have to contact HR and have them create it for you. Same goes for mail and FTP accounts, as well as additional domains, and if you want to change any of your information (like e-mail, etc.) This is kind of annoying in and of itself simply because it makes the whole process less streamlined; what's the point in giving you cPanel options if you have to contact them to manually do things for you?
But the part that makes it REALLY annoying is that HR staff are almost impossible to get in touch with. Their touted 24hr phone service is a huge lie. I have never once been able to get in touch with them via phone. They don't even put you on hold or anything, or redirect you to an answering machine... it'll just tell you to call back later. Again, what's the point in having a 24hr phone line if they never pick up?
Their ticket system is separate from your cPanel account, which is just baffling. They e-mail you your username/password for the ticket system when you first create an account with them, but if you're like me and you no longer have access to that particular e-mail account then prepare to jump through a million hurdles just to get a simple issue resolved... because remember, they won't let you just edit and update your e-mail address yourself. You have to have them manually do it for you, THEN have them send over the welcome message again, THEN you can log in to your ticket account, THEN you can sit in the queue for days on end waiting for your ticket to get resolved. The whole process can take days.
And if you are on the automatic payment system with them, make sure to keep your credit card info updated. It's a pain to have to manually update with them, but if you don't have your current CC info up when it comes time to automatically renew, they purge and cancel your account. It happened to my boss who also had an account with them. No warning, no e-mail asking about it, they just up and delete everything. When he was able to provide his new CC info, they issued an apology and offered to reopen his account, but they wouldn't be able to recover any of the data. (So much for regular server backups.) Needless to say he didn't opt to renew.
If you think you can deal with that kind of BS, I strongly recommend them. In the two years I've been with them I've never experienced any major downtime, and the price is fantastic for the kind of space and bandwidth they offer. However, I won't be renewing with them. Too many headaches dealing with them.
I've been with HostRocket since 2001 and have recommended them often.
Unfortunately, can't recommend them anymore.
Although I get good-will answers to my trouble tickets, actual support has become inexistent there; supposedly because of their ViaTalk sister company. Whatever, end result: no support.
I'm using a shared SSL certificate which has expired 10 days ago...
(a HostRocket-provided certificate by the way, which THEY forget to renew annually)
First trouble ticket was not answered at all.
The second ticket (a few days later) had a polite, but evasive answer.
Third ticket (2 more days later)... "We'll take care of that ASAP". Really?
Fourth ticket (another day later)... still not solved.
My online store has been without a valid SSL certificate for 10 days now.
No matter how good HostRocket was for 7 years,
it's now wasted money for a broken service, which hurts online sales.
HostRocket, I'm flabbergasted by this new irresponsible business behavior.
I can't coerce you into fixing this problem, all I can do is move to another host -- online business has to resume.
Excellent support is the biggest reason I've always recomended hostrocket.com. When I was first starting out and didn't know anything I needed a lot of help and hostrocket was answering troubletickets 10 minutes after I'd submit them. Over the years that has remained typical - amazing!
Very fast and no downtime too.
I hosted my sites on HostRocket from 11/03 - 08/05. For another year prior to that, I used part of someone's HostRocket dedicated server.
Good: Uptime and speed were quite good. Tech support was not super speedy, but they always got a knowledgeable native English speaker to solve the problem within a day or two.
Bad: they were compromised twice, once in 6/04 and once in summer '05. Both times I got prompt, professional form letters informing me of the attack, but it's still inexcusable. I also hit a problem with their cpanel that required me to scrap and recreate the whole account. Again, they provided serviceable instructions, but that's something that should never happen.
Ugly: your main cpanel account and your support account (rocketsupport.com) are not linked. There are absurdly low limits on how many FTP users you can have.
HostRocket offers both plenty of space for you to store your web site, and enough bandwidth to deliver. If you have a lot of side projects which require the use of sub-domains, HostRocket is generous enough to provide you with unlimited sub-domains (a unique factor amoung most web hosts). HostRocketis the first host to utilize “rollover bandwidth” that allows unused bandwidth to be used in the following month. This is an excellent value because it virtually eliminates costly bandwidth overage charges often faced by webmasters at some point. An excellent feature, if you have a very popular website.
With faster servers, technical support, and a 14 day money back guarantee, they are an excellent webhost. Watch out for their set-up and domain registration fees ($20/year), which is higher than most webhosts.
So in Conclusion Host Rocket has a nice Customer service team that answers all your questions.
Very good and very reliable. I would recommend this host to anyone looking for a good one. Pricing is good, and customer support has been very helpful and reliable. A+
Very reliable host, but then again our website is fairly simple so we haven't had much experiences with their support team. HOWEVER, there have been quite a few instances of where everyone on my shared server, including me, was hacked - our index page was replaced with some nonsensical hacker statement. It wasn't a problem for us because we keep a backup of our site, but I imagine it may have been for others. But yeah, otherwise - almost zero downtime for us.
