There are 32 hosting user reviews for
Host Excellence
Average Jury Ratings & Reviews of
Host Excellence
3.1/5
2.2/5
2.1/5
2.0/5
Reliability
Support
Pricing
Overall
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Date Submitted :
June 22nd, 2009
Length of time hosted by this company :
1 - 6 months
Overall Rating :
2 out of 5
Reliability :
2 out of 5
Support :
1 out of 5
Pricing :
3 out of 5
Verdict :
We’ve been with Host Excellence for a couple months now. Our sites have been down more than 3 times each that we know of. Our sites are slow most all peak times. Extremely slow tech support response -- sometimes 3 days to answer a ticket! We just learned that the server we’re on has over 27,000 Websites on it, which is overcrowded and obvious by the poor performance. We are sorry that we went with them now but we are past the refund period so we have to suffer! You don’t! Do yourself a favor and stay away from Host Excellence, which is run Fathi Said. He also runs IXWebHosting.com, IHostBig.com and Webhost.biz.
When I went to their website I looked at their staff and saw that they were all russian. That was a redflag because I currently have ixwebhosting as my host and they are all russian. So, I did a whois lookup and guess what I found out. ixwebhosting is hostexcellence.
The host excellence reviews sounded so familiar to me expecially the part about script injection. Same thing happened at ixwebhosting.
Ixwebhosting is the absolute last place you would want to go right now. I am desperately looking for a new host but I cant find a reliable one yet. And many are using dupe names. Lypha is another company that also goes under another name.
Anyway, get as far away from ixwebhosting aka hostexcellence as you possibly can. Maybe next year they will have their problems taken care of. But for right now, servers are overloaded causing page loading time outs on all of my sites. Lost a lot of money because of them.
If your websites are intended to make you money, then go somewhere else. Your search engine rankings are in jeopardy if the robots cant access your website.
I am already for more then 4 years with this company and have never had any problems. Few times I needed help in submition my site for search engines and always got needed help. All servers are stable and work pretty good. I have also few accounts on godaddy and hostmonster, but they realy have poor support team and I guess that do not know anything about hosting.
Host excellence is by far the worst host I have ever come across. I am freelance web developer that built over 40+ websites and growing. I have 3 websites host by HostExcellence and my nightmares begin. I came across problem and try to contact them and the toll-free number is always busy. I have to use their online chat room, and all supports seem like they do not know English. Broken grammar and non-sense sentences. The worst part is they will pulse for 5 – 8 minutes to reply the question you asked. And if you ask the next question, be prepared to wait for another 5 minutes before they reply back. I have suffered enough and I will never host another site through them.
In short, excellence great deals, worst supports, and HostExcellence is not a good choice for intermediate - advanced developers.
had problems with them in past but their support staff quickly rectified but not this time - their server died and they did replace it in about 12 hours - but after that they left my site dead in the water - all the e-commerce aspects of the site were left disabelled - it\'s been 2 1/2 days now since no one has been able to buy any thing from my site - I have now access to the admin panel on my site - The help desk for my first 4 calls kept telling me thing would be restored in a few hours - 18 hours later - they said I needed to open a help ticket - they opened one for me - it\'s been 23 hrs from that help ticket being opened and I have called 3 times requesting that the data bases be restored - the last call a few minutes ago said it would be no longer than tonight - it\'s been 3 straight days now since the site has been done from there dead server and not restoring the data bases.
I just cancelled my account with Host Excellence. As another reviewer stated, I have also been "hacked by Russia" a number of times. I have done everything that the Host Excellence people tell me to do to protect my site (also a simple display site - nothing fancy, no bells and whistles. Anyway, I have done everything I've been told to do and nothing works. Lastly I got an email saying there was too much traffic and they locked my account (I couldn't get to it at all). I called the support number from the email and got no information, no instructions on what to do, no help at all. Seems to me Host Excellence is anything but Excellence. You do what you're told and it happens again and again and again and each time you get different instructions on what to do. Seems to me they need to work on keeping their server hack proof and not letting paying customer's sites get destroyed because they are incompetent. Don't use these people - pay a little more and get much better service elsewhere.
These guys are born liars and the worst hosting company out there. My sites got hacked several times. Plain HTML site, no PHP, no Frontpage extensions, no Virtual FTP, no Directory Listing, so how did this happen? Because Host Excelence servers get hacked by people in Russia every once in a while and they then get into individual sites using a shell script. One of the agent told me this by mistake. Then when I confronted them, they denied everything.
Plus I get SPAM like crazy. More than 500 emails of junk mail a day. More than 100 messages on an email address that I created less than 5 minutes ago.
Frequent SQL errors plus website is always down. I have the unlimited plan but they restrict my hosting space, plus with unlimited email they only let you use 2 GB. The whole thing is a huge scam. Non existance customer support, and if you ever get through then abusive agents from Ukraine who know nothing about trouble shooting.
We are buying our own servers and will host our own sites. If you want to keep your blood pressure low, stay away from Host Excellence.
Our primary site for ALFAS 4N
CLIENT to support our customers with
GoGlobal points is vip-members.net.
We need a reliable hosting service to keep this
site up 24 hours / 7 days a week.
When we found this host, we thought 'wow
that's cheap,' and considering we're in the uk,
with the current exchange rate....even better!
However this is a crock of sh*t. We have
one week ago written to host excellence
and asked what is the problem with our
websites. Both or our domains have been
suspended and visitors see the following
notice when they try to access our website:
"Account for domain www.vip-members.net
has been suspended"
"Account for domain
www.vipbusinessdirectory.com has been
suspended."
This years' renewal charge due date for three
of our websites was five minutes overdue (not
joking, as a webmaster I am used to watch
out for downtimes with our webservers.) and
Host Excellence suspended the accounts
whereas Acenet Inc went out of their way
to help by rolling back the invoice
for another two weeks, no question asked.
Both of our hosting packages became due and
we informed their billing departments about a
technical problem in our accounts department
Couldn't have been worse. Fresh from
preparing the businessplan, ALFAS should
have been gaining and impressing potential
investors.
.....their response.."we have investigated issue
and discovered, that we unfortunately cannot
proceed with postponing of your account's
expiry date. This procedure is possible only
when the account is now suspended yet. You
have placed this ticket on Apr-08-2008 and
your account has been suspended on
Apr-07-2008. Unfortunately you were one
day late. I regret, but we cannot assist you
with this. But though your account is not
active, we will keep all its data within 30
days after account's expiration. Thank you
for your understanding."
I asked their technical support manager to
replace the notice "Account for domain
www.vip.... has been suspended" by a
investor friendly notice which I defined
for them but . ... there was no
reply.
This is not good enough i replied by writing
to the CEO, Mr Fathi Said ...is there any
assistance or even an apology as we
are loosing business because of your lack
of a reasonable customer satisfaction policy
There was again NO REPLY
My advise to anyone reading this review do
not use Host Excellence. I'm sure you can
find a better hosting company then this one.
We are already on our way to change.
Negatives: everything else; most notably horrendous service, subpar security, and advertising lies.
If nothing ever goes wrong on your site, you'll love Host Excellence. The second *anything* goes wrong, you are thrown into the pit of despair that is their customer service line.
A perfect example: while doing a WP upgrade, I deleted a directory by mistake. This directory has at most 10 MB of data in it. One would think this would be easily taken care of.
Ticket opened; rather quickly I get a response back that said:
"I have forwarded your ticket to our administrators in order they restore the folder you asked for. Once it is done you will be informed about it through this ticket."
Great, I think. 6 hours later, nothing. I get on live chat support. They tell me in no uncertain terms "this issue will be solved in 24 hours." Once again, I'm fooled into submission.
24 hours pass. Nothing; not even an update. I get back on live chat. Either I'm dealing with pathological liars, English as a fourth language, or both, because I am told after asking and reasking the question three or four times "the problem will be solved in a few hours."
No shock here, we're up to 36 hours and still no solution. I get on chat a fourth time, and the tech flat out refuses to answer my question about what the SLA is for this site. I ask him how to escalate the ticket. He doesn't answer either and just keeps repeating "the problem has been sent to admins for action."
So I call the tech support phone line and get an intensely rude tech. What does she say? "The problem has been sent to admins for action." Wow, haven't heard that before. I ask how long this is going to take. "I can't tell you that sir." So you don't know? "Sir there are many customers here." Wonderful, demean your customer base, that is quite a good business strategy.
Still waiting on a simple restore. EVERY problem I have had has resulted in support calls like this. In addition, my site has been hacked twice (please read https://www.hostexcellence.com/index.php/v2/pages.faq#q69 to see their lie that states "we have never been hacked") and each time they stated it was my fault and could not restore the data back to original form because "backups failed."
I'm changing my hosting company ASAP. Do not go with this company unless you enjoy headaches, frustration, rude and indifferent support techs, and being lied to by a company which you are paying to provide a service.
Host Excellence offers two plans: 300GB of storage and "unlimited."
That is false advertising. They tell you that you are interfering with other customers if you use more than 20 GB.
This pretty much sums up my last tech call:
Me: you don't have enough disk space for every user to actually use the 300 gb they pay for, do you?
Host Excellence Tech Support: with such space usage you should look for dedicated servers
Bear in mind that the actual cut-off for disk space usage from them is around 25 gb.
(I had to give you the URL for my site when filling out this form, but my account had to be moved from HE because of excessive disk usage, which was under 25 GB.)
I'm currently in their live chat support... yes, right now.. but I have time to come here and write this review. I'm a web developer and have used Host Excellence for almost 4 years now. Not only do I host my own site but have my clients register with HE as well.
TO be fair, 4-5 years ago service was good, but since then it has deteriorated. Down time bacame more frequent, ping speed was slow and their support was horrible.
Support used to be comprised of staff from India and has now shifted to Russia. I have absolutely no qualms where support staff originate, it could me Mars for all I care, as long as they can communicate effectively... which they couldnt.
... I'm still on chat support and have been told "one moment" and have been passed to someone else. I'm sure you can find a better hosting company then this one. I'll be changing soon.
I'm not quite as negative on them as most of these reviews. I'd like to give them a "3.5", a "4" would be too generous.
I've been hosting up to a couple dozen sites with them for almost 2 years now, using them more during some periods than others. I have not had a particular problem with uptime. My client sites have gone down a couple times in the time I been with them, had them back up in 3-4 hours. They slow WAY down during the two net-rush times of the day, the rest of the time they are actually pretty speedy, for a shared-hosting oversold misleading-advertisement kind of place. I do host some large digital downloads, no problem except for those rush hours. They have had a few episodes of extreme email quota malfunctions, obviously they are playing with anti-spam measures. I moved critical clients to other hosting, the problems were eventually resolved, been very smooth with them for several months now.
The big handful dedicated IPs they give you is the real reason to host with them. Running ecommerce clients, having all these dedicated IPs in your pocket, getting a cheap SSL Cert working over their web interface is simple and works fine. Hosting with this outfit just depends on your needs, if you don't need more than an H-Sphere interface gives you to manage your sites, you understand that the support is outsourced slaves (fix ticket and cover-your-*** without admitting the problem) for emergency use only, then you can save a lot of money using HE.
When we found this host, we thought 'wow that's cheap,' and considering we're in the uk, with the current exchange rate....even better!
However this is a crock of sh*t. We have written to host excellence and asked what is the problem with the email service.....their response..'we are testing a new webmail service..we did not notify you of this.'
How long will this take to fix? I asked....They replied that the web mail service will be working better in a week.
This is not good enough i replied...is their any compensation or even an appology as we are loosing business because of your problems?
They replied back swiftly with 'No'
My advise to anyone reading this reveiw do not use Host Excellence.
When I started with them it was great, but over the past 6 months there has been 1 problem after another. The minimum wait time for customer service seems to be 30 minutes. Once I do get through I usually get the standard answer that there is no problem on their end, it must be with my scripts. When I try to explain I have made no changes to these scripts and how it was working fine the day before, they tell me they can not help with my scripts. When I ask for a supervisor, they take my name and number and never call back.
I have over 100 websites on their servers and am now looking for a co-location close to me to make a move off their server.
Host Excellence offers multiple plans. I had the top plan, which includes "unlimited" disk space. They begin by allocating 20gb of space, then allocate more disk space as your needs increase. Approximately a year ago when I had used 19gb, I requested they increase my disk space to 40gb. They did. Since then, I have added less than 5gb.
When I was unable to upload a 36byte file, I contacted them. They said the disk drive is full and they'd fix it. It happened again the following week. When I reported it, they told me I'm using more than my fair share of resources and have to delete between 5 and 10 gb from their server. I explained that I have the "unlimited" disk space plan. They just kept repeating that I'm using more than my fair share of resources. So, then they wrote a ticket to me, telling me that "per our conversation" I need to delete between 10-15gb.
I told them that my fair share of "unlimited" was at least 40gb, since that's what they set me up with. They just kept repeating that I'm using more than my fair share of resources. When I go to the Home Page of my account manager, it says I am using 22,306.85/99999MB, which indicates I am using 22gb of 99gb. In Web Shell, it says I am using 23% of my allotted disk space.
Their terms of service do say you may not utilize more than your fair share of resources. When I signed up with them, my fair share was deemed to be adequate for my hosting needs, and was verified in emails and telephone correspondence with them. However, my fair share has decreased signficantly because they have apparently oversold their resources.
My plan is "First Class Excellence," which is the top plan they offer as of 2/2/2007. I'm not even using as much disk space as their second lowest plan allows. In their advertisement for the top plan, they stress "Unlimited" Disk Space by putting "Unlimited" in red, which is the only one of the features in the piechart in red. Under "Website Features, it says in red, "UNLIMITED Web Space - No Limits!"
What part of "false advertising" do they not understand?
Host Excellence offered a lot of things that they aren't delivering on. There is no 24/7 Chat Support and they don't answer their phone. When you use their "Ticket" system, they close the tickets as resolved, even though they don't provide answers. They keep referring you to their documentation, even though their documentation is totally inadequate, and if the answer was there you would not have contacted them anyway.
They claim to have their U.S. headquarters in Hopkinsville, TN, but I did some Googling and found that their address (247 Information Hwy. Lane) doesn't exist. I called the Postmaster in Hopkinsville and he confirmed that. He said they often get letters sent to the none existant street, which they return to the senders!
It appears that there are about 3 people working there. The have Russian, or Ukranian, names given; but, they could be Al Queida operatives for all I know. The problem with that is that they are obviously liars, they are untraceable, and they only do business through your credit cards. They also offer ecommerce hosting, so they could suck up a lot of American's credit card info and drain our accounts at some point. I sent in a complaint to the FBI, but I know they won't do anything until hundreds of people get bilked.
Ongoing server problems. Slow speeds. Email problems Tech staff who respod quickly but dont know what they are talking about half of the time. I had to ask 6 times for the paths for zip tax and mysqldump. Each time I was told they did not support these. I knew they did and eventually got a person who gave me the paths.
I have a number of sites with host excellence and I will be moving all of them.
The pricing is great, and the generous helping of static IPs that come included with their accounts is very nice, everyone else wants to nick you for those. The shared SSL is better than most. Lots of good features.
Having said that... I have all the email quotas for my HostEx sites disappear about once every two weeks. Myself (and my clients) will wake up and discover their email doesn't work. VERY BAD thing for your clients to experience regularly. HostEx fixes them when you open a ticket, but they refuse to address the cause, they won't even admit there is a problem - They've taken to fixing it and closing the ticket saying that there wasn't a problem to begin with. After about a half-dozen of these incidents, it dawns on you why you're getting a good deal on the price. The support is outsourced, cover-your-b**t quality.
You get what you pay for, so know what you're looking for: If you don't care critically about reliablity and serverload, then HostEx is a very excellent deal with lots of cool stuff. If you do care about those things, you'll never be satistfied and should look elsewhere.
I'm hosting several databasedriven-websites. Since day one there was server-underperformance. Most of the time the server was low and non-responsive or completely death. There were login and logout problems with the database-driven websites and Control Panel, spaminvasion, etc. Nothing has changed!
It doesn’t matter if you have subscribed for their “Express, Business, Professional or First Class Plan”, the server is almost completely down or extremely slow (what do they use, a dial up modem or smoke signals...?).
Service is bad too. I’ve complained a hundred times. every time I hear the same answers: “Server is ok. We’ll send your ticket to admins, blabla, etc.” Every time I hear the same excuses, but nothing has changed. But worst of all they treat customers like morons: do they really think customers are stupid? In fact they lack business integrity, you cannot rely on them, you cannot trust them, always the same excuses...... I've been fooled.
Never seen such bad hosting. You really get nothing of value for your money. It’s simply worthless! They even don’t deserve the name Host Excellence and a rating; they deserve a minus 10.
Let me tell you: if they don’t change their policy and attitude towards customers and keep treating them like morons I’m really not surprised that next year they don’t exist anymore. I will never recommend this host to others!
Anyone here who can deliver me the names of the managementteam and (email)adress of Hostexcellence?
Price is okay but overall service is pretty bad. My site is sometimes fast but for no reason at all the speed will start to slow down at all times of the day. It's never gone down, but when it takes 40 seconds to load the shopping cart it might as well be down because NO ONE is going to wait that long to purchase something.
Every time I create a Trouble Ticket for Support to look in to the slow speed issue I receive back a very apologetic note that the issues has been resolved but soon after, sometimes even hours, the Site starts creeping again.
I've now given up on them even fixing the issue and that's when I found this place.
I'd say that "Host OKness" would be a better name for this company. In my experience with them everything but the price has been OK--the price is the one thing that is excellent. All I use it for is email and hosting a few scripts that I want to be able to access from wherever I might be. Server response is sometimes slow but not so slow that it's a big problem. The cheezy check-before-send authentication that they use for SMTP is a pain in the neck, but all the cheap hosts that I've tried use it.
I've opened a few trouble tickets and have gotten reasonable helpful and coherent answers within about a day.
If you're technically savvy and there's not a lot of money at stake, this host is worth considering.
I have been using Host Excellence for almost a year. I host 3 sites with them. I have only been down one time on one site and it was remedied immediately when i contacted tech support. I have hosted at 3 other places as well as having worked tech support for another company. There are some as good, but in my humble opinion non that are a lot better.
The first time I connected to their FTP site to upload my files to my new web server I WAS ATTACKED BY 7 DIFFERENT TROJANS. Thank god I run a security suite that detects trojan attacks and intercepts them. I just hope that none got thru. And, THANK GOD I didn't transfer my domains over to them before I figured this out, because none of my customers ever visited their servers, meaning that none of my unwitting customers was infected due to my poor judgment in selecting this joke of a hosting provider.
It is for this reason and this reason alone that I immediately terminated my account, and it is also why I'm giving them the lowest possible rating across the board. A webhost that doesn't scan its machines for viruses is simply inexcusable, and shows such a poor level of professionalism I have no idea how they even got into the business in the first place, to be honest.
To their credit, they have a 30-day money back guarantee -- unfortunately the sales lady copped a little bit of an attitude with me when I answered her query as to why I was not satisfied. Seems she's either upset at the techs at the company for being such idiots or she actually thought I didn't have a good reason to leave. In either case, seems like they don't have much of a handle on things there. Regardless, they actually did refund my money. Still not enough to raise the rating though.
Serverperformance wasn't the best, and often very slow. Availabiltiy was unsatisfactory. My domains often didn't respond, many times it was not possible to log into the control panel or webmailer either. Worst was that sometimes my domain got routed to a totaly different website than my own. But the worst is the customer service. Sometimes they needed over two weeks to answer a high priority trouble ticket. The answer usualy was not relevant to my problem. I finaly canceled requesting a refund (in August 2005), which I couldn't check since I am out of the country and didn't get my credit card statements until now. No refund of course. I called them, they told me to open a ticket (they never can solve something over the phone) and I they answered my question regarding the missing refund with "your account got suspended because you no longer wish to host with and you received a refund" and they closed the ticket. I reopend it asking again about the refund and they answered they now refunded the current month (january) and the ones I already paied in advance (till march) and closed the ticket. I reopened it again asking to refund the money back to the date they suspended my account (in August) and for 2 days I didn't get a response. According to their own invoice system, the refund for January-March never happened either. Probably won't see that money ever again.
The staff also often messes up the Hostexcellence Terms with the terms of their other company IXWebhosting.
Reasonable pricing but you don't get what you paid for. My website was down all the time. I complained to support and every time they said it was a one-time thing but it kept happening over and over again. I host a small craft store and I don't have that many visitors, but even with that, a few customers have told me that they have lots of problems getting the pages to load. It was so embarrassing and frustrating!!
Where to begin. Our sites had less than 80% uptime. Multiple calls to tech support over a period of 2 months led nowhere. If the sites were up, they quite often had over one minute response time from server to browser...totally unacceptable. Customer support was always readily available and friendly, but if they don't fix anything then what good is it.
They are pretty bad. My website was down all the time. Customer support did not react to my emails. Trouble Tickets sometimes got answerd weeks later (They guarantee 1 hour response time). Not one issue was resolved. My domain even got redirected to other peoples website a couple times, which also happend to my email.
They are reachable via internet live chat which is nice. They are generally nice. But my site is always down. When you finally reach them via phone they are friendly but they act like something is wrong with your computer and not their servers....and I think like most of their customers are realizing...It can't always be our computers.
Host Excellence has a great package and good service. But it also has major SPAM problems. My email is regularly blacklisted by just about every major provider in the US and AOL appears to have a permanent grudge. Host Excellence does not appear to be making any sincere effort to put the squelch on the major spammers, so the problems will likely continue in perpetuity.
You can't beat the value for every other part of the package, but if you need your emails to get delivered, you need to pick another provider. I never had any email issues with any other provider I've used, so I have to believe that Host Excellence is making big dollars from hosting spammers *or* the admins are incompetent. Either way I need to find a new provider now.
Have been with them now for 2 months. Started up a small e-commerce site and had problems from day one! Found out after setting up the site that they have a HUGE spammer problem which results in their mail servers being black-listed by several large ISP (Verizon, AOL, SBCGlobal). Their admins are untouchable, so you can't EVER talk to someone who's actually working on the problems. They could all be high schoolers for all we know. Even tech support doesn't have a support number...they Instant Message them! 8-(
SQL problems are rampant. Website goes down so much that I actually have a "Website Under Construction" html file in my root that I can put up when the SQL goes down.
Their site states they have been "Independently reviewed #1 Web hosting", but from who? The link at the top advertising this just re-loads their webpage!
I would stay away...I've had more problems with these people than from ALL the others combined!
