HostPapa Web Hosting Review by Bonnie Plumb
Bonnie Plumb's Rating of HostPapa: Poor
Bonnie Plumb wrote us a negative review of HostPapa.
Bonnie's Review was posted on: 11/05/2011
Here is her HostPapa Review:
I have a long list of good reasons why not to use HostPapa. My first major problem with them was that a couple weeks after I started being hosted by them I was told by one of their tech guys that I was not allowed to host my site on their server. What a rude awakening considering my page is only a PHP web based game that using only a tiny bit of system resources. The people they hire there thought I was running a game server for first person shooter games even when I specifically told them that I was running a small PHP game I wrote myself and there was nothing in their EULA that disallowed me from running my site. At least their head admin has half a brain and said everything was fine, but from there on every time I contacted support I was harassed about running a PHP program on their server which was very annoying. If you are planning on using PHP or having your site being anything about games at all, HostPapa is not for you.
My second problem was the page not working, being very slow, or outright completely down. The site seemed to go down for about an hour or two every other week. Then came a couple BIG downs. In one case last month my site was down for most of a day and night. That is 24 hours. If you like your site to have more uptime than a free host then HostPapa is not for you.
Yes, then came the third problem I had with them. First, they force you to commit to one year because they know you will leave the moment you notice their crappy service, but they do advertise a 99.9% guarantee on the front page of their site. So, I wrote to their forum asking politely asking for the reminder of my year as a refund. I was rudely told that 99.9% does not mean my site. Yea, they don't mean your site is up 99.9% of the time even though they imply this. They only consider something down when the server you are on goes completely and utterly dead. To make things worse, unlike most other providers they don't have any server status anywhere and they will not respond to you if you ask. So, there is no way for me to tell if he was telling the truth or not. If you want a web host provider that does not cheat and lie HostPapa is not for you.
If it was not bad enough that HostPapa bailed out on their 99.9% uptime guarantee they deleted my post asking them about it on their forum without notice. Then, when I made another post politely asking why, they deleted that post; once again, without giving any reason to me. If you want a host you can trust and listens HostPapa is not right for you.
Please, do yourself a huge favour. If you are ever looking for a web host provider avoid HostPapa like the plague. Also, make sure you spend several; hours checking up on a host and don't take their own forums seriously unless you see bad things about them. If there is nothing bad written about them on their own forum, chances are, they are deleting all the bad stuff. And make sure to check neutral places like this, webhostingtalk.com, where people rate their own host. I have done all this now and found a short list of very good host.
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