Nov

When Good Web Hosts Go Bad - HostGator and 23:42

Filed Under (Tips) by admin on 19-11-2008

There goes 23 minutes and 42 seconds of my life.

This morning I had a rude awakening. I was writing an article about some twitter do’s and don’ts and had just finished editing it.

So of course I go to login to TaggZilla and schedule the blog post in my WordPress. When I go to the page it gives me the nasty greeting “account suspended”.

“So what the hell happened?” I asked myself. I’m looking at my financial statement and I see I paid the bill just two weeks ago.

So I login to the billing section of my Host Gator account and it says it zero dollars due. Now I’m really confused and getting frustrated because I have to waste time calling in.

So I go ahead and call HostGator and get the next piece of good news…it’s a nine minute wait to talk to a customer service rep.

After holding I talk with Mike who informs me it’s not my fault.

Apparently their billing system isn’t working. So even though I was seeing zero dollars due there was actually an invoice past-due.

So I ended up getting it paid and the account turned back on.

I only had to sit on hold and talk to them for 23 minutes and 42 seconds. Now I can get mad but I like to have a positive self talk.

So I asked myself how I could reframe the situation.

One thing Mike did tell me is that they’re migrating to their own in-house billing system which they had custom-built. So they have been using a third-party billing system and I don’t why it just broke now but apparently it did.

He says everything should be back to normal next month and no service outages but to make sure and check closely.

So the only silver lining I see is Host Gator having their own in-house billing system which should be more efficient and avoid any future pains and waste of time.

During the 30 day challenge a free and a one dollar HostGator trial was offered. Maybe this is what caused problems because Mike told me there was an absolute mass of web hosting accounts which were getting it for free because of the billing system snafu.

So they had an extremely high call volume due to having to shut all these accounts down and I’m sure people wanting to get their sites back.

This is one of those instances where it was actually believable when the recorded message said “due to experiencing extremely high call volume your hold time is 9 minutes”.

So I got it taken care of and hopefully next month everything will be smooth and without any website hosting issues. Did you get tangled up in this HostGator situation?

Leave your comment because I’ll be interested to see if I’m the only one who suffered this fate or if they really did have a billing issue.

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