I “inherited” a hosting account with Greengeeks via my business partner. Our sites used to be hosted with them, but we’re currently moving away from them, because, to be blunt, they are awful in so many ways.

Robert Lee had this to say, which pretty much sums up how I feel about them :

“Poor customer service. Slow Servers. DDoS Attacks. Customer Support SUCKS” – Robert Lee @ trustpilot.com

The first issue I became aware of was Greengeeks staff complaining about storage space used on one of our projects. It turns out that the “unlimited storage”, well is actually a lie, they don’t really offer unlimited storage. My business partner said that he managed to talk them into letting us use the storage and the site remaining. But he now tells me they’ve been complaining to him again (recently) – this is the last straw for him, he’s now moving everything off Greengeeks servers, and WE WONT BE RENEWING our contract with them.

The second issue was embarrassing for us. We’d recommended Greengeeks as a web host to a customer who we developed a website for. We installed the site on the customer’s hosting package @ Greengeeks. The problem was that the customer was repeatedly unable to access their new site, which looked bad on us after having recommended them. Greengeeks attempted to blame the customer, when ultimately the lack of accessibility was entirely Greengeek’s fault (not ours or the customer’s). The customer obviously cancelled their subscription with Greengeeks, and we never received our referral commission from Greengeeks.

The third issue, which has been ongoing with Greengeeks, is the SLOW response to sites hosted with them. Speed is important for web page loads – Google ranks partly based on the speed a page loads. So slow pages get punished by Google. Greengeeks we assume are sharing physical server hardware with as many people as they possibly can, so this means potentially slow page loads with them. ADD to this that Greengeeks continually pester their clients to upgrade to a more expensive package, so presumably slow pageloads on their “ordinary” hosting means a lot of people will just cough up the cash for a more expensive package.

And the fourth, and last issue, which broke the camel’s back as far as I’m concerned, was their shutting down of our commercial site DonCharisma.com because we’d come under attack by hackers with a DOS (Denial Of Service) attack. We’d done nothing wrong. Greengeeks presumably are a professional company who are supposed to be helping those who host websites with them. Also presumably they should have technical capability to deal with attacks from hackers, and the power to resolve these type of issues. Well seemingly not, they told us essentially, they wouldn’t help, then proceeded to shut down our hosting account and wouldn’t re-instate it until until we moved our under attack site elsewhere … Basically they wiped their hands of any responsibility, and forced us to move …

Well, we did move, and we’ve been vibrantly happy ever since. A few months ago we moved DonCharisma.com to DigitalOcean, and haven’t looked back since, it’s a FAR SUPERIOR solution. I may post more about DigitalOcean, and my experiences with them at a later date. If you’re considering signing up with digital ocean, please use our referral code (just click on the Digital Ocean logo below) – helps us a little with costs 🙂 … and you get a free $10 worth of credit for nothing, win-win.

So a cautionary tale, of why not to sign up for a hosting package with Greengeeks.

Lastly, what some others have been saying about Greengeeks :

“Stay Away from Green Geeks Hosting” – drupal.org forums

“I’ve had enough..” “Great idea, awful people to deal with” “Poor customer service. Slow Servers. DDoS Attacks. Customer Support SUCKS” – Trustpilot.com

“Awful and Blatantly Rude customer support.” – Tu Taplin

“GreenGeeks Cheated Me” – hostingadvice.com

“Refused refund for services not received” – complaintsboard.com

“Do yourself a favor and use a different company.” “While working with GreenGeeks I did not feel like they cared that I was a costumer, just that I gave them money” “Signing up with this company for hosting service was the biggest mistake I ever made.”  – yelp.co.uk

So, my business partner and I are not the only ones who’ve been treated badly by Greengeeks … Our advice – DigitalOcean or one of the WordPress recommended hosts like BlueHost or DreamHost …

Cheers

Don Charisma

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Unless otherwise stated everything here is (c) DonCharisma.org, all rights are reserved.
Digital Ocean logo is (c) Digital Ocean, thanks to them for making available.
Dollar graphic CC0 and courtesy Pixabay.com

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Comments

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