Review about Host Excellence - completed on 2007-02-10 - by Victoria Basqe
General Impression Host Excellence has been in business for several years. With a top-of-the-line data center and customer support office, Host Excellence has continuously improved its performance and outlook. While recently re-launcing their web site with more aggressive hosting plans and prices, Host Excellence has really started putting the heat on the competition. Their very large and generous selection of hosting plans, coupled with superb customer service and network reliability, have resulted in extremely quick loading websites and high customer satisfaction. During our review, we had very few complaints and many great observations and feel obligated to rank Host Excellence great on web-hosting-top.com.
Price & Cost Effectiveness If you're looking for great deals on web hosting services, look no further. Being a very customer-oriented business, Host Excellence has a large selection of services and payment options. When combined to fit your specific demands, they provide the most bang for your buck. Savings start the moment you sign up. With options to pay in advance, setup fees are waived and free months can be tacked on for no additional charge!
Reliability During our extensive hosting experience with HostExcellence, we have had hardly any server outages. It would be a lie to say they have never been down - everyone of the hosting companies we reviewed have had downtime, on occasion. The question is not IF downtime happens, the question is when it happens - and on that occasion, it is very important to have a hosting company that is capable to quickly resolve any ongoing issues, so your site is back online in no time.
Data Center (toured) As the title indicates, we have personally visited and "examined" Host Excellence's data center. The importance of doing that is obvious. You might have heard of the story that 90% or more of the web hosts are just resellers, and another 9% are just co-locating in some other data center, without direct physical access to the machines. That's not a story, that's plain reality.
This is why we have personally verified that Host Excellence's data center facility actually exists by paying them a visit at their facility. You can find the data center's address on their website. Host Excellence currently has two redundant (SONET) fiber-optic connections. They have built their own fiber-optic loop, which means that they do not depend on any telephone companies for the last mile, or the local loop. This automatically gives them a higher reliability than any other "rented loop" hosting company, or co-location facility.
Host Excellence has multiple DS3 and OC3 connections to various Tier1 network providers such as MCI, Qwest and ATT. The connections are delivered by Bell South and KDL over two separate fiber-optic loops. At the time we visited their facility, they were busy getting a new OC-3 line (155mbit / s) from ATT for their future expansion.
Customer Service The support they provide can be rated as excellent, especially their LIVE CHAT feature. What's nice about their support is that you have 24 / 7 support via an online ticketing system as well as real 24 / 7 live chat tech support and sales service. While we only encountered a few small problems, their support staff was quick to provide us with answers and make any necessary adjustments. We commend them for their prompt and reliable support!
Control Panel HostExcellence has developed a unique control panel for their hosting sites. Frankly, their control panel software is one of the best available in the market. They use HSphere (www.hsphere.com) as their hosting control panel with the big advantage being that they offer both, LINUX and WINDOWS based accounts.
Through testing, the control panel has been very fast and very reliable. It is very user-friendly and easy to operate. Included is an extensive customer guide which can quickly guide even the most reluctant novice.
Contact Information and Support
Phone 24/7 sales and support available.
+1-270-707-2058 International
+1-800-792-1197
Attention: This information can be already old, please contact us in case this information is wrong and should be updated! Alternatively, in case you represent this company, create your self a free account to manage hosting plans and much more!
Web services details about Host Excellence [provided by paid service from Alexa Web Information Service]
"Well I bought an account with them and it was set-up within 2 hours, I picked starter plan which was just Ł2.00 as I could not see a plan that they offer for cheaper. I was having problems making a site to go on the domain that I got with the account, so I posted a help ticket and they help me make a site for free! they made it for me and said I did not have to pay. no web hosting company would do that for free I thought but they did. And their customer support very good I can post a ticketed or I can use live help to talk to them and the problem are sorted out and I have my own unique tech who helps me. Just wanted to tell people about this site as they made a site for me"
from Tim Leightley (leightley347[at)btinternet[dot.com)
"Over the six years of my Internet presence I have had painful experiences with different hosting companies, thus changing a provider more than once. Now I am on my fourth host and it seems like this time it is for long. First of all, because Host Excellence is oriented towards Web Masters who intend to run professional sites and secondly, since I have an interactive forum on my site, I'm logging on at least daily basis and more likely during peak hours. I was impressed with the extremely robust server environment Host Excellence offers. I feel like I'm strongly backed and have complete peace of mind, never having to worry about downtime issues with my websites."
Mayra jimenez ( mayrajimenez at yahoo dot com ) at: 2008-03-22 Time Hosted: 6 mo. to 1 year General Rating note:
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I also own an e-commerce site, as I see some customers that have reviewed this server before. In the short time we've been with them, the server has crashed at least once a week, sometimes for several hours. We constantly have clients flooding our customer service email asking what is wrong.
When we call host excellence, they always have an excuse for the server crashing. "Somebody is abusing their site", "we're moving our server to ohio", etc, etc. We've lost countless sales due to their unreliability.
I DON'T SEE HOW THEY CAN CLAIM, LEGALLY, THAT THEY HAVE 100% CUSTOMER SATISFACTION. SEEMS LIKE A LOAD OF CRAP TO US.
We are looking to switch servers immediately, and to get a refund of the time we've been with them.
Do not pay to have your site hosted by them, it is not worth the pain.
Bob Smith ( advertisers2000 at yahoo dot com ) at: 2008-03-12 Time Hosted: over 3 years General Rating note:
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93 out of 99Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful! Did you find this review helpful?
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I´m writing this review as I wait for my e-commerce site to come back up and for Host Excellence to give support to the other 33 callers before me on their phone support. Live Chat is down as well.
If you have an e-commerce site and expect at least 99% uptime, do not host with Host Excellence.
We open an average of 3-5 tickets a week. Their web and database servers crash constantly, including their own support site. Live Chat support is often unanswered and waiting times for phone support are often longer than 40 minutes.
In January 08, a couple of tables from our database were suspiciously lost. When we asked for a security or login log of some sort, Host Excellence could not provide any. To this day we don´t know what happened or how those tables got deleted.
Even more upsetting is the fact that when you visit their site, right on the home page they state 100% Customers Satisfied. From my experience and many others, this is just false.
We are currently looking to move our site to a different provider. I strongly recommend you look somewhere else if you want to have your site live and running. I´d rather spend my time running my business than having to deal with Host Excellence´s unprofessionalism day in, day out.
Matt ( mattfuehrer at mailshack dot com ) at: 2008-02-20 Time Hosted: over 3 years General Rating note:
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60 out of 64Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful! Did you find this review helpful?
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Hosting of my business website has been stable and problem free over the past 3+ years.
Customer service via phone and help desk ticket has been fast and easy- they have always been able to solve any issues right away.
Email on the other hand is another story. spam, spam, spam. They do not use any spam filters at all (because on a shared server if they filter the email then it'll affect other hosted users) so I get ALL of the spam that comes my way. Also, blacklisting has been a real big problem. This is not all Host Excellence's fault, but as a hosting service they DO have more power than me to make email a better experience. Also, Horde, the web mail client sucks, sucks, sucks- it is there for emergencies only.
Jesse ( jesse_worley at yahoo dot com ) at: 2007-07-03 Time Hosted: 1 to 2 years General Rating note:
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71 out of 81Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful! Did you find this review helpful?
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If you sign up with HostExcellence you will need a lawyer on retainer. They will lose your data, as they did to so many people in June 2007, and then lie about why it happened, using an excuse that is simply not possible in a data center as well managed as they claim theirs is. How is it that a power surge can even happen in "one of the most robust and well-managed data centers in the world?" It's a literal impossibility unless they aren't employing even the most basic power hardware available. Either way, they cannot be trusted. Their administrators are largely incompetent and WILL lose your data, change permissions on your files, or suspend you without investigating your account. Use another host, these clowns aren't worth the money they steal.
Elvis ( qvkrrlyd at trashmail dot net ) at: 2007-01-27 Time Hosted: 1 to 2 years General Rating note:
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83 out of 179Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful! Did you find this review helpful?
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These are the facts:
I signed up about a year ago and was on the original "Linux basic" plan (or something like that), which gave me 50mb web space for $2.95/month. Then around December some time I was looking on their home page and saw that that for the same price the new plan now called “Linux express.” I contacted the “live chat” and asked them if I can change plans, a seemingly simple request. After a convoluted conversation I finally got a response basically saying it would cost me the equivalent of almost two-years of what it would otherwise cost to sign up for a new plan! When I inquired how they determined this I was met with no response. I kept prompting but still no response. So I closed that window and opened a new one to ask the same question.
This time the “agent” once again gave me a convoluted explanation of how they determine the outrageous figure but he assured me that the refund of the existing plan would equal the cost of “starting” the new plan so the actual charges would be zero. At the end of the conversation I simply asked, would I be charged anything? He said no. So I was like, great, lets do it.
A few days later I checked my credit card bill and what d'ya know, the clowns did charge me. Fortunately I had kept a transcript of the conversation in which the “agent” clearly says I won't be charged. So I opened up a helpdesk ticket, and attached the transcript of the conversation explaining basically what happened and politely requested they refund me immediately.
Well, to save a month's worth of going back and forth with what seemed to be a robot at the other end of the keyboard this is what happened:
1.Their first response was that the “agent” told me there would be a charge
2.I pointed out the plain English wording there wouldn't be a charge
3.They admitted the “agent” was mistaken but said they don't always have the right information and I should have logged a helpdesk ticket to get a true answer
4.I said fine, but I still want a refund
5.They responded saying that the agent had been sent on further training and that they were very sorry for the problems.
6.As before, I was like, okay, but I still deserve a refund
7.They responded by saying they are very sorry for the inconvenience.
8.Again, I want my refund
9.They said that the only way I would get a refund was to have my hosting account canceled!
Outrageous. So they screwed up and instead of just refunding me a paltry US$45, they would have to cancel my account. What choice did I have but to cancel. I'm now with a different provider and am exceptionally happy with their service. I don't live in the USA but I am shocked by this service. Notonly did they lose a customer for life but I will take any chance I get to dissuade others from using their service.
That's it.
Mark Smith ( webmaster(at)aboututila(dot)com ) at: 2006-11-19 Time Hosted: 2 to 3 years General Rating note:
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Prices are expensive when compared to others (BlueHost for example offers more bandwidth and more disk capacity for almost half the price).
Technical Support is weak, "Instant Chat" staff are geared towards sales, not technical suppport. There is no on-line "Knowledge Base" or Customer Forums.
Control Panel has limited functionality and features (and until recently pretty slow), but probably suitable for novice users.
Uptime is excellent.
Overall - suitable for novice users with un-complicated web sites where ease of use is more important than price.
Ramesh ( ramesh(at)yahoo dot com ) at: 2006-06-16 Time Hosted: 6 mo. to 1 year General Rating note:
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364 out of 506Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful! Did you find this review helpful?
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I have hosting my website and the customer was excellent. The technical support from india is great and they should be rewareded :)
Oliver Mueller ( muell039842(at)web dot de ) at: 2006-01-12 Time Hosted: 3 to 6 months General Rating note:
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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.
Stay away from this place!
Ken ( kennethpschnell at adelphia dot net ) at: 2005-10-29 Time Hosted: under 1 month. General Rating note:
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I have had them for about 3 weeks now - nd so far they have been down twice - so no website and no development - the down time has lasted for more than 4 hours - this is not a good impression of 99% Uptime because I think I have just experienced the 1% down time and I have not been with them for more than 3 weeks.
Sam ( samk at digitk dot cn ) at: 2005-08-15 Time Hosted: 3 to 6 months General Rating note:
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161 out of 297Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful! Did you find this review helpful?
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Generally a good hosting company, all features are working as advertise.
Thier mail server is sometimes unstable, especially they use Horde mail which is awfull, full of bugs, slow and with limited functionality.
Not recomended for those with extensive mail traffic, or if you need
to check your mail via Web and not Pop3.
Jan Hauser ( JHauser at qwest(dot)net ) at: 2005-07-26 Time Hosted: 3 to 6 months General Rating note:
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184 out of 329Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful! Did you find this review helpful?
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Host Excellence offers a lot for the price -- but at a price. Customer service is varied - some reps are very helpful; others flat refuse to do anything to help. Reliability has not been good - web host has been offline several times; Database service has stopped (crashed) & for the first 12 requests, customer service refused to do anything about it. Email service is unreliable -- 20-40% of emails passing through their servers are delayed, lost, or blocked.
