In some truly bizarre circumstances, my previous wordpress host – hostgator, suspended my account a few days after paying for another 3 years.

I suspect it had something to do with their “support” directing me to turn off automatic billing, actually cancelling the account instead of only turning off billing.

While frustrating – it would have been ok…. but the response by Hostgator support was beyond poor.

1) They claimed to have emailed me about the cancellation. Since i use a hotmail account, i can’t see the SMTP logs or spam logs to verify if they actually did or not…. but i can say that all their billing emails reach that account fine – but none of the messages they claim to have sent from support have ever arrived… and their response to this was “check your spam folder”… excellent point… never thought of that. Just insultingly basic.

2) They were unable to give me a reason for the cancellation… as above, i suspect it was an unintended consequence of turning off auto-renew… but surely they would be able to see that.

3) They were seemingly happy to cancel my account, but not refund my money… while repeatedly claiming they have refunded my money – and to “check with my bank” – whatever the fuck that means…. while I’m looking at my online banking and can see the money going out – but no money coming back in.

4) They have emailed me a site backup – which will arrive in 24 hours (and never did)… they will also get someone from their accounts team to email me within 24 hours about the refund (never happened). I managed to eventually get a cpanel backup (rather than the preference of a wordpress export) out of them via the online chat, which, fortunately only had corruption for stuff i didn’t need anymore…. and for the refund i have taken the approach of lodging a dispute via my bank – as its pretty clear to me that its intentional theft on hostgators part.

Anyhoo – long story short – i would not recommend hostgator.