Does HostGator sitll hijack error pages?

It's been years and years since i've used HostGator. The only thing i hated about them was them hijacking all my error pages with their ads and crap. We could override them with a custom .htaccess, but it was still annoying.

Does anyone know if they still do that?

I'm tried of hosting my sites with smaller companies, and want to try a large company, such as HostGator, Godaddy, Etc.

The only replies i need are related to my answer, please keep any other opinions and thoughts elsewhere.

thanks

 

I am not certain about the error pages issue. I never had that when i was with them, though I had a reseller account which may have been different to what you had.

While hostgator is a solid host, and I found their support, and live support to be fantastic. But that said, in the end I had to leave hostgator due to the pages continuously loading too slowly. Their servers are insanely overloaded as they fill them full of "unlimited" accounts.

I recommend avoiding any company at all that offers unlimited, go for companies that guarantee you a fixed amount of resources, and you will have a better result.

 

Most if not all the unlimited hosts I am pretty sure do that...

 

Hostgator still hijack your error pages, nothing changed with their error pages policy
Agree with matt_62 you must go with limited guaranteed resources instead of unlimited resources and crapy ads and speed

 

I personally didn't experience any issues with hijacking the error pages. WebhostingWatch has made the following company analysis by contacting them via live chat, phone and email.The results are the following:

Support:

There is no menu at the beginning of the call, though it can be still understood how long you have to wait until the suport answers. Here are some interesting cases: 2 operators not knowing the answers asked us to wait a little and went some other place to get a consult, another operator (probably a newbie) apart from the answer, gave a lot of unnecessary information.

Live chat

The connection to the operator is very slow - about 10 minutes. The chat software is not perfect, it stops working sometimes. The answers are not worth the time spent waiting for the connection, as they are template made and are answered with long pauses during the chat. The competence is by far not the best, neither is the politeness. Once we talked to a very incompetent operator, he lacked attention, answered slowly, finally suggested us to email another department and to get an answer from them within 24 hours. Though, the next day, there was already another operator which answered faster and providing more details.

Email
The Email Support left a better impression - 7 letters out of 10 were answered. All the answers show attention to details, are informative and correct.
Call Center
It takes some time until they connect you to an operator. The operators are all native, can answer all the questions giving clear instructions. They speak in a fast tempo, but the speech is clear.

The average support wait times can be seen on the picture below:

 

Not only do they hijack the error pages, last I heard, they also put ads in cPanel, so you're bombarded with ads every time you log in.

 

Thanks for sharing such useful info, the OP.

 

Yes, they still do it - I have an account with them and have just checked this for you.

If you want a big company that does not do this, you could try Bluehost - I have a hosting account with them, too and they don't do what Hostgator does.

 

wow sounds so unethical for sure......

 

Though, Bluehost is remarkable for being recommended for wordpress blogs by WordPress company itself and has 8 years of experience on the web hosting market, it has some disavtages as a hosting provider:

1) Low security against hacking (PHP settings error) (complaint at www.webhostingreviews.com)
2) Hosting may cancel subscriber's account without prior notice for storing archived files (ToS)
3) Doesn't provide backup; not responsible for data loss ( written in their ToS)

Speaking about the company Tos, we should say that Bluehost claims that they don’t put any restrictions on the quantity of resources that the customers hosting-account uses and that they are doing their best to prevent the clients from feeling limited in any way. But its important that also, the clients respect the hosting’s rules. Of course the company understands that every site has its periods of rise and fall, that has influence on the amount of used traffic and disk space. In this cases the customers wouldn’t be asked to pay any additional fees. Bold statement, isn’t it?
Further, you’ll be able to see warnings about the fact that a shared-hosting is used in common with many other users, that's why it should be used in a way that wouldn't negatively influence the activity of other users’ accounts. In practice this means that as soon as the customer exceeds the frames of the conditional unlimited hosting (limits known only by the provider), he will get a notification, and if ignored could get the account suspended.
Are the customer’s rights prejudiced? No. Is the client cheated, when the hosting is called “unlimited”? Again, no.
The client is told from the very beginning that is case his site grows, his account will be transferred to another server (and he wouldn’t be suggested to purchase a VPS, how it usually happens), but this will happen only if the site grows to fast (because the high disk space or traffic usage).

According to the investigation, their uptime rate is only 97.78%, you can see the details on the picture below -

 

The only thing is try another reliable web host or pay more and get a VPS. I guess they do not do it with VPS or dedicated server plans.

 

its the only host i know of that does it.

so i've been testing their hosting for a few days now, and the pages load just as slow, if not slower than my older host.

So i'll just cancel my hostgator account after this first month. i only paid 1 cent using the coupon, so its cool, but not worth it.

im not interested in any vps right now.

 

Not actually, The default error pages can be customized easily.

 

Hi, Which old hosting you are using. I am also looking for some powerful server better than HG? However HG is somewhat still satisfactory for me but i need something much better (on shared).

 

I'm quite sure HG still does this, but only if you don't set custom error pages (I think, someone correct me if I'm wrong). I believe if you setup the error pages manually then no ads are shown.

 

That is correct. You can use custom error pages with them to eliminate the ads. The ads within the control panel, however, cannot be eliminated.

 

Yes they do
they show their own custom error pages on users website with ads on it

 

What I said, They show those annoying ads but that can be easily customized. they show: http://hostgator.com/404
Sorry, if i created confusion.