HostGator affiliate Program / Hosting, Bad Experience! Help is Welcome

Dear Readers

We’re writing this message because of the very bad experience we have with Hostgator hosting company and we want to warn you all for this company. We spent more than €1000 on running an advertising campaign for this company and transferring our domains to this company. We got about 120 signups in this period with their affiliate program. Which should have resulted in a payment of 120 * $125 = $15000. In the end we received nothing! Please take some time to read this story and draw your own conclusions.

In October I decided to host several domains at the Hostgator. I read many good reviews and decided that Hostgator would be a trustworthy company to host my domains.

At that moment they offered $50 tot $150 per sign up in their affiliate program. Since I’m an experienced advertiser in Google Adwords and Overture, I decided to set up a campaign for this company. 15 October 2005 I started up an advertising campaign for the Hostgator Hosting services. From the very beginning my campaign was very successful.

Because the campaign was costing me quite a lot of money, more than €500 in the 2 months. I asked in October if the campaign I hosted at downdiscount.com was ok. They confirmed the campaign was ok. They also warned me that some appeared to be fraud. So I asked them how many are fraud to see if my campaign was ok. They told me at 20 October that 1 was a fraud. Till that moment I sent around 20 signups, so I decided to go along with this campaign. If 5% is fraud it’s acceptable for me. To be complete I add our email contact, so you can see for yourself.
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>>> From: "Hostgator Sales Department" <sales@hostgator.com>
>>> To: < >
>>> Sent: Thursday, October 20, 2005 5:24 PM
>>> Subject: [HGSales #DKN-11533-734]: Affiliate Question
>>>
>>>
>>>> Yep that is fine, It was just one so far so no worries, they could have
>>>> called too and verified they were not, we run an audit and email you on
>>>> the 1st too with how many you have.
>>>>
>>>> Anything else I can help with?
>>>> Thanks, Ben
>>>> HostGator.com
>>>>
>>>> HostGator.com/help
>>>> Please check our new knowledge base, it answers 90% of sales and support
>>>> questions!
>>>> HostGator.com/help
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, 20 Oct 2005 10:21:44 -0500, wrote:
>>>>> Hi Ben,
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks for your reply. Good to hear the site is fine.
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm not using email to promote my website. I'm using
>>>>> Google Adwords and just started using Overture to promote the hostgator
>>>>> offer. I hope this is ok.
>>>>>
>>>>> What do you mean by fraud signups? Have you got an idea what kind of
>>>>> percentage this is? So I can decide is the promotional investment is
>>>>> worth
>>>>> the revenue.
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks,
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I ran the campaign and spent more than €500 during this time to advertise the campaign in Google Adwords. I got about 3 sign-ups per day. I was happy with the hosting and transferred some other domains to HostGator as well. For the transfer of the websites and the conversion of the database I paid a Dutch company. €491,28.

Till I noticed all of my websites hosted at hostgator were offline! Due to this reason I lost valuable data and money. My websites have been offline for this reason for 2 days. I even paid my bills for the hosting! I received this message on 25 November 2005. By that time I had more than 120 Sign-ups. Which should have resulted in a value of $125 * 120 = $15000

This was the reply I got.
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All of your affiliate accounts have been deleted today, good luck defrauding another company.........


At the end of the month, we call up every single sign up via phones to check for fraud before paying any commissions.

Thank you for allowing me to work with you!

Sincerely,
Brent

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This sounded very strange to me since I asked in october if my campaign was ok. As I told you I sent about 20 signups by that time and they told me “only one appears to be a fraud”.
I’m very certain I didn’t do anything wrong in promoting HostGator. This is no way of dealing with business contacts, with people that spend lots of time, energy and Money on your company.

During October and November the advertisements for Hostgator where seen almost 2 million times in Google and they were clicked 4931 + 617 = 5548 times. These people were redirected to our website and about 120 people used the offer. I don't think these figures are very strange.

For two months afterwards I had contact with Hostgator, but without any result. I haven’t received one penny. I got screwed for more than $16.000.

I’m very, very disappointed. I hope my story will help you in making a good choice for a hosting company. Any help or legal advice in this situation is very welcome. We’re a company from the Netherlands, so it’s quite difficult the get into system of the USA.

Thanks for hearing our story. We hope this story will help you in making a good choice.

Yours sincerely,

 

Try using Atnt next time its the one company that will not screw you over guaranteed. Its the largest ISP in the world. Probaly will always be, That is the only company i am going to trust with my site im releasing, Thank you for letting us know this and very sorry about the whole thing with host gator, are you going to take legal action? you should.

 

Meesterweb is going all over the Internet posting the same message in every forum all because we will not pay him for the 100+ fraud sign-ups he sent us with fake domains, phone, and billing information. We are planning legal action against him due to his fraudulent activities, and blackmailing bashings in order to get us to pay him what is not owed. I do believe he lost money with adwords, but that is not our responsibility. We also lost a lot of money from the time the dozen+ hours processing over a 100 fraud sign-ups.


I probably will not be back to respond as I'm having trouble keeping up with all the forums he is bashing us at in an attempt to extort money from us. We pay out over a $140,000 a month to our affiliates and the majority of them have a very load fraud ratio unlike this affiliates 99%+ I believe the reason for all his fraud has to do with him building a web site instructing people step by step with pictures how to sign up with us for a free month, and get around entering billing information. We waited a little over a month before auditing all the sign-ups and once we did we found almost everyone single one of the 100+ to be fraud. There were a couple we cannot say our fraud beyond a doubt, but we have our suspicions and this number would be less than 5 out of the total 120 sent. We have terminated his affiliate account due to the ridiculous amount of fraud, and are not going to pay him $20,000+.

If there is any company out there that pays commission knowingly on fraud sign-ups and does not care please let me know and I will retire to make a living off this.

 

lol. . . interesting way to make a living (or not). . .

 

btw. . Welcome to DP HostGator!

 

Dear readers,

Thank you for the replies. I feel bad that what happened is told in bad way and the conflict seems to get only bigger. I’m not at all willing to do anything bad with this post. I’m just telling what happened to me. I just felt bad and frustrated of all that happened and wanted to tell my story. I prefer to work normally and don’t have these big conflicts. To be more complete and answer some questions I’ll describe some things more clearly and display my thoughts on this matter.

Beginning of October 2005 I was looking for a hosting package for a website. I decided to go for Hostgator. I read many good reviews on Hostgator. After I saw the offer on your website: $50 to $125 per signup. I thought this is interesting: "there is a business opportunity".
I setup a webpage and went advertising for this webpage on Google Adwords.

At that moment Hostgator had an offer for a free month on Hostgator. I decided to advertise with this action of Hostgator. This might be the cause of our conflict. Let's say Hostgator is talking the truth when they say didn’t receive any money from the 120 signups. It might have got something to do with this free month. People could have come in to my website and went to Hostgator, not to take hosting for a full year but just for a month to try it only. That is why I asked if my campaign was ok. They have seen my website and said it was ok. That’s why I trusted it was ok and I went along with the campaign and invested so much money in advertising on google.

Before Hostgator send me that email on the 25th of November. I was really thinking: Wow this is going very, very well. I received a confirmation from Hostgator that my site was ok and thought all was well. They said only 1 is bad from 20. The money was just coming in, I got more than 120 signups in these 2 months and read online in the affiliate part of Hostgator site that this was a value of $15000. I just calculated even if 1 in 20 is bad, this is still a very good score. And I thought I'm really doing a great campaign on Google, having a great website and am making good business for Hostgator too. I have no insight in the leads I sent to hostgator. The only thing I see is numbers and the money I will receive on the Hostgator website.

Then I received the mail. "Good luck defrauding another company" I hope you can understand how this must have felt for me. At that moment I expected a check of several thousands of dollars and this was happening to me! I really felt robbed at that moment. I had just been working very hard for 2 months, investing time and money in making a good campaign and website for Hostgator. And then at once all is gone. My websites are offline (where I paid my bills for), the statistics of signups I brought in are offline, the websites that I transferred were deleted. Without a warning all I built up during 2 months is gone.

For Hostgator I think it must have felt different by then. They saw many signups coming in, which must have felt good for them too, good business. They gave the people an account, also invested time in the new signups. But in the end they told me none of them converted into real customers. For me this is still difficult to believe because of the mail in October where they said only 1 was wrong from the 20, but let’s stop about that. It’s all about trust in this matter because I can’t look in their administration. They must have drawn the wrong conclusion then that I was frauding and probably they were angry at that moment, when they deleted all my accounts and websites.

I’m trying to understand how Hostgator must have felt and have been thinking and why they have reacted this way. I hope you can understand my feelings and conclusions too and understand. The thing that frustrated me the most was that we didn’t get any conversation going. I felt like I got no chance to explain my story to them. My websites were just deleted at once, so I couldn’t save important information and I couldn’t log into the affiliate program anymore, because everything was deleted without a warning. They could have contacted me earlier instead and talk about it. I am a reasonable person and we could have thought together on what might be the reason of the bad conversion.

We had some contact afterwards and we just couldn't get together in any way. They never provided me with a full list of people that signed up through me. I would be willing to check them myself. I felt I can do nothing from the Netherlands. I wanted to be heard and I decided to post my story and feelings about it online and how I think of it. I have no bad intentions with this.

I wish Hostgator good luck in their business. They are obviously a great company because of all the good reviews on their business that are online. They proved in their past they are good at what they do. But I find it also important too that people and businesses listen to your story before they judge and get into action like what happened to me in November. This is a forum where people tell their experiences and this my experience. Maybe I should just accept that the cooperation with hostgator worked out bad for me, because of a bad communication.

I hope this message gives some more clarity to the story and I hope you appreciate this message. I wish you all good luck in your businesses and life!

Greetings

 

Dude, you got busted! And you deserved it! Your a fckn chump!
I have dealt with hostgator on a personal leval and think they are a very honest company. People like you just make it more expensive for the rest of us. Hosting isn't cheap and your actions just make doing business more expensive for honest hard working people. I hope they sue your pants off and you end up living in a card board box.

 

955, who ever you are; STUPID is you. We don't want kids on this forum.

Thats what Meesterweb said, smarty pants.

I have read the whole story. Meesterweb, I feel sorry for you. As for hostgator; you guys could have atleast warned and talked about it before deleting the account.

 

The guy was trying to pull off a scam. Now he's pissed becuase he got cuaght, like criminals in prison who always claim thier innocence, his story has holes bigger than paris hilton. "soniczonex", either your extremly gullible, or have the same moral fiber as the original poster, which, perhaps you are. ( your verbiage/use of english is similiar. IE:3020)

 

Thats getting off topic. 3020 is a name.

 

Coming to think of it, yes meesterweb is a scam.

 

meesterweb, when your account was flagged as fraud and deleted your accounts, you could have called HG and resolve the issue rather than posting in forums(assuming you are speaking truth). Registering in forums just for posting your story surely takes you no where.

 

Dear readers,

I just wanted to let you know. Hostgator and I solved our conflict.
Hostgator paid me out for the very few signups that were good on the condition
that I will have to pay them back any chargebacks they get.
This is fair to me.

Greetings

 

he he he

HostGator proves to be a responsible company again. Paid this scammer the money he earned from the few signups and dealt with him in a very polite manner.

I host all my sites with HostGator. Very good customer service.


he he he, what a cheap little dirty scammer...

I'm so proud to be a member here, where most of us don't even think on attempting something like meesterweb did.

 

Well this is an old thread but I want to comment.
This is not the first time I have heard hostgator doing this with their affiliate program and I know for a fact they do similar business with their hosting. If you have a semi high traffic site with hostgator they will suspend you for resource abuse. I have seen it plenty of times. I even had some friends that were hosted by them sddesign.biz a semi high traffic site, may have around 50-100 people online at any given time. They was first suspended and then terminated. Hostgator says resource abuse but I know better because I use the same exact cms they do and never had any problems.
In their shared hosting they are nothing more then an overseller and if you actually use what they allocate you will get suspended for resource abuse. Actually according to their fine print and resource usage policies it is impossible to use what they allocate.
No one here can tell me they have a site with high traffic on their servers.
I have posted about this elsewhere, Ive not started no topics on it because I am not on no crusade against then because I could care less but I think people should know whats up before they move anything over to them.

 

well, i dont think hostgator is that bad.......

 

Far more people have good experiences with HostGator than bad... including myself. The numbers speak for themselves.

 

Hostgator is an absolute SCAM!!! Do NOT use this company ever!!!!! They promise over $125 commission for referrals and then they never pay you... Avoid them and use a reputable company.....

 

dropship we don't pay scammers and fraudsters if we did we would be out of business.


What is your affiliate user name? I'll be happy to post every non paying / fraud signup you sent us. It's as simple as that......

 

Dropshit, I've used hostgator for around 8 months now and i've referred probably 12 new customers. I've been paid EVERY TIME, on time.