Stay away from HostPapa hosting and its affiliate program

I’m thick of HostPapa.com/HostPapa.ca hosting company and wish to warn other users to stay away of this greedy company.

1. They oversell their servers, sites go down 2 times a week on average. When site go down and you ask for the reason, support is answering in rude words, like “we just caught user who loaded our server too much and he was terminated”. User can leave them any moment with refund.

2. They ban commissions of their affiliates without notice, you can receive such letter any moment:

My name is Maricel Tewari – I manage the affiliate program for HostPapa. I am currently processing August affiliate commission payments and I came across your August sale. I noticed that invoice # xxxxx which is a package purchased on xxx xx - the same day you joined the affiliate program - for domain xxxxxx.com appears to be your own purchase. Please note that we do not pay a commission for packages purchased for your own benefit, as the affiliate program was not created as a way for affiliates to enjoy “discounted” web hosting, but rather as a tool to compensate affiliates for advertising our company.
I look forward to receiving your reply at your earliest convenience.


--That was ban of my affiliate purchase, no other hosting company do this, since they understand that affiliate then will have to generate more sales to receive payment check, 100$ minimum. Since they are wise. HostPapa is greedy.


3. They can terminate your affiliate account any moment:

to: xxxxxx Your account with Hostpapa.com Affiliate Program xxxxx has been Terminated effective immediately for violation of the Hostpapa affiliate agreement. REASON: TRADEMARK BIDDING (google.com) Stealing exclusive promotional code from other website Regards, Hostpapa Affiliate Program


There is no point concerning trademark biddig in their agreement. Stealing exclusive promotional code???? I’ve seen this code on 4 or 5 sites. Greedy.


HostPapa looks like a scam for me. I was wondering why number of people querying their name goes down in time. There are many other hosting companies in Canada and in US to use and promote, like HostGator (my #1), BlueHost (very reliable), etc.


Stay away from HostPapa.

Thanks for reading this. Stay away from HostPapa. Happy holidays!

 

We truly enjoy all the great partnerships we have developed with many affiliates over the years, and we encourage all affiliates to do their best in promoting our program; however, as you can understand, we have guidelines to protect all parties involved.

Since this former HostPapa affiliate is active on forums and boards defaming our program and company, we thought it was important to provide some additional information regarding the decision made to terminate our relationship with this particular affiliate.

This affiliate was terminated from our program for the following reasons:

-The affiliate had started to promote our program through Google.com by bidding on the terms “hostpapa” and “hostpapa coupons”.

Here is the ad related to the termination:

"HostPapa Best Discount
Buy HostPapa hosting with 18% OFF
Coupon expires 31.01.2009
Xvel.com/HostPapaDiscount"

This is a clear violation of the terms of our affiliate agreement. Essentially, this affiliate was providing a coupon/discount to a consumer who was already searching for our web hosting company using our trade name as the keywords such as “hostpapa” and “hostpapa coupon”.

Here are the terms of trademark and display URL bidding in our affiliate agreement:

“Affiliates are expressly prohibited from bidding on any of the HostPapa display URLs, domain names or trademarks in all search engines, including but not limited to Google, Yahoo and MSN. This includes direct bidding on hostpapa.ca, hostpapa.com and hostpapa.co.uk as the display URL or any variation thereof. Any commissions obtained by bidding directly on the HostPapa display URLs will be forfeited."

"Affiliates are also prohibited from bidding on any of the HostPapa trademarks as keywords in search engines. This includes using the terms “hostpapa”, “host papa”, “papa host”, “hosting papa”, “hostpapa coupons”, “hostpapa coupon codes”, “hostpapa promo codes”, “hostpapa rebates”, hostpapa.ca, hostpapa,com, hostpapa.ca, hostpapa.co.uk, hostpapa.com, or any misspellings or combination thereof to obtain search results utilizing HostPapa’s trademarked terms. Any commissions obtained from such keyword bidding tactics is a direct violation of this Affiliate Agreement and compensation will be forfeited for such results”


-The affiliate was utilizing a coupon code that had been provided to another affiliate to use on their respective website. This does not help our affiliate who had requested the use of an exclusive coupon code, and furthermore hurts our marketing efforts overall. Most affiliate programs have varying levels of promotional activities, and they also have to deal with other promotional efforts from internal marketing, channel marketing, etc. This affiliate could have contacted us to receive our available coupon codes, but elected to use an exclusive coupon that we had provided to one of our established affiliates.

Here are the rules as defined in our affiliate agreement regarding the usage of promotional materials. We do have coupon codes that are available through the affiliate program:

“Affiliate may only utilize valid coupons and incentives as provided through the HostPapa affiliate program. Affiliate is responsible for keeping these coupons, deals and incentives current on their respective website(s). Affiliate may not produce their own coupons, deals or incentives without the express written consent of the HostPapa Affiliate Manager.”

-In addition to the activity above described, in August, this affiliate was informed that he was not allowed to claim commissions for a purchase he had made for himself. Below was his answer to the email we sent him:

“Hello

Yep, that was my purchase. Please cancel affiliate payment for it. Thank you.”

-Furthermore, here is an email I received yesterday from the same affiliate:

“Hi again Hostpapa Affiliate Program

It is so cold in my country now, I feel very ill, lonely and have nothing to do. So I just posted a message to digital point forums

And I will also copy it to 10-15 other popular affiliate forums. Dealing with scams like you is such a fun thing. Thanks!”


To our surprise, yesterday we came across his application to become a HostPapa affiliate through Commission Junction. Unfortunately as you can all understand we declined his application, and warned CJ regarding this person’s attitude and lack of compliance to general guidelines. The question still remains, if he is really so unhappy with the manner in which we conduct business, Why would he want to continue working with us?

If you have any questions regarding our hosting plans and/or affiliate program, please feel free to contact us.
Happy Holidays to all.

 

I am here with hostpapa because they have already mentioned everything clearly and still if someone doesn't follow the rules then no company will afford them.

 

Bravo HostPapa Thanks for clearing this up for the DP community.

 

thanks alot for saving me getting into their catch. thanks again.

 

Hello HostPapa affiliate Team,
We send mail my friends to use HostPapa and use CJ link.they buy hosting 3 account By my Friends.you team not paid yet our cj account.If need their email address i can send.if dont paid us.I Will open scam report cj and google adwords all web hosting forums.I guess HostPapa team paid and look after me i can send 10+ user a month.
Host gator already paid.HostPapa not wait.. for reply. they scam or not.

 

I am replying to the heading: "Stay away from HostPapa hosting and its affiliate program".We don’t have any experience with the affiliate program, but we can certainly echo the warning that users should avoid using HostPapa. The issues appear to be caused by the business having access to sufficient resources. Many of our field staff are reporting difficulties uploading and installing websites on shared hosting provided by HostPapa. In fact; 1 in 3 has issues on the sample that we have observed and have directly purchased to date. The sample that we own is 15 individual hosting packages and the sample we have visiblity of is well over 40, so it's not a once-off problem. Apart from the hosting problems what we find more concerning is the lack of support. I am able to verify with ample evidence situations where help desk is being held down by a single person, who then admits to having little to no experience and currently confronted with more problems than they can handle. I am sure that person is doing the best they can with improper level of resourcing provided to them by management. Other examples include Support Tickets left unanswered for more than 4 working days, and when followed up using the online chat, the support person on duty cannot promise that the ticket will be answered within as many days again. For a business that advertises itself as a platform for commercial websites. I can safely state without fear of slander; that HosPapa is a reckless choice for hosting of websites, and that our experience is that HostPapa is a mismanaged business incapable of delivering on advertised claims. We are happy to openly share chat transcripts, emails, screenshots, and documented reports from our field staff with anyone should they need verification of what I have just said.Once again, we wish to echo a revised warning to all those seeking hosting: "Stay away from HostPapa".

 

edit reading hostpapa

 

HostPapa is in poor financial shape and they have really cut all outgoing expenses to the bone. From the perspective of some of the staff who work at the company things are not looking good - moral is low, and infrastructure is stretched. Skelleton staff are being pushed to handle maintenance and support as best they can under the present circumstances. If HostPapa goes into bankruptcy no one knows if they will protect the staff and honor entitlements.

 

My horrid experience with Host Papa;

Hi there!

I've just spoke to your representative "Johnathan", and he said that he has submitted a ticket for me in order to resolve this situation. I would like to point out though that I have not purchased this domain yet, and I am very confused as to why the order has already been submitted.

The last page that HostPapa has lead me to is an "Order Summary" page, with the final line with: "Total Due Today" (screenshot attached).

As you can see in red, the domain name in the order summary is ledmsg1, and the one which I have signed up for instead is ledmsg (the name of my company - see email address). My company has been known to customers as LED Message for some time now, and it would be very misleading to have a domain named ledmsg1 Not only that, it is not the one I have signed up for, nor have I even confirmed my payment for this order. It is as if a payment has been submitted from my credit card without my approval. This is very frustrating, upon inquiring a friend who works in law , illegal.

I have signed up with HostPapa after being referred to this site by a friend, who have only had positive experiences with the company. It is very confusing to me why I have been calling for the past hour and explaining my situation, but to no avail.

 

why would you buy your domain name from the same company you buy your hosting from?

Buy domain names from the domain registrar, and hosting from hosting companies.

 

Yes I buy domains from Namecheap and hosting from hostgator. I can not say a word about hostpapa b/c I never used them.

 

Always 2 sides to every argument.

 

Hi everyone. We welcome all of our customers' feedback - positive or negative - we consider it crucial to listen to our customers. For any current client with outstanding issues, that feel that our Support team has not helped them resolve their concerns, please let us know (via ticket, live chat, email, phone)!

http://www.hostpapa.com/customer-care-center/

Thank you to all of our customers for your ongoing patronage and support. If you aren't yet a customer, please contact us and try our services; we offer award-winning services (web hosting and related add on services) and support throughout the world.