I've been through more than a year of hell with BGSA Web Hosting Services and it's not over yet. When I first signed up they had a great monthly rate on a reseller account and I was stupid enough to fall for it. I soon realized that regular outages would be an ongoing part of their service, so I signed up with another host and moved my critical sites to them. Unfortunately, I still have critical business email accounts with these guys and as we speak I've been a week without cpanel access! BGSA Web Hosting Services offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee but I'd estimate my uptime has been between 80 and 90%. This really sucks when email is your main method of communication with clients. Of course the sites that I am still hosting with them are also down at the same time. To make matters worse, BGSA has servers in the USA (I use one that's in Seattle), but their corporate office is in the Phillipines. This means that their business hours are completely opposite mine so when I need help they're never available. In fact, I always have to wait a full day to get a response and the only way to contact them is by opening a support ticket. When they do reply, they usually respond with questions or excuses which creates another 24 hour delay before their next reply. Hardly a month goes by without something going wrong with my account. Either my webmail is rejected because of suspected malware or spamming activity (so much for secure hosting servers), or I stop receiving email to a previously working account and never recover the weeks of messages that I didn't get (this happened once), or the server goes down completely (sometimes for weeks at a time)! This is the kind of hosting that should earn its providers a trip to the federal pen (or maybe Gitmo), but these guys consistently play dumb and act like they've done nothing wrong. I've been with Hostmonster and several other web hosts in the past, and present, and my experience has been almost entirely positive. To be honest I wouldn't even believe that a host could be this bad if I hadn't experienced it for myself. That's what I get for being a cheap-ass and trying to save a little money. Don't let this happen to you! In the immortal words of Monty Python, if you come across an ad for BGSA Web Hosting, RUN AWAY!!! P.S. In case you're wondering, although the account I have, but not for long, with BGSA Web Hosting Services is a reseller account, I haven't had the guts to sell hosting to anyone else. This was my original intention but why would I put others through the soul destroying experience I've had!
I forgot to mention. After bitch-slapping BGSA Web Hosting at the above two sites, plus 4 hosting review sites, I tried to post my review in their forum but Askimet kept labeling my comments as spam and blocking them. I assumed they had blocked my ip address so I re-registered through a proxy (with all new information) and tried again but with the same results. The obvious conclusion is that BGSA has set up Askimet to block all forum comments so the only posts in their forum are made by staff themselves. Talk about a bunch of dishonest dirt-bags. No wonder their forum is full of cheerful comments that blow sunshine up your ass.
Ha ha ha! Sounds horrible. Sales and Billing staff being available during local business hours only is fairly common, but Support? That's absolutely ridiculous. They should be available 24/7. The biggest problem is that with the plans they are offering (i.e. 200GB of disk space and 2TB of bandwidth for $3/mo.) it can mean nothing else but extremely oversold and overloaded servers. Those numbers just don't add up. Lesson learned I suppose.
It's a lesson I won't soon forget (more like a beating). The only upside to this disaster is that I can help others learn from my experience. Too bad there are so many businesses that are unwilling to treat others the way they want to be treated.
Sorry you had to learn the hard way, but in the end it makes you a more informed consumer and saves others from making the same mistake. Best of luck to you with your future host!
What a terrible experience. I suggest that users stay away from host that use the term cheap on a regular basis. No offense to those of you who do use the term cheap. It does unfortunately seem to be a very attractive term for many looking for a hosting provider. It is also important to check some reviews regarding the customer service. Try to base your decision on the reviews overall as opposed to few good or bad ones. Also 24/7 technical support is now a standard practice across the industry. If this service isn't in place you could be out of luck late one night or over a long weekend. I hope these basics tips help others not to fall prey to bad providers.