Background
About a month ago, purchased to Level 3 VPS (Virtual Private Servers) running Linux for about $50 a piece. I’m close to launching a new product and that’s product customized shopping experience, forums and web site are all built with php. I had several things that were important to me.
- Full Service Linux Hosting
- PCI Certified for processing Credit Cards
- First Class Customer Service
I’ve always known of HostGator by it’s excellent reputation so it was an easy choice. Up until this week, I did not realize what an excellent decision I had made.
Some Details
After getting our welcome letter on our first server, we started installing our software. We gave HostGator a list of what was needed (php version, mysql, secure ftp, etc.) and they promptly went to work configuring things. Once the server was ready, we began loading. Without going into too much detail, we started having lots of issues. HostGator immediately spun up new VPS instances for us and unfortunately, we kept having problems. After a couple days, HostGator assigned a manager to our account who totally took care of us. We quickly got to the bottom of our problems and now everything is running really smoothly.
At this point, I feel like part of the family. Our new manager friend at HostGator has continued to follow up, even after things are running well.
Conclusions
Rating an organizations customer service is an interesting exercise because unless you’ve had a hard problem, it’s hard to really know what would happen if there was one. Kind of like asking for a good airplane pilot. You don’t want one who has never been in a tough situation because if something bad happens on your flight, you want a pilot that’s been through worse.
Well, as I explained in the details section above, I did have problems. I can’t say for sure why I had the problems, but in the end, HostGator totally stepped up and made sure I was take care of. We are close to releasing our product and I have so many things to keep track of, it’s nice not to have to worry about the servers.
Thanks HostGator! I’m a very happy camper.