Green Geeks negative review #7087 by Joshua on Oct 2009
Green Geeks got a negative review on and one official response on
3411 Silverside Rd. Tatnall Building #104
Wilmington , DE 19810 US
☎ Phone 1-877-326-7483
📧 sales@g...Joshua ( -no email- )
This is the worst hosting company I have dealt with since beginning to host sites over 8 years ago. Their price is average, their features are standard features for CPanel hosting, and they are 300% green. The green part is what motivated me to sign up but it was the worst mistake I made.
First I tried to use shared SSL. Didn't work, support advised me that “shared SSL is 1998 technology” and that I should pay $30 for dedicated IP and $15 for SSL. Why should I when shared SSL was advertised as a feature. I had to send Trey and email, and he did get it resolved. The whole process took 2 weeks; unfortunately the shared SSL is self signed, so it gives a warning and causes a red address bar in browsers. I just let it go, even though other hosts have shared SSL that won't cause browser warnings, I thought not a big deal, I'm helping the environment.
Next I tried to point a website to CPanel instead of changing the NS records. I got an email from support saying it was done. When I changed the A record, guess what, didn't work. It took them over 48 hours from the time I asked for the domain to be added manually to the time the site was working. In total that site experienced over 24 hours of downtime from the time I was told that it had successfully been added.
My Current Issue, need to have 4 CNAMES created for Google Apps, has been more than 48 hours and they are still not working. More downtime, over 48 hours of downtime and counting. Support advises that it is done, obviously it is not. Reading about the outage they experienced in August and my experience with the 'quality' of their tech support has made me decide it’s time to move on. I will be filing a complaint with both the BBB and also my credit card company since I am 5 days past their 30 day money back guarantee.
Oh when you get their invoice there is a square that says 'Your Logo Here Replace images/logo.jpg'. A testament of their attention to detail. Also I signed up 09/08/09, my invoice date is 06/09/09 and due date is 11/09/09. According to the invoice my hosting expires 05/09/2010 so apparently they are trying to rip me off for four months of hosting. My invoice is 3400 so they haven't been in business long and with these practices I don't expect them to be in business much longer.
GreenGeeks support is arrogant, unknowledgeable, and unresponsive as other posters have said. It doesn't matter if they have chat or phone support because all my issues have been 'escalated' to level 2 or 3 support. I called today and the spoke to Derek over the phone and he admitted that they only have 3 or 4 support reps, seems to be Derek Di Benedetto, Josh Dargie, George Saunders, and Karl Davids. Derek also mentioned that early in the morning only 2 support reps are available. Kind of shed some light about why everything needs to be 'escalated', perhaps to someone remoting in from a third world country.
I signed up with GreenGeeks to help out the environment. My $70 (used discount code) would have been better off with a 501c environmental non-profit. I would encourage other people considering hosting with GreenGeeks to consider your ROI, TOC, and bottom line. To the people that think 60 hours of downtime is acceptable, I’d hate to be your client.
So I am switching to HostGator, they are only 130% green but they can at least resolve basic DNS through chat or over the phone. They have a comparable package for $9.95 a month which is a much better deal if you consider that they always have at least 15 techs available through chat and ussually around 40. For 14.95 a month, you get private IP, private SSL, and a toll free number. At these prices you are billed monthly but the prices drop if you opt for 2 or 3 year packages. Also you can enter the discount code ‘green’ to get a 20% discount off your first order. I manage some shared, reseller, and dedicated servers for my clients so I know their tech support is responsive and knowledgeable.
http://www.hostgator.com/green-web-hosting.shtml
HostGator was my #2 choice, GreenGeeks won for their 300% ‘greenness’. Maybe they should buy less energy certs and invest in better training for their technicians and better support for their customers.
First I tried to use shared SSL. Didn't work, support advised me that “shared SSL is 1998 technology” and that I should pay $30 for dedicated IP and $15 for SSL. Why should I when shared SSL was advertised as a feature. I had to send Trey and email, and he did get it resolved. The whole process took 2 weeks; unfortunately the shared SSL is self signed, so it gives a warning and causes a red address bar in browsers. I just let it go, even though other hosts have shared SSL that won't cause browser warnings, I thought not a big deal, I'm helping the environment.
Next I tried to point a website to CPanel instead of changing the NS records. I got an email from support saying it was done. When I changed the A record, guess what, didn't work. It took them over 48 hours from the time I asked for the domain to be added manually to the time the site was working. In total that site experienced over 24 hours of downtime from the time I was told that it had successfully been added.
My Current Issue, need to have 4 CNAMES created for Google Apps, has been more than 48 hours and they are still not working. More downtime, over 48 hours of downtime and counting. Support advises that it is done, obviously it is not. Reading about the outage they experienced in August and my experience with the 'quality' of their tech support has made me decide it’s time to move on. I will be filing a complaint with both the BBB and also my credit card company since I am 5 days past their 30 day money back guarantee.
Oh when you get their invoice there is a square that says 'Your Logo Here Replace images/logo.jpg'. A testament of their attention to detail. Also I signed up 09/08/09, my invoice date is 06/09/09 and due date is 11/09/09. According to the invoice my hosting expires 05/09/2010 so apparently they are trying to rip me off for four months of hosting. My invoice is 3400 so they haven't been in business long and with these practices I don't expect them to be in business much longer.
GreenGeeks support is arrogant, unknowledgeable, and unresponsive as other posters have said. It doesn't matter if they have chat or phone support because all my issues have been 'escalated' to level 2 or 3 support. I called today and the spoke to Derek over the phone and he admitted that they only have 3 or 4 support reps, seems to be Derek Di Benedetto, Josh Dargie, George Saunders, and Karl Davids. Derek also mentioned that early in the morning only 2 support reps are available. Kind of shed some light about why everything needs to be 'escalated', perhaps to someone remoting in from a third world country.
I signed up with GreenGeeks to help out the environment. My $70 (used discount code) would have been better off with a 501c environmental non-profit. I would encourage other people considering hosting with GreenGeeks to consider your ROI, TOC, and bottom line. To the people that think 60 hours of downtime is acceptable, I’d hate to be your client.
So I am switching to HostGator, they are only 130% green but they can at least resolve basic DNS through chat or over the phone. They have a comparable package for $9.95 a month which is a much better deal if you consider that they always have at least 15 techs available through chat and ussually around 40. For 14.95 a month, you get private IP, private SSL, and a toll free number. At these prices you are billed monthly but the prices drop if you opt for 2 or 3 year packages. Also you can enter the discount code ‘green’ to get a 20% discount off your first order. I manage some shared, reseller, and dedicated servers for my clients so I know their tech support is responsive and knowledgeable.
http://www.hostgator.com/green-web-hosting.shtml
HostGator was my #2 choice, GreenGeeks won for their 300% ‘greenness’. Maybe they should buy less energy certs and invest in better training for their technicians and better support for their customers.
This is Trey Gardner CEO of Green Geeks responding to this complaint.
I have been in touch with Joshua as a client and involved in some of the areas of his complaint here, specifically the shared SSL so when I saw this complaint, the length and detail of it and the specifics I wanted to make sure that I got in touch with Joshua and tried to resolve as much of this as possible.
I called Joshua this morning from our company phone, I wanted to make sure Joshua knew it was us calling and when someone got on the line, I asked for his name and I was hung up on. His phone should have identified Green Geeks as the caller. I called right back thinking that perhaps the line went dead by mistake and I got no answer. I called back several more times from our company phone and no one ever picked up, this was at the Joshua’s corporate phone number midday on Wednesday October 14th.
So having been hung up on by someone I have tried to help in the past and then no one taking my call from his office for several more attempts I decided to look again at this complaint by Joshua.
By the way if anyone from Green Geeks hangs up on any one calling our company and then refuses to take their calls I will have that support person’s hide and they will be out of a job.
So I reread the complaint by Joshua and a couple points of interest came to mind especially the marketing push to HostGator he has at the end of his complaint. I am not sure if Joshua has a background in marketing but he should apply for a position at HostGator if he has not already done so. I specifically love the way that he includes the coupon you can put into your order at HostGator to receive 20% off.
He also states: “I manage some shared, reseller, and dedicated servers for my clients so I know their tech support is responsive and knowledgeable.”
This is curious because Joshua seems to touch upon all three of HostGator’s three service business models; shared, reseller and dedicated server hosting which indicates that he is already using HostGator but he is also switching over to HostGator. Now obviously he could have meant just switching over the 1 domain he hosts with us but it seemed a little curious.
The reason this seems curious is that Green Geeks has become a strong competitor to HostGator’s reseller hosting with our reseller plan so this push to HostGator by Joshua in this complaint seemed a little out of the ordinary.
Then I went to my technical director to diagnose all the issues Joshua explains in his complaint. First thing I was curious about was Joshua’s downtime as our servers typically don’t go down (we did have a prolonged outage on 1 server back in July 2009 but outside of that we have had below .1% downtime). So the only way that I know of a downtime would be if Joshua switched his dns records to us or away from us and not have his web site files setup on the server he was pointing his dns records to.
After talking with our system administrators however I discovered there was no downtime to his account or web site only that through the CNAME records he states were not setup correct could he not use 4 google app programs, in fact looking back through our ticket records I do show that the records were sent to our administrators and that they were setup properly for Joshua and in a timely manner.
This brings me to another point of interest Joshua mentions in his email, our support. Let me state unequivocally we have excellent support and we have a support structure which maximizes efficiency for our customers’ resolutions. I am sorry that Joshua does not like the fact that not everything can be done by live chat. There are server side issues which must be handled by our most experienced technicians and as I have described in our web site in our why us support area:
http://www.greengeeks.com/why-us/wu-support.php
we must have a system that works which is that issues which involve research must be escalated and those which need to research the issues must be able to focus, something that they cannot do if they are stuck on a few live chats, so we have our clients email the issues and our turn around time on those emails as they are escalated to their proper place in either tier 2 or tier 3 support departments are far faster than what you see at other hosting companies.
Joshua mentions the amount of people we have on staff here at Green Geeks and compares them to HostGator. Joshua mentions that Derek indicated that there were only two representatives on early in the morning which may have been accurate depending upon the time of day that he may have come onto live chat. In addition he mentions that Derek indicated that we only have four technical reps which is inaccurate. During the week we have four tier-2 technical reps working the busiest hours and we have two tier-2 representatives working after hours.
In addition to this we also have two tier-1 technical representatives working around the clock and we have at least three tier-3 technical representatives (our system admins) working at any given time monitoring our servers to make sure that they are always up and fixing any server side issues for clients through our ticket system.
Now juxtaposing Joshua’s claims about our support and HostGator’s for a minute. I have known Brent Oaxley the owner of HostGator for a long time and I have competed against HostGator for many years. HostGator is a huge web hosting company and is easily 50 times larger than GreenGeeks, they host several hundred thousand domain names. Even if Joshua got us in our after hours and there were only two tier-2 representatives available for a chat, at 50 times larger HostGator really should have at least 100 tier-2 representatives rather than the 15-40 that Joshua claims.
Going back to Joshua’s complaint, he mentions shared ssl certificates. Now really this is an old way of doing things and I have not seen this done by any other of our customers here at Green Geeks or at any other hosting company for quite some time. The majority of people we see who need an SSL certificate, need it for ecommerce or to have a private internal network. To do this properly you really need to be on a dedicated SSL certificate and not a shared one, this is well known in the industry and the costs for a dedicated SSL certificate are only $15 per year and you can find them anywhere online.
Shared SSL does not have the same security as a dedicated SSL, nor does it allow people to have their main domain name secure. The difference is:
https://servername.websitehostserver.net/~username/files - Shared SSL
VS
https://www.theirdomain.com/files - Dedicated SSL
As you can see the difference between the two is that the Dedicated SSL shows your domain name and the other is the server name, which is why, in addition to the low price, people almost always opt to buy a dedicated SSL. After reviewing all of the ticket correspondence with Joshua I still do not know for what reason he needed and demanded a shared SSL, in any event we did manage to get this up on his site for him.
Joshua complained of pointing his site to our servers, something done seamlessly by our customers everyday and for which we have tons of helpful information on our website on how to accomplish this. For someone who has been in technology for so long as Joshua indicates (and in fact his web site shows him as a technical expert) this should not have been a problem whatsoever. Changing where a web site points is something so basic that with our instructions even our most novice of customers can accomplish this.
I did check the whois information for his domain name:
domain:
created: 15-May-2007
last-changed: 09-Sep-2009
registration-expiration: 15-May-2010
nserver: ns1.greengeeks.com 99.198.112.83
nserver: ns2.greengeeks.com 99.198.112.84
and I do see that he has the correct name server records and the correct IP address used for his domain name so I am not quite certain where the disconnect was here.
I looked at all these indicators, the strange need to use old technology for SSL certs, the inability to adequately change the dns even though the whois information looks proper for his domain name, the indication that he had several days of downtime where there was clearly no downtime on the server of any sort:
(I can state that here because I know that if we did have downtime you would see many more of our customers writing about that fact and you would also see me owning up to it as I have in the past for the downtime we did experience in July 2009).
And then I look at how Joshua also seems to inadequately compare us to HostGator, one of our main competitors and I have to wonder if this is a truly unique set of circumstances which lead to Joshua’s experience or perhaps something else.
In any case Joshua remains listed as a client on our books and even though someone from his company hung up on my earlier phone call I will continue to call him to offer my personal assistance to anything that he needs. So far using our phones to make sure that his caller ID lets him know it is Green Geeks calling we have not had anyone from his company answer our calls.
I find it interesting that I have not been able to reach Joshua since he expressed so many views about our company’s support.
Sorry again for the long read on my rebuttal to this complaint however sometimes these things need to be clarified in their entirety.
Good luck with all your web site projects and if you have any question about our support from Joshua’s complaint please go ahead and test us out, we’ll be here.
Take care and have a great day,
Trey Gardner
Green Geeks CEO
Marketing representative ([email protected], ).
I have been in touch with Joshua as a client and involved in some of the areas of his complaint here, specifically the shared SSL so when I saw this complaint, the length and detail of it and the specifics I wanted to make sure that I got in touch with Joshua and tried to resolve as much of this as possible.
I called Joshua this morning from our company phone, I wanted to make sure Joshua knew it was us calling and when someone got on the line, I asked for his name and I was hung up on. His phone should have identified Green Geeks as the caller. I called right back thinking that perhaps the line went dead by mistake and I got no answer. I called back several more times from our company phone and no one ever picked up, this was at the Joshua’s corporate phone number midday on Wednesday October 14th.
So having been hung up on by someone I have tried to help in the past and then no one taking my call from his office for several more attempts I decided to look again at this complaint by Joshua.
By the way if anyone from Green Geeks hangs up on any one calling our company and then refuses to take their calls I will have that support person’s hide and they will be out of a job.
So I reread the complaint by Joshua and a couple points of interest came to mind especially the marketing push to HostGator he has at the end of his complaint. I am not sure if Joshua has a background in marketing but he should apply for a position at HostGator if he has not already done so. I specifically love the way that he includes the coupon you can put into your order at HostGator to receive 20% off.
He also states: “I manage some shared, reseller, and dedicated servers for my clients so I know their tech support is responsive and knowledgeable.”
This is curious because Joshua seems to touch upon all three of HostGator’s three service business models; shared, reseller and dedicated server hosting which indicates that he is already using HostGator but he is also switching over to HostGator. Now obviously he could have meant just switching over the 1 domain he hosts with us but it seemed a little curious.
The reason this seems curious is that Green Geeks has become a strong competitor to HostGator’s reseller hosting with our reseller plan so this push to HostGator by Joshua in this complaint seemed a little out of the ordinary.
Then I went to my technical director to diagnose all the issues Joshua explains in his complaint. First thing I was curious about was Joshua’s downtime as our servers typically don’t go down (we did have a prolonged outage on 1 server back in July 2009 but outside of that we have had below .1% downtime). So the only way that I know of a downtime would be if Joshua switched his dns records to us or away from us and not have his web site files setup on the server he was pointing his dns records to.
After talking with our system administrators however I discovered there was no downtime to his account or web site only that through the CNAME records he states were not setup correct could he not use 4 google app programs, in fact looking back through our ticket records I do show that the records were sent to our administrators and that they were setup properly for Joshua and in a timely manner.
This brings me to another point of interest Joshua mentions in his email, our support. Let me state unequivocally we have excellent support and we have a support structure which maximizes efficiency for our customers’ resolutions. I am sorry that Joshua does not like the fact that not everything can be done by live chat. There are server side issues which must be handled by our most experienced technicians and as I have described in our web site in our why us support area:
http://www.greengeeks.com/why-us/wu-support.php
we must have a system that works which is that issues which involve research must be escalated and those which need to research the issues must be able to focus, something that they cannot do if they are stuck on a few live chats, so we have our clients email the issues and our turn around time on those emails as they are escalated to their proper place in either tier 2 or tier 3 support departments are far faster than what you see at other hosting companies.
Joshua mentions the amount of people we have on staff here at Green Geeks and compares them to HostGator. Joshua mentions that Derek indicated that there were only two representatives on early in the morning which may have been accurate depending upon the time of day that he may have come onto live chat. In addition he mentions that Derek indicated that we only have four technical reps which is inaccurate. During the week we have four tier-2 technical reps working the busiest hours and we have two tier-2 representatives working after hours.
In addition to this we also have two tier-1 technical representatives working around the clock and we have at least three tier-3 technical representatives (our system admins) working at any given time monitoring our servers to make sure that they are always up and fixing any server side issues for clients through our ticket system.
Now juxtaposing Joshua’s claims about our support and HostGator’s for a minute. I have known Brent Oaxley the owner of HostGator for a long time and I have competed against HostGator for many years. HostGator is a huge web hosting company and is easily 50 times larger than GreenGeeks, they host several hundred thousand domain names. Even if Joshua got us in our after hours and there were only two tier-2 representatives available for a chat, at 50 times larger HostGator really should have at least 100 tier-2 representatives rather than the 15-40 that Joshua claims.
Going back to Joshua’s complaint, he mentions shared ssl certificates. Now really this is an old way of doing things and I have not seen this done by any other of our customers here at Green Geeks or at any other hosting company for quite some time. The majority of people we see who need an SSL certificate, need it for ecommerce or to have a private internal network. To do this properly you really need to be on a dedicated SSL certificate and not a shared one, this is well known in the industry and the costs for a dedicated SSL certificate are only $15 per year and you can find them anywhere online.
Shared SSL does not have the same security as a dedicated SSL, nor does it allow people to have their main domain name secure. The difference is:
https://servername.websitehostserver.net/~username/files - Shared SSL
VS
https://www.theirdomain.com/files - Dedicated SSL
As you can see the difference between the two is that the Dedicated SSL shows your domain name and the other is the server name, which is why, in addition to the low price, people almost always opt to buy a dedicated SSL. After reviewing all of the ticket correspondence with Joshua I still do not know for what reason he needed and demanded a shared SSL, in any event we did manage to get this up on his site for him.
Joshua complained of pointing his site to our servers, something done seamlessly by our customers everyday and for which we have tons of helpful information on our website on how to accomplish this. For someone who has been in technology for so long as Joshua indicates (and in fact his web site shows him as a technical expert) this should not have been a problem whatsoever. Changing where a web site points is something so basic that with our instructions even our most novice of customers can accomplish this.
I did check the whois information for his domain name:
domain:
created: 15-May-2007
last-changed: 09-Sep-2009
registration-expiration: 15-May-2010
nserver: ns1.greengeeks.com 99.198.112.83
nserver: ns2.greengeeks.com 99.198.112.84
and I do see that he has the correct name server records and the correct IP address used for his domain name so I am not quite certain where the disconnect was here.
I looked at all these indicators, the strange need to use old technology for SSL certs, the inability to adequately change the dns even though the whois information looks proper for his domain name, the indication that he had several days of downtime where there was clearly no downtime on the server of any sort:
(I can state that here because I know that if we did have downtime you would see many more of our customers writing about that fact and you would also see me owning up to it as I have in the past for the downtime we did experience in July 2009).
And then I look at how Joshua also seems to inadequately compare us to HostGator, one of our main competitors and I have to wonder if this is a truly unique set of circumstances which lead to Joshua’s experience or perhaps something else.
In any case Joshua remains listed as a client on our books and even though someone from his company hung up on my earlier phone call I will continue to call him to offer my personal assistance to anything that he needs. So far using our phones to make sure that his caller ID lets him know it is Green Geeks calling we have not had anyone from his company answer our calls.
I find it interesting that I have not been able to reach Joshua since he expressed so many views about our company’s support.
Sorry again for the long read on my rebuttal to this complaint however sometimes these things need to be clarified in their entirety.
Good luck with all your web site projects and if you have any question about our support from Joshua’s complaint please go ahead and test us out, we’ll be here.
Take care and have a great day,
Trey Gardner
Green Geeks CEO
Marketing representative ([email protected], ).
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