JustHost web hosting rant - Read this!

Note: This is a rant after dealing with a web hosting company called JustHosts. If you’re considering using JustHosts, I recommend you take a read through this post and do a little bit of research on forums and review sites first…

When working as a freelance web designer, I used to use standard web hosting for my clients. I used well known companies such as 1&1, Fasthosts and more recently JustHosts. I chose these companies because they were reasonably cheap (not the cheapest though by a long way!) and were all in the top 10 on these UK Best Hosting sites (although I would love to know who actually runs / regulates these). I was initially very sceptical of JustHost as everything they offer is unlimited i.e. unlimited webspace, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited domains even! Sounds fishy, right?

I did a bit more research and found mixed reviews, although this could be said about any hosting company – generally, people only tend to write reviews if they have had a bad experience, and everything seemed ok so I thought I would give them a shot. When I purchased the hosting, I instantly realised they were a little more expensive than they first made out as the costs they show on their main page are for a 4 year contract! I decided to look elsewhere, and when I tried to leave the page it connected my to a live chat agent that offered 25% off the cost. Ok I was interested again now, and went for a 12 month contract. Once up and running, everything seemed to run great. The server seemed nice and fast, the cpanel was good (although so salesy – you get prompted to buy additional addons everytime you login), htaccess wasn’t a problem etc and it all seemed good. After a few months I was still happy and hadn’t experienced any downtime, so I used them again for a few other clients.

I then had a weird email from the “Director” who had supposedly seen the site, and awards the best 10 sites each month (or something like that!) a cheap upgrade to their premium servers. I checked online and sure enough everyone at somepoint had received this email. It seems like an odd thing to do, tricking your customers into upgrading rather than just presenting them with a special offer. However I just ignored the email and put it down to bad advice from their PR/Marketing team.

This year one of my clients has changed supplier, and as a result has decided to move their domain to another server. I decided to leave the account open for them until the hosting had expired, and about a week ago I had an email reminder from JustHost saying that the hosting was up for renewal and would automatically renew in 7 days and a payment would be taken. I contacted the client, and informed them that their time was up and they need to transfer their domain. The following day I received an invoice from JustHost (taken a little sooner than 7 days don’t you think!?). I contacted them and said that I did not wish to renew the hosting, and that I would like to cancel my account. The response seemed simple, just send a written confirmation email to cancel@justhost.com and they would cancel it for me. Great!

I sent the email and a day later I received an email back confirming receipt of my request, and to confirm the cancellation all I needed to do was use the following link http://cancel.justhost.com. I followed the link, and I was made to jump through a few hoops to cancel the account, it wanted to know why I was leaving and offered a few special offer incentives etc. I finally got to step 5, where they offered 75% off my renewal cost for the year, see screenshot below:

However, it is impossible to get past this stage. Clicking cancel simply refreshes the page, and the hyperlink for both buttons is the same. Just a way of stopping you from cancelling perhaps? I tried to call the customer service number, but when I selected “Billing” the automated message said that for security reasons all billing has to be dealt with via email. I found this very interesting as their sales line doesn’t have this problem! I decided that I would try and speak to someone technical in support, but as I didn’t want to pay the premium number I used the live chat support. This became so infuriating that I copied and pasted the conversation:

All our operators are currently assisting others customers. You are currently in position 1 Thank you for your patience. An operator will be with you shortly.
You are now chatting with ‘Vincent’
Vincent: Welcome to Live Chat support, how may I help you?
Vincent: Hello.
Luke: Hi Vincent, I’m trying to cancel my subscription using the information provided by JustHost. I am on what appears to be the last step of the process at the URL http://cancel.justhost.com/step5c (choose a cancellation type) however clicking cancel does not do anything so I cannot complete the process
Vincent: Please give me a moment to go through your issue
Vincent: Can You please let me know the reason behind your cancellation?
Luke: The client has changed suppliers and they are hosting the site on their own server
Vincent: for canceling the account please send an email to our admins at cancel@justhost.com
Vincent: and your account will be cancelled
Luke: I already have, they sent me the link to the cancellation process and I cannot complete it as described
Vincent: Is [the domain name] your domain that you want to cancel
Luke: yes
Vincent: the hosting for?
Luke: yes
Vincent: have you sent an email to cancel@justhost.com?
Vincent: also you have outstanding invoice of £ 59.40
Vincent: that you will have to pay
Luke: yes. They sent a link to a cancellation process which I am on now, but cannot complete because the cancel button does not work
Luke: I am NOT paying the £59.40 because I DO NOT want to renew
Luke: The current hosting does not expire until 30/6/2010
Luke: and today is the 28/6/2010
Luke: I have been trying to cancel since I was sent a reminder that this was due
Vincent: In this regard I request you to contact our admins at billing@justhost.com
Vincent: Our admins will provide you the exact details in this regard
Luke: So just to confirm, I have called up to cancel the account and was told to email cancel@justhost.com, which I did, and have followed their instructions which do not work, I have explained the situation to you and now I have to email someone else??
Vincent: yes, as you are not able to cancel your account on that link
Luke: Clearly, as the site does not work.
Vincent: sorry?
Luke: The issue with this process is that I have been told to CONFIRM the cancellation request using the link, and have got through to step 5, however the links on this step 5 don’t work so I cannot complete the process i.e. the site isn’t functioning correctly.
Vincent: yes, and for that reason I am requesting you to please send email at billing@justhost.com and also as you have an invoice still to be paid

At this point I quickly disconnected before I said something I would later regret, however the sheer incompetence was staggering – I couldn’t believe he kept going on about having to pay an invoice for £59.40.  As well as just being offered the renewal fee of £14.88 on the last webpage I was on, my current hosting period hadn’t yet expired.

I decided to call them again, this time opting to speak to someone in support.  While waiting to be connected, I looked at my original email from JustHost which included the cancellation link.  At the bottom it said if I had any problems I could email back for assistance on the same address. So I sent a short email in response to the sender, which said:

Hi Hannah,

I have been trying to complete the cancellation process, however the site gets stuck on step 5 (I am given an offer of a £14.88 renewal price) and I cannot proceed any further. I have been trying to get support from Live Chat but this is proving to be completely pointless. Please advise.

Best regards
Luke

Within a few minutes I had a response, which said that to complete the cancellation I needed to use the confirmation link at http://cancel.justhost.com. Hmmm… ever get the feeling we could do this all day? I got through to support on the phone, and after answering the same questions again such as why do I want to leave, he said I needed to send written confirmation to cancel@justhost.com. I re-explained the issue, and told him of my recent email response and asked him if he could just cancel it there and then. He said he would look into it, and after 5 minutes said he could not find my details!? Wow. Okay, so his solution was for me to email cancel@justhost.com and state that I wanted to manually cancel the account. So I sent this email:

I have just sent an email saying that the link DOES NOT WORK and you have sent me the same link back in what appears to be an automated response. Having now spoken to another adviser on the phone, he has suggested I request that the account is now CLOSED MANUALLY. I repeat, I would like to MANUALLY CLOSE this account.

I look forward to your response,

Best regards
Luke

I got this back a few minutes later:

Hi Luke,

Thanks for your reply.

I am unable to manually close your account. Please let me know what part of the link is not working?

Kind regards,

Rachael

I have since sent a few emails back and forth including screenshots of the page I am on, and the situation has still not been resolved. They have made suggestions on how to proceed including “have you made sure the comment box is filled in and the tick box is selected?” which as you can see from the screenshot does not relate to that page (I think it may have been step 3 or 4).

While investigating the issue on forums and social networks, I have found a huge number of complaints about JustHost, including a lot of people having difficulties with trying to cancel and being charged for services and subscriptions they do not want (despite the fact they supposedly have a “anytime money back guarantee” http://www.justhost.com/anytime-money-back-guarantee). I’ve also heard some nasty stories about their “unlimited” services offer, where accounts have been suspended because users have had too many files / hits per day / too many emails sent etc. This is not something I have personally experienced so I cannot comment on this, but looking at their homepage on http://www.justhost.com/ there are no asterixes next to any of their services which may have small print about the actual amount of space / bandwidth etc you are entitled to. Surely trading standards must be able to take some action on people offering something that isn’t genuine? A lot of people refer to JustHost as a scam company in the forum posts for many reasons, and I can really understand why.

Anyway, take what you will from my recent experience as documented in this blog post. I’m just glad that once this account is finally cancelled (if that will ever happen!?) this is not something I have to deal with anymore. We now have our own server which we host our sites on, and so we have complete control over the domains, the contract length, amount of bandwidth etc. For any other limited companies out there offering websites, I would highly recommend you do the same!

** UPDATE 14.55 GMT 28/6/2010 **

Just had a phone call from renewals doing a courtesy check and I guess hoping that I will renew the account (ha!). I’ve explained the issues I’m having and will be interested to see if she can get the issue resolved. Apparently the development team are looking into it…