Alas it’s true – I’m in love with the web hosting company that “eats up the competition”.

The Mr. and I design websites for a living (among other things). When asked “where should I host my website” I don’t hesitate to recommend Hostgator. Of course we would never recommend any company to our clients that we hadn’t tested thoroughly ourselves; we’ve put the shared-server hosting accounts with Hostgator to the test and been very happy with the outcome.

We began working mainly with CMS type sites back in early 2006 when Joomla forked from Mambo and that is when we decided to give Hostgator a try. Before 2006, The Mr. and I had several static sites that we either owned or managed for clients scattered across several different hosting companies — The names of which escape me because they have all gone out of business in the years since we left them in the dust. We’ve dealt with all kinds of problems with these shoddy hosts to top it off — You name it, we’ve dealt with it: downtime, file loss, hosts that don’t keep software up to date, intrusion into one shared account via another, major security issues and very poor to non-existent customer service across the board.

Crappy hosts pissed me off so bad that I thought very seriously about getting out of managing client’s websites all together.

So come 2006 we were toying around with a new Joomla install for a personal project and needed a place to host it. After some lengthy research I found that Hostgator offered what we needed at a decent price (actually I wondered if the price was too good to be true at first). I scoured forums and found some people bitching about Hostgator issues, but the issues I found seemed in many cases to be operator error (ID10T) and not security or downtime issues. I figured that in the worse case scenario I would sign up month to month and move the site elsewhere should they end up totally sucking – it was a personal site anyways, so it wasn’t like we were testing out a clients site on a new host.

Once we signed up with Hostgator things went surprisingly smooth.

The first time I actually needed to contact their tech support was due to a cron job that was acting up with the above mentioned Joomla installation. When I started having a problem and realized I needed to contact support, the thoughts that ran through my head were anything but pleasant. Up until this time, I’d had nothing but horrible support experiences with the various other hosting companies I had dealt with. I bit the bullet and submitted a ticket via support@hostgator.com. Lo and behold, I got an email response within about 20 minutes (the email was even legible and written in English I could decipher without my craptastic email support decoder ring!). I explained the issue I was having and the tech support rep handling my ticket had the problem figured out within a couple of hours. I was pleasantly surprised, but the coolness didn’t end there…

Soon after that experience I had an issue with my email and credit card. I needed to contact their support to get it straightened out, so I hit up the live chat feature. The CSR was very helpful and directed me to the correct department I needed. Got the my billing info all updated within the day and our site was set. For the next several months I monitored the website downtime using monitoring software and found that if the site went down it was down for such a small amount of time that I could never actually catch it while it was down. In a way, I was kind of (evilly) hoping to catch Hostgator slippin’ because you see HostGator has a 99% uptime guarantee and apparently you can email them if your site was down for a period of time and get a refund…I couldn’t comment on this feature however, because I have never been able to catch a site while it was down for longer than maybe a minute.

So fast forward over 3 years – We now manage about 20 separate hosting accounts through Hostgator for our clients.

I hate to admit it, but over the past 3 years I have probably contacted Hostgator’s tech support department more than 50 times for various client accounts as well as my own. Some of the emails I sent were for really stupid (my bad) errors and some them were issues with the server/CMS, htaccess, php.ini configuration. Thankfully, none of which were major problems such as “HELP MY SITE’S BEEN HACKED!1!!!1″ However, each time they were generally urgent requests and for each time I contacted them, I heard back within the hour; Lately the norm has been within about 15 minutes!

I have also used Hostgator’s phone support on two separate occasions when I didn’t feel like typing out a long detailed email to explain an issue I was having. YES I said phone support. That’s right … a host … with real live … English speaking people … you can talk to (pause to catch my breath). In both cases their phone support was great. I got the matter resolved quickly, the tech support person was able to follow the progression of my tickets and pick up right where the email support left off.

Overall, in the past 3 plus years, I can’t think of any negative experiences with Hostgator.

There was only one time (in my over 50 times of contacting them) that it was for a major glitch on their end. Apparently a server bit the dust mid-day on a client’s website and her domain was showing another website. It was pretty hairball and I was highly pissed off when I called to ask what was going on. The tech support person assured me they knew about it and told me the problem would be fixed as soon as they could restore everything on another server. I started thinking the worst or something along the lines of: “Son of a ….. this is going to take all day. Great, I need to inform my client and she’s going to go off on me –  I can hear it now. And if I get yelled at by my client, then Hostgator can rest assured they will hear from me – because I’m not taking sh*t on their behalf…“. I think it was probably before I finished that thought when I refreshed the page and everything was working normally.

Needless to say, I can get a bit spastic on my client’s behalf. It’s truly because I care about them and the services we provide to them – it’s for this reason that I have no problem recommending Hostgator to my clients.

HostGator Quick Review:

Purchased: My first site was hosted with them over 3 years ago – since then I have referred and manage about 20 websites on separate Hostgator shared hosting accounts.

Hostgator Benefits:

• Tech support available via the live chat, email and telephone
• Great prices
• Quick response time on support tickets
• 99% uptime guarantee – if their server bites it and your site goes down – get a free month
• 45 day guarantee – if you don’t like it, get a refund
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Free domain and website transfer – spare yourself the trouble and let them do it, trust me on this, they get it done super fast
• Unlimited domains (on all but the $8.95 per month hatchling plan)
• Software is generally up to date – granted it’s not usually the bleeding edge latest release of php , mysql etc. But the version is still secure and most compatible with all the php scripts available
• Up to date cPanel installs with Fantastico one click installs for popular php scripts such as WordPress, Joomla, etc.

Hostgator Drawbacks:

• Their logo is funny looking. (what? I had to put something here I guess)

The Mrs. gives Hostgator 5/5
You’re looking at the reason I give Hostgator a 5/5 review – that’s right, this site is hosted on Hostgator along with several other personal websites we own. They have great service and practically never any downtime. Give ‘em a try if you don’t believe me – I don’t think it will be long before you too sing their praises.

They offer a some really awesome specials too for first time orders  – so check here before ordering!

Mozy’s online backup tool which I once loved, has turned into a total piece of CPU-cycle-eating crap.

After using Mozy for a year and referring many a friend, client and colleague to them, I must say that they have gone downhill in a BIG way and I want to publicly apologize to anyone I may have harmed in the process of raving about this now-craptastic product. Here is how my experience with the Mozy backup product went down:

After an extensive online search, I found that Mozy was the one backup that both PC and Mac users alike raved about. In fact, at the time it was also the only online backup service I could find that worked within a Mac / PC environment. When I found out that it was only about $5 a month for unlimited online storage I jumped on board. In fact, I was so excited after reading all these glowing reviews that I bought the Mac Mozy Home edition for 2 years in advance to save a little extra money.

Unlimited storage for $5 a month? Oh I knew I was SO going to exploit that…

We run a marketing and graphic design company so we have a pretty large volume of files that need to be backed up on a daily basis. I configured the Mozy Mac client and it told me that the first upload was in the hundreds of gigabytes – which took a couple of weeks to upload as I recall. Once I saw that it was backed up, I was a happy camper. I now had an off-site backup solution, so should my local backup drive and my main drive burn in a fire, I had a plan…or so I thought.

An entire year passed with Mozy installed and performing its nightly backups. I actually really liked the interface for the most part. I was able to access the logs and see what uploaded each night and from what I could tell it was doing a good job scanning all of my files and updating the backups as needed. All was good until about two months ago when I got this cool error:

“Mozy has not successfully backed up in over 7 days”

What?? So I go digging through my computer thinking it’s probably something on my end and can’t locate the problem. I looked through the logs and couldn’t really distinguish any problems so I looked to my pal Google for answers. That’s when I came across the mountain of forum posts, blog posts and general complaints about Mozy and thought “(insert expletive here)”.

I contacted support and heard nothing. In the mean time I decided (and don’t ask me why I didn’t do this earlier) to try and restore a file from their backup server. First I tried the Mozy software client and although it seemed to access the list of files on the server, it would never restore anything – the client would get stuck after trying to download even the smallest file. I then attempted to restore a file from their ultra clumsy and sluggish online interface and was told the file would be emailed to me or I had the option of paying $100 for them to send me my files on DVD. Yes Mozy – in a major file loss crisis that’s just what I want – to sit and wait for a damn DVD to come in the mail. I chose the email option and did get the 5MB test file emailed to me in about a day.

After 4 days I heard nothing from my attempt to contact support and tried looking for other ways to contact them – I found none. Finally I used the “submit feedback” option in the Mozy program to tell them again that:

1. Mozy was not backing up
2. The Mac client doesn’t restore either

After a total of 8 days I finally hear from their support department…

Here is what support says:

Hi there,

It’s been over 72hrs since we last contacted you and we have not heard back from you yet. We’ll be closing your case at this time. However, if you need further assistance on this issue, you can always reply back and your case can easily be re-opened.

Uh yeah, I don’t think so. I was never contacted by anyone and now they are telling me they are going to close my case? At this point I am just pissed. It’s been over 2 weeks and nothing is being backed up.

I email them again and tell them that I was never contacted and yet again state my issues. Finally I get an email back after another 2 days with instructions to send them the log file that Mozy created – I do so and thus begins the ongoing volley of emails going back and forth to Mozy’s customer support – each of which have at least a two day delay in between responses from their CSR.

After sending them the logs, I get this email:

It seems like an issue with the Mozy client itself, the configuration is corrupt. You might have upgraded your client from Mozy MAC 1.3.2 to 1.4.3 version. The new version of Mozy 1.4.3 requires a clean installation in order to avoid using the previous version configuration. I would request that you perform a clean install of the latest version of the Mozy client.

Ok great, I already tried uninstalling/reinstalling while I was waiting over a week to hear from you — guess what? No-dice. I did it again just to appease the CSR and yet again nothing happens.

I email them telling them their suggestion didn’t work and get this email:

Please browse to Hard drive/Library/Application support/Mozy. Look out for cache.db and state.db files. Delete them and reboot the computer. You need to configure Mozy again by selecting all files again and do a backup. This will reset Mozy to backup as per the new settings. All data that was previously backed up is safe. This would not only synchronize the data that is backed up already it would also add any newly added files for backup.

Something told me this was a bad idea, but I did it anyway. Goodie, now not only does Mozy not back up, it also can’t even find my older backed up files on their server to sync to (which is the exact opposite of what they said would happen in the aforementioned email). If it would ever successfully back up, it would be backing up all 1000 GB of data again. GRRRRRR!

At this point I have had it, it’s been almost 2 months now with no resolution from Mozy.

I have this worthless icon sitting in my taskbar, still eating CPU cycles and memory mind you (because the file monitoring seems to be the only thing that does work) for absolutely no reason.

I finally email them to tell them I want my money back and 6 days ago I got this email with no further correspondence:

Thank you for contacting Mozy Technical Support. This is to inform you that I am transferring your ticket to a technician with more resources to help resolve your issue. Further research will be done and you will be contacted shortly.

I give up.

Mozy Online Backup / Restore Quick Review:

Purchased: 8/18/08 and have used for over a year at the time of this review.

Mozy Online Backup / Restore Benefits:

• Desktop interface is easy to navigate
• Inexpensive
• Relatively quick uploads depending on your connection

Mozy Online Backup / Restore Drawbacks:

• Extremely poor customer service response times
• Automatic updates of new software often fails
• Restore process is clumsy and slow (if it works at all)
• The process to exclude files for backup is tedious
• Ultra slow file restoration downloads (if you can even connect to their restore server at all)

The Mrs. gives Mozy Online Backup & Restore 1/5
What started out seemingly great turned into a complete disaster. I am thankful that when I tested Mozy’s restore process that I wasn’t actually in the middle of catastrophic file loss or I would be writing this review from the funny farm in between med doses. I do not recommend anyone use Mozy (for personal or professional purposes) and I am sorry I ever did. I wouldn’t even use this product again if it were free… remember folks, you generally get what you pay for and for $5 a month for unlimited storage, I should have known better.

Once a Major Let-Down and Magazine Printing Nightmare; PrintPlace.com Has Come to Surprise Me

My husband and I own a marketing and design business where we print many large orders as resellers with several online printing companies; we also own and publish a local magazine in the city where we live. When seeking out a print vendor with good magazine printing prices for resellers, we chose Print Place to print our monthly magazine. We found that the price was pretty much unbeatable for the options we needed in press run.

To start, our first run of several thousand booklets looked great. The colors were sharp, the trim was darn-near perfect and overall we were very happy with the appearance of our magazine. We printed on a 3-day turn-around which meant our cost was a bit higher than had we been able to choose a 5-day turn-around option. We used their ground shipping which at the time was Fed-Ex and for the first 3 runs we got our magazine in 7-8 business days, like clockwork – their stated time frames were dead on.

Then came the problems…

Upon printing our fourth issue, Print Place notified us that they had opened a print plant in California – Oh Joy! – this was great news for us because we could hopefully use a less expensive 5 day turn-around and get the magazine in the same amount of time. I even called Print Place to confirm that they had a plant in California and was told that my order would automatically print at the closest plant, which was just a few miles from us. When looking at their turn-around time map I found that it said my area of California was in the 1-day transit time boundaries too! I happily placed my order on the 5-day in-house turn around with ground shipping and waited….and waited….and waited….

On the 5th business day the order finally shipped — from Texas!! I immediately called and asked to speak with a supervisor in order to clear up the matter. I got nothing but bad attitude from this woman and when I asked for her supervisor I was placed on “hold” and hung up on! I asked several times via phone and email if there was anyone in charge that I could speak with to voice my concerns with regards to their confusing “transit times” map and a lack of time-frames on their site – several times, I was ignored or told “someone would call me back” with no response.

By the time I got my order, 13 days after I placed it online at PrintPlace.com I was livid and hastily found another printing company to do business with.

Months went by and no one from Print Place bothered to check up or even wonder why suddenly a couple thousand dollars less in revenue was coming in via my credit card each month.

The grass wasn’t so much greener on the other side…

And without writing a full blown review here on the “other” print company (I will do that via a seperate post) I will just say that 6 months later I ended up back at Print Place out of last minute desperation and was pleasantly suprised!

I found that the CSR’s seemed far more pleasant than in the past and the different departments seemed to be in sync with one another. When needing to speak with the design department regarding custom trim settings it was duely noted in my account and the next CSR I spoke with was able to easily update me and give me helpful information!

When I placed my order this last time, I found that the order was printed and actually shipped locally and I got it MUCH faster than I had anticipated. The magazine print quality was fantastic, however I never had any issue with their print quality; it always seemed to be top-notch.

This time when I contacted Print Place’s customer service department it was to tell them that I was happy with my order and to ask if they would be able to somehow have my orders print locally by default. I was told that at this time it was not possible, but that my request would be forwarded on to those “in charge”. (Hey I am glad I wasn’t lied to this time and was actually told that it wasn’t possible) I only hope that they can sometime soon guarantee which plant your order would ship from in order to plan better as a print reseller – I would probably use them for far more of my print jobs if they could do that.

PrintPlace.com Quick Review:

Purchased: On a monthly basis, over a period of 1 year. Also used Print Place to print client orders several times within that time frame.

Print Place Benefits:

• Consistently great print quality including color matching and bleeds / trim
• High volume reseller discounts
• Short runs with alot of options
• Many order options and stops in between print quantities
• Quick answers from customer service
• Easy to track orders
• Proofing issues / hold-ups are emailed to you immediately
• Ability to submit art to go straight to press without art-checking
• Easy online ordering process with instant pricing

Print Place Drawbacks:

• No way to guarantee your order will be printed at a local plant for faster (cheaper) turn around/shipping
• Confusing “transit times” map on website isn’t accurate if your order doesn’t ship from a local plant
• Not many paper weight options outside of 16pt 14pt 100lb cover/book and 80lb cover/book (This mainly is something I would like to see them offer for magazine printers, such as a 60lb paper stock option)

The Mrs. gives PrintPlace.com 4/5
I actually wanted to rate them higher based on print quality, but based on the past it’s hard for me to forget the bad experience I had despite my more recent positive experience. I do however hope to revisit this post and update it with my further experiences with Print Place and hopefully give them an improved rating. I will say that I do intend to use them for my future booklet printing orders because you can’t beat their price for the quality and so long as they keep improving in the customer service area I am sure to use them for other jobs as well.

One last note! Be sure to check the site for coupon codes before ordering.

Sometimes Print Place offers coupon codes to make their prices even sweeter!