I’m not sure how proud I am to admit this, but I do have a Homestead account. As a matter of fact, I host about 20 websites at Homestead.com. I opened the account about 5 years ago and the only reason I chose Homestead is because I had absolutely no clue what I was doing and Homestead seemed to be the best option at the time.
I couldn’t have been more wrong…
Since then, I’ve had problems so often that most of the time I just ignore them as I don’t really use those sites anymore. There was a time, however, when I would actually try to contact Homestead support for help. Contrary to what the Homestead big shot, Justin Kitch, says about his customer service, it has got to be some of the worst support I have EVER dealt with. And I have sites hosted on at least ten different hosting companies. Hands down, Homestead is the worst.
To take it a step further so that I don’t just come off as a disgruntled customer with nothing of substance to bitch about, I’ll explain a few of my experiences with the big red house.
My first major let down happened about a year ago. For some unknown reason several of my e-mail accounts just randomly shut down and all data was lost. I couldn’t log in, send from, or receive messages to this account. The account was VITAL because all of my form submissions were being sent there and I didn’t notice the problem until five days of it already being in play.
It took three e-mails and several frustrating phone calls to discover that not one single person at Homestead had a clue of what happened, and it appeared that no one was willing to explain that they didn’t know what was going on and they felt it would be easier to just ignore me.
To this day that e-mail account is down and none of the data has been restored. Simply put, support didn’t want to deal with it and rebuked me for not understanding the value Homestead offers its customers.
From the Homestead CEO blog:
That’s when I learned that sometimes the best thing you can do is fire your customers. If they don’t get the value that you are adding, or don’t appreciate your service, or have unreasonable demands,
Yeah, you read that right. Kitch says he doesn’t need you. In fact, if you complain he’ll just toss you to the curb.
The next issue I ran into was form spam. I have a convention site hosted at Homestead and it ranks well for certain keywords that attract spammers. Homestead has a form creation tool that allows you to easily drag and drop form elements to create a form submission page.
Here is an example of the forms you can make with Homesteads tool.
The problem is these forms are wide open for spam. That page I just linked to receives a good 50 spam submissions a day. My inbox is constantly flooded with these useless forms that are full of porn and hair loss links, and there is no end in site. The worst part about it is I actually have to check them all because I don’t know which ones are real and which ones are fake.
Ridiculous isn’t it?
I figured Homestead Support have a solution so I wrote them a long and well thought out e-mail requesting help. The response I got was something along the lines of “well we have no way to stop it so we recommend you change the URL to avoid the automated script from hitting your form page.
Homestead’s suggestion was that I throw all of my hard work in getting a page to move up the rank ladder with some inbound link action and start all over? As you can imagine, I was upset.
My e-mail doesn’t work and my sites are getting spammed on an hourly basis. I feel I have a valid reason to be little pissed off.
In the mean time, our employees would get demoralized, the customer would want a discount on the remaining work
Yeah, I let a few of your employees have a piece of my mind. I also asked for a discount. What was I told? The message was clear.
“Screw you and screw your discount” is pretty much what I got from the experience.
If you tell them that the customer is always right, and to do whatever they say no matter what, you are effectively telling them that their opinions don’t matter even though they are supposedly professionals in their field.
I guess Homestead believes that employees are always right. That’s interesting, because with my account they’ve NEVER been right.
Needless to say, I’m working on moving my accounts out of Homestead and highly recommend that anyone looking to get into online business stay away from them. Start with Wordpress or something simple and spend some time figuring it out. I made the mistake of picking the quickest fix and I’m paying for it now.
Oh, and for those who want bad advice, read the Homestead CEO blog post, Customers are always wrong.
