Cowboy Review – GoProHost Doesn’t Even Get A Star.
It sounds intriguing but you should really know what you are purchasing. The promises, the WOW of all the free features that are normally very costly with popular hosting companies is very attractive and you are tired of paying all that money every month, maybe as much as $100 a month. The lifetime-one-time payment initially appears awesome. I am no hosting expert so why listen to me? It’s simple, I purchased 3 of the lifetime hosting offers through either JVZOO or Warrior Plus and they were abysmal experiences at best.
The last one I purchased was GoProHost on 6/30/21 and I even upgraded to the highest package for hosting, without purchasing the reseller. Damn,I thought, this is going to be awesome and I don’t have to spend all this money every month at Godaddy (More on Goddady Later). So, I whipped out my credit card to pay the low start-up price of basic hosting, and immediately I was redirected to an upgrade page with stuff I thought I just purchased on the basic plan but evidently I was mistaken. I needed all the stuff on the upgrade I thought was on the basic so I whipped out my credit card again and after my purchase I was immediately redirected to another upgrade page with all kinds of security and one-on-one support. I liked the idea of one-on-one support, so again I whipped out my credit card only to be sent to another upgrade page promising me an amazing money-making-reseller-opportunity, of which I passed on that upgrade and I also passed on another upgrade that I think was a white label business opportunity. This kind of upgrade squeeze is not unique and is pretty common among JvZoo and Warrior Plus sellers and I am actually ok with the process but this time I just needed hosting services.
Man, I was excited. I was going to get into the back-end of the hosting panel and start migrating all my sites. I went to the support area and there were some videos that were inaccurate and nothing worked like they claimed it would so I opened up a ticket. I followed the video on how to add their Domain servers on my domain so it would point to my site but their Domain Servers never saw my domain. I waited a couple of days and finally, someone responded and said I was now set up. NOPE, still didn’t work so I put in another ticket, only to be set up again the exact same way. Now, instead of four services that didn’t work in the back-office area, I had eight services that didn’t work.
After 5 days GoProHost never responded to my support tickets at all, so naturally I requested a refund. Again, after two days, GoProHost never responded, not even to my refund request. In the past I had purchased bad lifetime hosting deals through LifeHost and ProfitHost but this is the first time I was straight-up ghosted. I had no other recourse but to dispute my charges throught paypal. To my surprise, the refunds were disputed. I didn’t claim a scam or anything like that, I simply claimed the service was not as described. At the very least, knowing I have a 30-day, money back, satisfaction guarantee, and I was well within my timeframe, a credible company would have just refunded me my money. I know the photo below illustrates my tickets from the 1st through the 4th but I was kicked off after requesting a refund so I couldn’t get another screenshot. I guess basically, in their own way, they repsponded.
It wasn’t much different at ProfitHost or LifeHost. After days going by with no results. After my troubles with ProfitHost, which wasn’t much different I asked for a refund. The days went by without a response to my refund request until finally the big guy with his name on the product asked me if instead of a refund, I might accept some kind of trade. I thought to myself about the proposition I was just made, “sure, what the heck, what ya got?” They were offering me some tired old traffic-generating products that were more outdated than my parachute pants so I turned them down. Thankfully I was at least refunded about 2 weeks later, unlike my experience with GoProHost.
It’s sad really because I wanted to believe I was going to get a fabulous service with each new marketing pitch, but I basically wasted my time and valuable money just waiting around for something to work. Do you know what makes me even madder? All the faux review sites that are claiming they reviewed the hosting services when actually, all they did was copy the cool sales page and put their affiliate link on the purchase button so they will make a money split on the same crappy hosting service. I know they aren’t real consumers. They might be buddy customers but they aren’t real consumers because that would mean everything that happened to me was freak anomolies; all three times.
I’m not going to bore you with writing the same experiences over and over again regarding the other two hosting companies, LifeHost or GoProHost because the experiences are pretty much the same. No responses, DNS not found, SSL not functioning. If you do get a response you are at the mercy of email or support ticket-only service. When stuff doesn’t work, you have to just wait for days to see if they will or can fix the problem.
My final thought about GoProHost and these other one-time payment services is more about the longevity of the companies What happens when the money stops coming in to finance the operation. If they don’t receive any monthly money they won’t be able to keep things functioning. It’s clear that don’t have the resources to take care of the business they have currently. I had that happen after I purchased a product called zapped from Ian Del Carmen. He might not have been the actual creator and he might have just sold it to me as an affiliate but I trusted him enough to spend a couple of hundred dollars for the service, only for it to go bust in a couple of years. That business plan went down the drain before it really got started.
I’m not jaded by JVZoo or Warrior Plus services. I actually like many of the vendors, products, and services. My favorite is Matthew McDonald and all his WordPress plugins that are just simple, clean, and work like they are supposed to work. I’m actually happy with most of the stuff I get through JVZoo and Warrior Plus but some are real stinkers and are just really good marketing pages with a bunch of empty promises, so beware.
So, who should you choose as your hosting service? That is kind of a loaded question because it’s about convenience and preference but I am going to answer it with as much simplicity as possible.
HERE IT GOES…
Your preferred hosting company must have a phone number you can call for support. If a hosting company doesn’t have that, it is a deal killer, otherwise, you will waste your time on countless tickets and back-and-forth emails. If you could actually get a response in a timely manner, it might be worth looking into for some people but for the most part, you will at a minimum wait an hour or two for help and if they don’t actually fix the problem, you will wait a couple of hours for each response. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have that kind of time or patience to just hang around my keyboard, holding up projects, waiting to get support. I’ll pay $150-$200 a month because I can make that money up, and then some, with just one sale from my services. If you are just a small business and need one site hosted, you can find some pretty good deals, with telephone support too for less than $10 a month. Surely that isn’t too much to spend on your business, is it?
Who do I use? GoDaddy. I can hear some groans right now, and some of those groans are definitely not without cause or merit. GoDaddy has failed in a lot of ways, in fact too many to mention here but my sites are stable and work. I have a phone number to call and they fix my problems. My biggest complaint regarding GoDaddy is their lack of security on their base plans. If you don’t want your sites hammered with spam, the instant it starts getting google views, you have to pay more and more for security stuff. I had to purchase office 356 email because it was expensive as hell to secure the Cpanel email that is supposed to automatically come with your domain. They give you unlimited emails for your domain, but if you don’t want them to be shut down after being spammed millions of times a day, you’ll have to pay to have them secured by other GoDaddy Services. What a racket.
Why don’t I switch, you might ask? Migrating to another hosting company takes a lot of time and is painstaking. The last time I did try to migrate a website, the hosting company migrated my site for me and the file structures were different so they didn’t show up on the web. They told me that wasn’t part of the migrating service and I would need to pay another $200 for them to change all the file structures. Basically, all they did was use the zipped backup file of my site and copied it to their platform (Hell, I could have done that).
If you are a bonified web tech, you might have your own servers and just forgo all the hosting challenges but my business is not hosting. I live in the country and I don’t have GIG services with static IP address available to me in my area. I am at the mercy of hosting companies, just like you. If you are just trying to keep an online presence and make money like I am trying to do on a daily basis, this information should be useful.
I hear good things about BlueHost and HostGator too but I can’t comment on their services because I don’t really have a dog in the fight. I have never used them so I can’t comment, good or bad. Nonetheless, I hope this information is helpful, and thanks for stopping by CowboyReview.com
