Anyone been with Hostking?

I was wondering the exact same thing now. Think some of them are going on what the one guy said, even though the guy stated he received good support from them and still hosts with them.

I just signed up on this forum to get a my new website for my new business up and running and found this post to be the first today. I wanted to get hold of Webcrew but I see they have no details really nor live chat or phone number or is it my glasses that requires some cleaning?

Hostking however had livechat online and I chatted to a guy called Johan on there and then called just to check on the number on their about us page like Solitude stated in a previous post and called them and another person Karl answered and answered some questions for me on what web hosting is and how to get my website going. Anyway the karl guy said he will get his manager to approve a trial account for me to play with but will send me login details to for the free site builder they have. There live chat and telephonic support is till 10pm I see though so will test their ticket support response now aswell.

Anyway I trust Hostking more already as I see there are alot of positive feedback on this thread about them aswell. I also read SSD is faster than SATA and Hostking offers that too? Need my site fast.

Was considering Afrihost though too but see too much negative feedback about them on here? I have ADSL with them currently but I see they have a lot of outages. But will probably give them a try tomorrow aswell. Do they possibly have trials or a free account aswell? Can't see anything on the afrihost.com site regarding that?

Any other hosts I should try aswell?
 
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Good Morning All,

Not sure as to why there is a feeling our contact details are bogus? I surely can guarantee that it is not. We are located in N1 City Mews Business Park as per our invoices and statements and our website and are a team of 8 system administrators working here currently assisting our customer base. Customers call us constantly on the telephone number provided aswell as some arrive at our offices from time to time.

You are welcome to contact us as per our About Us page to confirm. We also cannot have incorrect details as we are a ISPA Member.

We thank all our existing customers on this thread regarding their responses and we hope to continue to strive to give the best support and service we can. We are not an ISP or Web development company and hence focus on Web Hosting alone that makes us stronger in that area than most.

Hope everyone has a great day further.
 
Just an update, I'm going to go with Web Africa as they seem to offer the best bang for buck for what I need at the moment. Live chat was also quick when I asked a few questions.
 
andre.g said:
I was wondering the exact same thing now. Think some of them are going on what the one guy said, even though the guy stated he received good support from them and still hosts with them.

I just signed up on this forum to get a my new website for my new business up and running and found this post to be the first today. I wanted to get hold of Webcrew but I see they have no details really nor live chat or phone number or is it my glasses that requires some cleaning?

Hostking however had livechat online and I chatted to a guy called Johan on there and then called just to check on the number on their about us page like Solitude stated in a previous post and called them and another person Karl answered and answered some questions for me on what web hosting is and how to get my website going. Anyway the karl guy said he will get his manager to approve a trial account for me to play with but will send me login details to for the free site builder they have. There live chat and telephonic support is till 10pm I see though so will test their ticket support response now aswell.

Anyway I trust Hostking more already as I see there are alot of positive feedback on this thread about them aswell. I also read SSD is faster than SATA and Hostking offers that too? Need my site fast.

Was considering Afrihost though too but see too much negative feedback about them on here? I have ADSL with them currently but I see they have a lot of outages. But will probably give them a try tomorrow aswell. Do they possibly have trials or a free account aswell? Can't see anything on the afrihost.com site regarding that?

Any other hosts I should try aswell?
Click to expand...

Maybe you didn't read properly... This is an old thread...
As for contact details, well, I can understand that hosts generally want to encourage clients to submit tickets and what not, but I have contact details for both HK and WC. I've received phone calls from both hosts in times past.

I find that it's not all that easy to choose between different hosts for the most part - thus I've been with every second host in SA and have a story to tell ;) Hetzner's konsoleH is disgusting, Afrihost's support was good but they had issues etc.
WA isn't great imho and have had numerous issues in times past as well. Have hosted with them and it took 4 months for the cancellation request to go through...and my experience isn't all that unique. When you're talking about value, then WC is on top. WC's lack of a live chat has been off-putting, but then I think their services are aimed more at those who know what they're doing and want great value (where can you get 3 GB Storage with everything else unlimited for R14pm??).

As for performance, WC and HK is on par with each other (this was after the SSD upgrade of HK) although I tend to look at resource allocation and software before the drive tech. Amplehosting takes the cake there, but their tech support is trash (their techies didn't even know their servers where capable of SNI) and I had "ample" downtime (excuse the pun). Good software and optimization bring HK and WC up to their level when it comes to speed. Afrihost and Elitehost I found were disappointingly slow in comparison.

Actually just checked, I'm surprised to find I still have a client who is hosting with Hostking (so I stand corrected). No issues lately, although some of my fellow devs have complained about DNS issues. I don't think you can go wrong with them, although their prices are going up in December. Maybe Johan can shed some light on this?

I understand it's gonna be R35pm for 1Gb of storage, right?

TL;DR - for me the HK vs WC thing is really a matter of fantastic support (HK) vs best value (WC). WC has adequate support while HK's value is ok I guess. Performance is fairly equal so the choice for me was obvious as I don't always need someone at the end of live chat to clean out my diaper.
 
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I used HostKing for about 2 weeks last month, that's all I could handle before switching to a different host. I used a reseller package.

Many e-mails couldn't be sent to legit recipients and when I turned off their numerous e-mail filters I got loads of attack mails sent to my domain e-mail boxes from spoof accounts on my domain. Many e-mails never arrived and data disappeared from a database of one of my clients after hours of data capture which they had to do again. Finally, almost 50% of repeat customers could not actually access the webpages after I pointed the domain to their server even 2 weeks after the process.

All in all an absolutely horrible experience and would never go down that street again, I guess you get what you pay for. Their support staff were also a bit snotty in their replies which was not appreciated. I've never experience these issues with other hosts. I re-opened my account with the previous host and I'm happy to pay the higher fees for the far superior quality of service.
 
^^vampire^^ said:
I used HostKing for about 2 weeks last month, that's all I could handle before switching to a different host. I used a reseller package.

Many e-mails couldn't be sent to legit recipients and when I turned off their numerous e-mail filters I got loads of attack mails sent to my domain e-mail boxes from spoof accounts on my domain. Many e-mails never arrived and data disappeared from a database of one of my clients after hours of data capture which they had to do again. Finally, almost 50% of repeat customers could not actually access the webpages after I pointed the domain to their server even 2 weeks after the process.

All in all an absolutely horrible experience and would never go down that street again, I guess you get what you pay for. Their support staff were also a bit snotty in their replies which was not appreciated. I've never experience these issues with other hosts. I re-opened my account with the previous host and I'm happy to pay the higher fees for the far superior quality of service.
Click to expand...

Hi

I would really like to look into the issues you experienced and see where the issues come from. I know you have left but would still be nice to see what types of issues you experienced and where the issue stems from. I have not seen any issues reported like this - we host over 9000 domains currently and surely many customers would be complaining regarding this if this was the case. If its a server you were on I'd like to get someone to check it out and if one of the support agents setup your account incorrectly we'd also like to know surely so we can ensure it does not occur with any other customer in future.

I am truly shocked by your experience though and will flag it for my manager aswell. Could you possibly provide me with your account details via the PM so we can investigate please.
 
Idiosyncratic said:
Maybe you didn't read properly... This is an old thread...
As for contact details, well, I can understand that hosts generally want to encourage clients to submit tickets and what not, but I have contact details for both HK and WC. I've received phone calls from both hosts in times past.

I find that it's not all that easy to choose between different hosts for the most part - thus I've been with every second host in SA and have a story to tell ;) Hetzner's konsoleH is disgusting, Afrihost's support was good but they had issues etc.
WA isn't great imho and have had numerous issues in times past as well. Have hosted with them and it took 4 months for the cancellation request to go through...and my experience isn't all that unique. When you're talking about value, then WC is on top. WC's lack of a live chat has been off-putting, but then I think their services are aimed more at those who know what they're doing and want great value (where can you get 3 GB Storage with everything else unlimited for R14pm??).

As for performance, WC and HK is on par with each other (this was after the SSD upgrade of HK) although I tend to look at resource allocation and software before the drive tech. Amplehosting takes the cake there, but their tech support is trash (their techies didn't even know their servers where capable of SNI) and I had "ample" downtime (excuse the pun). Good software and optimization bring HK and WC up to their level when it comes to speed. Afrihost and Elitehost I found were disappointingly slow in comparison.

Actually just checked, I'm surprised to find I still have a client who is hosting with Hostking (so I stand corrected). No issues lately, although some of my fellow devs have complained about DNS issues. I don't think you can go wrong with them, although their prices are going up in December. Maybe Johan can shed some light on this?

I understand it's gonna be R35pm for 1Gb of storage, right?

TL;DR - for me the HK vs WC thing is really a matter of fantastic support (HK) vs best value (WC). WC has adequate support while HK's value is ok I guess. Performance is fairly equal so the choice for me was obvious as I don't always need someone at the end of live chat to clean out my diaper.
Click to expand...


Hi

Yes that is correct. Some pricing will increase yes.

We've made some necessary changes over the last year. We completed the following:

1. Completed all cpanel servers from cPanel Enterprise SATA disks (RAID 10) to SSD RAID 10 - so hopefully that should speed up sites considerably.
2. We moved from ASSP Spam filtering which caused some issues here and there to Mailscanner and Spamassassin which seems to better for us to manage and block spam. We moved to ASSP as cPanel experts recommended a month or 2 ago but it was not a very good change in our opinion hence management stated we move back to MailScanner immediately and work on improving the config files using KAM rules etc.
3. We installed CXS on all servers which scans ftp uploads and POST queries for any malware or virus uploads.
4. Lastly we increased memory on each server and hence our litespeed licences had to be upgraded with additional cost.
5. We also fixed an issue where if a customer was to hit a server with 3 authentication failures or filled in a password incorrectly in wp-admin for wordpress sites 5 times it would block the IP for 5 minutes. We made it more lenient on this regard - can't provide our security setup as to what it is now though as I'm not provided with that much info from the sysadmin guys but I am told 90% of hits are now from international sources like Ukraine and Russia trying to brute force email accounts so firewall is blocking them correctly but letting SA IP ranges through and others to be less strict than before.

The above is just some of the changes that we can inform customers about but we hope going forward we get only sales tickets going forward as support tickets should drop substantially :) Seems so far to be good as support tickets have dropped and support team which is small is far less busy.
 
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Yay. I submitted a support ticket last night with a simple question and it still hasn't been answered.
 
Charly said:
Yay. I submitted a support ticket last night with a simple question and it still hasn't been answered.
Click to expand...

Hi Charly,

I'm guessing you're referring to the support ticket you submitted to us? Our records show that two responses were sent to you early this morning by one of our agents. Please PM me if you are unable to locate our responses in your inbox.

Thanks Idiosyncratic for the great reviews - we're glad your experience with us has been good :)
 
Hi. Thanks. I just logged into the portal and I see that they were answered there. It's weird that they didn't get emailed to me.

Thanks, you guys have been really awesome so far.
 
Charly said:
Hi. Thanks. I just logged into the portal and I see that they were answered there. It's weird that they didn't get emailed to me.

Thanks, you guys have been really awesome so far.
Click to expand...

Glad to hear it!

Mmm, that's very strange. I'll ask one of our admins to check that out. We've never had any issues with clients not receiving ticket responses.
 
Hostking has good support I still have 40 odd domains with them that I have to transfer, but can't complain about them.
 
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