HostPapa hosts over 500,000 websites on their data centers in the US and Canada. That’s impressive considering that they suck at the services and the customer support.
My nightmare with hostpapa started 2 years ago when I switched from Bluehost.
One potential explanation for this is their horrible customer support team who is not technical at all. They are incompetent and very rude. They say one thing before you sign up with them and after you discover that the futures that they offer, are called “Fair Usage”. Nothing with them is unlimited.
I am not the only one. An important thing to note is that clients complain of long wait times for return emails and trouble tickets. Waits can be as long as 48-72 hours. That’s a long time to have your website down and is a huge source of frustration.
Like many other web hosting companies, HostPapa offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, but even that is a little misleading. You can easily cancel your subscription online, and they’ll refund your money. This refund doesn’t include what you paid for in domain names, privacy, setup fees, mobile fees, or other add-on features.
Here is some of the Con’s (I honestly cant think of anything pro)
- Expensive Renewal Fees
- Customer Support is Slow
- Loading speeds are slower than average
- To get the lowest pricing you must sign up for a lengthy hosting package
- Backups not included on shared plan
- High-priced add-ons at checkout
How would you rate Hostpapa?
Daniel
Papa
In 2018 i switched to hostpapa hoping that as a small company, they would take care of customers better than the large hosting companies.
I was very wrong.
A month after, my first wordpress site, started to load very slow. It would take about 15 sec to load a page.
I called the support. They created a ticket and told me that they would get back to me ASAP but did not give me an ETA.
I waited 48 hours and called again. This time the support guy was very rude telling me to wait untill they get back to me.
It was only a wordpress site with no extra plugins and very lite. How hard would it be to check the server performance?
their support has no clue what they are doing and they all say the same thing. “Our level 2 is working on it”. If you ask them what exactly they are working on, they have no answer.
Anyway… this issue went on for 2 months. The loading times for a webpage went up to 30 to 45 sec. I lost lots of clients because of this and they keep telling me to be patient.
At the end I called them and wanted to talk to a manager. They said that no one was available. They never wanted me to talk to anyone in charge. Because I called them one day to many times requesting an update and talking to someone in charge, they threatened me to stop calling otherwise they would terminate my account.
I cannot find the right words to describe how rude and incompetent. It was a horrible experience.
I did shut the website down because of them.
Two days ago, I called again because an issue with the domain. I had the same experience as before. Nothing new. their staff is the same rude and they don’t know how to solve an issue. All they do is: Open a ticket and pass it to someone else.
They don’t have technical support team. They only have people answering the phones and opening tickets.
John
I don’t recommend hostpapa.
James
I asked them at the beginning about some features that I was looking for and they told me that this was available with the hosting package I got. TO be more specific, about the php version for individual website.
After I switched to them I noticed that the features I was looking for were not available.
I was very disappointed. I called them to complain and ask if they could help.
They created the ticket and they never got back to me.
Jim
All the positive reviews around the web are fake and paid by the hosting companies.
I had very bad experience with hostpapa. It was nightmare when I was hosting with them. I was forced to move to another provider within the first 2 weeks of my contract with hostpapa
Bob
I have been using their services for awhile now and I enjoy being their customer. The only down side is that their customer service are not trained.
Sandra
After a period of time hosting with them I decided to leave to set up a project I was working on, I worked on my project for about a year but things did not work out so I decided to cut my losses and close the project down.
Dave
I took the bait and migrated over a vanilla WordPress blog to start and my page load time had gone from an average of 3-4 seconds to 12-13 seconds – even with site caching. I waited a little bit longer for that US-based server. It never came. When I asked about it again I was met with radio silence. They refused to look at resource usage across the shared environment. When I submitted a support ticket about site speed they sent me to the knowledge base and closed the ticket. When I asked to be refunded a prorated amount for hosting, I was denied. I had only used 6 weeks out of my 52 week purchase, and even a partial prorated refund would have been satisfactory. They refused to work with me. They basically stole my money with yes-sirs and false promises and delivered a level of service that was far below expectations.
Based on my experience, my opinion is that Hostpapa provided a minimum viable product marketed as a top tier solution. If server location, resource balancing, and page load time is absolutely something you’re concerned about, consider taking your business to another hosting company.
Toddy
Oh I forgot, another unique feature of this is the only host you can never add a domain not until and after the DNS is completely pointed to them. Same thing with FTP. Ever heard of a host that you can;t even do SFTP? I have no clue why so except I do know they don’t like you to hang around their backend.