Hostwinds Review - AVOID like the plague

Just a quick review of Hostwinds - https://hostwinds.com/

I had a server with them for a year or so and decided recently to cancel and migrate to Linode.

Deleted my server and cancelled my PayPal agreement.

Woke up last week to a charge on my company card from them. The card was on as a backup.

Ok, no worries, I'll just head over to their site, login and contact support.

"Login Details Incorrect. Please try again."

Nice, so they've deleted my account and are continuing to charge me.

I then contacted their support who told me there's nothing he can do, that I need to email "[email protected]" -- Sales? Wtf. This was after giving a screenshot of the transaction from my bank and showing one of the legitimate PayPal transaction IDs so they could lookup my account.

I pushed more here and eventually got him to get off his ass and file a ticket to the right department.

I then get an email from some engineer. Why an engineer? Engineers are handling billing over there? Strange..

Anyway..

He informs me that he can't accept the screenshot of the transaction, or the PayPal IDs as proof of account ownership. He wants me to take a photo of my card. My c corporation company bank card and email that to him.

Seriously? I'm going to email over my card to some engineer at a shitty hosting company so I can PROVE account ownership after they charged my card and then deleted my account, and will continue to bill me monthly.

Why do I need to prove account ownership? I'm the one who gave him the last 4 digits of the card and the screenshot of the charge with the exact time.

Who else would have this information except the person who owns the account.

I run a pretty big company, probably bigger than hostwinds, and if someone wants a refund or has a billing problem I don't ask them to photo their bank card. It's enough if they tell me the last 4 digits of the card used to prove that's their card.

Next, they tell me that the alternative is I email from the email on the PayPal account.

So I'm thinking to myself, are you serious with this? Are you determined to waste my time here. I'm emailing from hosting@mycompanydomain, and he wants proof that I own tom@mycompanydomain..

In summary they are one of the most unprofessional companies I've dealt with in a long time. Completely wasted my time, and as it stands they still haven't refunded or said they won't bill me again.

I've had to resort to contacting my bank's fraud department to get this resolved.


If you're thinking about using hostwinds, I would recommend you go for Linode or Digital Ocean instead. Much much better companies. Linode is fucking amazing. Great support, and you can actually phone them to get things resolved.

splishsplash said:

Just a quick review of Hostwinds - https://hostwinds.com/

I had a server with them for a year or so and decided recently to cancel and migrate to Linode.

Deleted my server and cancelled my PayPal agreement.

Woke up last week to a charge on my company card from them. The card was on as a backup.

Ok, no worries, I'll just head over to their site, login and contact support.

"Login Details Incorrect. Please try again."

Nice, so they've deleted my account and are continuing to charge me.

I then contacted their support who told me there's nothing he can do, that I need to email "[email protected]" -- Sales? Wtf. This was after giving a screenshot of the transaction from my bank and showing one of the legitimate PayPal transaction IDs so they could lookup my account.

I pushed more here and eventually got him to get off his ass and file a ticket to the right department.

I then get an email from some engineer. Why an engineer? Engineers are handling billing over there? Strange..

Anyway..

He informs me that he can't accept the screenshot of the transaction, or the PayPal IDs as proof of account ownership. He wants me to take a photo of my card. My c corporation company bank card and email that to him.

Seriously? I'm going to email over my card to some engineer at a shitty hosting company so I can PROVE account ownership after they charged my card and then deleted my account, and will continue to bill me monthly.

Why do I need to prove account ownership? I'm the one who gave him the last 4 digits of the card and the screenshot of the charge with the exact time.

Who else would have this information except the person who owns the account.

I run a pretty big company, probably bigger than hostwinds, and if someone wants a refund or has a billing problem I don't ask them to photo their bank card. It's enough if they tell me the last 4 digits of the card used to prove that's their card.

Next, they tell me that the alternative is I email from the email on the PayPal account.

So I'm thinking to myself, are you serious with this? Are you determined to waste my time here. I'm emailing from hosting@mycompanydomain, and he wants proof that I own tom@mycompanydomain..

In summary they are one of the most unprofessional companies I've dealt with in a long time. Completely wasted my time, and as it stands they still haven't refunded or said they won't bill me again.

I've had to resort to contacting my bank's fraud department to get this resolved.


If you're thinking about using hostwinds, I would recommend you go for Linode or Digital Ocean instead. Much much better companies. Linode is fucking amazing. Great support, and you can actually phone them to get things resolved.

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I used them, and they were horrible circa 2012 or so, and they would tell me I needed to upgrade, which was complete bs. Anyhow, check out the @Veil123 thread here https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/hostwinds-should-i-use-this.1239977/post-13306027.

splishsplash said:

In summary they are one of the most unprofessional companies I've dealt with in a long time. Completely wasted my time, and as it stands they still haven't refunded or said they won't bill me again.

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Had a server with them back in 2016, found them through a Black Friday offer, i cancelled after 4 months, i had similar problem with them charging my paypal account after cancelling, i contacted them about it and the situation was solved immediately, but not ''professionally'', their response was all about how i won't be able to use their services in the future, like that it was my fault in the 1st time !! i mean, they were stealing from my account !! 100% AVOID that shitty company.

Wow, scumbags.

I had a similarly poor experience with them a while back as well.

I’m of the same opinion that if a customer wants a refund I would provide it to them; I’m confident enough in my services that I don’t need to worry about too many of my customers asking for refunds and causing me a cash flow problem.

I've managed to get into the account, and the servers are still showing as live, but they say once I cancel them they'll refund.

I really dislike when companies make it hard to cancel.

Linode and DO. You select your VPS and delete/destroy. Job done.

Hostwinds, you have to request a cancellation and enter reasons, and then the "request" is submitted. Why should that ever be a request? Do I have to request permission to get something cancelled? I can imagine saying to my SEO customers they have to "request a cancellation"..

davids355 said:

I had a similarly poor experience with them a while back as well.

I’m of the same opinion that if a customer wants a refund I would provide it to them; I’m confident enough in my services that I don’t need to worry about too many of my customers asking for refunds and causing me a cash flow problem.

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Exactly. It's just the decent thing to do.

It's a privilege for someone to trust you enough to put their card info into your site and do business with you. I think it's important to look after that person and if they need a refund to give it to them. There's always way more customers/clients and when you put out the right energy, you get way more back.

Oh yeah you dont fuck with a mans money. Thats the highest sin. Fuck em. Thanks for reporting.

Man, that's brutal...

I get chills again because somehow most of our things are still related to some "other companies" that can go crazy at any moment and start causing us problems, and unfortunately, will never stop happening!

SMH... Quality and honesty as well as trust are lost at an abnormal rate.

I wish you a speedy recovery, I know that people like you don't write things like this for #noreason, so if you decided to do it, I know that the situation is really as you present it.

To piss you off, Tom, they must have gone the extra mile as you are pretty mild mannered.

Mrnewbie said:

I used them, and they were horrible circa 2012 or so, and they would tell me I needed to upgrade, which was complete bs.

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The same happened to me, I used them within that period, and I was asked to upgrade websites that was getting zero traffic back then.

BassTrackerBoats said:

To piss you off, Tom, they must have gone the extra mile as you are pretty mild mannered.

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Yep. It's only $9.95 too. I just found it really obtrusive that they billed me after cancelling, and somehow my account was disabled preventing me from logging in, then even after giving them the screenshot with timestamp and last 4 digits of the card, they wanted me to photograph my card. It's like they were just trying to make it as difficult as possible to perform the cancellation. I definitely cancelled too as I had been doing some mass hosting migrations and out of all the hosting companies I was using, they were the only one that presented a problem.

This is interesting. I've been using them for years and while I wouldn't stand on a hill and shout their name, they've been pretty straightforward and kind to me.

The irony part is bhw partnered with them for a long time lol

I've had similar experiences with other companies, so I always clear payment methods before cancel the service after that

Had some bad experience with their hosting few years ago.
Then I parted ways never ever ever went back to their site.

been with linode for years, can confirm the support is awesome.