If you visit JustHost’s website it is clear they pride themselves on two things: quality and customer service. They believe they have the most reliable and affordable web hosting service possible, and they believe that their company truly specializes in customer satisfaction.

To sweeten the deal JustHost offers a bunch of other features including free domains for life, free setup, unlimited space and transfers, secure servers, 24/7 support, and a 30-day money back guarantee. With all this stuff how could anyone go wrong with choosing JustHost’s top-notch customer service and 99% uptime promise? I’ll tell you how.

Tech Support
About a year ago, my buddy transferred his site from GoDaddy to JustHost because GoDaddy sucked, and JustHost was running a special for around $4/mo. After the free domain transfer and setup he quickly discovered that JustHost seriously [expletive] his [expletive] up. And, after files were lost and he threatened to leave them, JustHost threw some money at the problem which seemed to appease my buddy. Nine months later, his site abruptly stopped working.

He immediately got on the phone with JustHost’s tech support. The first rep he spoke with gave him something to try, but it didn’t work so the rep put my buddy on hold and then the phone went dead. The next guy put my buddy on hold almost immediately after answering the phone and never returned. The third rep pushed the blame on my buddy telling him there was no way that JustHost could have caused the issue. Again, more dial tone. The fourth person said the opposite, but didn’t know what the issue was. Hurray! Ownership of the problem. He transferred my buddy to another guy who hung up in the middle of being asked a question. FFFFFFFFUUUUUUU! I get it. Things happen. But a company that specializes in customer service does not give someone the run around, blame them, or hang up on them. As my buddy put it,

JustHost failed in every way imaginable that day.

Uptime
When I first looked into getting a host for my blog my brother suggested JustHost. He hadn’t had any real issues in the few months he’d been with them. Thankfully, I ignored his advice and went with iPage which led to Hostmonster which led to Hostgator.  So, my brother started experiencing regular intermittent downtime. How regular? Six times a day. How intermittent? Every hour or so. How much downtime? Between 15 and 90 minutes.

Now, I’m not an MIT grad, but I can say that if you take the mean of 15 and 90 (52.5) and multiple that by the number of times the site went down (6) you get 315. Divide that by 60 and my brother’s site was down for ~5.25 hours. That means JustHost was down 21% of the time. If you didn’t draw your own conclusion I’ll go ahead and do it for you, my brother ditched JustHost.

Final Thoughts
JustHost Sucks. Not because two people I know had bad experiences, but because thousands of people are saying JustHost sucks at the two things the company prides themselves on. Come on JustHost. People pay money for your service to work, not for 79% uptime and Peggy-esque customer service. Is it really too much to ask to get what you advertise? Apparently it is.

There are plenty of other web hosting companies that offer shared hosting without the issues. I’m currently using Hostgator. Is it perfect? No. On a high volume day it’ll take a few moments for some pages to load. I get this. I don’t like it, but I get it. It’s what I expect from being on a shared server. It’s when I pay for webhost that is continually down, provides little to no customer support, and shows almost no concern for getting things back in order that I get a bit perturbed. Trust me, if (when) Hostgator goes south, so will my opinion of the service.

Do you have thoughts on JustHost, iPage, Hostmonster, Hostgator, Bluehost, or any other webhosting service share ‘em below or send me in an e-mail at TiTy@y2kemo.com.

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