JustHost – My worst nightmare with webhosting

As you might know, Just2us.com (and others) are hosted on a shared server, running on WordPress. Over the last few weeks, if you have come to the website and see an account suspended page, it is because my (then) webhost – JustHost – suspended my account! This caused one week of downtime as I decide to leave and condemn JustHost.

I am describing my worst nightmare with JustHost, hoping if you are contemplating to sign up with JustHost or others, think carefully.

Not recommended

 

Summary of my experience

  • Jan 2009 – Chose JustHost as my webhost. Created various websites and services.
  • Feb 2009 – Website selected as top 10 by JustHost’s CEO (a scam..)
  • Sep 2009 – Account suspended. Unsuspended after 1 day.
  • Oct 2009 – Account suspended for the second time. Decided to leave them.
  • Oct 2009 – Migrated to another webhost, and all websites resumed service, after 1 week of downtime.

 

 

Why I chose JustHost?

I chose JustHost because it is cheap. There are many companies providing webhosting solution, and at $3.45 per month, the cheapest plan among others and still boosting a lot of ‘unlimited’, I was lured to JustHost.

And since I have an affinity with the word ‘just’ (see Just2us.com, Just2me.com), I thought JustHost is good. It is not.

 

My website is Top 10 – A scam!

One week after I signed up, I received an email from their Product Director, informing me that my website is one of their 50 picks for the month. He will be presenting to his CEO, who will choose 10 of the best, and offer the website owners an exclusive platinum service! I was elated at first, as I did have a beautiful website I am proud of.

Then came the CEO’s email that my website is chosen as the top 10. When I am given the platinum link, I felt a scam. http://www.justhost.com/platinum?email=anyone@email.com? If you click on the link right now, you can sign up for the platinum service too! This is a despicable, cheap and stupid.

We have chosen your website Platinum status approved

 

 

What else is bad?

JustHost is average or bad in most areas.

  • Web Speed is slow
  • FTP Speed is very slow – Navigating, downloading and uploading via FTP is painfully slow. It is about 5 KB per sec for upload.
  • Featureless DNS – I registered 3 domains with them. It was a bad decision as they do not provide Total DNS, like what Godaddy offered.

 

 

First Suspension

One fine morning, I woke up realizing that all my websites and services are down. There is no prior warning or whatso. All I found is an email telling me I have violated their ’10% CPU Policy’ and quoting me the 3 most intensive processes.

This is amazing bullshit, as my google analytics tells me that there is no more than 100 views a day for the index page, which they quoted to have used 24% of the CPU! There is no surge of activity that day too, which me believe their case in suspension is to make me upgrade to a dedicated server – that would cause $140 per month!

I emailed to say I would not upgrade, and they unsuspended me.

Suspended 1

 

 

Second Suspension

Two weeks later, I woke up in the middle of the night and found my websites and services are down, again! They emailed me quite the same thing.

I decided I cannot live with such poor webhost and told them I will leave.

I asked for my account to be unsuspended for 1 week as I migrate to another webhost, but they have the we-cant-help-you reply for second suspension. They told me that I would get my refund and backup..

Suspended 2

 

 

Refund

JustHost refund system either has a problem, or they don’t want you to leave them. The refund process consists of 5 steps, which somehow would bring me to the first step again and again. I tried 5 times before getting to the refund confirmation. And they still they tried to persuade me to stay with cheap offers..

Refund rethink 

The refund I have got:

Refund

 

 

Migration and review

I have migrated to a better webhost – HostGator. I have signed up for a baby plan at $7.95 per month. HostGator is helpful in my migration process and everything works within a day.

In selecting for a new webhost, I read reviews carefully this time. I was surprised that I had made such a bad decision in choosing JustHost 8 months ago.. Read the reviews and you should be convinced that everyone hates JustHost. It has a 5% overall rating and a lot of bad reviews! HostGator has 95%, and even Godaddy has 75%..

Not recommended

There are more to migrating between webhosts and transferring domains, which I would share next time.

 

 

Conclusion

JustHost is a big lie, a scam and the worst webhost.

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October 25th, 2009 in Development, News, Uncategorized | tags:
  • Jason Ward

    Hi there,
    Like a moron, I too used Just Host. I'm sure they had good reviews a year ago! I was wondering how you migrated? My account has been suspended and they won't unsuspend. As I can't log in at all, how do I migrate?
    I like your post, I had a massive deja vu. Even the 'top 50' website thing.
    Thanks a lot for your help. Jason

  • http://just2me.com/ samwize

    Hi Jason,

    So unfortunate that you are another JustHost victim..

    You should email them directly. They will help to backup your stuff for you to migrate out :)

  • http://www.thewordofward.co.uk/ Jason

    Hi,

    I know, they suck. I sent about a million emails, all just on the non-sue side of abusive. I have a backup that they eventually sent. I'm now with Host Gator as well because I think I looked at the same review site as you.

    I have asked them to restore my site to it's former glory. At the moment I'm still at the wordpress 'just started' phase. Hopefully it will kick in soon. How did you get your wordpress working again? You are probably better at this than me. At the moment my site looks like: http://www.thewordofward.co.uk. (i.e. a page slagging of Just Host)

    Thanks. Glad you are up and running. Feels a bit like we are a survivor support group. Cheers, Jason

  • http://auction-tips.net/ Dave

    You need to tranfer you domains, upload the files, generate new MYSQL database from the names and passwords in the config.php files, use php admin and import databases t new one.

    I'm with Just host, mad I'm biting my teeth hearing all these rave reviews. My site is getting popular aswell now. I had a spy on the server that I'm on the other week and there are 800 other sites on the server. I think there overloading it to save money and then bumming people when it suits them.

    How many vistors were you getting when this happened?

  • http://just2me.com/ samwize

    Hi Dave,

    How do you put a spy on the server to know that there are 800 other sites running on the server? I would like to do that too.

  • http://www.thewordofward.co.uk/ Jason

    Hi Dave,

    I was getting about 200 visitors a day for the previous few months. I then wrote a piece about a spammer guy/ “marketing guru” and a celebrity got on my site and had a go at the spammer too. I was getting about 600 a day at that point. Then lawyers, chaos, and immediate shutdown by JustHost.

    I wrote and said that I was a journalist and have a lot of data the site which has been published where I own the intellectual rights. Which is true, and they eventually released the data.

    My site is finally up and running again, thanks to Host Gator.

    Thanks to everyone who helped here, I'm grateful. I was a bit stressed at the time!

    Cheers all,
    Jason

  • Christopher Arnfield

    Hi Guys,
    Guess what? Yes the same has happened to me today.
    Can yo pleaser advise how to get my backups and then refund using your experience of dealing with them.

    Regards

    Chris Arnfield

  • http://just2me.com/ samwize

    Email to raise a support ticket. They will send you a backup archive. They will also refund part of the remaining to your paypal.

    But take note of this: If you pay them under subscription model, they probably didn’t cancel the subscription. One year later, you will get charged again! That is what happened to me and I have to email them on the wrong charging.

  • Burgundy

    I literally had the same thing happen to me this morning! Same exact sequence/lame reasoning/unjust (no pun intended) cause. There’s no way I’m exceeding bandwidth now, after nearly two years of (consistently) higher traffic.

  • Bruce

    JustHost suspended our web-hosting account … never gave us notice … because someone (not affiliated with us) in CyberSpace stoled one of our Email addresses. It appears that JustHost enables folks in their Ukrainian facility to suspend accounts on whim alone … any tech who thinks (doubtfuly capability) that he or she sees a customer sending spam. Suspension wasn’t enough. Once restored, the idiots failed to unblock the WAN ip address … so we were literally out of business for 10 days or so. Within weeks, we cancelled JustHost and went to another Web Host. Now, JustHost says we must have a PayPal account to refund the balance due to us for unused months OR wait for a check for 45 days … 45 days to write a damn check. They allege that their ‘system’ won’t allow them to simply credit the credit card we used to purchase the service initially. The good news is that we stopped getting bounced back Emails we never sent … the servers return paths were located in Taiwan and the Ukraine. I would have preferred to have a root canal than do business with these clowns; the CEO never responded to my Email.

  • Joakimkasper

     

    My company has an account with justhost for
    about a year now.

     

    We had a major issue a while back with
    server downtime and they kept telling me they were trying to resolve the issue.
    Then after some time without any change, I demanded they move me to a better
    server or cancel my account. So we got on a better server and things have been
    working well since.

     

    BUT!!!!!! This Friday, to my horror, I
    discovered that justhost was running an old backup of my site exactly the way
    it appeared in May 2011 (as we provide up-to-date news and market intelligence,
    this is a serious problem.

     

    So I wrote justhost and guess what? They
    told me to clear my browsers cache. This has nothing to do with the issue at
    all. So I decided to buy priority support for $20 to get better and faster
    service. Then they get back to me and tell me that the server I was on had gone
    bad so they moved my site to a different server. They had used an old backup of
    my site and put it on a different server without even telling me!!!!!!!!! I’m
    furious. But it doesn’t stop here. I can’t access either the online control
    panel nor can I get FTP access to the server to update my site with the newest
    data. I wrote justhost and complained about this to their priority support and
    I got an answer (not 30 minutes as promised but an hour but still ok with me).
    They just gave me a standard reply saying they had forwarded my mail to the
    “appropriate” department. And that department is not getting back to
    me. I wrote priority support and complained and they give me exactly the same
    standard reply as before saying they have forwarded my request to the
    “appropriate” department. So I pay extra money for better service and
    they feed me with standard replies at a time when I desperately need to resolve
    the problems we have with our site. We have just sold advertising (banners
    etc.) for our site and desperately need to get the site up and running and then
    we have this hosting provider not doing anything about it and sending us
    standard email replies. We are now going to move our site to host gator. This is just completely unacceptable.

     

    I noticed that justhost and other hosting
    providers are sponsoring or even managing this site:
    http://www.top10bestwebsitehosting.com/

    Take a look, the reviews are clearly fraud.
    All reviews have about the same length + if you try to submit a review
    yourself, you will find that the form is not working.

     

    Because of my experience, I recommend you
    stay far far away from justhost. This company is absolutely awful.