SEOhosting.com is offering larger plans for their separate C Class Hosting. You can now order up to 125 separate C Class plans (email them if you need more). You can check out their plans and prices here. If you go big with 125 C Classes, you can get them for as low as $4.35/C Class/month.

Yesterday (Friday) when I got home I had a message on my answering machine from Chad at SEOhosting.com. If you’ve been reading (I know, probably nobody is), I was rather frustrated with seohosting in earlier posts. Apparently Chad was doing some searches on SEOhosting.com and came across my mad ranting, and decided to give me a call.

Chad apologized for my troubles, and said he wanted to make sure everything worked out ok. I told him I was frustrated with my experience and lost several days of work while I was trying to get hosting issues resolved, and was less than pleased with online support, but I’m good to go now. Chad gave me personal contact information for me to get a hold of him if I need anything, and he said he’d give me unlimited lifetime SEOhosting for free for my troubles. No, really, I’m sure it’s in the voice transcript (Chad, you’ve got that, right?).

Chad’s phone call tells me that SEOhosting at the very least has a clue and is a good indicator that they actually care about customer satisfaction. It’s a good sign. Chad told me that I was only the 40th or so SEOhosting customer, so they are VERY new, and they’re working out their training and support kinks.

This gives me some faith that they’re going to be doing a better job from here on out.

Looks like my SEOhosing debacle is over. I got my additional accounts, and turns out I just had to add a ‘package’ to activate them. Too bad the online chat guy couldn’t help me with that; I had to wait for an email the next morning from hosegator support. I probably should have thought to try adding a package myself, but I’m just a poor noob trying to make a webmaster living. Let’s hope it’s smoother sailing from here on out.

Update: This issue was resolved, and further information is here.

So as of yesterday evening my additional accounts were STILL not activated on my plan. I hopped onto online chat with seohosing, and the operator told me that a billing manager would be in touch with me via email before the end of the night. I waited several hours until 11:30 PM EST (seohosing is on central time), when, with no email in my inbox, I fired up online again to speak with a different operator. I related my story and what was told to me earlier. He told me that a billing manager was there, but not there right now (stepped out). I told him I’d wait until 12:30 and check back, but please get back to me. Of course, I didn’t hear from anyone.

I started up chat once again at 12:40 (yes, that’s after midnight), and after waiting a bit, was told my accounts were activated. Whoo hoo! I even got an email! Of course, when I tried to activate an account (set up a domain), I was unable to do so. Hmmm. It was getting late at that point (after 1 AM), so I gave up for the night, hoping it was just an error on my part (gasp!). It would only be coincidence that when I list all my accounts in WHM, it shows 35/35 accounts used (not 35/50), right?

I tried again tonight when I got home to activate an account - no worky. I fired up trusty online chat and walked through what I did with the operator (I was doing it right). The operator looked into it, and even tried to set up an account using my login/pw - no worky for operator either.  He says I need to contact support with an email. Sigh.

SO: I STILL don’t have my additional accounts a full 5 days after I paid for them. When will it end?

Update: This issue was resolved, and further information is here.

Cue Soundtrack: Take the Money and Run by the Steve Miller Band.

When I acquired the Directory Network, I put the directories on 31 separate C class IP’s to improve their appeal. I ordered 35 C classes from SEOHosting.com, a Hostgator company. More recently, I’ve also been trying to build a blog network, so I wanted more C class IPs (4 wasn’t enough). I contacted SEOHosting and ordered the extra 15 C classes, and made a prorated payment for the rest of this month. I paid on Thursday evening, and I still have yet to receive my additional 15 C classes. Here’s the chat transcript from their online support tonight (Saturday, ~11:30 PM, EST):

Operator: Welcome to HostGator, how may I assist you?
Me: hi, how long does it take to increase the number of c classes on an existing plan?
Me: For example, if I were to go from 35 to 50?
Operator: You would need to e-mail sales@seohosting.com about this question.
Me: what if I were to call the number?
Operator: Unfortunately, the one person who would know about this is Chad Bean, and he’s not in the office tonight.
Me: I made a payment to increase my account from 35 to 50 on Thursday of this week
Me: hasn’t been done yet
Me: sent an email to sale today, has gone unanswered
Operator: As I said, I don’t have any access to any information about the SEO hosting part of our business.
Me: someone will be in in the morning?
Operator: Perhaps.
Me: perhaps?
Operator: I honestly don’t know when Chad will be in the office.
Operator: He will assuredly be here on Monday.
Me: ugh
Operator: I’m sorry I can’t be of more assistance.
Operator: Ok, take care and have a great day!
Operator: Thank you for using HostGator Live Chat.  Your opinion is very important to us.  When closing the chat, please take a minute to fill out the brief survey that pops up so that we may continue to improve our customer service and support.
Chat session has been terminated by the site operator.

Well, isn’t that nice? If you can’t tell from the transcript, I emailed sales (as instructed) much earlier in the day, and hadn’t heard back from them. I had actually chatted with a support person LAST night, too, and they said then it would be activated within an hour. That was 24 hours ago.

This isn’t the first time they’ve been less than stellar. When I moved my directories to different IP’s (choosing from the list of IP’s in WHM), 8 of the sites ended up pointing to nothing or other peoples’ sites. Several of my directories sent traffic to skin care sites for 2 days. When I was assigning IPs to use up my remaining 4 IP’s, it happened again, even though I was assured it was fixed beforehand.

I’ve even chatted with an obvious noob who wasn’t all that helpful. I’ll admit I’m a noob, but nobody’s paying me to be otherwise.

However, it looks like Hostgator is pretty pleased with their chat statistics/feedback.

I’m not sure how much this is a deal breaker. I seriously don’t think I’ll be moving the directory network, but I may be looking to work with someone else for the rest of my business.

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