You should be aware that I complain that HostMonster is oversensitive in term of scam alert by now at my HostMonster review. Many don’t get my point about “oversensitive” and I’ll explain further at this post, using my recent experience with their verification department as an example.
My HostMonster account got deactivated!
When HostMonster Secret Revealed was first started about a month ago, the whole website actually got deactivated for no reason at all.
I was totally stone!
And to be honest with you, it was totally driving me nuts.
Imagine you had just pay nearly a hundred bucks on the hosting services and the next day you found your hosting account banned for no reason given at all!
Communication with HostMonster customer support
So what I did was to hold my temper and submit a support ticket at their service center. Luckily the response from HostMonster was quick and I got this canned reply from them a few minutes later:
Dear Customer:
Your web hosting account for hostmonstersecretrevealed.com has been deactivated (reason: suspicious activity on this account).
Although your web site has been disabled, your data may still be available for
up to 30 days, after which it will be deleted.
If you feel this deactivation is in error, please contact customer support as
soon as possible.
Thank you,
HostMonster.Com Support
http://www.hostmonster.com
For support go to http://helpdesk.hostmonster.com/
Toll-Free: (866) 573-4678
Responses from HostMonster
Hours later, I got this email form a guy named Tyler:
Dear Customer,
Thanks for contacting us.
We apologize for the trouble you’ve been having, The reason your account has been suspended is because we need to verify the information you have us is correct. Please contact our Abuse dept at 866-573-4678 or if you are calling from outside the USA, please call 801-494-8462. We are open between the hours of 8AM to 5PM MDT.
Thanks
Tyler
Leve1 1 Support Engineer
Hostmonster.com
866.573.4678
Most questions can be answered by articles in our forum, knowledgebase, and video tutorials:
Forum: http://www.hostmonsterforum.com
Knowledgebase: http://www.helpdesk.hostmonster.com/kb
Tutorials: http://www.hostmonster.com/tutorials/
Server Status: http://www.serverstatus,hostmonster.com
Calling the Verification Department at HostMonster
I was like “Call your verification department? What the heck?” I was like half the globe away from the States and the support guy are asking me to call them at MDT time.
Having no choice, I called them. The guy who answered the phone was very polite, but unfortunately, couldn’t solve my problem at all. It happened that the account re-activation task fall under another department named ‘Verification Department’ in HostMonster and heck, my long distance call to U.S. got transferred and the connection got cutoff before I can talk to the personel in Verification Department.
Thus, the mess continues and my website has to surfer a few days down for no reason. Long story short, I was finally able to connect to the right person at HostMonster Verification Department and re-activate my hosting account again.
Things got fixed finally
In the last piece of reply I got for them, they explained the reason of the incident and the solution. The whole drama ended a day after I fax in my credit card and identification card copies.
As part of our on going efforts to provide our customers with outstanding service, we have criteria that we use in determining if an account is legitimate. Due to the certain items contained in the account information, this account was flagged for a suspicion of fraud. For security reasons, this flag caused the system to deactivate your account. We apologize and would be happy to reactivate the account.
To reactivate your account please fax or email a copy of your government-issued photo identification and the front and back of the credit card that was charged. You can white out all but the last four card numbers on the card front.
You can fax the documents to 801-765-1992 ATTN: Verification or reply to this email with the attachments.
The system is designed to do this to prevent fraudulent accounts from being created.
Brooke
Hostmonster.com
Verification Department
support-verification@hostmonster.com
(866) 573-HOST (4678) Option 4
Most questions can be answered by articles in our forum, knowledgebase, and video tutorials:
Forum: http://www.hostmonsterforum.com
Knowledgebase: http://helpdesk.hostmonster.com/kb/
Tutorials: http://www.hostmonster.com/tutorials/
Server Status: http://serverstatus.hostmonster.com/
Conclusion of the story?
I have been working with more than 10 web hosting companies (yes, using the same credit card and details) and I had never faced such issues (information abused) before.
I am disappointed to know that a reputable web hosting company like HostMonster will actually ask you to “verify the credit card information” by calling and faxing them. I mean… aren’t we doing business online? Why not get everything sorted out online? And heck, what’s up with this ‘information abuse’ claims where I have nothing to do with any sort of scam activity? Who’re going to pay for my long distance calls since this is not my fault? Why HostMonster isn’t doing anything on this to repay my losses?
Well, so there you go – my first rant on HostMonster. Fortunately, their services are so far doing good (in term of server uptime, disk storage capacity, unlimited domain hosting… etc) and the customer service is efficient.
But a fact is a fact: Although their hosting service is among the best, the scam alert is really over reacting and they really need to improve before they scare all their customers away.
Cheap Realiable Unix Hosting by “Web Hosting Geeks” (2006)