GreatWebGuy Self-proclaimed greatness is a hard thing to prove.

Great Hosting, Low Price, not exactly

Thought I had found a great hosting company, good service, good price. I even paid up front for 3 years. At this point I don't recommend paying for anything for 3 years, not even if it gets you a $5/mo price. It looks great when you see it, $4.95/mo, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited domains, no hidden costs, 99.9% uptime. I beg to differ. Don't buy any of these claims, read the terms and conditions carefully.

I've had so many hosting experiences, but usually don't have this many problems.

About 3 months after I started hosting with GreenGeeks I got this email from them:

Dear Customer,

This is an automated notification that your account has surpassed the
excessive resource limitations set out in our Terms of Service. This
notice is served to you as notification that your account may be
suspended if action is not taken to correct the excessive use.

Failure to resolve the excessive usage will result in account
suspension. You may be asked to upgrade your account to one of our VPS
or Dedicated Server packages if you are unable to correct the excessive
usage.

Full Details regarding our Terms of Service and Excessive Resource Usage
policy is found at: http://www.greengeeks.com/legal/tos.php

If you have any questions or concerns, please e-mail support@greengeeks.com.

Below is more information about the offending account:

account "greatweb" (domain name greatwebguy.com) is found consuming the following amount of resources:

Average CPU = 8.98 %
Average RAM = 4.25 %
Average MySQL = 0.1 %

Oh, I thought it was "unlimited", when in fact it was "ummm limited" I check out the Terms, they weren't lying. I took all the fancy bells and whistles out of the blog, lightened up the page, reduced the number of posts shown on the home page, the usual stuff you do to make your site have less impact. I hummed along for another 2 months until one day I routinely brought up my site and my home page was replaced with "Hacked by Psycho TN" and a laughing skull. Not really sure how the site was exploited, it's a shared host, I had limited FTP as much as possible, but in every directory of every site I had hosted on this account the index.php had been replaced and an img.php had been added. I cleaned up all the sites and got them running, most were WordPress installs, so replacing the install pretty much fixed and I cleaned up and reinstalled the plugins and the themes. I removed all but my essential FTP accounts, changed passwords and notified GreenGeeks of the issue, they scanned the site and told me that WordPress was a security threat. One week later I opened my site again to find a blank screen, the entire site had been deleted, my guess is by GreenGeeks. They have no backup, and offer no help. All I've asked of them is that since they can't keep their shared servers secure and my sites were missing in action, that they refund the remaining 2 and a half years of my hosting, I think that's fair. After all, they're not providing the service that they said they would. Instead I get responses like this from their Tech Support manager:

Hello Jason,

Not a problem, as per our Terms of Service refunds are only issued as per our 30 day money back period. This was agreed on by you during the signup and checkout.

Thank you and have a great day,

Josh Dargie
GreenGeeks Support Manager
support@greengeeks.com

Not sure what else to do, but blog about it and complain to the Better Business Bureau. Watch out for GreenGeeks and their fantastic claims. It's only a matter of time, before you realize it's not such a great deal after all.