HostOnce

John, Terry, I'm having the same problems. They were okay when I started (6 years ago), but things started really going downhill a couple of years ago, and this past year has been horrible. My site and email has been down on a fairly regular basis, email can be excruciatingly slow and often delayed several days, if not lost entirely. About a month ago I decided to move on, thinking I'd just stop the automatic renewal payment since Hostonce doesn't seem to want to communicate with me... unfortunately, that renewal snuck up on me before I had a chance to act, and I can't seem to get any info on canceling, or how to get my domain name released for the new host... hopefully they don't hold my name hostage... From now on, no phone number, no business...

Terri has it right. Something is WRONG at HostOnce.com. Their own site is now down, in addition to my own.

I have had a request in to them to release my domain into my name (so I can leave for another company that is not doing so bad!). Still nothing on my ticket after a week, and now they are totally unable to be reached as the ticket website is out.

Email outages over and over, and email loss. Ticket system is poor and SLOW.

If you are looking for a host, HostOnce.com USED to be very nice - years ago. However now, things have hit rock bottom. Avoid them, keep looking at other host options.

Something is very wrong at HostOnce. Their entire website is not up and hasn't been for 24 hours. My website is down; the email is down; and their site is down so you can't check status Over the past two months, all requests to support services have been closed arbitrarily or for a different reason than listed. Tickets go unassigned and unworked for days. I have been asking for DNS changes and they are ignoving the tickets. As others mentioned, domain sites go unrenewed, tickets are not worked, email is down often, and they will not make changes. Since there is no way to contact them except by trouble ticket and email that is not responded to; and their NC address in Whois is not valid with a disconnected phone number, my advice is to think twice about using them as a webhost.

EMAIL:

The email ID that I have created in hostonce is more often unavailable. Everytime it's down, it takes more than 3 days on average to have it back up.

SUPPORT:

The only way of requesting support is through their "helpdesk", which I think should be changed to "emptydesk" because more often the tickets submitted are left unanswered or arbitrarily closed.

DNS Name change

I have requested to have my domain under my personal name and it has been more than 4 days without any response at all

Bottom line, STAY AWAY!!

Can anyone tell me where hostonce.com is located and to which goverment agency I can lodge a complain about their service?? Thank you

Very poor hosting service.

Support is non-existant, no phone numbers to call. Support tickets usually take 2 to 3 days to get assigned, and the problem usually does not get correct right away.

STAY AWAY FROM THEM!

I've been with Hostonce for almost 6 years now I think and I'm done with them as of today. My email has now officially been down more days than it has been up in the last 30 days.

Hostonce has the absolute worst tech support and reliability I have ever encountered. They offer no estimate of when problems may be fixed, only respond with canned responses that clearly show your complaints are only scanned and not actually read, and they make sure there is no way to reach them other than their heinous help desk.

Anyone stupid enough to sign up with hostonce after reading reviews on this site gets exactly what they deserve....which will be cheap, awful webhosting.

I'm changing hosts this afternoon.

Horrendus e-mail problems since May, 2008. Not fixed after 2 weeks. Many e-mails not getting through, especially freeserve, wanado, fsnet, etc.

I have 20 hostings with them and will be moving them to a new hosted virtual server.

The price is certainly cheap, but you probably get even less than you pay for in the case of HostOnce. I've been with them for years and they weren't too bad at the beginning, but support and reliability are just pretty much non-existant these days. I have not received any email since Monday morning. It's now Thursday afternoon and their email system is still down. Their Status page has the same thing since Monday ("An overnight powersurge at our datacenter has caused some intermittant issues with our network. We are currently trying to resolve these.

The email system and server 64.79.50.242 remain affected."). How many other companies would take 4 days or more to bring email back up after a power surge ?

Well where do I begine, as steve has posted earlier, I have a few domains with hostonce and the service was pretty decent at first and has gotten worse and worse as time goes on. My domain expired 5-16-08 and the message I got from them last year said that was good until 6-9-08 and they told me that it was good until. I have made numerous attempts to get ahold of them via their helpdesk trouble tickets, which are a joke, and it has been 7 days and when they finally closed out the ticket they said that they updated their email servers and that it should resolve the problem. Obviously this is not the issue that i was having and they are just trying to skate around the problem. Then it gets worse. I call the actual registrar that they use for the domains that is listed in the WhoIS search and hostonce has the domains locked down tighter than fort knox. They are the only ones listed on the domains and they have it locked down to where the registrar cannot even renew the domain for you. This is just the latest of many many issues I have had with them. I think there should be a class action lawsuite brought against them for the horrible service they have provided, or atleast be taken down as a host and lose any liscensing that they have to be able to provide hosting services.

My site goes down all the time and all I can do is put a ticket in and then hope and pray there is a voluteer on duty that knows how to fix it. They do not have any phone number to call to actually talk to someone. I have sent numerous requests for a phone number to call and have been completely ignored. Their answer to the tech support tickets I put in is to send me an email advertisement on what they can do for me. They are the most frustrating people to deal with.

My website was down in July due to their server problems which they did not identify; and again in March 2008. They do not respond to emails to support or billing. After complaining, my website was back up again, but I never received any communication from them. Very frustrating that you cannot contact them by phone and they don't respond by email.

My site has been down for the past two weeks and I have filled the problem forms several times but I have not received anything not even "we are busy now". I even send an email to the customer service but they have not responded and obviously ignored me. Their website ad says "Knowledgable and speedy customer support". I don't think so!

I had no choice but to switch to hostonce as my old hosting company sold out to them. I have had them four weeks, three out of the four weekends my mail has been down, and I never got the old mail, and they did not fix until Monday. So, they must not even be there on weekends. This weekend, my web sites are down too. The only way I know to contract them is via an online trouble ticket as there is NO SUPPORT NUMBER and that is EVEN DOWN. This company is truly the very worst I have ever dealt with. I did not move my servers b/c I thought at first it was an accident, then last weekend when it did not go down, I thought their problems are probably fixed, but after reading their other online reviews I realize they just SUCK and always have.

The only reason I still use them is because I am extremely lazy. This is definitely one of if not THE worst host I have ever dealt with in any form.

The mail server is absolutely horrible and has been down so many times in the last year I stopped counting after 10 or so. Sometimes the outages last for days and often mail just disappears even though they will say it's backed up and should filter in once the servers are fixed. When I complain I get a very form like "Sorry, there was a backup...things are fine now" and half the time they aren't fine and normal service isn't restored for days.

Their site listing known issues with servers is not updated and sometimes I feel like the problems aren't even listed until a day after they are fixed. They are slow to respond to tickets and often I don't feel like they are even reading them due to the lifeless, poorly detailed responses I receive.

Both my site and mail are actually down right now as I type this (I'm not kidding).

I signed up years ago because they were the cheapest host around at the time....and all I can say is you really get what you pay for.

I do not know now but I years ago they hosted my website, the site was many times down and many times was hard to access my site for any maintenance, yes when I requested the cancelation the services they still charged me for 3 months,it was like talking to the wall,, BAD.

I got an automated email to tell me my domain and hosting was up for renewal. I couldn't log in to pay for it because my credit card info had changed and also I'd forgotten my login password to do this. I called the number in the Hostonce email and the lady told me to re-register the domain like new and fill out the form etc. with new credit card info. I did this and after 3 weeks I had not had any replies to my email requesting new login details. Today 26th December, I get a message telling me my domain expired and it was all my fault. Considering they processed my renewal fee and had my money for 3 weeks before telling me this - I can't think of a worse hosting company. All the time I had looked on WHOIS information before they got back to me, it said my domain name was pending deletion. On December 23, another company registered my domain name. DO NOT USE HOSTONCE!!!

I HATE HostOnce. They have the WORST service. I've lost money because my site is constantly down. They take forever to respond. Total failure to serve.

Where do I start? I have been with Hostonce for some time now and as with all other customers found them to be ok in the beginning. More recently I have found that all my sites are up and down on a daily basis and email for all my domains has been a total waste of time.

The ultimate disaster happened just recently when one of my main customers domains stopped functioning all together for almost a week. After many visits to their online support system I received a simple answer that they had somehow managed to currupt the entire domain and had to reset it so I should re-up the website. The only problem was they did not provide the new control panel settings for several days as yes you guessed it my email was down.

To cut a long story short my ecommerce section of the site was created online using a PHP script therefore this side of the site (which took over 12 months to develop) was not backed up on my system as Hostonce do not provide backup services within their control panel. When I eventually got the domain active again and reset the email accounts and repaired the website I had lost over 2 weeks trading. I was now faced with legal action from my customer which I informed Hostonce and all they said was that they did not provide a backup service and were not responsible for customers websites. Ok fine I requested a transfer to another provider. I still have had no response and guess what my clients site is down yet again and again there is no email on any of my domains.

Summary: Hostonce has got to be the most unreliable hosting provider out there. I spend more time in their support system (when it is available) than I do conducting future business. They have cost me and my clients great financial loss to which they do not seem to care. My advise is steer clear and avoid the nightmare.

PROS: Lots of file space. Hosting rates "locked in" for life upon signup. Cheap. Supports many types of active scripting without separate plug-ins or maintenance. Support is decent when responsive (but see below).

CONS: Marginal transfer speeds. Worst mail service I've ever seen: frequently down or delayed, sometimes for days on end. Sluggish customer support despite "24-hour guarantee." No phone support.

Relatively cheap hosting, has ups and downs, slow response to the tickets, mail server problems, etc.