How Host Gator Screwed Me For Three Years

How Host Gator Screwed Me For Three Years

Host Gator techs royally screwed up by blocking ALL Google’s bots from indexing over 50 of my domains during the past three years. No Google bots equals no Google listings equals no Google visitors. Read this to make sure your sites are not also blocked.

Here’s my open letter to senior management at Host Gator regarding this fiasco:

To: Senior Management at Host Gator
Re: How Host Gator Screwed Me For Three Years
Date: March 23, 2015

Reference Ticket Numbers: MIU-34587770, BCU-35170995, CCL-17654111

I have been a customer of Host Gator for over six years and have two accounts with your company.

It turns out that for three of those years, or half the time that I have been your customer, your company has cost me an immense amount of time, energy, effort and money because one of your techs royally screwed up by blocking ALL Google’s bots from over 50 of my domains during those three years.

Three Years Without Google

As I’m sure you know, this prevented Google from indexing any of my pages on more than 50 sites for three years.

No matter what I tried to do during those three years, I simply could not get Google to index my pages. Not being an SEO expert, it never occurred to me that one of your techs would have put a block in the root directory for my entire account!

The entire reason I went to so much effort to design, program and publish over 50 websites was to generate traffic for my message and/or to get my sales pitch out and/or to get my ads in front of eyeballs to make money from that account.

With Google bots completely blocked on all accounts by Host Gator, none of that can happen.

None of that did happen.

Three years of completely wasted effort.

My First Facebook Posting About Being Screwed By Host Gator

This is what I’ve already posted on Facebook on March 17, 2015 about Host Gator to my 3,543 friends regarding this fiasco:

Tech Rant On: I just spent two days trying to find out why Google would not index one of my new sites. Google Analytics, Google Web Master Tools, etc. all gave me 403 errors that nobody could figure out on the forums or from Host Gator.

I finally just mentioned something about the techs at Host Gator had done something to my server several months ago when I was having a major problem with foreign bots invading and totally crawling several of my sites while taking my server CPU usage to 100%.

That clue seemed to be the magic elixir for the Tier 2 Techs at Host Gator.

Turns out that the Host Gator tech back then had wrongly included in my server’s home directory’s .htaccess “SetEnvIfNoCase User-Agent “^.*Googlebot” bad_bot” – which we all know means that Google was banned from even visiting, let alone indexing, my site… And, wait for it… And also blocked Google from all 50+ domains I have on that one Host Gator server! And, this has been going on for several YEARS.

I share this here in case anybody else ever runs across this kind of problem with their own sites.

I’ve been using Host Gator for years, and they really do a great job, but this is inexcusable.

If this had been my direct employee, we would be having a conversation about their continued employment right now. Actually, by now, the conversation would be over.

I am not amused…

Tech Rant Off.

Open Letter To Host Gator Management

Many of my friends are asking about the current status after seeing my above posting.

That’s why this is an open letter to the upper management of Host Gator and will be included as a separate webpage on one or more of my sites with the title, “How Host Gator Screwed Me.”

That way I can easily provide a simple link on several of my Twitter accounts to the nearly 7,000 followers I have there – along with posting updates to my 3,500 friends on Facebook.

Your Customers Are Not Necessarily Webmaster or SEO Experts

I ask that you put yourself in my shoes and see yourselves putting that much effort into building over 50 sites to end up finding out three years later that some royal screw up by your hosting company techs completely interfered with you reaching any of your goals on any of your domains for all that time.

Like many of your customers, I am not an SEO expert by any means. Up until about a week ago when I started teaching myself about Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, I had no idea about any of this stuff.

Your customers do not expect to be sabotaged by your staff just because they are not Webmaster experts.

Good News / Bad News

The good news is that my pages are now being aggressively indexed.

Google Site: shows that many of my sites that were reporting zero pages indexed now have over 6,000 pages indexed in some cases!

The bad news is that I get a Terms of Service Warning from Host Gator after they have completely blocked all updates for all 50+ sites because of high CPU usage! I would assume the high CPU usage might, just maybe, have to do with the World, including Google, trying to do three years of catch up on 50+ sites all at one time!

So, after Host Gator blocking all indexing of 50+ sites for over three years, now Host Gator wants to penalize me again!

Once again, I am not amused.

Token Liquidated Damages

Here’s what I want from Host Gator as partial, token liquidated damages for all of the above problems you have caused me during the last three years:

1. Refund me all payments that I’ve made on both of my Host Gator accounts for the last six years I have trusted you as my hosting provider.
2. Do not charge me anything on either of my Accounts for the next six years.
3. Move me to faster servers where I don’t use 100% of your CPU time.
4. Don’t embargo, suspend, cache, etc. any of my domains until, together, we’ve had a chance to fix whatever the problem is with any specific problem domain.
5. Search the root domain of EVERY customer of Host Gator to ensure that this Google bot block is absent and not causing the same kind of devastating impact on other user accounts that I’ve been suffering through for over three years.

The above token liquidated damages are nowhere close to compensating me for the damage that Host Gator has caused me.

I see it as a token gesture on the part of upper management at Host Gator that it will own up to its mistakes, make the above token gestures and make sure it is a whole lot more cautious about causing this kind of problem for its customers in the future.

The World Will Be Watching For Your Response

During the past six years I’ve recommended your service to many of my consulting clients and even signed up as an affiliate of your company. So, I have probably nearly 12,000 folks who are going to be very interested in seeing how you, as a company, handle this fiasco.

I look forward to your response. Be aware that I may post some, or all, of it to any webpages I have dedicated to this matter on several of my domains.

One very pissed off customer,

Robert