Final HostingZoom Review? 36 Months

[WARNING: This may be a long review, reader discretion is advised.]
If some of you have followed my other reviews on HostingZoom(HZ) posted on here, you might be wondering why are the # of months are not correct... it's actually do to my poor math skills haha.. but here it is, calculated correctly(I hope).

I've been an HZ customer for 36 months now. That must say quite a lot about HZ in itself and the fact that I come back here periodically to tell others about my experience at HZ. A little backgrounder for starters.

I've been with HZ since April 2005. I came to this very forum to read up on reviews and get recommendations. I narrowed down my search to HZ and Site5. At the time, 2 very formiddible hosts in the industry. Both touting blazing fast response time to tickets, superior-high quality support, excellent servers managed by the best. After getting feedback and contacting both hosts I made my decision to go with HZ. Their sales staff was particularly helpful and friendly. Quite prominentely I remember getting blazing fast replies from Kiet Duong(CEO of HZ) with detailed explanations to the questions I had as a n00b in the hosting industry(I feel quite dumb looking back at the questions I've asked). It was this personal helpfulness that I experienced that gave me the extra push to go with HZ added with the fact that they had live chat technical support.

Fast forward a year and a half. I totally patted myself on the back telling myself what a great choice I've made. It was this time I've seen the "Site5 Fiasco" unfold here on WHT. To such amazement I didn't understand how such a highly touted host could run into so many problems and just be bombarded with a barge of negativity. It was also at this point where the overselling went mad with Site5. I was just glad I wasn't any part of it.

I was happy over here at HZ. Stable server with little to no problems. The support I received through tickets were always blazing fast and amazingly helpful and personal.

Such notable technicians as Alex and Vlad who are still with HZ today made my stay at HZ a perfect one. Any problems I had were always delt with in the most professional manner. The server was very stable and I had little to no reason to complain about anything since all my websites were working beautifully. The times where I've used live chat was pleasantely helpful. No trouble getting a hold of a technician and having a personal 1-on-1 support session to get a quick problem resolved.

On a few occassions as well, I had special urgent requests and they were fulfilled greatfully. One was to get a new VPS plan purchased at their sister company ModVPS and get it setup during the weekend, which they don't normally do. Kiet took it upon himself to get my VPS up and running over the weekend. Absolutely wonderful gesture.

A second request was to have my site moved back to the original server I was on, when I moved to their 'failover service' simply because my experience with the 'failover service' was quite bluntly put, horrible. Kiet again took it upon himself to personally make sure my sites made it over safely. He worked over the wee hours of the night and had a technician, Alex I believe, follow up with me the next morning. Again, a very wonderful gesture on Kiet's part. This is what made me really tout HZ so much simply because of this service I received that was above and beyond what I felt I should have gotten.

Fast forward yet again in time. Now I start to experience minor hiccups here and there. 500 internal server error reports from my users. No biggie in my mind but then also at this time I seemed to have observed a pattern happening on the forums. The problems of other customers have began to become very vocal. Day after day, all I observe in the forum is posts about problems problems problems and support not being helpful. For me personally, support quality and response time definately took a hit.

Not a big one, it was still good by my standards, just not as good as it was before. I don't take much out of this, simply take it as growing pains.

Fast forward a little more to now. Nothing has changed. Customers are more and more vocal about problems. Some network outages occur with more frequency and in my honest opinion, were handled horribly. Horrible customer communication and notification about the status of the major event.
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Customers are more and more vocal about the horrible support service as well. Canned liked responses, unhelpful support, very slow responses and the increasing difficulty to get on live chat.

This is the point that began to worry me. My server was still more or less fine so I haven't had an excuse to use tech support so I could not put these claims to truth.

Customers also begin to now point out the increasing problem of load ont he servers.

This past month. I too have begun to feel the effects of this. Load has been an issue daily. My sites are inaccessible during the morning hours as the load hovers around 15+. Either that or my sites are just so incredibly slow that it doesn't even matter that they eventually load because more than likely the visitor would have left. ALL my sites have been taken a hit due to this inaccessiblilty. I loose some traffic becuase this vital part of the day, none of my sites are close to being function due to the speed.

I have contacted support and have gotten nothing that has been remotely useful. Also mentioning that the respones time has turned to hours for my tickets(6-9 hours if memory serves me correct, instead of 5-35 minutes like before). I've also had little luck connecting to a tech on live chat on the first attempt. The responses I've gotten from support seem more like excuses than anything. Alex did take it upon himself to reopen my ticket to check up on me(which I really appreciate) but it still doesn't change the fact that the problems have still been occuring. It has come to a point where I no longer think it's beneficial to stay any longer with HZ. So I may call it quits with them after 36 months unfortunately.

Nonetheless, I am greatful for the times where HZ has been helpful and had taken it upon itself to provide me with service above and beyond what I expect. But like the saying, all good things come to an end.

Hope you found this review intriguing and sorry for the lengthyness of it. I hope it's a great read!