Hostnine Review

I was going to wait on this until I heard back from HostNine about my backups, but I'll go ahead and review them. By the way for anyone interested, you can view their F rating for yourself at the Better Business Bureau: [url]

I have used 6 hosts during my 9 years on the internet. Of those 6, HostNine is the 3rd longest at 9 months. It did seem to be the answer to what I was looking for. Back then the price was only $3.95 a month with no contracts. I could pay by the month, and I was a bit gun shy back then after going through 2 back to back bad situations, so I didn't want to pay for another year in advance and fear not getting my money back if I needed to leave.

I'm sure you've all heard the phrases, Don't judge a book by its cover and/or If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. Well, HostNine fits both of those. You can't assume the company is reputable because they seem to be what you want and need. True, they have a very good uptime. I only had one problem in the first month, but my site was only down for a few hours, and I've had no problems since then (until I was suspended that is). I was assured it was another user that was taken care of. Well, I now know what they mean by "taken care of." My site has grown a little bit during those 9 months, but I never got even close to the max storage space or bandwidth allowed.

This host will suspend you after one thing that they feel violates their TOS. They don't care if it's fair. They don't care if the problem is easy to fix. They don't care if it's never happened before or that it won't happen again. Hostnine is a One Strike You're Out company. They act like it's to protect their other customers, but they wouldn't delay suspending any of those customers for the slightest reason. Is this what you would want to trust with your business?

They have a community forum that is comprised of their friends and loyal followers. If you dare post anything even slightly negative on that forum, a member will tell you that it's wrong...or your post will be deleted. HostNine expects all their members to visit this forum on a daily basis to read about any maintenance or server downtimes. Unless you join that community and become friends with the staff, they show you no loyalty if a problem arises. I don't want to be friends with my host. I just expect them to run in the background and provide the service I pay for.

I would never go back to HostNine, since I cannot trust them. BUT they promised me a backup, which I have in an email:

> From: HostNine Abuse <abuse@hostnine.com>
> Subject: [#ITH-505861]: Account Suspended: judelb
> Date: Monday, April 13, 2009, 7:02 AM
>
> We can provide a backup and please stop emailing support for
> a restore.
> Regards,
> Alex Jankuv
> Hostnine Support

I have waited and still have not received the backup. I have emailed and asked, but they are now ignoring me. Well, I won't be ignored. It doesn't hurt my feelings that they don't want me to be a customer anymore. I have a feeling I know why. They recently raised their prices to $6.95 a month to be prepaid for a full year. They are probably trying to weed out those of us that were paying $3 less on a monthly basis. Whether or not this is true is moot, though. I don't care what their reasons are, but I do care about not having received the backups they have promised me...and believe it or not, this could happen to you as well. I read all the negative reviews for HostNine out there, but I felt I would give them a chance. Until someone has burnt me, I try not to judge, but I'm here to try to save anyone else from this. My website is currently running on an old backup. I've had a lot of personal issues the last year, so I haven't downloaded any backups in awhile. It hurts my site and online business to be running on an old backup. How hard would it be for HostNine to give me the promised backups? I wouldn't think it that hard...would you?