Startlogic Inc. Web Hosting service borders on scam Phoenix Arizona

Wow! I thought I had filed this last year, but upon returning to file an update, I don't see it.

So, here goes!

I purchased a single domain and a year's hosting agreement from Startlogic almost 2 years ago now. Within 2 days of launching the site the account was suspended for exceeding the traffic limit. Bogus. I hadn't even notified friends and family that it was up yet! It took a week to resolve, with the standard run around, blame shifting etc. you're seeing in all the reports on this shady company.

I was lucky, however. I wasn't new to the game and their various and asundry claims that I had "bad code" that was "eating resources" and "crashing" my shared server were easily counter argued. For example, the bad code that was pulling vast volumes from my database and causing the problem? Well, they couldn't tell me what type of code it was so that I could correct it. That wasn't "their responsibility. It was mine." Well, of course they couldn't tell me, but not for the stated reasons! There was no code and no database at that time. It was a straight HTML page with a few personal (and highly compressed) family photos.

I wish I could say that was the end, but it wasn't. Downtime was utterly unacceptable. Their claims of 99.9% uptime are outright lies. I spend a total of 72 days "down" over that first year. You do the math.

24/7 customer service? HA! Oh, how I wish I could upload attachments here. I saved the "live chat" logs--where I walked away and left it for more than 2 hours and returned to no response. Not once. Not twice, but dozens of times. I saved the cell phone hold times of well over an hour. I kept every single buck passing, excuse making, contradictory email they ever sent.

When they suspended me for the final time, I went bezerk. By that time, I DID have a BBS running. I highly active one in service of military families nation wide. My logs show that I NEVER had more than 50 users on in one day. EVER. In order to exceed my bandwith with the MAXIMUM users, they'd have all had to have been hitting the refresh button every .25 seconds for an hour. Um, yeah.

THEN, they "upgraded" their service, dumped my entire website, locked me out (see the other complaints filed here, this is a common problem complaint) and tried to charge me $50 for their backup.

September 17th, 2007, I filed with the BBB under case number 97027492. Startlogic finally responded on May 9th, 2008, that a pro-rated refund had been credited to my banking account. Wish I could upload my statements too, because I haven't seen the refund yet.

This is in NO WAY an isolated incident. In fact, I'm off to file a second report, both here and with the BBB on a second account with separate problems. My husband's company (for which I am webmaster) is now embroiled with them as well--if you've read the other complaints, you've already guessed it. I moved his domain and registry to a new host and they billed for renewal anyway.

Unbelievable that these criminals are still in business. Stay far, far away.

Webwriter
Fairhope, Alabama
U.S.A.