WordPress Web Hosting Secret Shopper Evaluation Report
WordPress is very popular. However, have you ever wondered which web hosting company provides the best hosting services for WordPress? Cheap web hosting isn’t hard to find, but finding quality web hosting is a much different store. Becuase of this, I had the bright idea to secret shop four of the more popular web hosting companies and evaluate the overall level of customer services they provided to me. I secret shopped HostGator.com, BlueHost.com, LunarPages.com
and iPowerWeb.com
. The results of this report will indeed help you with making a decision on which web hosting company you should sign up for.
To give you a summary of the results here are the scores:
HostGator.com
(1 = Poor, 10 = Excellent)
- Customer Service Rating: 6.0
- Level of Knowledge: 7.5
BlueHost.com
(1 = Poor, 10 = Excellent)
- Customer Service Rating: 10
- Level of Knowledge: 10
LunarPages.com
(1 = Poor, 10 = Excellent)
- Customer Service Rating: 0
- Level of Knowledge: 0
iPowerWeb.com
(1 = Poor, 10 = Excellent)
- Customer Service Rating: 3.0
- Level of Knowledge: 1.5
Click Here to download the full report available on PDF.
Overall Summary:
I was absolutely amazed with the level of customer service provided by BlueHost.com. The name of the sales representative I spoke with was Lonny and he absolutely had me sold on “hello”. Lonny was extremely knowledgeable and knew BlueHost.com services like the back of his hand. He was very professional, enthusiastic and motivated to help fulfill my needs in web hosting and was very perceptive of my situation.
In all secret shopper calls made, I projected myself as being just a very casual individual who had a basic Blogger.com blog with the interest of setting up a web hosting account for the purpose of getting a Self-Hosted WordPress blog up and running while also having the need of assistance with transferring or migrating the existing blog over to the new one.
Based on my evaluation, BlueHost.com compared to HostGator.com, LunarPages.com and iPowerWeb.com is the best choice. Their level of customer service, technical support and overall eagerness to help the individual customer by far outranked their competitors.
Sad to say coming from a guy who has been hired by HostGator.com as a freelance writer. But don’t get me wrong, HostGator.com did well in this cold call evaluation. However, they did not win and I only hope that they view this evaluation and take corrective actions towards improving. Honestly, I like HostGator.com; however, I am extremely picky about who I do business with.
Many people think I am crazy for paying double the price for domain names with Godaddy.com compared to registering my domain names with companies who have a more affordable price. The reason is simple. I am all about receiving excellent customer service. When I pay money for a professional service, I want to be respected, valued and treated with class. I want a mint put on my pillow, I want my drink constantly refilled and I want to be catered to. BlueHost.com exceeded my expectations while HostGator.com simply only met them. LunarPages.com didn’t take my call and iPowerWeb.com failed to meet my basic needs.
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14 comments
Morning G !!
You know this is the first positive review, or word I have seen about blue host, any where. Mind you I dont keep up with or do surveys of webhosting service providers.
But I have read many a horror story about blue host. ie the crashy-ness, being down on holidays for days at a time. That alone freaked me out of using them. I dont want anything providing me service where they close for holidays. Sorry but its true, The internet doesnt close because its easter, nor does my business on the net. I dont see any rereason why a web hoster should be either.
Just .02$
Check out shane @ making money blogging’s last blog post..Whats a Hoplink – How to create a hoplink
Did Host Gator buy Blue Host or something?
Seriously, I thank you for your honest review and it is great to see some “real” posts (although I like Cinnamon Toast Crunch too) come out of here again.
Check out Kevin’s last blog post..How Do You Read Your Favorite Blogs?
I don’t know about the other three, but I’ve had a couple of my blogs hosted with LunarPages with no problems. Perhaps you caught them at a bad time?
Check out Sire’s last blog post..A Blogger’s View On Google Chrome
Hi Sire,
This evaluated their customer service. If LunarPages.com wasn’t available at the time of my call while the others were, that just doesn’t look good. I will gladly follow up with them in the near future though because I am curious to speak with them too.
I was surprised to see how LunarPages.com forwarded my call to a default voicemail box. If they are doing that on sales calls, then I can only imagine what they do with their tech support calls.
Every company is going to have public horror stories against them. When a blogger is pissed off at something and they feel shafted, they use their blog and make World War III out of the situation. Kinda like what I just did with Linkshare.com. lol
All my posts are real. You only consider the ones to be “real” that interest you? Visit my feeds section and subscribe to only the topics that interest you.
Thanks Garry! While I haven’t placed a sales call as you did – I’ve read no less than a dozen “real” reviews about each company. I’ve never personally heard anything negative about Blue or HG, although Shane’s comments concern me. If you were truly signing up today – which way would you go?
Kent F.
I have an open and active account with HostGator.com and I will soon be opening an account with BlueHost.com
as this evaluation only reviews their sales staff and doesn’t now evaluate their network dependability and their level of tech support when problems do arise, and keep in mind, no matter who you sign up with, problem will occur. These are computers that we are dealing with doing very advanced things. The element that needs to be determined is which company will react the best to an adverse situation.
However, to answer your question is best as I can, I would have to say that BlueHost.com
won me over hands down and in fact I will be signing up with them within the next few days. Lonny provided me with information that was very helpful and I feel that he went very far and beyond what is expected from an individual with his job title.
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I’ve been truly impressed with BlueHost support. I was a total newbie, and they very kindly and patiently walked me through the questions that I had in setting up WordPress blogs.
Damn Garry, how do you find time to do everything that you do? lol
Anyways, thanks for the writeup, I had 2 databases crash on me a few weeks ago for no reason whatsoever so I had to get in contact with GoDaddy and find out what was wrong. The regular tech support guy couldn’t figure it out so he had to forward it to the advanced team. Took them a few days to get it sorted out but they fixed it.
Luckily the databases were for 2 sites that I am still working on and have no traffic to. If they had gone down to a site that had traffic I would have been pissed. In fact, after they went down I was considering switching over to HostGator because you have been so happy with them and they seem like they have some great deals.
But now with this post, I will go ahead and wait and see what you come up with.
Check out Jarret’s last blog post..Another Warrior Into The Fray: Chrome
You can’t go wrong with HostGator.com compared to GoDaddy.com Hosting… signing up with them will seem like a vacation compared to GoDaddy.
I am for sure going to be signing up for BlueHost.com
, so you can safely use BlueHost.com or HostGator.com. I only have an account with HostGator.com but I really don’t think BlueHost.com will have any issues with helping out with situations such as the one you recently experienced.
[...] if you are already a HostGator.com customer, we will need to use BlueHost.com. Also too, I am secret shopping many web hosting companies towards finding the best web hosting companies online. But in the mean time, HostGator.com and [...]
Pretty nice post Garry, thanks for sharing! I’ve been wondering for some conclusive information about web hosting sellers and came across your blog. I’m using HostGator.com right now but no doubt BlueHost.com services are also not bad.
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