Does anyone have their sites on Green Geeks? If so can you tell me your experiences, I'm looking for a site that has 7/24 support and also allows video with Drupal. I see they allow video and streaming video/audio, I wonder what their support is like and how well drupal runs on it.
Thanks

Comments

seanray’s picture

Green geeks is a new hosting company only in businees for 1 year, it's too early to evaluate their support.

In terms of your needs, i think quite a lot of other web host provide the features you want, such as hostgator, or bluehost.

mkmagu’s picture

I've tried Hostagor, the do have great support but file manager only allows for 25 meg upload which makes it hard to upload video files or move a site for that matter.

seanray’s picture

Have you tried to do it using some FTP tools (such as FileZilla) instead of File Manager? I just upload a file more than 100 meg to hostgator, but what I have is their dedicated server.

mkmagu’s picture

I can't use FTP at work and I do find file manager faster than FTP. Just a preference.

kamdroop’s picture

GreenGeeks looks to be around since 2006. It also is run by a guy named Trey Gardner, who has been around for a very long time according to my research. I think they just started marketing more. They are also a recommended host in the new Drupal for Dummies book that just recently came out.

I use them for my web site. They offer 24/7 service and allow you to edit your own PHP.INI.

JoeCool-1’s picture

following is the body of an email I received back from GreenGeeks customer support.

"Thank you for your interest in our web hosting service. As of right now we do not have a file limit, but we will be imposing a file limit in the coming weeks. Large quantities of files make it extremely hard for us to back up. This is an issue that is encountered all across the shared hosting industry.

My suggestion to you would be to use a cloud hosting provider, such as Uptimehost.com, who are built specifically to handle more than average amount of files/diskspace/bandwidth/cpu, etc.

Please get back to us if you need any further assistance and let us know how else we can help.

Thank you and have a great day,

Karl Davids
GreenGeeks Support
support@greengeeks.com"

I'm having a heck of a time trying to find a good host. They all want to allow unlimited space but then put a cap on the number of files allowed. I did go to the Uptime website and they charge 25.00 for only 25 Gb of space. Not nearly enough space for my sites, photos, etc.

kaakuu’s picture

That is an important info. They recommend themselves as Drupal host but if there is file limit Drupal hosting becomes meaningless - if there are user pictures or images posted by users (not galleries but just even attachments) the number of files can go up like anything and Drupal stores files in folders not as binary data in db. But are these hosts listening?

philbar’s picture

I think the file limit is referring to the size of 1 file, not the number of files you can upload. Meaning, you probably can't upload a file that is 100GB in size.

wireyourworld’s picture

I just started with greengeeks and have had one bout of 20 minutes of downtime, live chat was nice, they said they were aware of it and it would be restored in a few minutes and it was. No problems since, until today though I'm not sure it qualifies as a problem, fully. I installed ubercart and wanted to use Google checkout and paypal. (really I want to use amazon payments but no one around here seems willing to get that running). I then found I needed an SSL cert so I bought one from godaddy. After running in circles with instructions that didn't match I called godaddy for help, she didn't recognize the fields in my cPanel either so I called greengeeks. Turns out I have to pay $30 a year for a dedicated IP to install an SSL cert. This info was buried in their "knowledge base" and not up front as an additional service I might have to pay for, which is what qualifies it as "problem" to me. So anyway, I don't want to pay that now when I have no traffic. So I'm stuck with icky paypal. And greengeeks for 2 years. Godaddy will refund me for the cert since its not been generated yet.
But anyway, the phone was answered quickly and live chat is great too. But I'm not ready to pay more to them.

xkater’s picture

this is a good review - balanced - am also with GG and had a similar downtime, but the chat guy didn't know s_t, just said he could access my site OK - i told him i was having a slowdown in editing (multiple queries, over and over) - no love there. I called the next day, and the phone guy checked my site (and apparently my server) and told me the server looked slow and he would report to engineers. This took about 6 hours but all was OK.
$30/year dedicated IP doesn't seem outrageous, you can get SSL for $15 - GoDaddy's regular price for SSL + dedicated IP is $50/yr. (they have a 50% special on for new users now)

i know stuff is buried in the knowledgebase - i called to say i couldn't find something there, and the guy said, 'did you search for "catch-all" (email) and sure enough it was there!

I don't know anything about Paypal - what's so icky about PayPal - and what's so great about Amazon?

Oshun’s picture

Paypal has a reputation for freezing business accounts for questionable reasons. As well as taking money out of your checking account and you have no recourse.

http://www.paypalsucks.com/

http://www.paypalwarning.com/paypal_sucks

http://www.ablogaboutnothing.com/paypal-sucks/

Just google other horror stories.

Amazon seems to have fairer policies/protections for both buyers and sellers. I have sold on Amazon before and never had a problem. I feel they also inspire greater purchasing confidence and have a larger customer base.

trueMarketing’s picture

Hello,
We operate ThemeSnap.com (selling premium Drupal themes). We offer a nice discount for themes if someone chooses Green Geeks hosting. But we also have to install the themes we sell to customers at Green Geeks and we also host a few sites there ourselves. I would *never* recommend a hosting company to a customer if the host wasn't good -- especially since we'd have to deal with installing and setting up their new Drupal site there. I'd rather do without the headache and support if Green Geeks provided bad hosting.

So far, so good though. We have set up a handful of customer websites there and, like I said, have 3 or 4 sites that we own set up there to test things out. We have set PHP_memory limit to 124MB on most sites without problem, uploading or having access to PHPMyAdmin, cPanel, .htaccess, and all the other necessities for a Drupal site are pretty solid there.

"$30/year dedicated IP doesn't seem outrageous"

You're right xkater. This isn't bad or over-charging IMO. We pay roughly $2-3 per month for dedicated IPs at other hosting companies -- Hostgator, Fused Network, etc. So, this is in line with other dedicated IP address costs.

We'll report back more once we've set up more sites there, but right now I'd rate them as very reliable thus far.

jimzhou247’s picture

I use GreenGeeks and so far have not had any problems. I wrote a review for it a few weeks ago:
http://www.jimmyzhou.com/blog/drupal-hosting-greengeeks-review

ben4asterisk’s picture

Hi,

My question to GreenGeeks:
========
So do you impose any file limit? I haven't seen any file limits in your faqs/etc.

. What is the max size limit per file?
. What is the limit for number of files for one account ?

I want to be able to be install and control everything for my website using ssh. So I can set up things and administer my website using SSH instead of cpanel?
==========

Response from GreenGeeks
==================
We do not impose inode or file limits. We enable SSH on every account by default.
===============

So I hope this is indeed true and no '*' anywhere.

cheers
- Ben

RhiP’s picture

I've had a really poor experience with them. Maybe they've outgrown themselves?

pawi81’s picture

Hello,

do you have now some experience with them? i want to run my new site and searching good and cheap drupal hosting.

db size will be around 500mb plain

DaveSmall’s picture

Do you mean the size of your single db will reach 500MB? If that's the case, then you should go with VPS instead of a shared hosting, as most of shared hosting will have hidden restriction which might limit your DB size to 100MB or even lower.

RhiP’s picture

Poor phone support for Europe:
Because their phone support is only open during US timezone office hours, and their 'Level 1' support live chat facility isn't able to help with anything technical, it can be very frustrating if something goes wrong (eg. server goes down) because there isn't anybody you can speak with over the phone.
I was told that "Anyone from level 2 support team can't call clients.".
If your site is down and you need answers then it is very frustrating to have to send off an email and wait for a reply.

Server downtime:
The server issues have brought our site down a few times in the last year.

Site migration very difficult:
It took them a few weeks to get our site across, and when they had done it I realised they had moved the wrong database by mistake.

'Resource' limit:
Our site was taken offline with no warning yesterday because we had gone over our CPU limit. It is a small Drupal-Ubercart site, with the usual optimisation measures in place, and low traffic.

Poor customer service:
Occasionally when I phoned up I found the staff friendly, jovial and upbeat, but mostly I have been given incorrect information, and have found their support staff rude, patronising, unhelpful and muddled. Perhaps they are overworked/short staffed or have just gone surfing.

I really did give them the benefit of the doubt because they were mentioned in the Drupal book I bought, and because I like the idea of their business (green, friendly etc.), but sadly I think I am going to have to move my site somewhere else. I really wanted to avoid this because moving hosts is a right royal pain in the bum, but when I came in this morning my site was down again - I wouldn't recommend them and am moving to these guys instead who I do have experience with and who haven't had any downtime in 3 years now! :-)
http://www.ecologicalhosting.com

DaveSmall’s picture

You could consider to submit a review at http://www.hostucan.com/company/greengeeks, where those information will be used to rank a web host.

urbanx’s picture

I recently set up a greengeeks reseller account, and have been mostly happy with them, EXCEPT for the fact that I found out that they do NOT support drush on their shared hosting accounts.

not quite enough to cause me to switch from them, but close. in fact, when i consider the amount of time that will now be required for upgrading and maintaining drupal sites, it might just be enough to cause me to switch.

too bad, too. i've really like them otherwise

mcncyo’s picture

I been using them over a year. They don't allow drush. There support is ok. I use the live chat and they can answer some questions and some take a little while to answer, but to get anything major done that need root access to the server you have to send them an email and wait until they push it up to level 2. I wish the people on live chat can create a support ticket for you and push it up to level 2. I am on a server that use to get overloaded but now they put a thing in place that limited cpu and memory user per account. Since they did this a couple of days ago I seen the server load goes to 1.4 for about 5 to 10 mins during peak times and then it goes back down to about .30

seanray’s picture

Adding a tool to monitor the resource used of each hosting account will be a normal setup of each server. No surprise Greengeeks deploy it in their server.

aevalentine’s picture

GreenGeeks should be avoided by anyone who wants reliable web hosting. They claim to have 99.9% uptime, but I pay for monitoring that tells a very different story. They usually run around 95% in any given week and a few times last year, I was down for days at a time. I should have left then, but I continued to give them the benefit of the doubt. Please don't make the same mistake.

Their tech support is in India (even though they swear they are in the US). During every support call I get a visitor from India - without fail. Yeah, sure, they are in the US...they are just pinging off a server in India. The answers you get from tech support are copy/pasted and don't tell you anything. I would be surprised if ANYONE who works there knows a THING about web hosting. I tried calling and still couldn't get a straight answer...EVER.

Their unlimited hosting is only unlimited in the areas that don't cost them money or they ability to pack their servers full of sites. Have a blog? Don't even THINK about using GreenGeeks. They will limit your server resources and tell you that the only way to get back to normal is to upgrade to a much more expensive package. Then, if you don't do that, they will shut you down entirely.

I can't say one nice thing about them. I was with them for 19 months which was 18 months too long. If you want a reliable host, this is not the one.

cirenamlat’s picture

I started two years ago with GreenGeeks at a great promotional price. Renewal on the second year came at a 100% increase so I let them know via emai I wanted to transfer my domain name and cancel out my account (hosting). It took two weeks of daily emails to finally convince them to allow my domain to transfer to Godaddy. If your in this position keep pressing them. They are grabbing up the DrupalforDummies crowd they then they hold their "dummies" domains hostage for a ransom when they dont pay they overpriced hosting. Luckly for me my hard work and persistence payed off and now I have my domain! Horay!

I was so pleased about getting my domain and feeling that Green Geeks had more than sufficient requests to cancel my account after all we had been through I ignored the emails they were sending about a renewal invoice for the hosting ($100+).
That was until I see the charge on my credit card and figure out I have to go to GreenGeeks.com/cancel and that my multiple emails and phones calls expressing that I did not wish to continue my service does not fit their terms and conditions. So I cancel online and politely call in to request a refund (even partial) with Mark (nice guy). He somewhat agrees that what I'm asking for seems fair yet transfers me to the infamous Josh whom informs me that a partial refund is not possiable because I FAILED to follow their instructions for canceling my account in addition to not owning up to my MANLY obligations. If you get transferred to this guy hang up, he will ruin your day and a make you question if there is really hope for mankind.

The summation of my experience comes to; Green Geeks is not a scam but their offers are misleading and they hide behind their terms and conditions (which who actually reads?) and when it comes to dealing with renewals, refunds or change of accounts their customer service is far away from what we know in the open-source community as polite and fair. I strongly suggest the Drupal community reconsiders GreenGeeks as the official host for dummies.

To the CEO of GreenGeeks Tray, I left you a message with Mark to call and discuss this with me as i would like to coe to a fair resolution for bothnof us. However, i encourage you to listen to the phone call with Josh to hear how rude and disrespectful he was to me on the hone.
He would not let me finish speaking and he was very insulting regarding my inability to use your online cancel form. I would like a copy of this phone call to submit to my attorney for review.

Thannk You.

Eric

cirenamlat’s picture

I encourage you to post a link to my call so that everyone can hear what your manager Josh will sound like prior to falling for your alluring arresting offers.

gkuhf8’s picture

''The summation of my experience comes to; Green Geeks is not a scam but their offers are misleading and they hide behind their terms and conditions (which who actually reads?) and when it comes to dealing with renewals, refunds or change of accounts their customer service is far away from what we know in the open-source community as polite and fair.''

Couldn't agree more. Just had a really bad experience and am in the process of migrating out. Losing out on the 3 years I paid for and I'm only 7 months into it but after 3 hack attacks and suspended accounts, I had enough. I've been pushing for a refund for the remaining 2 years but as per their policy, only 30days. Anything past that, 1min even 1 sec, you can forget about it. I wanted to address this issue with someone in person, and the chat agent (Vance, nice guy) suggested that I speak to ''Josh'' (the hope destroyer lol) about my wanting to get a refund. I didn't bother in the end! Good thing I read your post about it.

gkuhf8’s picture

I have hosted previously with another company for many years without ANY PROBLEMS. It was a very peaceful experience, however after joining greengeeks, it has become a VERY frustrating experience.

I went with Greengeeks because I liked what they were 'advertising' as an eco site, however less than one year into the service and after spending $178 plus another $19 for another domain, I'm getting weary that continuing with their service would mean more hidden costs for basic security that should be anyhow a standard etc and most of all of all the hack and spam attacks that already happened to both of my domains in less than a year!

Imagine that your site gets hacked with some embarrasing pirate symbol stating you've been hacked is on open view to the public. I wasn't even aware untill a business contact notified me of this having visted my page to see a particular work of mine. Very embarrasing indeed. Greengeeks weren't even aware that this had happened. I had to report it to them.

Anyway, the first time, I was extremely patient with GGeeks and worked with the excellent technical support team to rectify the situation. I put the site back up and went back happily to my work believing that this was a thing of the past...... but lo and behold after a few short months, I went to update my site and what did I find? That both of my domains have been suspended with a large sign advertising to the public 'ACCOUNT SUSPENDED'. Apparently they do this due to spamming complaints etc, but my site is a creative site, I just have photos on there and so it was due to another hack that caused this to happen. Anyway, Ggeeks shut down my site without issuing me a warning that they were going to do that. You would think at least this would be a basic consumer right, a quality assuring service that a paying customer would be entitled to. A simple email notifying you that both your accounts are yet again suspended.

Anyhow, after all that's said and done, I'm expecting that these hack and spamming attacks will inevitably continue, unless I pay them more money everymonth to protect my Photography Portfolio from these attacks. Sounds suspect to me if I may say, extra hidden costs everytime to get the basic security service for a simple site occupying less than 300mb of space. If I were to sit out the remainder of the service, I'm already forseeing more frustrating days like this having to wrestle for some decent customer service and quality assurance. Quite frequently, I don't feel like I want to go through all this again and again and again.

So after a very frustrating experience, I will be going back to my old hosting service. It means extra money but honestly, I don't want to have to waste more time having to put my site back up and having landing pages with 'account suspended' that look wholly unprofessional without any notices or warnings issued by the provider, and most of all just to have that peace of mind knowing that my site is in good hands.

kristina3765’s picture

hi. i have a wordpress site on green geek and i need to increase the video upload limit by adding a file to the phpi. i couldnt find it in the cpanel and i called them and they were no help. the guy said he did it, he did not. i have sites on godaddy and had no trouble finding it and making the adjustment. i need to find it on green geeks. i read your post and i was wondering if you could tell me where i would insert such a file. it wasnt as clear to me and i have a wordpress site. if you can , i would sooo love some input.. you mentioned you increased your phpi. please point me in the direction. thanks so much in advance.. kristina (adamsimonis6@yahoo.com)

alhotel’s picture

Hi,

I hosted my website at GreenGeeks serve3rs. Unfortunately the site became inaccessible from time to time and their support couldn't identify and fix the problem. I couldn't identify and solve it either because I am just a regular internet user. I suppose it could be some routing problem because I am from Russia. Anyway I decided to migrate the website to another hosting provider. I tried a few companies but wasn't totally satisfied until I moved the website to http://myidealhost.com. It looks like MyIdealHost isn't a big hosting provider and care about every client because their support is really fast and friendly.

http://altairhotel.ru

YuvalBH’s picture

they put my VPS offline, I called the support and here is the conversation I had

Vance K.: Hello, my name is Vance, welcome to Green Geeks, may I have your name and how may I help you today ?
xxx: Hi Vance, VPS.xxxxxx.com is down again
Vance K.: Just a moment please, I'll check
Vance K.: This looks to be an isolated issue, will be resolved shortly.

xxx: isolated issue? can you be more specific?
Vance K.: In order to get more details on that, you will be required to email to our support staff at support@greengeeks.com
Vance K.: Or I can open the ticket for you or if you'd like you can log into the account manager and open the ticket yourself and include all the details you need to get the issue resolved

xxx: which issue?
Vance K.: I mean the steps taken by our support team to resolve the issue

xxx: what issue?
Vance K.: They will provide you the details on that in that email.

xxx: the site is again 10 min offline
Vance K.: Yes, we know that and our techs are working on this issue

xxx: what is the issue?
xxx: what is the problem? what are you working on?

no answers on that, 1.5 hours and VPS is still offline

Guys I would say, If can choose... don't choose this company

IT IS NOT PROFESSIONAL, IT IS NOT HONEST, IT IS NOT BUSINESS RELIABLE and IT IS NOT FOR WEBSITE WITH ANY TRAFFIC VOLUME !!!

teaolive2’s picture

I had various similar experiences, always the same people: Vance K, George, etc... they could never resolve anything, always saying to resolve something is to send email to support... but support never responds! Once one of them even told me they were tech Level 1 and they couldn't provide support! this is the support line to see how bad they are, they hire people who don't understand about computers!

teaolive2’s picture

They offered me a service and once I paid they said they couldn't provide. I have canceled and every week I call them to know what happened to my refund, every week they say it will be processed the next day, next week the same thing. all emails I send I never get any response, except to say they will respond in 48 hours but they never do. Horrible experience, do not use!!! Is been 3 months! They stole my money!!

merry-design’s picture

they are interested in what you have to say :)
http://www.sse.gov.on.ca/mcs/en/Pages/Complaint_Steps_to_File.aspx

trotsak’s picture

I have bad experience with GreenGeeks. I had two drupal sites on that hosting. Periodically during 1 yr I got errors (500), crashing, at least they suspended my account. They proposal for me was - #1 go to VPS #2 go to away. I went away..... So I have found special optimized hosting for only drupal sites http://it-patrol.com/ And now all is ok.

merry-design’s picture

Their 30 day cancellation promise is bogus. I contacted them within 7 days after registering and received the email below -- they never refunded me and now they are hiding behind some BS about my request not coming in within the 30 days. Don't use this service provider!

GreenGeek email:
Thank you for contacting us. This is an automated response confirming the receipt of your ticket. One of our agents will get back to you as soon as possible. For your records, the details of the ticket are listed below. When replying, please make sure that the ticket ID is kept in the subject line to ensure that your replies are tracked appropriately.

Ticket ID: ABC-123456
Subject: CR: xxxxxxxxxx.com
Department: Billing-Cancellations
Priority: High
Status: In Progress

For the quickest and most accurate technical support, please log in to your Account Manager to submit support tickets. To log in, please visit:https://www.greengeeks.com/login/.

GreenGeeks-Josh’s picture

@merry-design,

I'm sorry to hear your experiencing problems cancelling. Unfortunately everything you posted here provided no information in order for us to assist you. I'd be more then happy to take a look and provide any clarification, if you can provide me with the correct Ticket ID for your Cancellation Request.

merry-design’s picture

Just got off the phone today with a helpful person at the Ontario Consumer Protection Agency (filed my complaint yesterday talk about fast!). They are keeping my complaint on file and will take action with Green Geeks if more people complain. You can get the complaint form here > http://www.sse.gov.on.ca/mcs/en/Pages/Complaint_Steps_to_File.aspx or call 416-326-8800 / 1-800-889-9768

lashamaro’s picture

For a small-personal-single-page-static website that can be a good, but according to many negative reviews , I'd not recommend for a loaded Drupal site.. Providers offering strictly limited bandwidth, disk space and server resources are often more reliable then unlimited guys.

skowyra’s picture

For a company claiming to be Drupal friendly, they set the memory limit at 64meg. That's too low. Add and enable a few modules and the demand goes up resulting in exhausted errors. Most sites need 128megs. I'm not endorsing Hostgator, but they gave me 256megs.

Jaypan’s picture

Do they allow for increases beyond 64M? If they do, then it may not be a problem. If the max is 64M, then that's a good reason to skip this company.

prognostika’s picture

GreenGeeks should be avoided by anyone who wants reliable web hosting.
Thanks

datax’s picture

I'm using their shared hosting account for 6 months and it is horrible. All my sites go down dozens of times a day. They just stop responding from several seconds to minutes. Their support never admits the problem on their end so I had the site monitored with pingdom. After showing them the downtimes recorded by pingdom they still refuse to admit fault on their end and simply put the blame on my sites saying the files are causing the problem. The problem in my opinion is their shared hosting servers are so overloaded that it causes these disruptions in uptime. I attached the latest pingdom report.

Last 30 days
Uptime 96.53%
Downtime 1d 1h 40m
Number of Downtimes 577
http://postimg.org/image/dhy00fqid/

Only local images are allowed.

P_Sinclair’s picture

Very convoluted operation for simple tasks,
phone support people know nothing,
and they find very creative ways of getting and keeping your money without actually providing any service.
They should be avoided.

Jean-Francois Gagnon’s picture

I made the mistake to go with them. It's a nightmare.

  • Their mod_security rules blocks html, relative path as POST parameter, and other stuff (I gave up on the last 403 I got)
  • Their Mysql server block connection from time to time. A blank page with "Fatal error" is not fun for your customer...
  • changes takes few minute to get propagated. So if you're developing on a live website, it will be painful. (the tech support suggested me to flush my dns to fix the delay. What's next? Rebooting my computer? Turn the screen upside-down?

Their tech support is fast, but everything else if pure nightmare. STAY AWAY/

ear2track’s picture

After evaluating GreenGeeks hosting service for just over one day, I wanted to cancel my account. It took several days to process the cancellation, but I was eventually told via email that it was done. No straight answer from anyone on the phone or chat about when I was to receive my refund, but was told by a phone rep who answers the billing phone that it should go through in 5-7 business days. I just called today and was told I was not going to get a refund for my first month's payment of $9.95 because when I initially signed up, they waived a $15 setup fee and they now want that money since I canceled my account. Their home page boasts "30-Day Money Back Guarantee" but apparently they pulled some kind of underhanded trick. Obfuscation is the word that comes to mind. They didn't even tell me they were holding me responsible for the $15 waived setup fee when I canceled. I hope they don't come after me later for the $5.05 they must think I still owe them.

The reason for canceling was their poor support after signing up. Before I signed up, there was a super positive and chatty sales rep who said yes to anything I asked about database size, php memory limit, guarantees etc. Then later I realized that the monthly plan does not include any features like free domain, or SSL which are only included in packages that require you to pay at least one year up front. I found out that they don't pro-rate yearly plans if you ask for a refund after 30 days so I tried the monthly plan with the option to upgrade later. So the additional fees would have racked up on top of their monthly plan and wouldn't give may any financial benefits if I switched hosting. I also wanted true verification of the database size limit and PHP memory limits, but the online chat person kept sending unrelated canned responses. The phone reps couldn't answer questions about billing and I was required to ask via support ticket. There were so many unanswered questions and scant online documentation that I began to miss 1and1 hosting and regretted ever talking to GreenGeeks in the first place.

I'm now back with 1and1 and they gave me a great deal to stay. 1and1 is honest, organized and have 24/7 phone support with very knowledgeable people unlike my experience with GreenGeeks. Shared hosting plans may have limitations in memory, database size and more, but 1and1 Performance plan runs Drupal and any other system quickly. If my site ever gets too successful for the limits of shared hosting, I'll buy dedicated server hosting somewhere but not at GreenGeeks. That would be a good problem to have.

candyb’s picture

Spare yourself agony and try another. GreenGeeks is the WORST hosting company I have ever used, and over the last 15 years, I have had a few.

Customer service is rude and HORRIBLE. I filled out the service cancellation form twice and it didn't send the confirmation email, and they would not cancel my service. The support mgr sent email saying for me to refrain from being "pigheaded" and fill out their form. Told me they didn't mind keeping my account status suspended, accruing charges and would send me to collections.

As for service, that was bad too. My website was down for days and I did not realize it. When I submitted the support ticket, they had changed the PHP settings and not informed me. SCARY.

tburge’s picture

Horrible VPS experience with Green Geeks: They have no real support at night. Any issue you have they will push you to an emailed ticket that does not get touched until mid day the next day or two when real support people are working. If you are like me and try to do things at night so your clients do not have any downtime then you should choose another host. I also noticed that most employees at GreenGeeks lack a good business sense and certain people skills. I would rate the customer service poor due to a really bad experience with their Support Manager Josh Dargie. How this guy became a manager is baffling. He uses words like "sucks" and is overall very unprofessional. When I finally decided to cancel well within my 30 day risk free cancellation window he made me jump through several hoops just to cancel and then threatened me saying they would send me to collections if I filed disputes. He also said they would try to charge me $45 per dispute. He then refused to escalate to anyone higher. I did try to reach out to Trey Gardner the boss via linkedIn and no response. What a joke! Skip this company entirely

mattbk’s picture

I've been using them for over a year and don't have any complaints. They seem amenable to working with me when I've gone way over limits (they shut the site down, I email and say "did this fix it," they reply "looks good"). I've never used phone support--but phone support seems like the worst way to resolve website problems, so why would I use it?

Luna Lai’s picture

Because it is eco-friendly, I quite like GreenGeeks before. But its support is not as convenient as that of others. 7/24 support is limited to email and live chat only.

spyderpie’s picture

I'm not going to company bash .. but my experience has been horrible .. don't bother. What everyone is saying here negative is true ... including servers being down for days ... they don't provide refunds either.

niaxilin’s picture

GreenGeeks auto-renewed our account for another 3-year contract. We contacted their support but they don't do refunds. We asked them to turn off auto-renew and they said they can't do that either.

They suggest we keep the account open and remember to cancel it in three years before the next auto-renewal. Not sure if it's worth keeping it open even after we paid...

Jaypan’s picture

That would be illegal in my country. They're located in California it looks like, I wonder what the laws are like there.

Quite the scam that one.

JamesOakley’s picture

I would only give this advice on rare occasions. Most of the time, what I'm going to suggest will sour the relationship with the provider, incurs the risk of possible additional charges, mean additional services could be suspended without warning, and make it impossible to obtain a backup and/or domain outward transfer.

But, (i) assuming you have a backup of your services, and (ii) assuming you don't have any domains registered with them, and (iii) assuming you wish to cancel every service with them, and not just this one, then: Contact your card company and charge back the transaction.

You've always got to watch auto-renewal. It's often marketed as a feature - saves you forgetting to renew - and it is that. But most responsible providers let you turn off auto-renewal, and most would also refund if the payment went through and you had been caught out - never meaning to renew.

So, in this case, I think a chargeback is the correct course of action.


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bulletproof’s picture

GREEN GEEKS BEWARE IT IS A VERY SHADY COMPANY
I have been hosting with green geeks for 1 year and just got my website where i wanted it they are not a good hosting company there server admin doesn't know what he or she is doing. Last Thursday i had a problem the said it was a DOS Attack It was a little spike in traffic the blocked my account meaning my business website to did not even email me just blocked my account since then my site for my business fell out of rank no phone calls at all green geeks sucks also after that my meta tag for UTF8 i could not change it today someone on
the support line downloaded my index page and changed the tag it worked but now its to late my site is out of search thanks to green geeks. What i was told by my SEO teem is if someone on the server inserts code i cant see it only them. cannot say yes or no but this is what i know they changed my meta title tag and its in search for what its was changed and i did not change it. That was what they where hiding. I stuck with a lousy company until pay day. Support is closed at Mon-Fri: 9 AM to 12 AM EST
Sat-Sun: 9 AM to 8 PM EST after that just LIVE CHAT all other hosts 24 hour support
For the fastest and most accurate support, please log into your Account Manager and submit a support request. Average resolution time for an issue is 15-20 minutes this is what it said on there site and it took them 5 days to fix my problem Beware I'm out of business 5 days no phone calls. They Hung up on me and shut there phone off. If you see good reviews about them its false. I'm mad and there doing well because of all there affiliates advertising for them there servers are not good for you they are good for them if you want to waste money go with green geeks i have legitimate proof they blocked my meta tags and took me out of search this is 2016 email texting and the ticket system is for kids.

macdonjo’s picture

I ran a speed test on Google Speed Test Insights: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=joshmacdonal...

It told me my response time was 1.1 seconds and that it's high and I should contact my host. So I emailed them and they said: "I am sorry but this load time is not bad considering your are on a shared hosting. You can optimize your account at the server side to make more fast."

So Google say it's terrible and they are saying I should expect this. I don't know where this leaves me at.

Jaypan’s picture

They're right, and actually 1.1s for a Drupal site on shared hosting is pretty fast.

OliDox’s picture

I tried GreenGeeks hosting.
For your peace of mind, just don't go there.
They are totally unprofessional, and DISHONEST.

In their home page (http://www.greengeeks.com/),
it says "30 days money back guarantee" and "No hidden fees".
That's not true, I tried their services and when I saw their mess, I cancelled well within the 30 days and I didn't get all my money back... They holded some set up fee...

hfogwill’s picture

I decided to try a different them, and subtheme Redix. Turns out this require Compass. No issue, as CPANEL at Greengeeks do show Ruby, and a pretty nice interface to install gem's like Compass. After trying this I got an error causing the gem install to fail. Contacting support, which I will add was very useful every time I used them, to try and resolve the issue. Turns out they do not support this on the shared hosting plan.

This is a pretty major issue if you want to use themes requiring gem's like sass or compass. For me this is a huge limitation in their service, and I cant possible consider them a #1 Drupal hosting site if they do not support these fundamental services. I am in a contract, and will move to a better hosting company supporting current web technologies at my first opportunity.

C.E.A’s picture

I have been with Green geeks for like a year now, they have advantages and disadvantages like any other web server.

Advantages:

  • Very fast and reliable support, I meant it very fast... Asking them for support is like chatting on Whatsapp with my friend
  • I have opened about 25 suport cases with them to ask for help, and i can say 24/25 they got resolved in less than 1 hour
  • They have support of drush, ssh access
  • Unlimited storage
  • Unlimited Domain names
  • they will change some of resources in php.ini if you ask for it like: max_exexution_time, max_input_times, etc...
  • 99.99% Uptime
  • They allow php extensions like: APCu, varnish, opcache, Memcache

Disadvantages:

  • No support of the Let's Encrypt SSL Certificate.
  • No daily backup system
  • Missing of 2FA Security feature as an extra security layer for your account with them
  • If you like to change plan from Shared hosting to VPS, the vps is really expensive compared to other web hosts

Overall:
Cheap shared hosting with powerful resources for drupal (compared to other web servers)

digibear’s picture

Well I just began with them. If I knew about the issues with them, I would have went elsewhere.

This is the downsides to them:

1. they don't seperate the mysql server. They don't have an individual my.cnf so no secure ssl on external mysql.

2. You can't move the phpsession cookie from the root. This is standard practice to move the session cookie back a directory so when you log the client out and land them on the home page, the session is closed properly and the cookie gets deleted (on both ends). Since the cookie is time-out deleted because the session is on the root, The housekeeping cron job takes up more resources in the end because of this. Also you can't rename the session cookie from its default.

3. They really push the vps thing. I told them that 95% of the internet applications doesn't require a vps. If you just mysql with php and html there shouldn't be an issue. An I3 2.4ghz quad core can run 1000 clients simultaneously. That is why the resource excuse is lame to begin with. Now if you are storing blobs bigger than 256K in a database, then the performance hit happens. I'm sure wordpress has issues with some of these hostings, as has high usage of database.

  4. you have no php not mysql customization.

5. if you plan to have an ip address dedicated. do that first before installing an ssl. They added the ip address to mine, and didn't shut down the server when they did, which caused a bad domain error (because the ssl cache still had the other ip address) This caused the private key to be exposed and i had to get a new cert over all that.

6. I basically had to configure what i could myself. Their certificate install doesn't automatically add the mod rewrite so you have to go to another area and figure it out (the help desk guy said " If you need to get https:// from http:// you need to set up appropriate redirect under your account" )