Inadequate response to a complaint related to the hosting fee – website and account termination with no notice
Simply shocking behaviour after my complaint asking for a refund (reasons summarized below) – Hostpapa terminated the website as well as my account with them with no notice whatsoever, giving me no time to make new webhosting arrangements! Unbelievable!

Utterly appalling and disgusting customer care received from Nicolae D. (ticket #*******), who did not even try to understand my points, ignored my questions and always provided a lengthy and meaningless replies. As the situation was going nowhere, I requested information about Hostpapa regulatory authority to escalate my complaint and mentioned that this issue might be taken to court if they are not willing to make it right. As a result, the website hosting and the account with Hostpapa were terminated with no notice.

THE ISSUE: at the end of the first billing cycle there were two emails: first one stated that "HostPapa service is due for renewal just 30 days from now", the second one said: "Total due: £ 0.00", therefore it was my understanding that nothing to be paid at that point. Only 1.5 month later when the bank statements came through there was a transaction with unexpectedly inflated hosting fee, that increased by 328% compared to its original value. I complained to Hostpapa stating that (i) I was not informed about the x3.3 times price increase for their services, (ii) was not informed that it is going to be taken for 3 years in one go (iii) I did not authorise that payment and, very importantly, (iv) received a misleading email with "Total due: £ 0.00" not even prompting to check the attachment very deep below that actually had a number of £561.17 to pay.

Therefore, I asked Hospapa either (i) to price match their fee to the original payment of £170.64 or (ii) to terminate the agreement with the refund of unused hosting duration…. Considering the situation (points above), it could have been a fair resolution I believe.

In response to that I was offered: (i) website hosting termination with no refund or (ii) 30% discount after ~330% price increase. As I was not happy with either option, I asked for the details on their regulating authority and, as a result, my account and the website were deleted…. Shocking, isn't it? Zero reply, no notice of termination…. Nothing.

Definitely not the webhosting provider you want to deal with. It feels like it is their system to deceive you with zeros in "total due" and not inform you about the actual amount to be taken (inflated enormously), and when you realize that they response would be "No refunds".

On top of that they would disrupt your business with the website termination with no advanced notices as a penalty that you dared to complain perhaps.

It is a Canadian based company and shokingly they treat a UK customers as dirt, who cares. Yet, as they have a registered UK office this case will be reported to the Trading Standards, UK.

Good luck with your business Hostpapa

I have been customers with Lunarpages for years and everything was fine; I even was affiliated with them. Then, Hostpapa purchased Lunarpages and everything went from good to absolute nightmare.
First they increased my membership by 66% and reduce the memory available for my sites and space available for my email addresses. They claimed they sent me a notice but as all their emails were seen as spams, I never got it. What is sure, is that I would never have agreed to such increase in price and reduction of services if I had been duly informed.
Then, they constantly pretended that my websites was using too much resources and suspended my account several times without prior notice, resulting in having my websites and email addresses down until they deemed necessary to reactive them. By looking at my cpanel, my websites were always below their limitations, still they pretended they were using too much memory. According to their package ads, I should have a 2MB/s limit for the I/O, however my account had a 1MB/s set up. I asked for some explanations and the technical support informed me that these data were not accessible from the cpanel, but only accessible to them; so basically you have to trust them and have no way to check their says which is really troublesome. Whatever I did to fix my website was never good enough according to their logs.
This s*#t show lasted for over a year until. I talked to countless people from the supposedly technical support that provides you with no solution what so ever. I also talked with several account/sales managers who constantly threaten to suspend my account unless I purchase a dedicated server. I had to stop several cron-jobs and remove features from my sites so they didn't suspend my account every week for several days.
I finally migrated my sites and email addresses to a serious host. Now, I have a VP server that costs me less than their start packages and everything is working fine again.

In summary, Hostpapa overcrowds their shared servers and claims that your website is the cause of the problem with some unfounded allegations about resources usage or whatever they can think of... Then Hostpapa forces their customers to "optimize" their websites if they don't want their account to be suspended randomly for a unknown period of time. Whatever optimization is done, the website is always using too much resources and the only way to keep using their services and have your website up and running at all time is to purchase a very expensive and unnecessary dedicated server.

My advice, DO NOT USE HOSTPAPA. You are very likely to regret it.

I did not choose Hostpapa. About three years ago Hostpapa acquired Lunarpages, the ISP I had been happily hosting with for nearly 15 years. Lunarpages customers were promised a smooth, seamless transition and, at first, there were no changes. Business *appeared* to continue as before the merger, but changes were coming.

The first sign of trouble was *significant* increases in the annual fees for hosting services; two major jumps in two years.

The next sign of trouble was outages. My site experienced two outages in less than two months. The outages were not detected by Hostpapa. I had to discover and diagnose the outages and report them via tickets. In contrast, Lunarpages auto-detected and corrected most outages before customers noticed.

Lunarpages, which had given all customers affected by an outage exceeding their uptime guarantee unlimited storage for life, Hostpapa gives their customers nothing to compensate for excessive outages.

The next sign of trouble at Host Papa was heavy-handed practices. For example, a single email account on one of my addon domains was over it's allotted quota. Host Papa's response was to shut down all services for the main domain and all addon domains. When I pointed out that I had been given unlimited storage for life by Lunarpages, Hostpapa backed down during the first year. Afterward, Hostpapa said they had no record of the promise for unlimited storage. Clearly, company lawyers were watching their backs and running the show, and the excitement was just beginning.

I was told that upgrading to a reseller account would increase my quota and resolve the problem, so I agreed to do so. It turned out that I was notified of being over quota *again* when the techs were upgrading me to a reseller account. It turned out that the issue was the number of inodes used; not space per se and the reseller account had no more inodes than a basic account. That made the reseller account worthless for solving a quota problem. When the CSR explained this I told them to abort the upgrade and proceeded to delete data to avoid being locked out again. Host Papa billed for the reseller account anyway *in addition to* the regular hosting account. I was in danger of losing about $600 for a year of hosting. The only way to prevent these charges was to lock my Visa account, which caused other legitimate charges to be blocked.

I've been battling with Hostpapa to refund the useless reseller account. They claim they're refunding the charge for the reseller upgrade, but they seem to be taking their time. I finally had to relocate everything I host to another hosting provider and close my HostPapa account. Even then, Hostpapa's billing system shows a pending charge for the next year due two days from now which I have repeatedly said I do *not* want. My request has not yet been acknowledged. I suspect Hostpapa will cancel since I made it clear that the credit card company's fraud department will become involved if they continue to try to rip me off.

If Hostpapa didn't do this deliberately another possible explanation is that their system is dysfunctional. Either way, the result has been the same.

Avoid hosting hell. Find another hosting company. There are plenty of good companies out there. Read consumer reviews and heed them. There are plenty of reviews on Hostpapa out there. If you host with that company after researching it's on you. You have been warned. Host with Hostpapa at your own peril.