Had a very unpleasant experience with this company.
Just because I wrote a completely innocent and friendly blog post on how to create a website with Wix if you are a !:1 consultant, they started harassing me and making all kinds of completely unethical, false and defamatory accusations.

You wouldn't believe some of the complete nonsense they came out with.
E.G. This company seems to believe they are a law unto themselves and have the power to control who you can and cannot speak to on the internet or offer your services to.

They accused me of trying to sell my services to their customers/consultants and told me that I am not allowed to do so.

While the accusation was a complete lie, I am of course entitled to offer my services to whomever I want, and they have no authority to say otherwise.

They also tried to claim that I must abide by their licencing agreement/terms and conditions, even though I am not a customer of theirs or a consultant or affiliated with them in any way.

this is like asking you to pay insurance on a car you do not even own or pay rent on a house that somebody else lives in.

I did give them the opportunity 3 times to retract these false and defamatory accusations and give me an apology before I made this public, but they refused. So here we are.

I have used many hosts over the years, and the one area where most of them lack is tech support/customer service.
Having worked in the hosting sector myself for many years, I know more than most the difference between good and bad support and when I am being blagged.

Thankfully this is not the case with Guru... If you have a problem with your site, they do not just pass the pack and tell you "this is your problem", they will simply fix the problem for you if they can, even if it is your own fault.

A few other little security things that seems better, such as blocking remote access to mysql, no plain text ftp and the ability to have hourly backups even on shared hosting.

I am only using the FREE plan, but it does the job for my requirements. I like the fact that I can keep the store separate from my website and not have to worry about maintaining it or updating plugins or whether it will break when I perform updates.

So far I have found the support to be helpful and responsive, which is rare for me to say that about any company, even more so when using a FREE product/service.

I also recently submitted a suggestion/feature request RE the out of the custom fields on the order details. It was a mess as it put everything on one line, so I suggested they fix the email template and sort out the formatting and put all the custom fields on their own line.
I was rather surprised to find they completely agreed with my assesment and 1 week later the changes had been implemented.

Tripadvisor have extremely unethical practices and seem to be in the habit of making false and defamatory allegations and manipulating reviews and rating (just like trustpilot), presumably to the benefit of other clients who are paying for their premium services.

I manage websites and SEO for clients among other things, and have a few restaurants and takeaways as clients who I manage Tripadvisor listings for.

I have on multiple occasions now received the following allegation. When I ask them to provide evidence of the allegation, they have refused to do so making the ridiculous claim that they cannot provide me with information about myself due to their privacy policy.

Refusing to provide me with the information they are holding about me is in breach of the freedom of information act and GDPR compliance.

I have explained to them many times that I do not have any property or listing on Tripadvisor and I do not own or work for any restaurants, I am just a website designer. But they do not care and I have been forced to terminate al links/relationships with my clients on tripadvisor, because their unethical actions were affecting my client's listings and rankings.

I have since lodged a complaint with the ICO about this and their refusal to provide the data/evidence to prove their allegation, and they have also blatantly lied to the ICO as well, claiming they have sent me this information which they of course have not.

--
To whom it may concern,

It has come to our attention that individuals affiliated with your organization may have submitted unfavourable reviews of your competitors with the intent to manipulate property rankings on TripAdvisor. This is strictly against TripAdvisor policy and is against the law in many jurisdictions.

Reviews found to be in violation of our guidelines have been removed from our site. Please discontinue any attempts to subvert our system immediately.

Penalties have been issued to your listing and TripAdvisor is now actively monitoring your property for further submissions which violate our policies. Penalties may include:

Reducing your ranking in the TripAdvisor popularity index
Posting a large red penalty notice on your listing
Excluding your listing from TripAdvisor Travelers' Choice awards, top 10 lists, press releases, etc.
TripAdvisor takes attempts to manipulate our service very seriously. While we are deeply committed to preventing bias in our content, we will also work with properties who wish to remedy issues of this nature on their listing. The first step in this process is for property owners to speak with their staff and third-party vendors (e.g. webmasters, social media agents, SEO specialists, etc.) asking about their activity on TripAdvisor and ensuring that they are aware of our guidelines and policies.

Sincerely,

TripAdvisor Support Team, Content Integrity

I moved my website to ManagedWordPress.uk and the performance is so much better. It now loads in under 2 seconds, it used to take over 6 seconds.
It is also so much easier to just contact them to perform updates and make changes instead of having to post jobs on freelancer websites and get a different person each time.

The company is unethical, rude, offensive, tells lies and is completely dishonest.
If you have a bad experience with this company for any reason, and post a review online, the miscreant owner will start a vendetta against you, spreading completely false and defamatory lies about you online.

BEWARE. STAY AWAY

I was rather surprised to receive an email from tripadvisor, with defamatory accusations accusing me of trying to manipulate their system and making threats toward me and my clients.

After contacting them to find out what the hell this was about, It turns out that if you ever posted a review on TripAdvisor in the past and then end up affiliated with that company in the future, they will start taking unethical actions against you and the company you reviewed in order to penalise you and negatively affect your clients listing and rating.

This is obviously very likely to happen to you work in IT and web design managing websites for clients.

In my case I create websites and I have created websites for several local restaurants and also created TripAdvisor listings for them which I manage on their behalf.

And like many hundreds of thousands of other people around the world, I use TripAdvisor to review restaurants I visit, since that is the whole point of the website. And as a result I have of course reviewed some the restaurants who have since become clients.

Since nobody has the ability to see into the future, they cannot possibly know that a restaurant they are leaving a review for may become a client, or even that you might work for them in the future. And since time travel is not possible, you cannot go back and undo your review.

I have explained this to Tripadvisor, but they simply do not care and still think it is perfectly acceptable to take these unethical actions and to penalise you for review you left in the past before you were affiliated with that company.

This is simply not a viable way to get something designed. You need to work directly with a designer to get exactly what you want, and for them to make tweaks and changes until you are happy.
This site simply has no clue about how a website design works or what information is required and enough information is never provided to do a proper job.

DesignCrowd forces you to simply choose a winner from the submitted designs, it is then up to you to try and figure out what to do with that design. In the case of a website, you then need to deploy it, set it up, get all your own text/content into the site, which you will then need to pay someone else to do.

DesignCrowd customer services also wrongly advise clients of what deliverable they need to ask for. They will tell clients they need a design (PSD) then they actually want a complete website. So you then have to pay again for someone again to implement the design and build the website.

Not to mention the fact that this is not fair on designers who spend most of their time working on designs they will never get paid for.

The customer service is a joke too.

If you contact them for support, or reply to one of their own emails, or click any contact link anywhere on their website, all they will do is tell you to use the forums, over and over like a broken record. So you have to rely on the forum users for help and advice.

They will not answer your questions or provide support directly, but they actually consider making a post thanking another user on the forum for answering your question, even if the answer was wrong, as providing support.

Their product is advertised as being able to create freelancer sites like PeoplePerHour or Upwork, but sadly does not perform as advertised. The ESCROW functionality no longer works as it relies on PayPal Adaptive, which has been discontinued. Without this, it is really nothing more than a simple jobsite as there is no other way to handle transactions through the site, which means that buyers and sellers must communicate directly and cut you out of the loop.

If you look through the forums, the only solution they seem to give anyone who has issues with their product is to hire a developer to fix it.

I went to the Margate branch, but judging by the other reviews I have read, they are all as bad.
Total apathy and disregard for patients, completely unethical attitude and behaviour.
I was blatantly lied to on multiple occasions, refused an appointment while in dire pain because I had not had a checkup recently, so they de-registered me without any warning.
They submitted a false claim to DECS causing me to get fined TWICE, and the manager (Rob Western) blatantly and maliciously refused to do anything to fix the mistake.
They then started abusing my children and kept cancelling their appointments with bogus excuses, they did this 4 times in a row for all 4 of my kids. I caught them out when I called back twice in the same day and spoke to someone different, and got a completely different story as to why the appointments were cancell. The first time I was told the dentist was stuck in traffic, the second time I was told he was at a funeral.

I, of course, have moved my entire family to another dentist, and hope to never set foot in MyDentist again.

I urge any patient unfortunate enough to be stuck with this dentist, to double check any advice that MyDentist gives you, make sure you always keep a copy of your receipt or at least take a photo of it with your phone for your records just in case you need to prove payment. And avoid filling in any information relating to benefits or tax credits or exemption status on forms unless you have first spoken to NHS directly and confirmed the correct details (preferably in writing).
You may also want to consider recording all your phone calls and conversations to prove anything they have said to you and then subsequently denied.

--
Update 18/09/2017
Today I received a response from
Leah Cavenay
Patient Support Officer.

he/she completely supports and condones the practice managers unethical behaviour and blatant lies, and have refused to communicate with me further. it would seem that the unethical treatment of patients must be a company-wide policy.
I have now submitted a complaint to the ombudsmen.

I purchased an ergonomic mouse hoping it would help with my RSI. Sadly it did not, but they sent me an alternative mouse to try free of charge. Very caring and helpful was rather shocked TBH.

I was using Trustpilot for years to post reviews, mostly good ones, then I discovered what happens if you post negative reviews about paying customers.

If a company is using their FREE services, then they do not care what gets posted. However any company who is paying for Trustpilot's premium service can just request for any negative review to be removed, and they will remove it. If you try to dispute it then they will request that you provide ridiculous evidence to prove your review is true. Such as written statements from the police, court orders, proof of phone calls etc.

They also hide your negative reviews from the public, but show them to you when you are logged in, so that you think they are actually visible on the site.

I bought an Anker ergo mouse off amazon. I thought there was a problem with it as it was freezing, and they replaced it no questions asked, even though it turned out not to be the mouse.
I then mentioned that it wasn't helping my RSI, and they sent me an alternate model to try out, at no cost.
Really impressed with this companies commitment to customer satisfaction.

I was using Trustpilot for years to post reviews, mostly good ones, then I discovered what happens if you post negative reviews about paying customers.
If a company is using their FREE services, then they do not care what gets posted. However any company who is paying for Trustpilot's premium service can just request for any negative review to be removed, and they will remove it. They will then request that you provide ridiculous evidence to prove your review is true. Such as written statements from the police, court orders, proof of phone calls etc.

My son's PS4 controller developed problems while it was still in warranty. We got sent around in circles for so many months then told it was out of warranty. If you tweet them they say use DM, if you DM they say tweet them, if you use live chat they tell you to call or tweet, if you call the lines are busy or you get disconnected.
They even made my 11 year old son cry by refusing to help him and hanging up on him after he had waited on the phone for ages to get through to them.
Complete $#*!s.

I have used numerous ISP's over the years, and while I cannot claim that Zen have been perfect, they have been the best by a long shot when it comes to reliability and customer service.
At least I actually get the feeling that they care and want to help you, unlike the likes of Sky or PlusNet whose staff just don't give a damn.

I bought about £3000 worth of furniture from oakfurnitureland, and while the furniture is nice, the customer service is non-existant, they simply do not care.
They broke the mirror, but the damage was at the back of the frame, so when we inspected the delivery we did not see the damage. We did not find the damage until we came to take it out of the box to hang on the wall, only to find the frame was completely broken and unusable.
It was 100% obvious from the photos we sent them, that the damage could not be seen from the front, but OakFurnitureLand screwed us and refused to replace it. They also refused to collect it and take it away so we were forced to drive down to the shop and dump it on their doorstep.

They also have nice little a scam in place to try and stop you posting negative reviews on Trustpilot. Oakfurniture and SofaStore are both owned by JBDirect. And when you place an order, the invoice says JBDirect and that you ordered form SofaStore Online. So they then get your review removed on the basis that it is fake and you are not a customer and never purchased anything from their store. Even if you send TrustPilot your invoice as proof, it has a different company name on it, and TrustPilot, unfortunately, are too thick to understand that these are all part of the same company, even when you send them screenshots of the website which clealry states the parent company.

If you do buy anything from this company, I suggest you pay via CreditCard so that you can exercise your consumer rights and perform a chargeback if Oakfurnitureland try and screw you over.