Site5 Review

Solid Web Host With Questionable Pricing

Brad Smith  —  · Read user reviews

Site5 hosting review

Site5 Web Hosting is a niche service built for designers and developers, with multiple servers located in:

  • North America (U.S. and Canada)
  • South America (Joao Pessoa and Sao Paulo, Brazil)
  • Europe (U.K., Netherlands, Romania, and France)
  • Asia (Singapore and China).

It was founded in ’99 by Matt Lightner and Rod Armstrong, before being acquired in 2015 by the conglomerate EIG (which also owns HostGator, Bluehost, and many others).

Priding oneself on being ‘developer-centric’ sounds nice on promotional materials. Does this niche offer make any difference? How does it affect what they do – or more importantly, DON’T – offer?

We set up a basic WordPress website on the HostRocket ‘Shared’ plan back in June 2015 to find out for ourselves. You can also view our site’s detailed performance statistics like uptime & speed (click ‘History’ to dig in deeper).

General Info & Hosting Overview

SPEED: 629ms (February 2018 to January 2020 average)
UPTIME: 99.99% (February 2018 to January 2020 average)
SUPPORT: 24/7 Live Chat
APPS: WordPress, PrestaShop, Joomla, and Magento
FEATURES: Unmetered bandwidth and storage, daily backups
HOSTING PLANS: Shared, Reseller, and Managed VPS
SITE TRANSFER: Single Free Site Transfer
PRICING: Starting at $6.95/mo (same renewal price)

Pros of Using Site5 Hosting

Site5 is targeting an audience of advanced users. It means we had high expectations for the level of performance.

Over the past years, Site5 has performed OK on speed and support, and rather well in uptime.

What sets them apart are a few unique offers that specific customers will enjoy, including some time-saving cPanel migrations.

Let’s see how they shape up:

1. Great Page Load Times

People don’t put up with slow sites. Just a few extra seconds in page loading times can cause your page abandonment to increase by 38%. With most of those heading over to a competitor’s site instead.

For example, for an eCommerce site that is making $100,000 a day, a one-second page delay can potentially cost $2.5 million in lost sales every year. Needless to say, speed is important!

We tested Site5’s site speed, and they delivered a solid average of 629ms.

Site5 average load time:

Site5-2019-2020-statistics
Site5 average speed 2019-2020 | See stats

2. Amazing Uptime of 99.99%

Over the last 24 months, Site5 Hosting has produced some very impressive up times.

There were some bad months where we saw an uptime of 99.93% and 99.90%, but apart from that, they have been nearly perfect.

99.99% uptime is really impressive as they are in the top 5 with this performance.

Last 12-month average uptime:

  • January 2020 average uptime: 99.95%
  • December 2019 average uptime: 99.99%
  • November 2019 average uptime: 100%
  • October 2019 average uptime: 100%
  • September 2019 average uptime: 100%
  • August 2019 average uptime: 100%
  • July 2019 average uptime: 99.99%
  • June 2019 average uptime: 100%
  • May 2019 average uptime: 100%
  • April 2019 average uptime: 100%
  • March 2019 average uptime: 99.90%
  • February 2019 average uptime: 100%
site5-performance-24months
Live test site: hostingfacts-s5.com | Avg. uptime and speed: 24-months+

3. Good Customer Support

After a general background check into other customer opinions, it seemed that one thing most Site5 customers can agree on is that they offer good support (no doubt bolstered by EIG’s greater resources and scale).

We were optimistic after reading other reviews, and our personal experience didn’t let us down. A member of their support staff connected with us in just a few seconds and answered questions quickly and accurately.

Site5 Live Chat support

There IS one potential drawback – they’re used to working with a sophisticated customer base, catering to designers and developers.

It means that most likely you will not receive the necessary handholding and walk-through if you’re a beginner.

On the other hand, Site5 offers tons of walkthroughs and tutorials in their knowledge base that can help you learn quickly.

Plus, you can search for whatever you’re looking for right on the site.

Site5 Knowledge Base

Site5’s knowledge base has over 500 articles covering more than 70 categories.

4. 45-Day Money-Back Guarantee

Site5’offers a great 45-day money-back guarantee.

Their VPS hosting plans come with a shorter, 15-day money-back guarantee.

The great news is that there aren’t any conditions with these refunds. They promise to respond to your request within six hours (or they’ll credit your account extra for the delay).

5. Free Transfers

Site5 also offers free website migrations or transfers if you’re site is currently hosted somewhere else. Many other web hosts do this too.

What’s different is that they’ll migrate up to 25 (!) cPanel accounts for you (and up to 10 non-cPanel ones) – still free!

A generous offer to take care of an otherwise time-consuming process.

6. Plans Come Standard With ‘Advanced’ Features

Another thing we liked about Site5 was that ‘advanced features’ typically reserved for higher-priced plans come standard on their cheapest shared options too.

The most noteworthy ones include:

  • Unmetered bandwidth
  • Unmetered disk space, and
  • Disaster recovery backups

The last one is especially important when something – eventually, at some point (and unfortunately) – goes wrong.

Years ago, working on our first WordPress site, we remember hitting the Activate button while sitting in a coffee shop. A cold sweat broke out on my face as the screen went blank, and my site seemingly disappeared.

Stuff happens with websites. Having someone (or something) to have your back in the case of an emergency is immensely helpful.

7. Ability to Choose Your Server Location

Site5 has multiple server locations all over the world. They’ll let you choose whichever of their 21 different locations you’d like (regardless of where you live).
site5 server locations
It becomes handy when it comes to boosting your local SEO rankings.

In fact, according to Site5’s website, “From an SEO perspective, it can give a very small benefit by giving one more indicator that you should rank for searching in that city/region.”

8. Uptime Guarantee

Site5 offers an uptime guarantee of 99.9%.

The company offers a prorated amount of credit for the amount of time that your server isn’t available within each month. This guarantee only applies to unscheduled outages. Downtime caused by scheduled site maintenance doesn’t apply.

Circumstances beyond Site5’s control that cause downtime also don’t count, like DDoS attacks, hardware failure, third-party software failure, or maxing out your resource container.

According to their website, here’s how the company calculates service credits on shared/reseller servers:

  • 100% – 99.9% uptime : No credit
  • 99.9% – 99.5% uptime : 5% credit
  • 99.5% – 99% uptime : 10% credit
  • 99% – 98% uptime : 15% credit
  • 98% – 95% uptime : 25% credit
  • Less than 95% uptime : 100% credit

This guarantee doesn’t apply to VPS or unmanaged dedicated server plans. Users can request one day of credit for every 45 minutes of true downtime they experience.

According to Site5’s Terms of Service, the first 45 minutes of downtime won’t count toward your credit, and the maximum number of credit you can receive is one month of services, which is about 22.5 hours of downtime.

9. cPanel Is Easy to Use

Site5 offers a cPanel where you can manage every aspect of your website from one central location.

Although Site5 was “built for designer and developers,” the cPanel has everything you’ll need to maintain a site.

Site5 cPanel

You’ll be able to access video tutorials, email accounts, your mailing lists, add-on domains, web statistics, and more.

By offering a cPanel, Site5 has really made it easy to customize your site, data, and content just the way that you want it whenever you like.

You can access cPanel from the “Backstage area,” your domain, or from the server.

Site5 has an entire article on their site in the knowledge base that tells users how to access the cPanel from all three locations.
Cons of Using Site5 Hosting

As you’ve just read, Site5 does a decent job in most areas.

While they’re not in the upper echelon of any single category, they do deliver admirably in both speed and support (two of the biggest categories to pay attention to).

There is one big sticking point though that needs to be addressed transparently.

Take a look:

1. Misleading & Expensive Pricing

Unfortunately, Site5 sticks to the typical misleading pricing schemes that other hosts pull with their low advertised price.

Considering their performance, $6.95 a month doesn’t sound too bad. But you have to commit for a full two years AND pay upfront in order to get that price. Otherwise, you’re looking at $8.95 for twelve months.

What’s worse – they don’t even offer a true, month-to-month, or not even a six-month pricing plan with their cheapest plan.

Site5 Pricing, Hosting Plans & Quick Facts

Here’s a quick overview of Site5 hosting plans:

HostBasic Plan HostPro+ Turbo Plan HostPro Plan
Pricing $6.95/month $10.95/month $13.95/month
Websites 1 Unlimited Unlimited
Bandwidth Unmetered Unmetered Unmetered
Storage Unmetered Unmetered Unmetered
Email Accounts Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited

Quick Facts

  • Free Domain: No ($12.00 a year).
  • Ease of Signup: Lengthy, four-step signup process.
  • Money-Back: 45-day money-back guarantee.
  • Payment Methods: Credit Card, PayPal.
  • Hidden Fees and Clauses: Shared hosting accounts must not exceed 75,000 files, each email account shouldn’t exceed 10GB disk space, and each database must not use more than 2GB of disk space.
  • Upsells: No upsells.
  • Account Activation: Quick Activation.
  • Control Panel and Dashboard Experience: cPanel.
  • Installation of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): Quick and easy install of popular apps and CMSs with Softaculous.
  • Other Features: Backups, 99.9% uptime guarantee, SSH/Shell access, etc.

Do We Recommend Site5 Hosting?

Site5 isn’t bad, per se. But they’re not great, either.

So we can’t recommend them, unfortunately.

Despite the sheer number of ‘PROS’ vs. ‘CONS’ listed above, we can’t help but feel like their service is just… average. Especially compared to the (true) costs.

However, there are a few especially nice perks that certain customers will enjoy. The free migration service for up to 25 cPanel accounts and their support is also good.

Usually, that’s enough to put them over the edge.

Nonetheless, if you’re looking for the most stable uptime and fastest page loading times  – you might want to shop around for better alternatives.

Any experience with Site5 Web Hosting? Please leave your Site5 review below! We welcome all honest and transparent reviews – good OR bad!

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191 user reviews for Site5

Brockney C

5 — 

Excellent

I have personally found Site5 to be excellent.

Website speed is good, backstage is good and customer service is outstanding.

I began this with very little knowledge. Live chat is extremely quick to access and they will help with anything.

I have returned from a serious head injury and needed a complete and utter reminder of where all of the files are actually stored.

This took just a few minutes to give them all of the security details and get a very straightforward yet thorough response.

Linda

1 — 

Don’t Waste Your Time

I was a Site5 customer for a few years. The last year or so has been terrible, I see other reviewers have had this same problem: literally hundreds of emails bounced, regularly, from aol, yahoo, and gmail. In addition, people emailing me from those addresses would sometimes get bounce back messages when I had actually gotten their emails. I reported this problem countless times, and would always get the same lame explanation. I also repeatedly asked to speak to someone from Site5 ( I communicated with them through their online support ticket function) and was completely ignored.

Save your time and money - look elsewhere.

Dean

1 — 

Expensive hosting and bad email service

I've been a reseller host since 2016, was paying $25.95 USD per month and the service was fine... since then the bill has ramped up to $37.14 USD per month and the email service is horrendous... emails simply do not get through to Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook or Hotmail inbox. If you are lucky they go into junk, if unlucky they bounce back. This has been ticketed so many times but Site5 fail to fix this and blame Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook or Hotmail which is crazy. I can't afford to keep losing my reseller customers, and have had to find an alternative supplier.

GT

2 — 

Not as good as they once were

I've been using Site5 for a long time. Rarely a problem until last year. I've been having problems with being able to send emails to clients who use Yahoo. I contacted Support again this morning (lost count how many times in the last 12 months). The support person told me the issue had been happening for the last few days. Not true and I told her so. Either she wasn't aware or she was lying. I got my bill from them this morning for another 2 years of service. I'm going to start looking elsewhere. I'm really disappointed in them. They used to be really good.

Holly

1 — 

Just DON'T. Save your frustration.

I've been using Site5 for a few years now. When I first began using their services there was phone support, but quickly after I signed on with them that service was removed. Quite disappointing. When I ran into problems, I would hop into the online chat, which is the ONLY way to communicate with them. When their customer service didn't know how to handle my questions they would start a ticket, which would then take days to actually solve my issue, all the while my site was down. This game of waiting for responses happened on more than one occasion.

I finally decided enough was enough, and decided to switch to another hosting service. Site5 customer service told me that my money would be refunded, which was in writing on an online chat. The next day I cancelled my hosting service with them. I went into the online chat again to make sure that it all went through and a Site5 representative told me that I wouldn't be getting a refund. I showed the proof of the chat I had with the other Site5 representative, but Site5 still wouldn't honor it. Super frustrating.

Not a very honest or honorable company, and customer service isn't their main concern. I'm with SiteGround right now and the customer service has been awesome, and their website interface is way BETTER than Site5.

TW

1 — 

Site5 - Gone down the toilet - Stay away!

Been a customer for 7 years, the last 3 have been awful.

We cannot email anyone with a yahoo or aol account (or any derivative). My webhosting will just be down, I jump on chat and although i get through to someone quickly, it's often some idiot telling me I'm mistaken, then when I show the fault, they blame me for changing the DNS (I haven't) only to then find out it's a glitch on their side which they then fix. This exact happens several times a year. Site5 started out good but as soon as they were bought a few years ago, it became a race to the bottom and now they are the worst. Moving to Gmail for email hosting and will take my sites literally to any other host.

GJM

1 — 

Total Email Nightmare

Site5 is a nightmare. Their web interface for account management is highly confusing, burying all the key destinations into hidden corners. But worst of all is the email. Site5 is blacklisted by many email hosts, including Yahoo, AOL, and Verizon. Your email will bounce and fail if you try to send to those addresses, and Site5 will tell you that they will fix the problem. And then years later, after the problem is never fixed, they will tell you they are still working on the problem. At other times, Site5 hosted email will back up for 12-24 hours, and you won't receive your email until much later all in a batch dump. They will also telI you that WebMail is accessible, but not without an enormous workaround. I once contacted Site5 to see which credit card they had on file for me: they couldn't even tell me what card they were auto-charging each year for services. Absolutely shambolic. Do. Not. Use. Site5. I left after 5 years. I should have left after 5 months.

Peter

1 — 

Poor technical support

I have been a customer for many years, and my sites have been moved each time a new company bought out the older one. When site5 bought hostexcellence, I lost functionality on one of my sites. I discovered this was due to a Perl module not being installed. They have cPanel so I located and tried to install, but the install failed due a misconfigured build environment. I have been going back and forth with them for a month now and they cannot grasp what I am telling them. The latest was them asking me how I could tell I am getting a 500 error. Really? Just before that they said they had fixed the problem, but all they did was to completely break the site by making the permissions of ALL of my scripts non-execute. It will be a big job but I am going to be forced to move every one of my sites from them.

Jiri R

2 — 

Cool, but HTTPS/SSL is painful

Site5 is good and recently their uptime is ok as well. Only once you start looking into HTTPS/SSL, you discover you don't want to be hosted by them. You can't install any other certificate than theirs, which is 40 USD per year per domain. There are ways to do this free, but Site5 deliberately blocks that. And HTTPS is a must these days.

Moore

1 — 

Not worth it

Not worth it anymore.

Been their client for 6 years. Started moving my clients to a2hosting (Amsterdam) since last October 2018. Will move my remaining accounts as soon as the current invoice reaches an end.

Reasons? Malware attacks on some websites (although I try to keep everything updated and use verified and premium plugins/themes - Wordpress).

Strange memory dumps would haunt some websites, spamming hundreds of core.### files. Strangely, as soon as i got those websites in a different provider, the issue stopped.

On one account, which had different websites and clients, the inodes exceeded 400K for the past years. Site5 suddenly reminds me that the limit is 150k and suspended my account. Please be aware, they will not notify you as soon as you reach 150k, they will notify, eventually, 4 years later when the number is so damn high you have no other choice other than to move those clients to a different provider.

Personally, i strongly recommend a2hosting right now.

SHaymer

1 — 

Terrible Customer Service

I've been a customer for OVER 10 years. Yes, really. Since the buyout, the services have declined considerably. The only support offered is through a chat window. The service using the chat is extremely slow and I'm definitely not working with "expert" developers. Even when I painstakingly list out my problem and suggest solutions, they are completely at a loss. They go out of their way to belittle and ignore a legitimate customer request. I've lost features that I once had with no explanation. Like the ability to have multiple users login to their domains. Also, The email spam filter no longer works. Every single time I have purchased a new domain, the site doesn't work until I contact support. This is a pretty clear indication that some manual work is being done to process even a small requests. So, I'm leaving. Thanks to this article, I'm definitely not going to try HostGator if they're owned by the same company.

Daniel X

1 — 

Be very careful - 45 days refund only

Long time client of Site5 before the sale to a chinese holding company - which moved the servers to the cheapest platform in the world and replaced the previous competent sysadmins with the cheapest call center employees in India.

I decided I had enough of the ridiculously poor service, and so proceeded to move my many hosted sites to a better, local provider. A few clients couldn't move right away, and so my move period went past the 45 days during which Site5 refund payment.

I now find myself out of pocket for some 300$, which they want me to use - in the bad service they give, no thanks - and they refuse to refund me. I am sharing this information as a warning. Avoid this once-good hosting provider, they no longer give good service.

Abby

1 — 

Worst. Host. Ever.

I rely on my website to let customers book me. And over and over, Site5 loses their orders. Orders land in neither my inbox, nor in the customer's. This problem recurs regularly. Site5 claims that the problem must be on my end. I tell them over and over, my file code never changed. It just stopped working. So the trouble is on the Site5 end. If I put the files on another host that I use, the files work fine. The pattern is always the same. Site 5 at first will not believe me. It takes them days or weeks to admit that the issue is indeed on their end and to fix it. Worse yet, this problem keeps recurring. This is hurting my business.

Linda

2 — 

Used to be good, but...

Well, Site5 used to be fantastic. My website is relatively static, so it was really the email that I was interested in. One thing I will say - their reps respond very quickly. BUT...I have had a continuing problem of emails bouncing back from aol, gmail and yahoo. This has literally happened at least seven times in the last month or so. Each time, it appears fixed for a while, and then reverts to bouncing. I can't have this since I depend on email for business. They suggested other options for me - which would be way more expensive - but I think I will just switch providers.

Ed

1 — 

Won't stop harassing me

I had a hosting plan with another service, and these crooks apparently acquired them in 2018. Once I found out that my plan's pricing was going up, and some of the services I was getting would now be charged for, I immediately put in (what I thought was) a cancellation of service order. This was back in October of 2018 or so.

To date, I have received over 200 "overdue invoice" notices, because I went into my control panel and removed all of my credit card information so that they could not bill me without my knowledge. This has not deterred them from demanding money to automatically-renew my hosting plan, as I get, on average, three emails a week from them demanding payment. My website has been offline since the day before my hosting lapsed, as I took everything down. My domain was set to expire in December, and I went into the settings to allow it to lapse without renewal, and I still get harassed with all these demands for payment of an account that isn't even supposed to exist any more.

They make it darn-near-impossible to find an address, but I managed to do it. They're located in Texas, or so their information says, and unless they stop harassing me over an account they know I have cancelled and don't want anymore, I'm going to have to file a complaint against them with the state, to get them to leave me the hell alone.

LB

1 — 

Suddenly an expensive downhill ride

I've been with Site5 for over 7yrs and when I say the service was great, I am not kidding. It was great. I can't recall a downtime, or any issues I had or any of my clients had that weren't taken care of within minutes of chatting with someone. The support people I did chat with knew what they were doing. Please note I'm not a mega webmaster or sell hosting, I run my own sites and stores, offer free non-profit hosting for locals. I've been doing design work for over 17rs, but I'm a 'normal' hosting user, my expectations are what they should be. The past 5-6 months, wow. The service has dropped, the rates have gone up and now they bill 2 weeks before the bills are due. The new admin panel is chaos, I asked to be charged the advertised rate, not the rate they were charging me, they denied it. I started hopping through those hoops of the cancellation circus today. Already set up a new hosting account elsewhere, half the price. ps just read all other reviews and see they merged with another hosting service. Bad move site5!

Robert F

1 — 

Avoid Could Be Costly

Like many I was using IX Webhosting without issues.... then the sale to Site5 and things went downhill fast. My website that Site5 hosted was less important to me than dependable email service and that is where Site5 fell short. Of all the email addy's I use I have 2 email addresses that I use for income, one for a vacation rental, another for contracting work. I wish I had detected it sooner but It became apparent to me my emails sent weren't being delivered. Once this became known to me I would send out test emails and many weren't delivered to their destinations. I wouldn't even receive an error notice that the email didn't arrive at it's destination. Site5 support was responsive but after 4 or 5 attempts at fixing my email problem the problem still wasn't corrected so I informed Site5(not sure they even received my response)not to bother, I am moving to another host. Hard to say how much money this has cost me in lost contracting work and in rentals but I would avoid Site5 at all costs.

Mad D

1 — 

DO NOT USE THEM

I was with Site5 for years. Then when they were sold several years ago they went to complete crap. I have moved all my and client sites (several hundred of them). One client still has their hosting there. I'm trying to get them an SSL certificate. There is no way to automatically do this. I go to chat....they have a brand new chat which doesn't work. I've tried 6 times using three browsers, none work. It's non-functional. They have a note that they no longer have phone support (I didn't know they ever did). When I go to submit a support ticket, it says they only use chat now. Yes, the chat that doesn't work. So I find an email address on the site and send them an email. I get an auto-response that says they no longer respond to emails, to use their chat. You remember, the one that doesn't work. (As a bonus, there's a link on the bottom of the email for their Knowledgebase. It takes you to a totally empty one that either is old or not used yet.)

So there is absolutely no way to get a hold of them and purchase an SSL certificate. I will be migrating the client away regardless of the time left on their plan.

Until a couple of years ago they were GREAT. Their support people were the best. Now...judge for yourself. They're worthless if there's no way to reach their support people.

Brockney

5 — 

Fantastic

This review always seems to top the search results when I put Site5 into Google but I honestly can't understand the negative ratings,

Practically everything in this review is positive.

The only real criticism is the price, and I can't understand why. I pay about £10 a month ($14) and I am not locked into a 24 month contract and even if I was I don't want to leave.

I was a complete novice when I joined.

I am learning bit -by-bit and their live chat service is absolutely outstanding. They have helped me with what might seem the most basic of tasks and are now helping with a slightly more complex one.

Connection to live chat is usually instantaneous.

Site speed seems good, the site I am still learning to build has lots of video and audio and I haven't encountered any glitches.

Absolutely baffled about the low rating, I have been with them for over 2 years and always happy

And my browser isn't a spambot lol! My review was just blocked pmsl!

Jo

1 — 

Rubbish - don't use Site5

I was ill for most of last year and so our website was a bit static, but we've noticed now that we get continual dropouts while trying to do work /update/upload product - the repeating message 'connection lost', sometimes followed by 'Error 404 - Page does not exist' or sometimes followed by 'server failure, there may be maintenance in progress.' (What, for four weeks solid?) All this only started in September 2018 but we'd noticed that uploading and updating was slower than usual. Spent an hour in live chat with Site5 'Tech Support' (ha-ha) - first two attempts failed as the Site5 support page closed down in the middle of the live chat for no obvious reason. Third time lucky - no, after an hour it was determined there was nothing wrong at their end - it was all the fault of Wordpress! I then tried Wordpress - and of course it wasn't their fault either but according to them our website was a complete crock that would take over $1,000 to fix! I then contacted the man who built our website - a fabulous bloke who had recommended Site5 4 years ago - who had only just learnt of the sale to EIG and who is now helping all his clients change to another server. Customers have no problem using our site, thankfully, but for us it's been one long pain in the ar*e trying to get something done about the problems via Site5. They just shift responsibility and tell lies. DON'T USE THEM.

Jerry E

1 — 

Unethical Financial Obligation

The migration from IX Webhosting to Site5 was a disaster.

My email accounts were all intermittently down, and Site5 support claimed the problem was at my end. I have since gone with Interserver.net and the emails all work perfectly.

I have clients who use a web browser to access FTP files. Site5 support told me that they had no way to do that, forcing my clients to acquire and learn FTP programs.

Since I was an unwilling participant in the transfer to Site5 I am entitled to a refund of the balance I paid IX Webhosting for a three-year plan. I've requested the refund but I have no way to force them to give it to me.

T P

1 — 

Tim Northwest

Nothing but horrible experiences. No phone number or email to contact make correspondence very difficult. You have to sign in to get help. We were forcefully migrated by IXWebHost closing and had no credentials or email notifications. When we finally got in, the help desk repeated this pattern:

1. What seems to be the problem?
2. Let me check that and get back to you in 3-5 minutes.
3. Ok. Are you still there?
4. Goodbye

And then you have to start the whole process over. Be sure to go into lockdown so you don't miss the 5-second window you have to respond between step 3 and 4.

Side note: They say mailing address is Texas but other areas say Colorado. Looking for a new host now.

Brockney C

5 — 

All Good

My experience with Site5 has been pretty decent.

I began designing websites without absolutely no formal training and a bit of publishing experience on one Joomla site (without any training)

I have learned to build Wordpress and Joomla sites from a complete beginner, have encountered many issues (most of which were self-imposed) and ALWAYS received excellent support with the Live Chat facility no matter what time of day or night it was (quite often to begin with as well!)

My package is $14.95 a month which for what I receive is good in my opinion.

cPanel, WHM, and Webmail are absolutely easy to navigate and totally reliable, and once again I had no training or experience of this.

No downtime and a very efficient backend interface. I have recently been learning SEO and working with Google Analytics and the only issues I found were self-imposed.

I gave them a rating of 90/100 and the only reason it isn't 100 is because I cannot actually compare them with any competitors. However, I am happily staying with Site5 - if it ain't broke, don't fix it!

All good and many thanks

Harold S

1 — 

Terrible hosting

Hosted with site5 with a 90 dollar per month plan for years. Had multiple day-long outages, their support confirming it was due to server-side issues. The only fix they had was rebooting the server, not fixing the root cause. Why they waited with rebooting the server until I contacted them when an outage occurred: don't know. Got severely penalized in Google after a days-long outage.

Finally made the effort to move to a different hoster with a 15 dollar plan (I won't name them so my review does not appear biased), now the site is very fast and haven't had an outage in months.

Stay away from site5.

Jeff

1 — 

Poor Planning

My sites and Domains were migrated to Site5 back in March when they purchased IX Webhosting. I got some upfront notice before migration, but when the time came, it didn't go great, but it did go "ok". There were also some billing duplicates I had to call them about and my domain not getting renewed that I had just paid IXWebhosting for (maybe that is IX's fault and they stiffed them on the $$$...not sure). They made it right. But then yesterday, everything was dead. No email, no site. Nothing. 30 hours later, I finally managed to get through to a chat specialist (tried two separate times but after over 2 hours of waiting each time, had to go get other things done). Their comment? Apparently, no one bothered to update the NIS servers to the new DNS locations and the old IXWebhosting ones were finally pulled...seems trivially stupid to have let that happen.

Gary T

1 — 

Don't Use Site5 - find another

My sites were merged to Site5 when they purchased IX web hosting. I wish I had seen these reviews before the migration, I would have saved myself a lot of grief.

The migration occurred on June 26th. I was out of town, but everything "seemed" okay. I got a text from one person saying my emails were bouncing. I tested sends and it was working. Figure it happened during the merge. However, I found out that both sites would fail with Error 403 - Forbidden, and my email accounts would bounce with "550 No Such User Here" errors. The errors were intermittent.

When I got back in town I spent over a week with chats, and support tickets trying to resolve. The first time they fixed file permissions for sites and fixed some email setting. However, the problems continued to happen over the next week.

I explained they were intermittent - bad for an hour - up for hours, and so on. I posted logs, screen captures.. etc. They would continue to fix the sites by modifying the permissions - which they could not tell me why they would change. And could not explain why the email would go offline. I posted on my final day with them the details again, and how it needed resolving immediately, as I know I am losing emails, and my business site has been down many hours over the last few weeks. But after 8 hours and not a single reply, and finding this site, that was it. I've signed up for another host, and for them to migrate the account/sites.

I still have about 2 years pre-paid for Site5, and will request a refund of the balance, but don't hold out much hope for that.

If your host is purchased by Site5, do yourself a favor and just go to another host yourself. Save the headaches.

BB

1 — 

Bad migration and poor support

I had a similar experience as others here that have been force-migrated to Site5. No warning of migration date/time, stuffed DNS records and lost a days email in the process, with no help from support. Slow and useless responses, the list goes on.

There's so many other providers out there BUT who can I trust? I would appreciate others that have moved away from site5 to let me or this forum know where they have gone for their hosting and their experience.

Michael L

1 — 

Awful!

The worst! I had IXWebhosting for years and somehow they got bought out by site5. I never got notified by IXWebhosting, and just got very poorly worded emails by site5 that I assumed were spam until I decided to check by googling then and contacting that way vs clicking any links. Since then I've had 4 support chats where either nothing got solved or it got worse. One website is broken and I think my SEO rankings got demolished. Several URLs are not accessible, saying they're "currently being migrated". Email forwarding is broken on many emails. Switching, probably to GoDaddy, since I have other sites with them and their support is awesome.

Randy

1 — 

Site5 sux

I am a victim of the IXwebhosting debacle. Can't log in to cancel my service because my IX credentials no longer work. Site5 wants credit card information, billing zip code and a copy of an Id to prove who I am (and probably charge me for service before my bill is due)before they will make it work............WTF

No phone numbers to call to verify WHO I am actually sending this information to other than some words in a chatbox on an open browser(that's really safe, right/)

I am just a guy with a website that wants out of a contract he was forced to enter!!!!

Mike S

1 — 

Technically Inept

After Host Excellence migrated my e-commerce site to Site5 last week nothing worked. The site is completely broken and people cannot order any of our products. I sent Site5 a detailed description of one issue and here is the verbatim reply from their support team:
"I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this might have caused. I have viewed your account and I was unable to find which application you are using and also, I was unable to fix it on our end. So you need to contact your web developer to check this issue on your end.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us. We are available 24x7".

In other words, pay a developer to fix a problem that we (Site5) caused!

Billy

1 — 

Site5 took my site from IX Web and now all I have is 101 problems

After Site5 bought out IX Webhosting they migrated my sites and a bunch of client sites. They have mismanaged the process so badly that I've spent so much time fixing their problems, their support actually doesn't know what is going on either. If that wasn't enough I was forced to move instantly because all the emails on their servers were getting spam flagged. I looked into it closely and found that all their servers IPs are flagged by spamcop. Don't expect your emails to work. Your web server will do really weird odd things as well that is unusual. I was an IX Webhosting customer for 10+ years and never had a complaint, I used them as testing servers and very early stage domains, but Site5 seriously you can't even use their servers as an online testing ground they are that shit.

Michael

1 — 

Site5 Sucks so bad!

We were hosted by IXWebhosting and they were acquired by Site5. We were then sent a notice that we would be migrated automatically within two weeks to Site5 servers. I told them this will not happen automatically and wanted it done on the weekend and to be told what day/time this would happen. They said it was all automated. I told them again not to do anything without us accepting a plan of some sort. Well, they migrated us in the middle of the week and never updated our domain registers to point to new name servers. Everything still pointing to old servers and some websites down. a MYSQL DB did not migrate so when we got the name servers corrected, started getting SQL errors. I have spent HOURS chatting since they do not support phone calls. This is the worst of the worst companies. Garbage. I could go on and on but I have service to restore for a local government. Thanks Site5!

Tom W

1 — 

I would give negative stars if I could.

I got caught up by this nightmare company when they bought out IXwebhosting. When they migrated my account I had nothing but problems with emails and spent hours on both the phone and the live chat.
Unless it is the most basic problem the help line cannot solve it and after awhile they would not respond with anything more than it is your computers problem.
I had 5 different computers with my email accounts set up for 7 years and they all could suddenly not send emails on the day of migration? I don't think so...
Worst service ever....highly recommend against using it

Chris

1 — 

Trying to charge me for 11 months

Had a call from a client in Bali (I'm in the UK, it's now 2:30am) saying his site was down, I checked my client area and an invoice was due, so I paid it ($39) now they are saying I have to pay for another 10 months of invoices before unsuspending it (how would they even be active for 11 months if not paid???????).

So now left with umpteen unhappy clients due to massive errors and useless support staff who can't even speak English properly! No doubt they have farmed off support to the Philippines or elsewhere and now I have a suspended account due to their errors!!!!!

10 months of invoices! RUBBISH!

Chuck

1 — 

Site 5 support is non-existence

On April 29, 2018 our site was migrated from IX WEB Hosting to Site 5. We had no choice nor any communication other than an email saying this is going to happen -- good customer service -- NOT!! Since that migration, our site has been non functional. Their server changes our site's programing. Their response to every trouble ticket is "You need to do this or that". These trouble tickets are being generated do to a botched migration, that we did NOT ask for or WANT. Their support team assumes they know what the problem is and sends back a response that is just down right WRONG. The problems go on and while our service is broken, Out of some 24 trouble only 2 have a resolution. We issued an RFI yesterday in a effort to replace them.

Mike P

1 — 

Stay away from Site5

I found myself at Site5 after Site5 bought the defunct IX web hosting. The migration went terribly with outages and very weak/sketchy support.

After hearing the 1-star rating for Site5, I fairly quickly decided I needed to move to another host.

The day I cancelled, I was on the 44th/45th day after I renewed for another year (believing I was going to be remaining with IX Web Hosting). They refused a refund, saying there is no refund more than 45 day after *original* subscription. That seems unethical to me.

I suggest you avoid Site5.

Tom S

1 — 

Worst Web Host I've Ever Experienced

I act as tech support for a number of local small businesses. A number of years ago I set many of these businesses up at IXWebhosting, at one time they were a great provider but they went downhill over the past few years. Earlier this year IXWebhosting announced that customers would be migrated to Site5. My customers started to be migrated about a month ago. In that time I have not had a day gone by where I haven't had to "chat" with Site5 tech support. I've wasted many hours explaining problems. During the migration they misconfigured MX records for three separate customers. One customer had their website down for over a week. Earlier this week one customer was complaining about mail bounces. On further investigation I found that the bounces were happening because the SMTP server in use at Site5 was tagged as a known spam machine by Spamhaus, which is used by many ISP's to cut spam. I opened a ticket at Site5 three days ago, have contacted their support reps on three separate occasions (using chat) and the problem still hasn't been looked at. I keep getting told that the problem will be looked at by "senior admins soon". Over the past month, Site5's poor tech support and delays have cost me at least 2 dozen hours of time. Who can I bill for that wasted time? If you are like me, and care about your customers, don't even consider Site5 as a vendor for them. Despite that they say "Hosting for Serious Web Designers", nothing could be further from the truth. I've been in this business for over 20 years and this is the worst hosting provider I've ever seen in that time.

Bill T

1 — 

Poor service

I had a pretty bad experience with site5. I was previously with Bluefur (who were fantastic) but it seems they bought them and got rid of all the BlueFur people and systems so my hosting package and domains were transferred to site5 systems. The functional side is fine, cpanel etc is very good. But the site5 client area website does not work properly. The issue I had was that when I went to purchase a new domain that was quoted at CAD$12/year, the web form was somehow broken and the total price did not show up at the bottom (it said $0 - see image attached). I assumed it was just a javascript error and pressed Purchase. But then a few days later when I looked at my email it said CAD$28.26. It turns out they charged me for 'ID Protection' but at no point was this option presented - I don't even know what it is. This is not the main issue. I can tolerate a bug in a webform. But the hassle I had to go through with their chat customer service to get the additional charges refunded was immense. It took 10 days! And that's after I made a big effort to get screenshots of the broken web form and email it to them. They are just overwhelmed with customer issues probably and every time I got a new agent they started with the position of no refunds allowed. I looked at the chat history and it just took me 1 hour 32 minutes on the chat to get the refunds... I wouldn't be surprised if this company goes out of business soon.

Tennille

1 — 

Horrible Response Time

Another former IXWebhosting customer that was migrated to Site5. Avoid this company if at all possible. To say the response time for support is terrible is an understatement. I can accept that companies want to move to online support and away from phone calls, but then PROVIDE the support. It takes 20-30 minutes for chat support to event connect, then another 30+ minutes for anyone to offer a suggestion...only to then pass you off to email support. Then 7 days went by without a resolution. I got back on chat support to try to get somewhere, waited again, then it turned out MY suggestion is what fixed the situation. Absolutely unacceptable, especially when my issue was a very simple fix.

Non-Profit D

1 — 

IXWebHosting Migration Fail

I totally agree Sean. The non-profit client I do pro-bono work for was on IXWebHosting and just got migrated. I entered a ticket on Tuesday 4/24 because I could not login using to our DB mysqli or pdo. It gives me the 'Access denied for user...' error I even went so far as to remove ALL users and recreate them, knowing what the password is. Still same issue.

Their support techs on chat are lower level dipshits out of India that can't do anything but say "I've forwarded your ticket to advanced support"

I'm getting tired of this and am recommending to my client that they switch hosts immediately.

I used Site5 for another client back in 2010 and had a great time with them. Boy how things have changed...

Tony

1 — 

Failed totally to please

I had been with IX web hosting for over 12 years with very few problems. Recently it seems that they were bought out by site5. My web site and email have been unavailable for well over two weeks now. I have spent countless hours on their chat with people who give answers totally unrelated to my questions and have given no help at all to resolve the problem. I started several tickets and it took days to get unhelpful answers. The last ticket has been unattended to for over 4 days now.
Last night I signed up with a new host, I redirected the name servers and I was back on the air within 12 hours. site5 couldn't or wouldn't do that in two weeks.
Someone here said that they would score them zero if the system allowed, I would give them a high negative score if I could. Not a great end to 12 years of satisfaction.

Jack

1 — 

Better stay far away from this host

IXWebHosting "transferred" our client's account to Site5. Then our client's web site was down. We created a support ticket, and sent followup message every day, but we did not see a single word from them in almost a week. Eventually, our own programmer fixed the problem by logged in cPanel.
If you give up, you should let your customer know.
If you think your customer should work on their problem by themselves, you should let them know
If you have difficulties to fix the problem, you should let the customer know
If you do not think the problem is in your support scope, you should let the customer know

SITE5 SIMPLY AVOID COMMUNICATING WITH THE CUSTOMER

Cyndi

1 — 

Terrible - stay far far away!!

Like Sean my site was hosted by iXwebhosting which has been great for years. Now I've been migrated to Site5 and my site is down, I can't get into the cPanel or email or anything else because it says I'm out of disc space.... I can't get assistance because it says my email hasn't been confirmed. Seriously? I can't even get support assistance?? Wow, don't even know what to do right now. I have 8 sites hosted under mine and the only good news is it looks like my site is the only one that is actually down. But everyone's email is down and my hosting was just renewed for another year last month. I can only hope that I can get a refund because mine was not cheap.

Tim A

1 — 

IXP Migration stuffed up

I have been a customer of IXP webhosting for 14 years. My first and my major account was always hereticpress, but I registered a few other domains and hosting accounts with them over the years. Site5 brought out IXP in early 2018. But they have not honored contracts.

I have tried many chat sessions to try and resolve this with no success. My main site hereticpress was missed in the migration and ended up as a sub domain of another account I had under scrapar***. After another chat session to Mumbai, as instructed I deleted the subdomain hereticpress and then my site was unavailable, so the sub domain had to be reinstated.

They failed to migrate my main website (deleted my static IP for the site making it a shared IP site) and put it under another domain and hosting I have due to expire in a few months, whereas my main site is paid up until 2020. They also do not reply to emails, their live chat does not allow screenshot attachments. I am at the point of making complaints to the Better Business Bureaus and anyone else I can to get my main website back with a dedicated IP I have had for 14 bloody years. I am, sick to death of them.

Noemi

1 — 

Site hacked after migrating from IX Hosting

Avoid at all costs!

I was automatically migrated to Site5 as result of them buying out IX Hosting. I had been with IX Hosting for years and I have had no issues what so ever. No down time, good support and most importantly no hacks. The minute my Wordpress powered site was migrated to Site5 when you visit my domain all you can see if that you won an iphone 9 or similar deceitful content. I've been trying to sort this issue out for a week now to no success. Thumbs down!

Michael

1 — 

Site 5 is worst

Recently was moved from IX web hosting to Site 5. All of a sudden we can't send or receive emails. There is no phone number to call. Your only option is to chat. There tech support is terrible and they can provide no information as to how long we will be without email or what the problem is. Meanwhile email is vital to our business or any business for that matter. We will be moving our hosting soon.

Tom S

1 — 

Worst Host I've Ever Experienced

I act as tech support for a number of customers locally. Over the years I've had many customers that I've directed to IXWebhosting for their website hosting and e-mail. Years ago, IXWebhosting had excellent support and service, but that went downhill a few years ago. IXWebhosting announced that they had sold to Site5 and I welcomed the change. Now that migrations are occurring, I'm not so welcoming of the change anymore. So far three out of three accounts that have been migrated have had e-mail misconfiguration problems, resulting in my clients e-mail being offline for a day or more. In all three cases, tech support fumbled and diagnosed the problem incorrectly as being a DNS propagation issue, when in fact it was a misconfigured DNS MX record on their server.

One customer got migrated last Sunday morning and their website got broken. It's a wordpress website. Site5 has been contacted via chat multiple times and tickets have been created. It's Thursday afternoon now and the website is still down, nearly 5 full days. I've spent hours and hours on these problems. Who should I bill? As others have stated, Site5 has NO telephone support, NO published telephone number for anyone, overseas chat support (with poor grammar).

WARNING: Unless you want to spend endless hours "chatting" with support, stay away from this company. I can't comment on the quality of their service as I haven't experience any service yet. Their support is the worst I've ever seen in any hosting company.

Igor

1 — 

Support level is abhorrent

Ixhosting.com hosting just threw me out. The letter about the transfer did not explain anything. As if hosting site5.com itself took and transferred me without my knowledge. I was shocked. For 10 years I used hosting, paid regularly and any problems were solved quickly. And here is shit! A week sites did not work. Not everyone works today. I kept all the sites of uploaders on this hosting! From the support service, the answer is to wait for days and not always the answers correspond to the request. I myself have to look for answers to the problems. The workers were not able to make a decision. This is a beastly attitude towards users. I paid two months ago for the year and would like to demand money back.

Mike H

1 — 

Site5 migration a disaster

I was also recently migrated from ixWebHosting to Site5. It was also a disaster for me. My email stopped working on Saturday morning while I was out of touch camping for the weekend. When I got back Sunday evening, I could not contact Site5. Their cPannel would not let me send support tickets because I had not responded to their registration email. (Which did not work because they broke my email). I tried contacting them via their Live Chat System and never got a response, even after leaving the chat window open for 12 hours. Later I opened another chat window and asked if chat had hours of operation. No answer after 3 more hours and still ticking. I finally got them to accept tickets by changing my contact to an email that was not hosted by them. It still took a few hours to get the first response to a ticket and that was “we need to verify the request is coming from the account holder” before they could even look at all my tickets. Verification material accepted included replying from the email associated with the account (broken by them) proof of last payment (to a different company?) or pasting a Support Code with no indication of how to get one or where to paste it. I tried copying a support number off their cPannel and pasting it in an email to them and that worked. But I got that number from the same page that linked me to ticket processing, so why not accept a ticket as proof being the account holder? Email reception eventually came back up but sending emails was broken until I changed my client app to use SMTP “passwords, transmitted insecurely”. At the same time, my simple PHP WEB pages started limping back up, but many of the pages didn't work right because of a difference in the version of PHP or Apache. I submitted a ticket about that, no answer yet but in the hours that I have waited I tracked down the problem and fixed most of them myself. My FTP service also failed to work for several reasons, one of which is they took FTP accounts that were originally pointed at several different domain names and lumped them all into my “main domain”. Unfortunately they picked the wrong one, an abandoned domain that hasn't been connected in years and pointed them all there. My main FTP account is still not working hours later but when they finally let me use the cPannel I was able to create a new FTP account to jump in and start fixing things myself.

Sean

1 — 

Stay away from site5

Our site was hosted at IXwebhosting. Recently IXwebhosting decided to migrate my page to site5. Yeah... that did not end well for me. My page was completely offline for a week. Once site5 got it back online, many of the pages did not work. Several days later the email stopped working. The main issue with all this is the complete lack of any customer tech support other than by using a "live chat" I asked the chat representative for the tech support phone number, I was told there is no phone number. There is no phone number at all. If you have trouble, be prepared to wait.

Doodsie

1 — 

Horrible customer service!!

I was recently switched over to Site5 seeing that Host Excellence is going away. What a nightmare. After an hour and a half of chatting with Site5's customer service, I decided to move to yet another hosting service. I'd rather go through a root canal than have to put up with their very poor customer service.

Martein R

1 — 

What else can go wrong

Not had a good experience here.
- Couldn't login into mail and cpanel, after failed migration, I had to send my ID, which got refused because it had my full name on it, instead of my call name, after which I stated they had to look at the Creditcard Details and the name on the Domain-name.
- I almost got charged over $538 for HostPro for Triennially period, which is $1 each month more than HostPro+Turbo, almost payed $144 to much or $4 each month
- Documentation stated you can install SSL yourself, seems not, had to arrange it in Chat, No worries we can easily arrange it with a ticket, so I asked for a CSR, created a certificate, couldn't place it in the ticket, to much text, got server errror. So I go to Chat place the certificate there, was asked why I gave support a CSR, it wasn't... Got told I had to redo the certificate... while I was doing it I was told, I was wrong, even though I copied and paste the line which the support employee stated, it was accepted and if I could issue a new certificate.
- Being stated as they finally mange to do the certificate, Ow year, it costs $15 to copy and paste twice. WTF
- New website default didn't point to index.php
This within 4 days

Bonnie W

1 — 

TERRIBLE Company

Have been trying to get my SSL upgraded. I paid $40 last week. They can't seem to get it done. They are TOTALLY incompetent. I waited initially for a phone conversation last week with tech support. I waited an hour and 7 minutes with a recording telling me every minute or two how important my call was to them. I just found out from a chat conversation that they have DISCONTINUED their phone support--although their web page still offers it. RUN --don't walk from this company! I am STILL without the SSL upgrade.

Bonnie N

1 — 

Worst Experience EVER!!! TRAPPED! Can't access years of work

I've been a paying member of Site 5 for over 10 years. I am a photographer and they were recommended to me by Red Cart an online proofing service. Red Cart was always great, but I've had tremendous trouble over the last several years with Site 5's service. For over 1 year now, I have been trying to download all my files from Site5. I have volumes of image files that I cannot access. They always tell me to go to my FTP server and download them, but everytime I do it ends up running and running and crashing and I never can get my files. For over a year now I have been paying monthly for a service I can't access. I'm afraid to close my account because I need my files, yet I can't access them. I have been involved in numerous "Live Chat's" trying to solve the problem. Every time I am "Chatting" for 1-2 hours and in the end they say they are really sorry but they need to bump the case up to a higher level. Then the higher level will notify me via email. So then I get an email that doesn't solve the problem at all, just says something about connecting to my FTP or whatever, which was only one part of the problem and I'm on the merry-go-round all over again. I have tried calling the support line during the hours they say there is access to phone support, but I am on hold for literally hours and they NEVER ANSWER! Right now, this very moment I am sitting on hold waiting for an answer, it has now been 2 hours and 17 minutes. Yesterday I sat on hold for close to 2 hours and then my line was disconnected! This is ridiculous. Does anyone out there have any advice. Besides feeling ripped off for at least a year now without access to my files, I don't know how to force them to solve my problem so I can have copies of literally years of my work. I am TRAPPED! NEVER, NEVER USE THIS COMPANY! I'm going to seek legal advice. These files are my livelihood!

Mike G

1 — 

The Worst!

My story is very similar to everyone else’s. They were great from 2012 to late 2016, when they turned into the worst company I’ve ever dealt with. The downtime, but especially the complete lack of customer service. I an now hosted elsewhere, and much happier.

Suki

1 — 

Horrid

3 days before I planned to move to another host, they took money from my account – 5 days prior to my scheduled direct debit. Their customer service over the last 3 years has been horrible. I asked for a refund after it took 18 days to transfer my domain – nada. When they switched servers, my emails were glitchy for 8 months – I gave up trying to get help from them. Yes, you might have guessed, I’m not a developer, but I don’t need moisturised hand holding – just your common garden help.

Brockney C

2 — 

Gone downhill

I signed up with Site5 early in 2016 and considered them to be excellent in all respects. Until the last few months.

Initially:

Pricing – $14.99 month-by-month

Uptime – Site always seemed to be online

Support – Fast and useful

cPanel – Great

Now:

In the last 3 months the support has become poor.

Lost orders due to a technical error at their end. They admitted the error and refused to compensate us.

Support are incompetent and inefficient

Had to pay for SSL installation of my own certificate and a week later it hasn’t been done

The site now redrects to the Site5 homepage and all they will do is raise yet another ticket

They will not give me an email address to make a complaint.

Really disappointed because for the first year I found them to be outstanding.

They are now telling me that senior admins are working on it. Still? Come on, a week of this is too much!!!

Dee G

1 — 

HOLY FLIP FLOP!!!

Site5 was recommended by a friend several years ago and I was very pleased with their customer service and other services offered. Since the buyout, Site5 has done a 180 and a lot of their customers are becoming former customers. Sad to see them go from sugar to sh*t.

James

1 — 

Site5 Sucks

Worst customer support ever. No phone support, Untrained technicians, Rude and slow to respond. Mail Servers always crashing. Spam increased dramatically after joining site 5. If they don’t change their practices in the next month, They are going to loose my business pertinently.

pat

1 — 

They don't care about their customers

I would give them a Zero if I could.

I never give bad reviews to hurt businesses but screw site5. They have horrible customer service and wouldn’t help me after my site was hacked, in turn they helped to destroy my company.

Do Not Sign Up With Them

Fabio G

1 — 

Worst Hosting Service

We had severals problems with site5. Site disabling, support doesn’t provide response.

Bad infrastrutucture suceptible to hackers attack.

Sasa

1 — 

Site5?? DISASTER!

We were with Site5 for 5 years now.. Everything was cool until last 3 – 4 months.. What is going on now is that our portal is down for 48 hours, and no one can give us an answer why! So we are really really disappointed and we have decided to change them.. So keep your hands away from Site5. They just suck!

Once i was proud to have such a great hosting provider, now i am just thinking on how to backup my things and move away from them!

Sorry Site5, you have lost a customers with 12 VPS accounts..

Phil

1 — 

Avoid them, and EIG, at all costs.

1/5 is being generous.

I’ve been a customer of Site5 since 2011. Everything was great. Customer support was great, responsive, servers were good and it was an all around good experience.

Until EIG took over…

Since then, customer support response time went from hours to weeks (although it’s got a bit better now – it’s only days).

You can’t create new hosting packages for anywhere other than the US. I had my hosting in the UK and when I try to create a new account it ends up in Amsterdam?! I can’t change that.

They ripped out Site5’s perfectly adequate “Backstage” software and replaced it with CPanel – which isn’t the end of the world except it’s bastardised to work with the original Backstage that operates instead of WHM. And it’s all a bit ‘scrappy’ now.

I also notice (literally 2 days ago) that, since June 2017, the cost of hosting went from $13.99 a month to $19.99 a month. The key point here is that I WAS NOT INFORMED OF A PRICE INCREASE.

To say that Site5 is a bucket of shit would be an understatement. It’s hard to put into words the level of sheer dissatisfaction I have with Site5.

At this point it’s worth noting that I’m not talking about the customer service rep’s. Yes, all the old guys have gone and replaced with new guys. But, the new support guys are clearly doing all they can to help but are obviously up against it.

Ironically, the speed of the shared hosting is not bad. I’ll admit. And the downtime is OK’ish. Not good, not bad, just OK.

But it’s, literally, everything else that lets it down. And if you’re someone who uses / wants to use Site5 for business then it’s not just an inconvenience, it’s an outright show stopping money loser. The takeover of Site5 by EIG caused me weeks of headaches and lost me money (and has cost me more money now I see they increased the prices).

It’s been a painful learning experience of which the outcomes are:

1. I wont EVER touch anything to do with EIG. I could set up a hosting company and do a better job then they could. With my eyes closed, typing with my elbows and no internet connection.

2. I’ll never EVER go with another host that’s got anything to do with the original Site5 guys (I know who you are, I’m just bored of naming now). Why? Because they knew who they were selling to before they sold out (EIG reputation, anybody?) and they clearly didn’t give a shit about their customers. Money is a terrible mistress.

3. I’m now pretty disillusioned with hostingfacts.com because, if you guys are rating Site5 as 7th then, you’re clearly delusional (you’ve only got to look at all the other comments re Site5, here and anywhere else on the web, to see that). If you want to retain any form of credibility then you should reassess or remove Site5 entirely.

They’re shite. Just stay away at all costs.

steen e

1 — 

Bad services

We were with Site5 for 5 years now.. Everything was cool until last 3 – 4 months.. What is going on now is that our portal is down for 48 hours, and no one can give us an answer why! So we are really really disappointed and we have decided to change them.. So keep your hands away from Site5. They just suck!

Once i was proud to have such a great hosting provider, now i am just thinking on how to backup my things and move away from them!

Sorry Site5, you have lost a customers with 12 VPS accounts..

It has not been possible to send outgoing mails for more than 16 hours and the problem is still not fixed yet. Support just says wait for update and now it is not no longer possible to chat with them online. An outgoing mail-server down for more than 16 hours and no support at all. It is so frustrating, don’t ever use them, you will regret it sooner or later. And the pricing is very expensive on top of that.

Thomas

1 — 

Site 5 Extreme Poor Service and Daylight ROBBERY

The people running Site5 Used To be very good 2 years ago when I signed up. Now they’re absolutely horrible. In July 2017, I was reviewing the plan I signed up as my 2 year contract was coming up for renewal. Not only were the new plans not as competitive as the market, they were much more expensive, and they Do Not loyalty discounts, plus the support had suddenly seemed lacking, with poorer response times. The billing dept staff “seemed” friendly but they were actually telling me to piss off, with a “Thank You” and “Sincerely” with every email. I decided to change hosts, but to my horror, not only was I unable to remove my credit card details from their system (apparently their “policy”), I was charged the $300+ renewal fee 1 month ahead of the expiry date of my hosting plan. When I finally got hold of billing staff, I was told that they DO NOT REFUND to credit card. They provided useless credits (for use on hosting plans!) which I was never gonna use since I was changing hosts. Was that their “policy” to entrap customers? To force one to stay? Such under-handed tactics. I Do Not Recommend anyone signing up with them.

Dan R

1 — 

very unreliable / extremely poor support

SITE5 used to be good, but after being purchased by a larger company, their support became extremely poor. I’ve been waiting for three months for a ticket to be responded to by billing. Tech support and level 1 support simply throw up their hands and says they don’t know why the ticket is ignored. They charged me for daily backups for over a year and then did not provide those backups. Stay clear of SITE5.

Richard

2 — 

Horrible service

We have had a couple of Site5 VPS accounts for over 10 years. You were really good site5, with a really good service and support, but have went down hill when you got taken over and went down hill fast. Within the first couple of months several of my sites went down for several days with no explanation from site 5. I opened another VPS account last year with site5 servers in Canada for faster access for my Canadian clients. Much to my regret, only to run into a whole bunch disasters caused by site5 staff. My VPS server was down 14 days in August 2017 and my clients had no emails for even longer than that. I talked to support several times a day during those 2 weeks and all they said was that the server is being migrated and everything will be working soon. This was done without any notification and nothing posted on the site5’s announcements, news nor server status. This poor excuse of the server is being migrated went on for 2 weeks. After that I took the decision to move my business to A2. I asked for a refund for the second year that hasn’t started yet but they refused. This poor support and their refusal to own up to their mistakes plus this ‘no refund’ policy has forced me to move to a different host for VPS service.

They were the best but since the takeover I would not recommend them at all as they have ripped me off outright.

Eddie S

1 — 

Declining service and support plus no refunds

We have had a couple of Site5 VPS accounts for a bunch of years. They used to be great. Now, their service and support are failing. Recently they over billed our credit card and, when contacted, moved the overcharge into a “credit” on our account — they will not refund that amount to our credit card. The poor support and this ‘no refund’ policy will force me to move to a different host for VPS service — and when we do, we will lose the money in that “credit”. The business practices of Site5 have really taken a turn in a horrible direction. Combine that with their flimsy support and it’s a deal breaker. Very disappointed with Site5 and how things have changed. Tip for anyone hosting websites with VPS services: be ready to migrate to a new host when the current host is sold!

Steve

1 — 

Steer Clear of SIte5

I used site5 for 10 years and they were really good, with a really good service.

In short they went down hill when they got taken over and they went down hill fast. I renewed with them, much to my regret, only to run into a whole bunch of trouble and took the decision to move. I was under the belief I would be refunded as I was within the refunding period but didn’t read the small print that it only applies to new customers and as I had been with them for 10 years I wouldn’t be eligible (so much for loyalty!).

I tried to get somewhere with the issue and they appear pleasant on twitter only to tell you to piss off over email when no one else can hear.

Nate

3 — 

The worst customer service

Site 5 is the worst dont use them if you help it. They have the customer service I have experienced. They don’t like to assist with problems they just pass you off and you can only chat to them. I have 2 sites with which I will be removing asap. They raised my hosting to $14.95 and didn’t even tell me. They suspended my website’s and are taking there time to put back up it’s been 7days and still no assist ance from them.

Charla

2 — 

Buyout has runied support

I’ve been with Site5 for 10 years. Never had any issues. Support was awesome, fast and knowledgeable. However, over the past year, the quality of support has diminished to a surprisingly low level. The website is often down and utilities do not work. The latest issue for me, is that all new domains that have been purchased defaulted the ICANN registration info to my personal info used to register for site5. When I alerted site5 of the problem, they were nonplussed and told me to update it myself. When I tried to remove my personal contact info using the domain registration utility, the page had a script error which didn’t allow me to save changes. This was the straw that broke the camels back. After many problems over the past few months, I decided to research Site5 to figure out WTF happened to their awesome team. I found this article, which confirmed that they were sold. I’m planning to switch to another host provider asap. This has been the most frustrating experience.

Jen M

1 — 

Terrible Customer Service. Avoid at all costs

0 stars. This was the worst company I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with. I’ve been in Web Design for 17+ years and I have never been treated so poorly as a customer.

Our site was hit with malware. Immediately the site was suspended (understandable). Because the site was hit with a recursive script that infected all php files (which there are hundreds) I asked that the site be restored from a backup taken prior to the infection, which I verified there was one with the chat tech. They flat out refused until I went through and cleaned all the files first – makes NO sense since all those files would be overwritten with a restore. I jumped through the hoops anyways and got the site un-infected and requested the restore to be on the safe side that day. From there is was 6 frustrating days of being ignored through tickets and live chat all the while our entire company site remained suspended. No one could explain why they refused to un-suspend the site. My site was down for 8 days total before I finally transferred it to a different host. I truly believe they refused to un-suspend because I said their policy of having to have the client manually clean the files before allowing a restore from an old backup was ridiculous.

Avoid them like the plague. This was the final straw of years of un-helpful attitude filled support responses. I had been with the company for 8+ years. They were good when they started, but the last 3 years have been terrible. They finally made it worth the effort to move our entire company site, ftp, and whole online system elsewhere just to avoid ever having to deal with them again.

Andy

1 — 

Avoid like the plague

Jesus Christ these guys are beyond tragic. I’ve attached my latest uptime stats:

65.76% (last 24 hours)

92.38% (last 7 days)

97.92% (last 30 days)

My sites go down for at least a few minutes almost every day. for the past 3 months.

Customer support always say “It was a temporary issue and has been fixed now”. Then it happens the next day and the day after.

Do yourself a favour and do not sign up with these guys. They used to be ok, but seemed to go down the pan in late 2016. I will be spending the next few hours migrating my sites to another host as soon as the server is back up and running. It’s been down for 10 hours and no mention of the issue on their status page, so who knows IF or when it’ll be back up.

At least I don’t rely on my websites to make a living. Oh wait, I do. If you need any form of reliability for your websites whatsoever, then these guys are not for you.

Brett

1 — 

Disappointed

They used to be great, while I can list a few reasons my main complaint is that they will suspend a domain without warning. Yes, they do this. Now I’m not saying my sites are not hack free but what I am saying is that I get emails to change my email passwords on all my email accounts before they will turn my site on again – TO SITES THAT DO NOT HAVE EMAIL ACCOUNTS.

Let me rephrase that – I get the following message – HI, we have suspended your domain, no we do not care that its part of a national radio station or a current museum display, we just thought we would suspend it without asking. But now you know. Also please change all your passwords to all the email accounts that DON’T EXIST on this host so we can unsuspend your site.

Ok – it gets worse – I contact support and have been in this situation before with other domains so know exactly what they need to do and know its basically a button and it takes 3 attempts to get to someone who knows where “the button” is and then the domain works.

They are so @#$@#$@# ridiculous its unbelievable.

I was with dreamhost and bluehost prior (I see blue host is now EIG too which makes sense) and paying next to nothing and yes, they had their issues but at least they were upfront about the whole thing. These guys, FUCK!!! I think they deliberately trying to bring down the company and don’t care about the people who have hosted with it. Its the only thing that makes sense, no one can be that dumb in tech support can they ???

I HATE YOU SITE5 !!!!

Delly

5 — 

Just Had a Surprisingly Good Experience

I’ve been using Site 5 for 4 years with no problems. My website went down overnight. I run a high-traffic affiliate income based site so when it’s down I lose money fast. Contacted Site 5 in the morning. I was worried after seeing some of the comments here but I contacted them via logging in and accessing their support chat. I did have to give my support code, which I easily found once I logged in. Took the rep about 20 minutes to reply (during which time I was researching other hosting companies, lol…). But once he responded the issue was fixed within minutes. He said something about Apache server maybe. I’m not sure but he said it needed to be reset and that their web or server monitoring team would be monitoring my site to prevent it from happening again. So, we’ll see if there are any other problems in the future but I just wanted to share that I have had a good experience since they were purchased. You guys had me nervous but so far, so good!

Richard

1 — 

5 Star to 1 Star

I have been with SIte 5 since 2003 and they were the best. The past year has been a horrible nightmare. I have two re-seller accounts with many websites on them and currently site 5 decided to migrate the server that one of my accounts is in on without any notification. My websites and emails have been down for 7 days now and I can’t access cpanel or WHM either. I’ve been on chats and tickets with no results.
Don’t believe the uptime chart above, as I have experienced downtime last year as well. I tried getting a refund but they are not taking any responsibility. I am moving as soon as I have access to cpanel.
Stay away from site5

Josh

1 — 

Do Not Recommend

I’ve been using Site5 for over 3 years and they WERE very good, but within the last year their support has suffered. Support tickets do not get responses. If they do get a response it’s a basic, ‘we don’t see a problem’ reply. The only way I can get a response from anyone is messaging them on Twitter. Whoever runs their Twitter account seems to care and have the ability to get responses to support tickets. This is the 3rd support request that has gone unanswered in the last year. I’ll be moving to another host.

Victor

3 — 

3 days to fix a DNS entry? Unbelievable!

My hosted websites with Site 5 were migrated (without giving me any notice) from a Vancouver server to one in Toronto. I picked to be hosted in Vancouver for geographic reasons so now my users are going to experience higher delays.
The changes they made in their DNS after the migration were redirecting all my websites to a movie ticket page that looked that my sites were hacked. It took 3 days to got one DNS entry fixed and still waitinf for remaining websites.

It is unbelievable how their support went from amazing to disaster in just few months.
Looking to move to another hosting asap. Not sure I will get reimbursed as I paid 2 full years in advance early this year ?

Sam

1 — 

Terrible - after nearly a decade of being great

I used Site5 for just under 10 years. For 8 they were great. Then their service fell off a cliff. My sites were going down, emails stopped working, and loads of the control panel didn’t work. They reduced what was excellent customer service to a shoddy ticket system they rarely responded to, and yet I still didn’t leave. I thought it would be too much hassle.

A couple of months ago though, they accidentally terminated my account, deleting my websites and emails. It took an age to prove to them that it was their mistake – they kept trying to blame me – but eventually they conceded and miraculously located a backup from a few months before (which, when they were telling me I was at fault, they said no longer existed).

With the help of a kind local hosting company I was able to get an old version of some of the more important sites up and running, but it took weeks of using SIte5’s terrible customer service to get to that stage.

Save yourself a lot of hassle and avoid these charlatans.

pat

1 — 

Site 5 sucks

my website was hacked and site 5 won’t do shitt to help me.

They offer no phone support and over the years I’ve had tons of issues with them.

I recommend you DON’T use site 5..

Trust me

Lord

1 — 

EIG the E stands for Evil

Well as a disabled home worker, I suffer the crimes of how BC Canada treats stage 4 cancer survivors and traps them far below the dignity level. I could pull myself out but I can’t get a company going. I can’t work for anyone else but me, and can’t get the capital and knowledge workers support to survive.

Then the Site5 was sold to crooks.
Every single trouble ticket issue is avoided rather than fixed.
I barely have the energy to move these sites. My disability covers storage and business but I have no money for rent or food. With the crimes of ICBC, the Vancity lies, BC Hydro scam, Exquifucks scams, I say those millions spent on the Burrard bridge anti-suicide fence was well spent.

Goodbye, cruel world. You’re stupid as well as evil. I was your greatest achievement, biggest technological gift, a cancer survivor with special knowledge of the cure. You could have had the world if only you had not been a perverted evil sinner cult of liberal bullshit.

No, I am not going to kill myself, there is still work to do to the bitter end. I’m far to important. As long as I am alive there is hope for the rest of you.

Can I get a hand around here, a volunteer, a bit of capital? Can you help me turn a bad bad situation around to a gain and win for everyone?

Damn EIG to hell. Let’s Sue everyone for everything until the last breath I take.

Really, step forward, yes you reading this, step up, there is a huge reward for puttin ghtis egg back on the wall.

Raj V

1 — 

Terrible - DO NOT USE THIS HOSTING

I have been with Site5 for awhile and after it was sold off, it has turned into complete crap. The customer service is from India, and it is terrible as most things from India are. Completely bad customer service, usually no real answers, and just give you run around non-stop. The kicker is I have been signed up for the $10.95 /mo service, and then randomly my price changed to $14.95 for the HostPro account. On the website itself they were selling it for $12.95/monthly. I asked why was the price increased $4 a month with no notice or alert. The Indian customer support gave run around about pricing changing becaue they need the money to improve infrastructure etc. Sent ticket after ticket to try to figure out why I am being charged $2 more than what they advertise on their website for new users, with no actual response. I had to ask from someone from the USA to please answer. Shady business practices. Shady people. Slow and terrible hosting. Without a doubt, DO NOT USE SITE 5.

Leonardop C

1 — 

Very bad support

It was a good company, but the last month they became to work to bad, the ticket support is very bad, and no body now nothing about any topic, alaways said good words but not take any acction, I lose my money and my time with this company I make a mistake leaving hostgator, it never happen to me that kind of probles so I have to come back to hostgator…

Web S

1 — 

This company is shit now

Once this company was sold they did a nosedive. Now I need to migrate everyone off. Thanks original site5 for selling out and throwing us all under the bus.

Chris

1 — 

Site5 lost all my emails and files

I have used site5 for several years with several share hosting and VPS hosting in Singapore. Their service was really great in the past.

However, starting from 2016, their service drop suddenly. Seems it changed into another company. My websites down all the time. It takes hours to reply my support ticket, and just say “We apologize for the inconvenience this might have caused you. We will investigate……”. Then my site will up after one to two days. And then they will reply “After investigation, I can’t find any problem……” without give you any reason.

Now, in this moment, several of my sites are down again, all my files and emails disappear suddenly in Friday morning. After sending a lot of support tickets, and waiting for more then 48hours, now, it is Sunday morning, I have got back my files, buy all my emails are still missing.

Peter L

1 — 

Raising prices by 50% unanounced

I have been with Site5 for many years. It used to be a great service. Not anymore.
The worst is that they just raised my monthly fee (I always paid on a monthly basis) by 50%. Not sure if that is to chase away customers who do not commit long term but it certainly looks like it. And it was unannounced.
They also removed the easy payment option via PayPal. I believe one can still do it, but it is now.
The WordPress installations are also buggy nowadays.
Customer support much slower than before.
I also noticed I have many more ‘server connect’ issues now when sending out emails.

Pity. They used to be especially well known for being a good specialized hoist for WordPress sites, but now they are just a dime a dozen service provider.

The lowest common denominator won again here after their take over.

George

1 — 

utterly unusable

Site5 want from stellar customer support to completely ignoring all tech support questions. They never respond to support tickets. By never, I mean I have had tickets opened for months before they respond. They once responded to a support ticket a month after I transferred my service to another web host. LOL!.

They disconnected their phones so you cannot talk to them. They have an online chat but the tech support people either have no skill or authority to solve even the most basic tech issues.

One of my clients paid for a Sucuri web site management and repair service ($300 per year) through Site5 as an add-on service. When the site got hacked they never forwarded the request to Sucuri for repair. The site is still down more than 2 weeks later. I cannot log in and the tickets are still open at Site5 tech support.

I am in the process of moving all of my accounts to an non-EIG web hosting company

Eric C

1 — 

Do not setup account with site or all the hosting company owned by EIG

I have several reseller accounts with site5.com for more than 5 years. I have been very happy with their service till they sold to this idiot EIG. Since then zero support from the support center. Support ticket not respond for days or never. Live chat will just end after 3 mins before getting answer.

So frustrated that now have to move several hundred accounts to another hosting company.

Please never setup your site at this horrible company or EIG companies.

John D

1 — 

Site5 Turned to Crap

I’ve hosted multiple websites with Site5 for about 10 years now, and I’m finished with them. I can’t believe how much their customer service has gone down hill over the past two years or so. Both of my sites were infected, and had to be taken down. They offered ZERO support, and couldn’t even tell me exactly what had happened.

Site5, You suck!

John

Derek D

1 — 

tech team bad service

I’ve been a client now for a few years and I was amazed at the fast responce times of support .. also they were quick in solving problems, and wordpress questions were answered without hesitation. But lately the quality of support has propped at the bottom .. I’m really irritated. Tickets are lest open for days. Even urgent ones. What it looks like is that the Canadien/American support office was replaced by Indian support teams. And now everything takes a lot of time and I have to ask for the same support several times. The support team just keeps replying standard messages to stretch real support and the agents don’t really have insight into problems .. so they must open tickets and askt senior level agents to look at the problem, and that can take days. I have a malware protection plan for instance and it’s taking days for them to simply scan a site that’s infected. I’m really considering looking for another host .. actually i would like to go back to the old support team. I emphasize.. I have NOTHINg against Indians .. I’m half indian my self (Durgaram). But I’m frustrated with them.

Nick

1 — 

Site5 are USELESS

Have several websites hosted with these guys and can verify their service is absolute shit.

Just finished dealing with their support after an issue their end led to 5 of my sites being down for 48 hours! I must have went through about 7 of them to get one guy who could fix the issue.

They used to be excellent until they got bought out, but now I will be moving to another company as soon as I can.

Side note – their interface is crap too.

Never host with these idiots.

sundar r

1 — 

Site5 are USELESS

Any one help me to recover my account in site5 3 days before they blocked me to access my datas my sites are also down, if i ask anything in live chat they simply saying wait for ticket reply in ticket, 2 days before they said DDOS attacked my account you have to wait for the attack subsided in ticket, but they didn’t notify me before block my sites and access, even though i installed their suggested sucuri malware and also i installed sucuri firewall for my domain but still they said this, my accounts are attacked, after that in today live chat they told if u upgrade to VPS5 site will back in few hrs already i paid 1200$ for one year renew VPS4 plan now they asked me to update to VPS5 extra 400-500$ i paid and upgraded after few hrs another chat guy told this plan bandwidth exceed ur bandwidth usage upgrade the latest plan VPS8 for that u have to pay us 1444$ even i paid that too but still sites also not opening and not allowing me to access my datas till now no response in ticket totally i paid 3500$. Note: 2nd time payment i didn’t approve the payment from my side they said automatic paypal payment its deducted automatically.i noticed billing department working rapidly till i cant access my sites and my datas am loosing all my business and my clients kindly some one help me to recover my sites

Denise

2 — 

Long Time Site 5 customer who will no longer recommend

I have been with Site5 for many years but can no longer recommend them. They were bought by a different company a while back and everything has gone down hill. You can no longer contact them by phone. Their support staff about a third of the time does not understand English. Before I rarely had to call support but now its a regular thing. The version of C-Panel on their servers will not install WordPress – you either have to do it manually or get someone to do it for you there – and they often do not do it correctly the first time. Right now I have been on hold them on their Live Chat for over 30 minutes while they try to use Softilicous to install WordPress – that should take less than 5 minutes. I only rate them at 30 because with all things you get for free – unlike GoDaddy and Network Solutions where there is always an extra addon price – the price is pretty awesome. Just wish C-Panel worked smoothly.

Agustin

1 — 

It used to be great, now it SUCKS

DO NOT BUY SITE5 HOSTING,

I’m using Site5 since 2013, it was by far the best back then and I used to recommend it to everyone.

Last year I began having issues: Uptime problems, DNS problems, and so on.

I decided to keep site5 because they were so good in the past (bad decision).

2 weeks ago, all my sites were down for 1 week, no support, then I found out they all got malware and a security expert took a look and found out it was due to security issues with Site5 servers.

I moved to A2hosting, and not only they are much faster, their support is incredible!

My recommendation: Go to another hosting provided.

M. H

1 — 

Terrible Hosting Support on Site 5

Have had this host for several years but since the management change in the last year the support has become absolutely unacceptable and service is poor beyond belief for any issues beyond the most simple directions.

After several days of having all my Site5 hosted sites down AND my backend access, cpanels etc. I kept being told their “senior admins” were looking into it but no date of resolution or even estimate would be provided!

Stay away!

Drea L

1 — 

Terrible Hosting Support on Site 5

I host several domains on Site5.com, most of them drupal or wordpress-based. One particular page uses a graphics library to generate on-the-fly dynamic graphics patterns. It gets @10,000 hits a month and is the most popular page on one of my domains.

Site5.com moved all of my domains to a new shared server that didn’t have the gd.pm perl module needed to serve up the graphics on this page–and on several other pages. They refused to install the software on this new server. This was the last straw–I’m shifting all my domains to another host, no matter what the inconvenience.

Rohitsies

1 — 

One single advice: stay away from any EIG owned web host

I’ve been using web hosting for almost 20 years now. In recent years a company called EIG started acquiring almost all excellent web hosting companies and turning them into trash in every aspect. I kept moving my websites from any company once it gets acquired by EIG. Site5 was the last victim of them.
Now I switched to GoDaddy & digital ocean for all my websites.

S D

1 — 

Time to update this review

I’d say that is time revise this review. The service and performance have dramatically gone downhill since Site5 was purchased.

The support is now scripted and answered by people that don’t have any knowledge and are obviously juggling multiple tickets at once. It took me 45 minutes to get a basic question answered, and not well.

They’ve also fallen behind in updating MySQL etc. and do not meet the standard WordPress requirements, which are a bare minimum, with no schedule to comply any time soon.

I’m not sure how you got your performance speeds, but my sites still on Site5 are abysmal, plus the server response time is dinging PageSpeed results.

Mark M

1 — 

Site5 Gone WAY Downhill in the past Year

As a long time customer of Site5, I’m glad I found this article which answers my biggest question about Site5: Why did the customer support go from being the best I’ve ever had to pretty much the worst, almost overnight. Apparently the company was sold last year. I completely disagree with your review that customer support is a “pro” of using Site5. It used to take an hour for a ticket to be resolved with an obviously excellent tech guy from Texas. It now takes several days to get a response from somebody (I’m assuming) overseas at a call centre with seemingly no idea, and when they do respond, they want you to send them your “support ID” before they will answer anything, then they request that you repeat your question and hand-hold *THEM* through your problem. I don’t have time to have to educate tech support about my issues. Now that I have confirmed that the company was sold, I will definitely be moving all sites to a different host as soon as practically possible.

Tim K

3 — 

From great to horrible

For 5 years the support was phenomenal. The uptime was an issue a few times- but support was on it and I had good communication about what was being done.

The ownership shift happened at the exact same time that I switched to a more expensive virtual server- literally that week the support went to absolute shit. First, no one to get on the phone- now the phone recording says- to IMPROVE SUPPORT WE ARE DISCONTINUING PHONE SUPPORT IN FAVOR OF CHAT.

Kidding, right?

Secondly, the email “ticket” support which has always been great, is now the absolute worst I’ve ever experienced in over 20 years of hosting websites. Anywhere from many hours to multiple days to respond (was always minutes before) and for several months now the response is always the same: “we’re sorry, we switched to a new system and we are still settling in with it”
no help with the issue at all- just an apology that it took 5 days to say the new system doesn’t really work.

The chat has worked for me and the response was decent- now the chat is down- no one responds to the trouble tickets and there is no phone to call anymore.

To the idiots that bought this company: Please get your shit together- you are horribly incompetent.

You’ve taken a 5 year thrilled client who always posted great reviews about you and completely wrecked his business, and then made yourself unavailable for support issues.

Incredible how bad this is now after being the best support I’ve ever experienced in this space.
Shameful

Scott

1 — 

Support ticket response time is insanely bad

Landed on this post specifically because I was searching if the bad support I’ve been experiencing was widespread. Yep, seems like it is.

Been with Site5 for over 6 years, and was a very loyal customer not even dreaming of leaving. Now that they were acquired by EIG, they are just another cluster of servers. Used to get support issues resolved in less than an hour (sometimes sheer minutes on offpeak times), now you can open a critical request about your site not loading and won’t hear back for days. You might be able to rouse somebody to fix it via live chat but don’t hold your breath.

I will also be looking for an alternative until that company gets acquired by EIG and then the search will begin again.

Steven R

1 — 

I like how was....

Im planning to migrate my vps and reseller hosting ASAP,

After they sold the company everything just sucks,
The ticket support takes more than 15 days to answer, the people of the chat doesn’t help.

I’ve been with them since 2013, but I think is enought.

I see many people are upset with their service also.

Joy

1 — 

DO NOT GET NEAR!!!! DO NOT USE!!!!

Since Site5 changed hands Site5 is no longer the excellent service it used to be.
Chat reps have no technical knowledge and only answer pre-written lines with bad response time (sometimes they don’t even answer at all for hours).
Multiple down times with no response from Site5 reps.
Technical problems created by Site5 maintenance and automated scripts are not resolved.
My site is practically disabled due to all Site5 problems since Nov 2016.

Kevin E

1 — 

Stay Away!

Ever since they were bought by EIG every part of the company has gone to crap. Support has gone from being fixed in an hour or so, to not even getting a token boilerplate initial response for at least 24 hours. Uptime and load time have gotten worse. Their new backend system for customers to use is the worst. Most of it doesn’t work, lots of broken links and nothing is intuitive. Even worse is Site5 staff use that as an excuse for everything. “Sorry it took so long to respond, we’re using a new support system”….yeah, they’ve been saying that for six months now.

Adam

1 — 

Stay Away - I used to LOVE them

I used to build websites for a living, for government, to large businesses. I have a VPS with them, used to host a few or suggest clients to site5 because of their awesome support and speed. They must have sold out because now, it’s the worst I’ve ever experience. I’m moving my 40+ sites out to another service. Don’t go with them, they went from a ‘hero to zero’ real quick.

Nick P

1 — 

Horrible Now

I was a Site5 customer for almost 10 years. Since they recently got sold, and their site’s transitioning to a new frontend platform has been horrible.

They lost all my site’s databases, my client’s sites were down, they had no backups (good thing I did).

Their ticket responses sometimes take days, weeks, and sometimes not even answered.

I use to recommend them, and now they’re horrible.

Hopefully they get it together.

Mandy

1 — 

Worst Customer Service Ever

I requested a restore from backup. It took 10 days and 4 chat sessions for them to complete the restore. Unfortunately, they only keep backups for 7 days. The restore was with the bad code. Not acceptable!

Anon

1 — 

Once-great company is now in the toilet

DO NOT USE SITE5!

My company recommended Site5 to numerous clients over the years; Site5 was reputable, cost effective, dependable, and we had good choices of server locations. Everything has turned 180 degrees.

In the span of six months, the company has lost all credibility, can barely maintain its services, has little/no customer service, does not take requests seriously or deal with issues professionally.

I am now having to migrate dozens of websites to more reputable suppliers.

Until now, I’d never seen a brand that was so admired and mainstream become such a bag of crap so quickly. I’m stunned and furious.

Eugine

1 — 

Faulty email and no support

Email problems several days a week, we even got lost corporate messages. Support takes several days to answer. Stay away!

Frank S

1 — 

Since it is EIG owned: poor service, no support

The typical story: it should to be good but since it was bought by a big one (EIG) don’t expect thinks to work and in no way expect to have any useful nor quick support. 100% frustrating.

Tip: chat is useless and helpless, it will only make you loose your time and probably nerves. Still not sure if they’re bots.

john b

1 — 

Since it is EIG owned: poor service, no support

I thought my Site5 bill was on auto-pay. When it became late, here’s the chat I had with their support person. Note that it took over a half hour to make a simple payment, even though they already had my credit card on file. Note also the long time lags in the support person’s replies to me.

For 10 tears or so Site5 was a good service, but somethings clearly gone horrible wrong.

Welcome To Live Chat
3:43:06 PM
System
Amitha S has joined the chat!
3:43:42 PM
John Bartas
Hello?
3:43:46 PM
John Bartas
3:45:43 PM
John Bartas
Anyone there?
3:46:19 PM
Amitha S
Hello John, welcome to Site5 Live Chat support, my name is Amitha. I’d be glad to assist you today.
3:46:24 PM
Amitha S
My apologies for the delay in response.
3:46:34 PM
Amitha S
Please provide me with the support code visible under “Support Options” on the left hand side of the page so that we can verify your account. To get the support code, please go to your Customer Area at: customers.site5.com/clientarea.php.
3:47:23 PM
John Bartas
On the left side of what page? There nonthing on the left side of this chat page.
3:49:08 PM
John Bartas
OK, The customer area page. My problem is I can;t access this page. Some kind of overlay HTML which says “Looking to access your control panel” obscures it.
3:49:25 PM
Amitha S
Please provide the admin email address or the primary domain of the account.
3:49:55 PM
John Bartas
[email protected] – that’s me.
3:51:59 PM
John Bartas
When I try to log in with that address and my last password, I just get a blank page at the URL “customers.site5.com/dologin.php”. White screen, nothing else. This happens on 3 different computers.
3:56:09 PM
John Bartas
Hello? You still there?
3:56:10 PM
Amitha S
I will check the account and will get back to you in 4 to 5 minutes.
3:56:28 PM
John Bartas
Thanks.
3:58:01 PM
John Bartas
The account payment is past due, I’m trying to log in to pay it, but I can’t pay if it won;t let me log in.
3:58:18 PM
Amitha S
The admin email address was added twice to the account contact list. I have removed the additional one. Please reset the password using ‘Forgot Password” link at: customers.site5.com/clientarea.php and then log in. The issue occurred because of the backstage upgraded. Once the password is reset, you will be able to log in properly.
3:59:29 PM
John Bartas
OK. I;m at “validation email sent”.
4:02:26 PM
John Bartas
OK, I changed the password and now I can see the clientarea.php page..
4:02:58 PM
John Bartas
I’m looking for the past due invoice, but that “Looking to Access Your Control Panel?” Overlay show up on every page. How can I get rid of it?
4:04:28 PM
Amitha S
I could see that there is one Invoice which is unpaid.
4:05:00 PM
Amitha S
Kindly make the payment for the invoice #321799.
4:05:28 PM
John Bartas
I See it too, behind the “Looking to Access Your Control Panel?” overlay. everytime I click on anything that overlay comes back. How can I get rid of it?
4:08:49 PM
John Bartas
Even when I get rid of that stupid overlay, I still don;t see any “make a payment” option. How am I supposed to do that?
4:09:13 PM
John Bartas
I’m trying to give you guys money, but this website makes it really, really hard.
4:10:44 PM
John Bartas
I;m at this page:
4:10:46 PM
John Bartas
customers.site5.com/clientarea.php?action=invoices
4:11:22 PM
Amitha S
Could you please be on hold, I will be back within a few minutes?
4:11:32 PM
John Bartas
I can see the amount due, but there’s no obvious option or button to pay it.
4:12:46 PM
John Bartas
Ok. I;ll wait a few minutes.
4:17:00 PM
John Bartas
I clicked on the orange colored cell that said “unpaid” (which didn’t look like a link or button). That took me to a “pay now” page. It already had my credit card on file, so I have not idea why it didn’t just auto-bill me.
4:17:29 PM
John Bartas
Anyway, it says “paid” now.
4:18:38 PM
John Bartas
I must say, this was the most trouble I’ve had trying to pay a bill online (or any other way) in years. I really hope Site5 can get it;s website working better.

Fernando V

3 — 

I used to love site5.com but not anymore.

I’ve been using site5.com for at least 12 years. I was 100% happy with the company. One of the things that I used to love from them, was the fast and the accurate support. For me, the always provided an A+ support… but those days are gone.
In less than a year, getting support has become a nightmare. It doesn’t really matter which way you contact them (chat or ticket or even phone), your problem will not be solved or at least it will take several days, weeks or even months.

Just to give you an idea of how bad the support has become: In January 30th, 2017, I opened a ticket due a DNS issue affecting one of my websites. I will share an image to you about the conversation I had with the support.

Guess what? I had to solve the problem by myself, I never had an answer back from the support. I felt completely alone with the technical problem and not only that, I was under pressure by my client. Of course I spent sometime trying to calm down and to explain him the situation, I never did what site5.com did to me… I really wanted to dissapear from earth in those days.

This was the first time that I received the lowest quality support, but not the last one. What can I say? I am very dissapointed and I never thought one day I would ‘ve said that it is a good idea (and time) to start looking at a new web hosting company.

Colleen

1 — 

Terrible Service

We have been with this company for over 12 years. Just signed up for another year and for the last 2 days all our sites are down. Support is cold shouldered. And there are no longer call options available. Tickets take sometimes 2 weeks for a reply. Since new owners the support is basically bill. This is fatal to our business as we have 8 sites and not one works!

Alex

1 — 

Site5 Awful Support

Please stay away from Site5. Their service was originally great with high up times, very good support staff, and good pricing options. Since the start of 2017 their support has decreased so much in quality it is a complete insult to the work of previous owners and how in touch with their customer base they were. I’ve encountered days of downtime that was a result of an error on the hosts DNS that took multiple tickets and multiple days to correct only for their support team to update packages hosted on my server without permission which broke my web application. I then had to go through several more days of tickets and live chatting the oversees support personnel in order for them to tell me that they had no backup of my hosted content since August of 2016. This is completely unacceptable and I urge anyone interested in Site5 to look else where.

Sam

1 — 

Site5 made lose money, clients and mental health

I was a client since 2007 and everything was great until 2016. Now I find out the company was sold. They didn´t even let clients know about that. But since then all my sites started being hacked daily, DNS propagation issues, etc.
Last time I requested support via chat (the only way you get anyone to answer) the guy tells me: “Hmmm, your site looks fine to me”. Totally unprofessional.
I am currently migrating the accounts I have left after most of my clients simply shut me down.
STAY AWAY FOR YOUR OWN MENTAL HEALTH.

Stephan

1 — 

site5: very unreliable customer support

When we set up our website www.sinophilia.de in early 2016, we were looking for a reasonably-priced web host with a reliable customer support. We decided to choose site5. Unfortunately, we found that their customer reps don’t keep what they promise. Things got nasty when I contacted them about a backup issue last weekend via live chat. The customer reps asked me to create a support ticket (which I did), but afterwards nothing happened. I have kept on waiting for five entire days until staff finally got back to me asking me to send them more details. In the meantime, I had reached out to the tech team several times only to hear that they had ‘escalated the issue’. So, what is my verdict? Please stay away from site5. They are very unprofessional!

Kitty

1 — 

NEW SITE5 IS REALLY BAD - BUYER BEWARE!!!

I’ve been using site5 since 2010 and never had a complaint until now and the pain I’m going through with them makes that saying, “you don’t know what you got till its gone”. The new owners/buyers/company or whatever they’re called must want to get rid of their old customers so they can change their pricing or something. How else would you explain the absolutely horrible customer service. 2 weeks now and my website is down. I have opened several tickets with no response. Anytime I go on their live chat which takes forever to load, I am promised it will be resolved, then nothing. I’m absolutely done with them. I was prepared to stay loyal even though the changes were a bit disruptive for me at first but with this, there’s absolutely no way I’m staying.
Can someone pls recommend a hosting co. that was as good and budget-friendly as the OLD site5? Thanks

Carl

1 — 

BAD SERVER!

After a long wait of 20 minutes to get connected on their chat support system.

I wasn’t able to run php through ssh.

Their answer:

“I am seeing this issue has been reported to our team, and they do not have a solution at the moment on the legacy server, I was not able to find an update for you at this time. If you need to run the command right now, you will need to purchase a new hosting plan, which will be in our newer server, then you will be able to run the command. I am very sorry for the trouble and inconvenience .”

So, they have a problem and i should buy a new hosting plan.

Do i need to say anything else?

Jonathan H

3 — 

Five days of Silence, followed by THEM complaining

A website I host got infected with spamware and they notified me and shut it down. Which is fine – I get it. No problem there.

But then when I went to remedy the situation, the site was no longer listed in my account. So I replied to their ticket asking for help. No reply.

The next day, I asked for help again. Again no reply.

FIVE DAYS came and went with no reply. I just opened my email this morning and found this – mind you, if they had replied in less than a WORKWEEK of time, there wouldn’t be an issue.

Sorry, but five days of silence is not cool.

Hello,

Thank you for contacting our support team.

Please refrain from opening up multiple tickets on the same issue or tickets to check up on other tickets. It would clutter the queue and lead to delays in response times, as well as potentially scatter information related to the same issue among multiple tickets leading to potential missed details.

To view your current tickets and reply back to them, you may log into the customer portal at and click on the Support tab. Your ticket was reviewed and pushed up further higher the chain to our ToS – Abuse queue as it would require a specialized level of permissions to review for the information needed to provide you with acceptable response. One of our security administrators will be reviewing that shortly and will email you further updates as we have it. Please await further updates from within that ticket.

Warm Regards,

James T.
Site5.com – Linux Admin

Chuck

1 — 

RUN!!

It’s heartbreaking what happened to site5. I was with them since 2009 and got to know a few of the support staff well — back before Endurance bought them the team was excellent and you could get answers via online chat nearly instantly.

I should have paid closer attention to their sale to EIG but I didn’t know any better and I thought “ok, new owner…same team”. Wrong. It appears to me that none of the original support staff is there anymore, and now you deal with some off-shore ‘script reader’.

I was paying nearly $2,000 per year, happily, with site5. One day I could not log into my account. Nobody would answer online chat. No answer to phone calls. I opened a problem ticket and it took THREE WEEKS for the initial response, which was basically “please try to log in again”.

My full time job became getting off of site5. I was finally able to ‘backdoor’ my way into cPanel for each of my sites, and got them moved over to a new service. It was painful.

I also immediately called my credit card company and told them to cancel the credit card on file with site5 because I knew what was going to happen next. Yup, I tried to cancel my service with site5 and that request went ignored for FOUR WEEKS. I was getting emails stating that my card was invalid, etc — so those bastards were trying to hit the card for the $2,000 yearly fee. Imagine trying to get a refund from that?

I hope the prior owners of site5 are enjoying their big payout from selling out to EIG. And I hope EIG crashes and burns – they have no right to be anywhere near a computer much less hosting their victims websites.

Chuck

2 — 

No longer impressed

Been a Site 5 customer for a few years now. Their service and support typically has been great, but I’ve definitely noticed a change in the last few months. I haven’t had any technical issues with my email or hosting, but there have been lots of problems with their billing system. I’ll get the invoice from them, then instead of automatically charging the card they have on file, they keep quiet for a month and then all of a sudden I’ll get an email like “3RD AND FINAL OVERDUE NOTICE.” I’ll never receive any emails about the invoice being overdue until they are threatening to cut it off. It’s not like it should be a problem with my email…. they are the ones hosting it! Every month I’ve had to log in and pay manually, which is just a waste of my time. I finally decided to wait on their chat support for an hour before getting someone, who said they fixed the problem. I wasn’t able to get a response about the ‘missing’ 1st and 2nd overdue notices, but by that time I had lost so much time and patience I just decided to call it. Hopefully they get their billing figured out; here I am looking at hosting reviews for other places to switch to. Anyone have good suggestions for linux software for backing up and migrating IMAP accounts?

Rick

2 — 

Been A Site5 Client For 10 Years - They Turned To Shit

Ive been on site5 for close to 10 years and while they were great at first, they are now a big pile of shit. Always having problems now that they are “changing” what wasnt broken to begin with.
Soooo many performance issues now that they have been bought out and as they continue to implement their changes, we suffer as clients. I notice that they outsourced their support. I wonder if the old support staff were fired.

“We are very sorry”. Tell my clients that. They dont even offer to reimburse for downtime or anything.
If you are debating getting your hosting with Site5, I would not. I am moving all of my clients once I find a worthy host like Site5 USED to be. Unbelievable.

Mark

1 — 

What's going on?

I’ve used site5 for years. They’ve always been fast, reliable and – the killer feature – had fantastic, responsive customer service. I’ve never waited more than a few minutes for a response to a support ticket.

Right now, however, every single one of my websites is offline and I can’t access WHM. It looks like their billing system has screwed up and auto-suspended my account. No matter – these things happen. However, I can’t get hold of anybody via live chat. It’s been over an hour and my customers are beating down the door.

I’ve opened a support ticket also – but my last was ignored for over a month before I got a reply, so I’m not holding out much hope.

A crying shame. Site5 were a beacon of professionalism in the world of web hosting. Not now. Would not recommend at all.

Jennalee R

1 — 

reply to ticket 4 months later

Yes, you read right. My sites were down for 5 days. No answer on their phone, no response to email and it took 4 months for them to reply to my ticket. I dont know what happened to this company, but I really wish that I had never heard of them.

Andrash

1 — 

shit!

Support ignore all of my problem. I buyed server, and it did not work all month, they did not want return money.

Hossein

1 — 

Respond time is ridiculous

I have been using Site5 services for over 4 yrs, I have over 110 accounts with Site5. They do NOT even care about me, as their reseller.
I am begging on the phone, or chat or email to just update me to have a respond to my customer….
THEY DO NOT EVEN CARE!!!!!
HORRIBLE SERVICE….
HORRIBLE AND AGAIN HORRIBLE…..
Even a shitty small hosting company is more responsible than SITE5!!!!
KEEP AWAY FROM THIS BUSINESS, THEY SCREW YOU, PROMISE!
DISCLAIMER: The OLD-TEAM site5 had awesome customer service, always send maintenance updates via emails and uptime was great. Now, it sucks and is horrible.

Aaron

1 — 

Worst Hosting Provider Ever

Purchased one of their hosting plans for a client to test them out. Worst. Mistake. Ever. Site5’s servers are ridiculously slow to the point that basic PHP applications take some times half a minute just to load. And guess what, majority of opensource CMSes are built on PHP. Not only is the quality of their product subpar, but their support system requires DAYS to respond. In an era where server uptime is fundamental, you’d assume that most hosting providers would create reliable support systems. Nope, not site5. Not even hostgator was as pathetic as this. If you’re even CONSIDERING using site5, my professional recommendation would be for you to look away immediately.

Long story short, shitty servers, shitty support, and they should no way be in business of web hosting.

Grace

1 — 

Site5 is not Site5 anymore :(

Hey guys,

I was a site5 customer for more than 2 years and everything was great but since the EIG acquisition site5 is not anymore site5 :(. The support is very very very slow and the quality of the replies is very low. However, after about 2 months effectively crying because my websites were up and down, I finally found another warm house for my websites chemicloud.com – it’s a small web hosting company but it reminds me of site5. The support is AWESOME and the servers are working very good. Strongly recommend them. I don’t want to advertise them, but I know how is to stay with the website down for like 2 weeks for a reply from the new site5 support team and this is why I wanted to share this with everybody! Thanks!

Peter M

1 — 

Support gone to pot! The worst hosting company ever!

They were fantastic, support was the best in the world.
Since sold to EIG, its the worst in the world despite what this review says.
I mean beyond bad.
You will wait hours before they answer live chat and weeks before they answer ticket.
Then it gets worse because 9 times out of 10 they wont be able to help you, as opposed to before EIG bought over, 10 times out of 10 they would solve your problem.

Trust me they are beyond bad, avoid avoid avoid!

Mesut T

1 — 

I'm sorry

Our relations with site5 is almost 10 years. We were really happy and had great friendly support from great admins. Now it become horrible and rookie support. Seems its time to say goodbye. I am sorry.

Barbara

1 — 

Deplorable Service - Unable to Cancel Account

I had been a customer of Site5 back in 2014, and had prepaid a 2 year shared account. I went to cancel because i’m no longer using the account. The experience was the worst I’ve had in a long time.

First, I couldn’t login as they’ve changed their admin. Live chat told me to reset password, but the email on the account was for an old email no longer active. So then, we attempted to “verify me” for security…

This required getting the credit card last 4 digits. Bear in mind it’s been 2 years. Needless to say, the cards I have now have had the number changed before due to fraud, so now I’m trying to dig online through past statements to find a number.

The support rep leaves me going round and round, then finally tells me it’s not an Amex, it’s a visa. So around I go again – searching. Needless to say, although I find the statement with the payment – he now tells me that’s not the same number they have on file.

Next, I ask him to verify the phone number – as I’ve had the same cell phone number for 18 years. They can’t call me. So I ask for the direct number and not the 888 number, as I’m roaming in Mexico at the moment and the toll free number wont go through. He then proceeds to ask me if I’m dialing it with the area code – uh, dude – SERIOUSLY!

At this point, I cannot cancel the account. I’m in the process of emailing every credit card to try and make sure they cannot charge me again, and deleting all the files off the account to make sure they have none of my information.

Absolutely unprofessional and the worst service. I completely understand they have security precautions, but you can’t tell me there isn’t a process for when a.) the email on file no longer exists and/or b.) the credit card has changed and 2 years have passed.

I even asked to be transferred to a manager, because I understand that customer support level 1 has limitations on what can be done. This was denied. I asked for that direct number so I could call, this was refused as well.

Bottom line: Run away quickly and pick a different hosting company!

Anthony

1 — 

STAY AWAY!! Awful service just got worse after upgrades (downgrades really)

Something bad has happened here, no ability to pay (my sites going to get cut off and I can’t pay them, this is an issue that goes on and on (3 weeks now), they just copy and paste replies that are of no use) support is no existent, just a robot.

Service and back end makes zero sense (was awful before an upgrade). I have no idea how to login to my add on domains, was weird before but more obvious.

Billing upgrade is a DISASTER, please don’t use this service they are incapable of providing anything like what you need to stay sane and run or keep a website live, THE WORSE ever and I am 10+ years into services from suppliers like this, stick with the old boys or find one with good reviews.

Rob B

1 — 

This is no longer a suitable Wordpress host

Site5: I’m out of here also. I’m using their VPS server (level 5). Load times are okay for HTML only sites, but there’s now extremely serious very frequent latency with all WordPress stuff, even when it’s optimized, that never was an issue pre-buyout.

Also, all the data centres now apparently are in Dallas (there is no longer choice of data centered), and the VPS I’m on is in Vancouver but it’s now a “legacy” product in my control panel. While load testing and finding out that my WP sites don’t hold up at all with even a reasonable number of simultaneous visitors, I searched via a “who is hosting this” tool and discovered that my VPS server actually traces back to A Small Orange. So I feel like some weirdness is definitely going on behind the scenes, that my server is actually just being handed off to the broom closet of a company in the same family.

I have all the same problems with the help support frequently mentioned in previous comments. It used to be exact opposite – really knowlegeable answers from an experienced Site5 team that were fast, personable, and conscientious.

Another issue with Site5 that I never hope to see addressed is lagging behind in PHP versions. Like, even the WooCommerce plugin now flags you if you’re only running PHP5.5, which is the max PHP level on their VPS. Kind of a sign that you need to catch up.

No o

1 — 

Another dissappointed customer!

Years with them, but this last few months my experienced with them became a disaster… Got many problems, with really bad low crap support…
Used to be I trust site5’s support.. They used to be honest and I trust them. We can trace the cause of any problem easily because we cooperate together, now its not…

Currently, many problems come up and I dont trust them anymore… a php application suddenly not work without any changes? webmail suddenly stop to work or weeks of requested dedicated IP ticket that finally got answered by “amazing” answer..

Enough is enough.. I am hunting new place for my websites now…

Mike

1 — 

The buyout seems to have killed them

Site5 customer for the last 6 years. Used to have excellent service which I (fortunately) rarely needed.

Starting around October, I began having problems. Slow page loading, downtime like crazy, and zero response from customer support. I then started having problems with spam originating from their outbound SMTP servers, my own mail not being delivered, and possible intrusions into client inboxes. I opened tickets with both general support AND security staff *three weeks ago* to look into these issues, asking for server logs and other information, and received NOTHING in return. Just tickets sitting open in the void.

Seems like everyone good working there has quit. I’m going to quit being a customer as well then. My resolution for 2017 is to give my business to someone else.

Dennis

1 — 

Had to cancel within 2 days

I went for their service based on price, and that was my first mistake. I had 24 websites to move and after moving only 4 of them noticed after DNS propagation none of the pages were loading. The tech live staff support were helpful but not knowledgable and couldn’t help me with the problem. The insisted that I have to wait 48 hours for DNS to propagate but if DNS did not propagate then the sites I moved would still load from the old hosting servers, not go blank and result in time out errors.

I will still with my current provider, and have learnt the lesson that saving some money doesn’t come with some grief or stress. I would never recommend site5 for hosting in a million years, I don’t understand how their tech could not even diagnose a simple issue.

Luke J

4 — 

Wish they hadn't sold out... Again!

Similar to other reviewers, I have had a site5 account for years now. Lately i have been getting near daily downtime notifications from some of the wordpress installations i have on it.

To top that off, my invoices stopped paying themselves and i started getting past due notices evey month.

The first month that happened i contacted support about it and my ticket has been open and unresponded to for nearly two months now.

Today i had to login and pay my invoice manually, again, and i went into ticket and responded to it about reestablishing my automatic bill pay. Its been about 7 hours now with no response.

About 5 hours ago i emailed billing directly with the same question, and asked them about switching to annual payment terms to get the advertised price of 11.95 instead of paying 14.99 each month.

Billing has also failed to respond.

I loved site5 and i switched to them after EIG bought out host gator and host gators support took a nose dive. I found this review after searching if site5 support has gone down hill only to find out EIG acquired them last year.. around the time i started seeing more downtime notifications and not long before billing issues started.

I have no desire to switch hosts but if they cant get their sh*t together and take my money or respond to tickets in a timely manner, i will be shopping around next month.

In closing, site5 never should have sold out just like they did with hostgator. But i guess that is their business model.. build something successful and sell it to a conglomerate.. rinse, repeat. Anybody know what company they’re starting next?! Perhaps i will follow them after each sale.

Sean J

1 — 

Site 5 - ripe fruit that went rotten

I’ve used site 5 for about 2 years and up until a few months ago (October 2016) they were phenomenal.
Best bang for buck and always got support from educated techs.

Within the last couple of months all my clients sites and email went down with no warning several times a week for hours at a time. They called this emergency maintenance.

Then I asked to be moved to one of their newer servers where my other friend was not having issues. After a week of messages from different migration techs they were going to move me to a newer server with sni technology. Worst idea ever.

The migration tech half assed the job and quit half way. Half my sites DNS were pointed to the “new” server and half at the old. It took days to get a senior Admin to correct the DNS mappings. Meanwhile I scrambled to bandage the issue by changing name servers back to the registrars and creating DNS entries. At the same time I ended up opening accounts with site ground and name cheap. I found out that site 5 did a big layoff and many techs left to companies such as site ground.
Even site 5 techs told me that the takeover by eig caused massive havoc. Now a week later after the DNS migration issue the entire server is down for over 12 hours and counting! I hope it Comes back online soon so I can begin migrating users away.

I will never work with a hosting company unless they are privately owned or at least at not owned by eig.

Craig S

2 — 

Disgusting service

Signed up with Site 5 in 2013 and was raving about the sensational support to every one I knew up until when the company was obviously sold and everything since then has been an uphill battle to get any sense out of anyone there! It is now manned by a bunch of robots programmed to constantly ask “is there anything else I can help you with?” when they can’t even help in the first bloody place! My 5 year old grand daughter could do better on Chat support than these people! Have never been so frustrated with lack of knowledge and lack of caring for my urgent requests to fix problems.

Today I am so, so, so happy to announce that my website is being migrated away from ‘Shite’ 5 .

Conor H

1 — 

Stay Clear Of Site5

Long time user over 5 years of site5. What ever happened in the last two years has ruined the company. Look at ever other review here and you’ll see what I mean.
They are now just lying about there service options and lack of communication. 3 hours on support with no answer to show for it. My sites hadn’t functioned in month. But only heard from them when it was time to pay the bill.

NO N

3 — 

MY SITE5 HORROR STORY

I was with site 5 for 6yrs, loved them, support was fast and good.

Now, they do not know anything, I had a guy say to me, “why does your subdomain folder have .com at the end?” “that wont work”,….he said this while it was running in a production condition btw.. One day I had to contact them 3 or 4 times working on my mx records and issues with email.. btw their email servers have terrible rep, your mail will end up in spam all day. They got annoyed by me and started leaving me in chat for 15 – 20 minutes at a time. Then they would get on and make smart remarks and ask me moronic questions that where off topic, “obviously messing around” until I got fed up and left. Tickets used to be 1 day 24hr turn around for a late ticket. Now, 3 – 5 days……. ARE YOU KIDDING 3 TO 5 DAYS GUYS! When I decided to leave, I told them I was going to MDD, then, you wont believe this, one of their staff dropped a leach on one of my apps.. lol, seriously. I caught it, saw him come to my website live when I neutralized it (on the new host at this point) and banned him and everyone in the vicinity. Also yelled at him a bit through my live chat..

I used to love site5, Now I hate them, Go to MDD they are like site5 used to be, but better.

Alassani F

3 — 

Customer support and services

I really started hosting my websites with them and after something called upgrade, the whole stuffs messed up..I open tickets about a month now..none has been replied…Anytime i want to install WordPress, I had to chat with them(waiting time so long)before they installed it for me manually.They have evn promise to solve the issues and send me email..i have never got any mail until now…not even a copy of the tickets i submitted…For chat anytime, they ask you to send support code,you will give it and they do not even send any message to explain any about issues, when you tell them you are angry and thinking to change the hosting provider, they CAN even tell you, to do whatever….CUSTOMER SUPPORT REALLY BAD…I don not recommend it to anyone.

Alan

1 — 

Service Has Declined Dramatically Under New Ownership

I have used Site5 for many years. I’ve used the $5 hosting deal as well as their more expensive and robust VPS service. Until this past week, I never had issues with performance. Maintenance had never impacted operations during business hours. It was a great, reasonably priced service that offered support for just about everything you’d want from a web host. (I believe it was one of the first hosting companies to support Ruby on Rails with an inexpensive basic hosting package.)

A migration of Site 5’s back-end/billing/configuration module brought down my company website for several hours during an especially crucial time. There was no specific notice of when this migration would occur — just an ambiguous notice that we could expect an updated “BackStage” with a streamlined responsive design. Unlike in years past, this upgrade was made during east coast business hours on a Friday. The site was down from about 7am until 10am. Site5 was unreachable by phone (their regular business hours are only 10am-6pm, Mon-Fri) and took more than an hour to reach by online live chat. Support emails/tickets that used to be answered promptly, now go ignored indefinitely. Essentially, the new billing system had marked our monthly service fee unpaid and resulted in a suspended account error page. (Might it have been possible to have configured the fancy new billing system not to suspend any accounts while such a migration was taking place? It’s disturbing how cavalier Site5 is with suspending accounts. Surely it’s better to risk not suspending a past due account than to cause a paying customer such headache.)

I would strongly discourage use of Site5 — or services provided by its new parent company. Support is no longer responsive or easily obtained, upgrades are scheduled without notice during business hours, and little care is taken to insure that migrations and upgrades avoid impacting uptime. Thankfully, there are plenty of hosting companies out there. Choose a different host.

Adam

1 — 

Site5 - AVOID AT ALL COSTS!

I have been with Site5 for nearly 10 years, but in the past 12 months they have done from amazing with excellent customer service, to extremely poor, with my websites hosted with them going offline for lengthy periods in time, and have had a number of support tickets open and unactioned for weeks on end already (and no action taken yet still!). I’ve even tried emailing their management about it, and just another support ticket was logged. Their online chat people just say “someone will be in touch”, but nobody does.

Up until this year, they were great! They really looked after me. But since this year, they’ve been atrocious and I would NOT recommend using them at all. I’m already looking at moving my hosting to other providers.

If you are looking to spend money on hosting, i strongly recommend AVOIDING Site5.

Rather S

1 — 

WTF Happened to Site5 - I used to Rave about Site5

Have been with Site5 since 2006. The support is almost non-exisistant. We have a Virtual Private Server with 100+ domains. The issue is that I can no longer access ANY of the accounts because of a migration. Cannot add accounts, cannot modify accounts. They have no eta on the fix. Not to mention that support went from 5 stars to 0 stars. This is crazy, but I also have someone else’s account in my account, I do not understand this and neither does site5. I only bet that this persons’ account is inaccessible by them. Wait times have gone from 2-10 minutes, to 40-60 minutes and it takes at least 2-4 calls to fix something that should be very easy. All of the issues started with Site5 when they sold. I do not recommend Site5 and will be looking for hosting elsewhere.

Jered R

1 — 

Well, you can scratch "good customer support"

I’ve been a Site5 customer for over 10 years, and it looks like it’s time for me to find something new. The previous CEO left last month, and the customer customer support has tanked since then.

Over the weekend they migrated me to a new back-end platform. I didn’t receive any emails that this would be happening; one day I logged into my account and none of my information was there any more. This was already pretty frightening. I contacted support and they pointed me to the new platform. I logged in there, and everything seemed okay. Disaster averted.

Except that’s not how it ended. Two days later, I tried to log into my account and I couldn’t get in. The support rep I chatted said they couldn’t help me because the username and credit card numbers they saw on file didn’t match the ones I gave them. Luckily they also have a support phone number – when I called into that the rep was able to tell me what the correct login information was, and why the information was out of sync.

Essentially, your username is your account email. But what they don’t tell you on the ‘account details’ page is that changing your email address there *also changes your username*. Consequently the username was changed without my knowing that would be happening.

The credit card issue is more disturbing. They copied over the old credit card number from the old backend (which was not even my information – it was a former coworker’s) – but they did this AFTER I had already put in the correct information. So they overwrote the information I had put in with old information that was no longer correct.

And that support rep I chatted? When I told him I could verify my identity by giving him my security questions, he said that wouldn’t help because that was all in the old system, not the new one. When I finally got the issue resolved with phone support I told the support rep on chat that the issue had been resolved and that he had been frustrating and unhelpful. His response was “you can’t be on a support call with both chat and phone at the same time, so I’m going to let you go now.” And then he ended the session.

So basically, the service I’ve relied on for my entire digital presence for the last decade has turned into the equivalent of a high school business class project. They seemingly have no care for providing customer service, or making their tools easy to use, or any of the reasons why I’d loved using them in the past. It’s been a good run, but since they’ve been gobbled up by a corporate conglomerate, it looks like it’s time to move on to a business that actually cares about their customers.

Dustin

1 — 

Loyal customer for years now looking for a new host...

We have been loyal customers to Site5 for years, but after their acquisition they are unrecognizable. The “Backstage” was completely rehauled with no warning. I had thought my account had been hacked when my password was not recognized until I finally found they had a new client area. Sub-accounts were erased, so developers were soon emailing me asking what happened. I could not create new ones with the same settings since their new backend did not allow that feature. I needed assistance with a malware issue, which in previous years customer support had been great about, but now they simply said it was not something they assisted with. The list goes on… Stay away – this is not the same Site5 we once new.

Chris

1 — 

Site5 - SUPPORT IS GONE

I am a Site5 customer for over 10 years. I loved the customer support that was available. I recommended multiple clients to use Site5 based on this experience.

However, as other reviews have said, Site5 was purchased during Summer 2016. This changed everything.

The customer support is now absolutely horrible. Extreme wait times on Phone or Web Chat. Zero knowledge of anything technical.

I will be moving everything and recommending all clients to do the same.

Thank you for the background information in this article with regards to the company that bought Site5. I will make sure to avoid any services from any business that company owns.

Al

1 — 

Even purchases fail now

I am now my 3rd year a customer and needed to add a few more domains and web space for some clients.

1st of, the front end changed. Not to the better. It got slow and hard to maneuver, but the worst was that I tried to do a few purchases and pay via Paypal and all these attempts timed out.

I opened a support chat, because I LOVE(d) their support chat so far. It was knowledgable, very quick no bullsh*t answers on the dot. No sales bla bla, or other stupid chat template.

This changed now: For the most simplest thing (hey, I can’t pay you due to Paypal time out) I chatted over 25 min to be told to try later again.

This is when I googled Site5 and found this page and the other reviewers. So, for the love of service: Move on.

Jeff M

1 — 

Avoid Site5 if you are a reseller

We were with Site5 for three years. Up until the last couple months, we would have given Site5 great reviews, especially for their technical support. Then in September they fell apart. I still have tickets submitted that have gone unanswered since September. Right now, their user portal doesn’t work and we can’t log into the backstage (the account dashboard). They have not responded to my emails requesting help getting in. By Site5, thanks for the memories…. or nightmares.

Robert L

2 — 

I used to rave about this hosting

I have been using Site5 for over five years. I would preach and sing their praises to everyone I met. I moved dozens of websites over and have continued to use their services. One day recently (October 2016) I filled out a support ticket as I had done many times before. Instead of the few hours of response time, I waited three days for a response. I think the love affair has ended…

sarah

1 — 

worst of the worst

After a long long wait for ticket replies and after too many outages recently, I finally made my mind and switched my hosting. I am now having an account with https://www.ispaze.com. Looks promising and they have good support.

So far happy. For people looking for an alternative I would suggest ispaze.com or mddhosting. I have accounts with both and both look good.

Matt B

1 — 

STAY THE HELL AWAY!!!

If there was a prize for the most monumental failure of an organisation after a sale Site5 would have it.
If there was a rating of less than 0… they would get it

I have absolutely raved about them for the 5 years i have been with them. The team of Salvador, Dawn, Dragan and so many others fantastic staff.

Company sells out… whole system goes to hell…. Thanks Matt and Rod the founders… really… thanks a lot for caring enough how your company has been treated and nursing your customers through a transition process!!! I hope the money is worth it!!

Like you are seeing in every comment below mine here this company has gone from world class to a service I would not wish my worst customer on

UNBLOCKING AN IP ADDRESS – 5 days
INSTALLING AN SSL – 3 days (and counting)
HOLD TIME ON CHAT – 1 hour at best and no response at all at worse
and that is just the tip if the iceberg….

Last week our server went down. Digital pacific, who site5 have their VPS’s with over here in Australia got their stuff together and fixed the problem (which you can see nicely documented on their website). But the failure after was that site5’s SMTP failed. All sent email BOUNCED from every website. Now usually this would be resolved quickly under the old site5. Noooo… the new one… i could not get anyone on chat, nothing on their status page. No support ticket responses. I waited up til 1am (when it would be conceivable that their office would open in Central US time) and finally mail sends again. Almost 18 hours of nothingness

Did i get a reply to my support ticket? Nothing. Zero response to anything.

I have written 2 letters to management since this service started to go down hill. Not a single response at all.

I have the unenviable task of migrating my 100+ sites from site5 now and over the coming Christmas period as there is NO WAY i can stay with them. It is impossible to run a hosting account with them

If you are reading this… take heed… STAY THE HELL AWAY!!!!!!!!! NOTHING GOOD WILL COME FROM YOU SIGNING UP TO SITE5.

magurochan

1 — 

Has turned into garbage

Have been with Site5 for several years. Service and support was once very highly regarded and rightfully so.

Since being acquired, support has become non existant, tickets take 7-14 days to answer!! ( I still have one unanswered after 10 days)

Have already moved away but it looks like it could take a while to cancel my account there.

Very sad to see a once pretty good host with really good support staff turn into junk.

Stay away.

Herb G

1 — 

Site 5 - MIGRATE AWAY ASAP

I have been with Site 5 for over 10 years….

Until the last few months they were OK to Great!!

Now they are a complete and TOTAL DISASTER.

My sites were down over 3 days last month, and nothing could be done.

Now, the sites are up,, but I cannot access them or update them. Support hasn’t responded to open tickets for over a week. I can’t even close tickets anymore with the “new” interface!

If I am ever able to access cPanel again on these sites I will migrate to someone else… Almost any other host would have to be better than what they have devolved to…

Jay

1 — 

Stay Away from Site5

I’ve been with Site5 for about 10 years. They are great for simple websites, and can handle more complex websites too. I use them for 90% of my websites.

They were inexpensive, support was awesome (support tickets answered within minutes, chat worked great).

This is no longer the case. Support tickets can take a week to get a half-assed and didn’t even review your question responses, and now are sometimes not even responded to at all! Solutions to THEIR issues were put on me.

Chat support takes over an hour and you can tell the support person in either playing a video game while
helping you (10 minutes between simple back and forth Q&A), or they have 20 support windows open at once.

Their blog is down (a web hosting company that returns a 404 for their support blog?). The forum has also been removed because I imagine it was filled with upset customers.

I now face the daunting task of migrating all my sites to a new host, and all the joy that goes with such an effort.

Daniel X

1 — 

Site5 - STAY AWAY

I have used site5 for a number of years for hosting my sites. I understand the company was sold recently.

That day, support went to utter shit. Instead of fast responses from friendly and knowledgeable sysadmins, support is now slow – ONE HOUR hold times are common – and the “techs” read from a sheet and are completely ignorant.

I suffered the same problem as yasin, migration of my sites – all my sites just went down without warning.

I currently have no sites whatsoever for over 18 hours – they say it’s the DNS propagation delays.

Furious at the poor service, moving away from them as soon as possible, despite the obvious trouble.

Angie

1 — 

New Owners & Any Knowledgeable Support Staff Fired/Quit

We were previously with Site5 for 5 years and I raved all the time about their level of customer service/support to anyone that would listen….until recently. Everything was fine until this month when I needed their support to find out that they no longer answer phones and no longer have ANYONE who can answer a basic email server issue. The wait time for the support was literally 1hr+. If you decide to go with Site5.com you are going making the worst decision for your business. Of course these are all my opinions and experiences. I hope by writing this review that it will save people the time and money that I now have to spend to migrate our multiple sites to a new host. I want to even mention that they upgraded my portal and now I am unable to migrate my own site to the new host, which now I have to pay for the migration…thanks Site5 for not only disappointing me but costing a more money than needed to another small business.

Lisa

1 — 

DO NOT USE!

After years of using Site5 we’ve had it. Response to support tickets is horrible and they changed our primary account over to a previous client of ours and we’ve been the primary account holder for YEARS! Now we have to ask another business to please let us have access to ALL OF OUR OTHER CLIENTS ACCOUNTS.

This is a nightmare.

Matthew S

1 — 

Avoid like the plague

Site5 has been taken over and most staff is gone now. I’ve been hosting my site for over 10 years now and experienced a lot of problems since around August this year.

It takes inexperienced staff members up to 4 weeks to reply. The replies are generic KB items which do not help you at all. Want to try their support chat? It takes about 15 minutes to get in. Once in, there’s a big chance you will get disconnected. The people in the chat cannot help you and are not authorised to reply to any of your tickets. They will have a look and copy/paste the good ol’ ‘an admin will take a look at this ASAP’ string in there.

What happened really? Site5 used to be a great host with nice people who took hosting and support seriously. Now it’s abandoned and a scary to place to host your site at.

Avoid like the plague, this place is nothing like it was a few years, heck, a few month, back.

Don’t believe me? Open a chat, you will feel the pain ?

Lisa-Marie K

1 — 

I loved them, I really did

I raved about Site5 for the past two years. They were fab. The migration service was brilliant, the support answered within a half hour and they really seemed to care about what they were doing.

I had a VPS running on a server in Amsterdam with all of my clients on there. Since August 2016 it’s been a nightmare. Not only did they move my server to the U.S without my permission or even without informing me.. their support has been terrible. I waited a week for a response to my transferring a domain to them (before I realised it had totally gone to the dogs). Now I only have a few sites left on there which I’m trying to transfer but I just went to my control panel and my password (same one I had the whole time) is suddenly not working. I hate Site5.

Raj

1 — 

From great to horrible recently

I have used Site5.com for a few years and their response time, both for the website loading and for chat support had been excellent. In the last few months though, something has changed and their service is complete crap. Support takes about 10 minutes by chat, and if you send an email, it takes days if they even ever respond. It’s like day and night and now I’m looking to pull all my client’s websites away from them. Whoever is pulling the strings for that business completely shot themselves in the foot by whatever they did – probably cost savings.

Oh, and the price of my hosting silently went up by $30 per year. For what?

Bruno B

1 — 

From great to horrible recently

I have been a customer of site5.com for years. Since some weeks they experiencing a complete meltdown. Tickets previously answered within hours are not answered at all or after weeks. Problems remain unsolved. Suddenly I get invoices for services terminated long time ago. As it would not be enough, they moved my hosting from Asia to US without notice! Instead of resolving the pending issues, they change the terms and suddenly complain I have too many inodes. If you don’t want to get into trouble, avoid this service!

Frank

1 — 

Terrible

I can’t even begin. Went from having the best service in hosting to the worst…WORST, in a matter of 6 months…after they were acquired by EIG. We have 60+ sites there and will most definitely be moving them over the next few months. They take forever to respond to tickets and their chat support knows less than my dad about servers and he’s old. Seriously disappointing.

Don’t use them if you can help it.

Alexander

1 — 

Be Aware of These Thieves!!!

I believe that this company has the concept of f***** their clients over and over by giving them bad customer service and steal ones money.

I have for more than two months tried to transfer a domain from site5.com to another hosting company due to bad service, and during this time site5.com refused to transfer the domain. Within this period my domain expired, so they told me that the only way I could transfer the domain, was if I renewed it. So with the fear of losing my domain I had to renew it. But then they made a second withdrawal from my account of $35,95, which they promised me would be returned into my account. BUT BULLS****! They are f******* thieves, and I would recommend EVERYBODY to stay away from this company. $35,95 is not a lot of money, but they withdrawed them from my account without our permission or accept.

Be Aware of These Thieves!!!

Armando

3 — 

WTF is going on

After being with them for over a decade all of a sudden they suck in every direction. Multiple websites having issues, email issues they can’t seem to fix after 2 weeks of running around. I’m literately going mad and ready to go elsewhere. Stay away and don’t ever go back!

Ryan

3 — 

Terrible Technical Support! Not sure if they even know what they're doing

So I signed up for Site5’s Host Pro + Turbo service and at first it seemed fine… Little slow but everything worked for a basic website.

Then came the need for a Dedicated IP Address (needed for SSL). One of the main reasons I signed up for their top tier plan was their promise of a “free dedicated IP”. This is when I started to run into problems….

After first raising a support ticket to request the Dedicated IP, it took days for them to get back to me. Their customer support is terribly understaffed. Avg wait of 45+min and reps that didn’t care. Anyways, after about a week of messaging back and fourth their support told me that they could not provide me with a dedicated IP at the time because the server I was on was all out. It was now the waiting game… holding up work I needed to get done in preparation for the website’s launch… no bueno.

3 weeks later, out-of-the-blue, I get a reply on the support ticket saying that a Dedicated IP has now been assigned to my account. NO WARNING AT ALL! This meant that all the sites on my account are down for 24-48 hours while the name servers associate the new IP address.

After the 48 hour mark my sites were still down so I contacted support (another 1 hour wait). Turns out there was now an error with my cpanel that was the cause for my websites being down. Support told me that the fix would propagate in 4-8 hours, then an additional 24-48 hours for the nameservers.

Waited the 2 days and again sites were not up. Wasted another hour on customer support. Was told the problem would be fixed in 30 min (it wasn’t). At this point I lost all trust and confidence in Site5… have since moved to A2 and couldn’t be happier.

STAY AWAY FROM SITE5!!!

Steen N

3 — 

Bad customer services

First of all they did not reply the online chat. Even though I waited for 1 hour. They claim there are there 24/7.

The I chose to submit a ticket. Still No reply after 2 days. And my question was quite simple how to admin e-mail accounts etc in the new back-stage layout.

Horrible support, not as it was before.

Stella

1 — 

Site5 Has Worst Uptime, Zero Suppport Response, Zero Customer Service

Site5 used to be good pre-2014. I’ve been with them for 4 years now, after a good friend told me they were awesome.

I advice anyone reading this to NOT USE SITE5 if you are serious about your website. Here’s my experience.

Uptime is zero, or how would you explain that last month September 2016, my sites were offline for over 1 week, and I could not login to my WP dashboards – logins saying ‘incorrect’. I researched to find that they did a server upgrade – not a single email about it. Again, this October from 12th to evening of 16th today – offline. Not a single email to explain. In 2015, same type of thing happened. No one is responding to support tickets or emails sent. NO APOLOGY or anything from them, to date.

Zero Support: zero response via email or via support ticket. I’ve had some that no one replied even 7 days after my site was completely down, and even 2 months after. Even chat support, may take a whole day of waiting and no one would respond; on a lucky day, you may wait for hours to be attended to.
AND, in many cases, the support person would be totally not helpful and sounding pissed off, so that at the end of the day, you are left alone with your offline site. Simply put, they have no regards for their customers.

Silly refund policy: In June renewed for another 12months and September after the over 1 week downtime and no response or email or support from them, I asked about how to go about some refunds, BUT was told that their terms of use stipulates that there is no refund after 45 days or so – SO, I could forfeit over 9months fees/ payment of unused service IF I decided to leave now.

They changed the login to customers’ side and there was not an email. Support ticket raised and no response. I kept trying to login and getting alert that my email and password were incorrect.

Bottomline: If you use site5, prepare for a shockingly rude and no-communication customer service; prepare for months of downtime, maybe 50% n a year and know that no one will say anything to you or talk about it. AND prepare to forfeit your remaining months when you are fed up and decide to relocate.

Overall, you will lose loads of daily business income, you will lose confidence with search engines and your traffic will tumble down over 75% like mine.

DISCLAIMER: The old site5 had awesome customer service, always send maintenance updates via emails and uptime was great. Now, it sucks and unapologetically so.

Jenn

1 — 

Sites down for 3 days no support

I have had the usual ups and downs with this company, but they have always been responsive and down time was not long.

A few days ago all of my sites went down. There has been no communication. No response to open tickets, no-one answers the phone, and no-one responds to chat . it has been three days now, and I have lost a lot of business. Have they closed their doors ? I don’t know.. just feeling very sick to my stomach.

Doug

1 — 

Used to be a great host - not anymore

I am a Drupal developer.
I use Site5 for doing my own development and I have enthusiastically recommended Site5 hosting for client sites. I have 20 client accounts on Site5.

Their telephone, chat and ticket support were awesome before.
Well those days are long gone. All the folks who made Site5 so awesome are gone.

Now telephone support is sort of there if you feel like listening to aggressively bad muzak for an hour before talking to a EIG support person who is more of a PR person than anything. I am currently on hold and have been on hold for the last 50 minutes. If I seem like I am in a pissy mood, that is why.

Even support chat takes a long time to access and you still get to chat with an EIG apologist.

They do not respond to support tickets.

The migration of Site5’s backend to the EIG one is a complete disaster.

They used to have a good system where you could use one account to manage others. Well not anymore, that turned into a bad joke. My personal account had it’s primary email address disassociated from the account. Not only could I not login, but I became a non user. In a 2 hour chat session I managed to get access to my own account by assigning another email address to it. As I say I have 20 accounts. I am just starting to figure out this pile of crap so I can actually get back to work.

Oh attention Drupal developers. They managed to bork Drush (pre-installed by Site 5). They have turned Drush into a vicious site killer.

I want to move all my site from here.

If you are thinking of getting hosting here, well it might be OK. It will be a generic middle of the road server. It will not be Site5 hosting it will be EIG (engulf and devour) hosting.
If you are an existing Site5 customer be warned. (I did not write the linked post)

Catherine G

3 — 

Count me among those feeling disillusioned

I spent over 90 minutes waiting for support from Site5 today — 37 on a live chat window, which spontaneously closed itself just as I was getting ahold of someone, and the rest spent holding for a phone call with a real live person. It appears that their migration to “new hardware” has unearthed a bunch of technical issues that they seemingly have no plan or timeframe to deal with. I not looking forward to migrating my 15+ sites to another provider, but I refuse to give money or delegate such a vital service as hosting to a bunch of clowns with a bad reputation.

This is a real shame, because I’ve raved about Site5 for 10 years — and they deserved it, too. Their support staff was incredibly helpful and prompt. And I’m afraid I just can’t stomach another 10 years of what I got a taste of today.

ASQ

2 — 

Non existent live support since last month

I’ve been with site5 for the last 5 years and prior to last month support was great as was the live chat however since last month I have experienced live chat to be incredibly poor to the effect where it might as well not exist. The chat operators seem to all respond by saying open a ticket yet a ticket doesn’t get answered or seen to for days.

From being really good to worse than poor. We are now seriously considering moving all our client sites to a new provider due to the lack of urgency or importance that we the customers are now receiving from site5.

David

1 — 

DO NOT USE THEM

Site5 used to have fantastic support but in the last 4-5 months the support has gone to S**T

We are in the process of moving all clients off site to another provider for example

Chat system does not work now.
Tickets system does not get answered.
We had a ticket marked urgent a site down took them 20 days to answer.
Billing tickets still not answered after 15 days
All other support tickets not answered at all since april.

It is a shame that a once good company that offered fast and good support now has NO support for its customers.

If they talk about migrating your account onto another server RUN, as they have stuffed all 5 migrations in the past.

We are currently moving 12 VPS and 10 reseller accounts from Site5

W

1 — 

Site 5 support has left the building!

Glad to see here that others are in the same boat with me…

I too have been very happy for over 10 years with site5…

I logged a ticket 7 days ago and have heard NOTHING. Got an automated response and I can see the ticket in the system, but nothing. Tried chat support today and it never connected to anyone!… starting to move my sites now… it’s only a matter of time before things go really bad I fear…

Marty

1 — 

Astonishingly Bad Support after EIG acquisition

The EIG acquisition really killed site5. Just recently they made a support system switch and now support is nearly non-existent. I’ve been waiting almost 5 weeks for help on a ticket. They stop responding, then claim they haven’t gotten any updates from me. When they do actually respond, it’s a brush off that asks for more info that was already provided in a previous ticket update.

Avoid like the plague.

yasin

1 — 

bad support bad hasting bad in all

As we contact sales chat they was with us online in 5 minutes .

after we start th eplan with them the HORRO ADVENTURE STARTS

– migration of the shop after 8 days
– migration was horrible shop brakes down complete
– no answer in tickets so we contact chat support after 8 hours hold ” please be pazient
than again nothing
than we start to go in facebook page but they delete the coments on the site and block our account in facebook !
also they block us out from ticket system and ban our ip in chat system

so game over 3 weeks no website ! no shop !!

thanks a lot site5.com for this adventure

beware to transfer your shop web to site5.com

Jason

2 — 

Site5 Sales & Support chat MIA

I used to rave about Site5. I could get someone on the line in just a few minutes. Support tickets would be answered at the most, 20 or so minutes. I recently needed support on a few occasions just to ask a few questions and it took 30 to 45 minutes to get someone in chat. Of course, no more photos of the person you’re chatting with.

Site5, RIP

Kazi

1 — 

Poor Support and Service

After taking over by EIG, site5’s support has gone. 4-5 days no reply of support ticket. Chat agents are arrogant, not learned like the previous agents.
Server goes down every now and then.

Not recommended.

Mike

1 — 

No more support from site5?

Had been hosting with site5 for many years, was all good till aug 2016. Seem like no more support for site5 customers? Had tried calling them, backstage ticket, even FB. Didnt hear from them yet.

David

2 — 

Site 5 From Good to Deplorable

I have about 120 websites that I host on Site 5. Since August 22, the purchase – it’s as if they want to destroy this company, I don’t get it. DAYS without communication…and today, the phone is not active. Online Chat used to be great, now, it crashes my computer. Sorry guys..I’m looking to get out. It’s going to be a nightmare, but I can’t run a business like this.

Tom

1 — 

Avoid at all costs!

I have been with Site5 since 1998. They were the best hosting service ever when they started out. Now, as of September 2016, I wait days not hours and have not had access to my server or domains for 3 weeks. I have used the online chat and support, email tickets, and nothing works. I have written more emails than I can count and all I get is the runaround from their Senior Tech, Dragos B. Whoever the hell that is.

For whatever reason, they can’t seem to repair what’s wrong and they are not forthcoming about the nature of the problems and what it will take to repair them. I just hope I can get access long enough to make a backup migrate to another host.

I strongly suggest that you avoid this company at all costs.

Michelle

2 — 

Rapidly Gone Downhill

Have to agree with a lot of reviews. Support changed in Aug 2016 and since then it’s been a hassle to do anything. It’s never been the fastest host, but has rapidly gone downhill. I’ve gone from being proud to promote Site5 to clients to being embarrassed to admit my own site is on them.

In fact I’m moving it today it’s been so bad!

Willie

1 — 

WHAT HAPPENED?

They used to have awesome support, but for the past 2 weeks it has been non-existent. Terribly disappointing considering I’ve been a customer for 10(!) years. So bad, in fact, that I’ll be switching providers. So sad.

Dave

2 — 

What Happened?

I have a reseller account with Site 5 in the Singapore data center. I agree with Sergio – it was great up until around Aug 22nd of this year. I’m not sure if this is related to them being bought up by the destroyer of hosts known as EIG or not.

All of a sudden support tickets go days without reply, where previously you would get a reply in 15min. from someone who actually knew what they were doing. I’ve noticed that you no longer get the profile etc. of the support person handling your ticket. I’m guessing EIG has fired most of the great support staff they used to have and have replaced them with less knowledgeable but cheaper techs…

Anyone know a good host with Singapore reseller plans?

Jorge

2 — 

What Happened?

As Dave said I have also a site5 reseller account running without problems together with a fast and accurate support team for years. Amazing service… really happy with them… until 2016 Aug.

As far as I have seen they have closed the old help system to open up a new one with new people but much more slower than the previous one and without details as Dave also confirm.

But the worst thing is that they have also removed the locations option so you are not able to get an account but in US anymore. And, even worst, they will eventually move the actual accounts outside US to the only US Central datacenter left they are offering right now. Perhaps a movement to close the whole service without noise? I don’t know. But I know that at least all non US customers are forced to move out of site5 after this (european laws force us to do so)

That’s what I have just found after noticing, by chance, that they are not offering locations any more. Because site5 is not informing the customers about its policy changes even though the big effect that they will have on us and, more important, on our own customers that we will have to manage because of this.

That’s what happens when a big company buys a good but smaller one and sais that “everything will remain as before”. Time to run!

As Dave say: Anyone know a good host with reseller plans?

Sergio

1 — 

Bad support (all started in August, 22)

I am going to start saying, i have always love site 5 support, their support is the reason why we are with them. But then we found out that they change all the support team, or thats is what the live chat support Tell us, they say they have too many tickets And thats why is taking time to respond.

We have tickes betwen 2 an 8 days with no response at all. We have 4 VPS of different levels, 2 resellers, 3 pro share hosting, i mean we are paying more than $900 per month. And now all my account are at risk becuase THERE IS NO SUPPORT AT ALL. The live chat is taking the hit, ticket dont work And phone call is just impossible, even after 30min waiting on the line no one answers.

We already lost a few clients. And i am thinking on moving all my accounts.

Any advise where?

Marie

3 — 

Worst Service, Don't Waste Your Time

I’ve been with Site5 for 3 years and just canceled. Their customer service is very generic and frustrated, you go back and forth by email, and each time someone different replies with no idea what’s going on. The hosting service was terrible and had several down times. I can’t say that they cared about my support as a customer so don’t waste your time with them.

Cameron

4 — 

Site5 shared hosting is among the best

I used to use Site5 shared hosting for years until the site I was hosting there needed a VPS. I don’t have one bad memory. The support system is easy to use and they always were able to help. If you need shared hosting, I couldn’t recommend anyone better. The SSH access feature they offer is crucial, as well.

Mario

3 — 

Performance doesn't match with their price

I moved from HostGator to Site5 few years ago, but to be honest – I wasn’t really pleased with their service, thus I canceled within few months.

By all means – their support was great, quick to answer and helpful. However, their performance didn’t quite match with their hefty price tag. As I can see from your review, they aren’t quite fast either.

I ran several page speed test towards my site when I was hosting with Site5 and it wasn’t THAT fast. I’m now using A2 Hosting and I’m much more satisfied.

Connor B

5 — 

Useful for my use, not recommended for large scale projects

I bought a low end plan & have never had issues with it, however when my team & I needed more bandwidth & power their services fell short. Latency issues & outages while uncommon were far from non existent.