This is Review Signal's FIRST review of a web hosting company! I hope you're excited.
Background
This is a follow up to our original blog post exposing Hostinger's fraudulent reviews which were encouraged and defended by their CEO.
Part 1
Most companies would reconsider their behavior after being caught and called out so publicly. But Hostinger is a special kind of company. The kind where the CEO seems pathologically intent on deceiving customers and passes his values down the corporate chain.
Hostinger's follow up performance was their notorious 'brand ambassador' program. Screenshots below take place on the WordPress Hosting group on facebook around April 19, 2018.
This 'brand ambassador' was caught within an hour of posting. One Hostinger rep jumps in to defend this practice (Daugirdas Jankus, a familiar name if you read the first article). The 'brand ambassador' also tells us there is 32 brand ambassadors in this program. Their CEO, Arnas Stuopolis joins in as well.
The entire thread devolves into a joke with their brand ambassador embarrassing himself. Arnas doesn't do his company any favors either. He even tries to use Hostinger's TrustPilot rating to defend himself. Yes. The very same ones from the last article which exposed his employees were manipulating with his blessing. The full thread can be read here (warning: long).
Part Two
Then the next part of the saga starts with Arnas Stuopelis issuing a statement to the group.
He uses the same lines, including defending their Trust Pilot reviews which were manipulated by their employees. He gets called out immediately, because he's lying.
Of course I had to go grab a screen shot as he made these statements. His 'brand ambassadors' are also posting reviews on Trust Pilot. Posted after he became a brand ambassador of course, wouldn't want to think a legitimate customer posted a review and then became an ambassador after all.
Of course, this was brought up with him at the time as well.
I lay out the evidence. Multiple 'brand ambassadors' posting in multiple places (including commenting on here on Review Signal) trying to promote Hostinger. Posting fake reviews. Hiding their relationships. The exact behavior that got them in trouble the first time.
Apparently laying out all those facts is 'missing the point.'
Just like their employees are customers, brand ambassadors are customers too and he seems to believe they should be feel free to spam communities all over the internet.
Brand Ambassador in Hostinger : I had been the brand ambassador for the company Hostinger and am still working as a brand Ambassador and I met lot of people from abroad and we work together as a team for the growth of our company. (Source: Sai Kiran Bali, Brand Ambassador)
Does this sound like customers who are getting to try new hosting features? He's responsible for working as a team with other brand ambassadors (and Hostinger staff?). The growth of our company. Doesn't sound like a customer at all, smells like employee. Our friend Christopher Khawand also started a github repo called hostinger-ba-dashboard. Why these guys are listing it as a job on LinkedIn, Facebook and resumes? Why are they building software for Hostinger? Who is team drago? Why is Christopher also posting reviews on HostingFacts, TBWHS, whoishostingthis, their own review site and more? Does Mumbere Ausbel post more than a russian troll factory?
#Banned
Hostinger was banned from the WordPress hosting group on facebook for their repeated and calculated deception of an entire community. Good riddance.
Epilogue
I thought this saga was done. Arnas Stuopelis said the brand ambassador program was shut down. Why would should anyone believe this liar?
Guess who I found on Quora (posting as recently as July 20, 2018)? Guess you missed that I dig up web hosting spam networks on Quora too.
Source: Mumbere Ausbel | Aditya Bhavsar
So much for actually shutting down your program, these 'brand ambassadors' (spammers, shills), are back at it in coordinated fashion.
List of Known Hostinger Brand Ambassadors (6/32?)
Mumbere Ausbel
Aditya Bhavsar
Christopher Khawand
Pranshu Maheshwari
Mit Rao
Sai Kiran Bali
Conclusion
My Hostinger Review: avoid with a 100 foot pole. It's hard to in conscience believe a company so intent on lying to people is a good company by any definition of the word. Their CEO is happy to lie to people's faces about facts. His employees are happy to do the same. They spend a lot of time coming up with ways to manipulate communities into believing they are good by astroturfing (brand spamdassadors). Hostinger is a company anyone with a sense of ethics should steer clear of, 0 stars.
Kevin Ohashi
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I am in deep! I do not know why this is so “can’t-stop-reading-utterly-fascinated-and-angered-by-this-CEO”!! Have you done reverse image searches on their profile pics?
Nope, did you find something?
I have seen a lot of reviews of Hostinger on Quora. People are just convinced that Hostinger is great and then, later on, come to know about the bad service. Why are companies doing this? Just to earn money?
Instead, spend some time on building good relationships and servers and it will go a long way down the road.
It is expected that this Hosting Companies have top level security parameters implemented.
Not this one; Hostinger looks more like a bunch of criminals managing a web host.
One only needs to make a Google search about “hostinger problems” to land in hundreds of reports
about misleading, bad support, “Abysmal email – delays, deletions”+”AVOID AT ALL COSTS. HOSTINGER IS A SCAM.”,
“Oh Soo bad”+”I would NOT recommend this hosting, not even to my enemy!!”, “inside job on our email account used to spam and phishing”,
“Unreliable Host company that cheats clients. selling Unlimited paid plans and reducing them with several cuts, forcing all clientes to accept new conditions and restritions pushing them to their abusive and ditactorial TOS.
HOSTINGER – Total deception of customers who bought the UNLIMITED plan – Fraud
How can you recommend this hostinger, who sells cat for hare?
HOSTINGER is an unreliable hosting company. Very bad ! – Run away while you can!
It is a company of unreliable people, who does not respect contracts. You pay UNLIMITED and after some time you only have a litle portion to use with many restrictions.
They change the rules during the game and impose their decisions on those who are bound by a contract in place for several years.
They push customers to the Terms of Service, which they adjust to the detriment of customers.
They are not responsible for any issues or anything, under is own terms.
They have aggressive marketing that leads customers to unnecessary UPGRADES without providing a service that matches what they advertise.
They fooled customers with UNLIMITED Business and Premium plans (sold between 2012 and August 2019) which they then manipulated and cut as they saw fit. Now it’s just restrictions on everything.
Not to mention the “courtesy email”, internal account hijacking, and other freebies …
UNLIMITED FRAUD
“
I want to refund and delete my account and here’s what they replied
Talking about the renewal, although I’d love to make the refund for you, I’m afraid that I can’t do that because of our strict refund policy which can be found here. No worries, though, you can sell the domain even for higher price via Sedo.com and earn some extra mone moneybag .
Here is the LINK to it 🙂
what a fucking scam company Hostinger is.
i started using them a year ago, now that my domain was about to expire i got into some issues with them.
first they renew the privacy protection at almost 10dollar automatically on a domain that was about to expire without any renewal plans for the domain, this was done way ahead for the schedule. so i logged inn to renew the domain because why not, then they tried to charge me over 98 USD to renew it for another year, i mean seriously what the actual fuck!
i opened a chat about this issue, after reading my message they closed the chat without replying. so i thought why not move it to namecheap instead, but on hostinger website you can not find any documentation on how to do this.
so i found another hosting service that had a guide on how to move a domain from hostinger, so i used this to move it do namecheap and renew it for another year and unlimited free privacy protection for less than 9 USD.
now i am trying to get the privacy protection refunded but obviously they are not making this easy, still have to see how it goes in the end but i am not optimistic.
i still have 3 years on my hosting subscription so i will keep this but as it runs out i will be moving everything away from them.
ANYONE considering hostinger, please save your self the headaches and choose a better more serious company.
Hostinger is the worst hosting company i have come across and the support is just horrible. Do not spend your hard earned money on this hosting provider because you will be sorry and frustrated in the end.
I bought the business hosting package and have been having issues from the very start. Nearly every week at least twice i get a CPU fault and the percentage of CPU usage is less then 10% in most cases which makes me believe that they use extremely low quality and also apply throttle limits no matter which package you are using. Support is just simply dumb and comes up with copy paste responses of plugin issues even when you have 0 plugins you will come across this issue. Secondly the logs do not point to any plugin related issues and thirdly when you ask for an RCA they just disappear and do not respond. My current issue has been ongoing for last 4 days now and still i am waiting to hear back from there technical team. I have been documenting this and if any one is interested to read the whole chat then feel free to click on this link >>> https://1drv.ms/b/s!ArpS5Tt…
Don’t forget you will always get low server response and DB related issues on top of this. Live support chat takes at least 1 hour before responding and they claim five mins lol.
In the document you can see the following in detail
1. Issue was with performance and as usual CPU faults. The support staff creating a blank HTML page with the words hostinger and claimed that our server response time is excellent :D. Can you imagine a blank HTML page being used to test server response lol
2. Issue is related to redirect from non www to www domain.
3. Trying to Transfer a website from Zoho Builder to Hostinger. You can see the knowledge of the support staff and how someone completely new to hosting can mess up things if they follow them
4. Error establishing a database connection. Once again i am facing this issue and this has been very consistent. This time they admitted that they are doing some maintenance and as usual no one informed about it.
5. CPU Fault once again and this time i had enough so decided to post everything online.
hostinger SUCKS, might even be worse than CloudFlare (they won’t allow people who spend less than $200/month on business plan to even contact them, so don’t be me and give them money to regiser your domans). Hostinger – I spent hours on a website over the course of a couple days, saving/updating as I went along. Then one time I try to update website, it refreshes to my account and its just gone, GONE. No website, like it never existed.
Try to contact them, you can’t find a way to contact them. You search for it in their crappy article section, it comes up with “how to contact a live person”, great, yep. NOPE an article of how to go around in a circle and get back to the “help center”. I finally find an email for “non-paying” customers and they tell me I never made the site………
You can’t copy or download back-ups of websites you build with HOSTINGER’s OWN PROGRAM. WHAT!? Again i look for help after trying to figure it out. Yes, an article on how to do it. Nope, shit again. It references a sidebar that doesn’t exists and says the tutorial was updated a week ago…..
F these fools. I’m canceling this BS. How tf do i do that? again, same steps, can’t find it, article in the help bs that references something that doesn’t exist, and wait on them to respond. What a joke