Dear Readers

We’re writing this message because of the very bad experience we have with Hostgator hosting company and we want to warn you all for this company. We spent more than €1000 on running an advertising campaign for this company and transferring our domains to this company. We got about 120 signups in this period with their affiliate program. Which should have resulted in a payment of 120 * $125 = $15000. In the end we received nothing! Please take some time to read this story and draw your own conclusions.

In October I decided to host several domains at the Hostgator. I read many good reviews and decided that Hostgator would be a trustworthy company to host my domains.

At that moment they offered $50 tot $150 per sign up in their affiliate program. Since I’m an experienced advertiser in Google Adwords and Overture, I decided to set up a campaign for this company. 15 October 2005 I started up an advertising campaign for the Hostgator Hosting services. From the very beginning my campaign was very successful.

Because the campaign was costing me quite a lot of money, more than €500 in the 2 months. I asked in October if the campaign I hosted at downdiscount.com was ok. They confirmed the campaign was ok. They also warned me that some appeared to be fraud. So I asked them how many are fraud to see if my campaign was ok. They told me at 20 October that 1 was a fraud. Till that moment I sent around 20 signups, so I decided to go along with this campaign. If 5% is fraud it’s acceptable for me. To be complete I add our email contact, so you can see for yourself.
--------------------------------------------
>>> From: "Hostgator Sales Department" <sales@hostgator.com>
>>> To: < >
>>> Sent: Thursday, October 20, 2005 5:24 PM
>>> Subject: [HGSales #DKN-11533-734]: Affiliate Question
>>>
>>>
>>>> Yep that is fine, It was just one so far so no worries, they could have
>>>> called too and verified they were not, we run an audit and email you on
>>>> the 1st too with how many you have.
>>>>
>>>> Anything else I can help with?
>>>> Thanks, Ben
>>>> HostGator.com
>>>>
>>>> HostGator.com/help
>>>> Please check our new knowledge base, it answers 90% of sales and support
>>>> questions!
>>>> HostGator.com/help
>>>>
>>>> On Thu, 20 Oct 2005 10:21:44 -0500, wrote:
>>>>> Hi Ben,
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks for your reply. Good to hear the site is fine.
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm not using email to promote my website. I'm using
>>>>> Google Adwords and just started using Overture to promote the hostgator
>>>>> offer. I hope this is ok.
>>>>>
>>>>> What do you mean by fraud signups? Have you got an idea what kind of
>>>>> percentage this is? So I can decide is the promotional investment is
>>>>> worth
>>>>> the revenue.
>>>>>
>>>>> Thanks,
------------------------------------------------------------------------


I ran the campaign and spent more than €500 during this time to advertise the HostGator in Google Adwords. I got about 3 sign-ups per day.

During october and November the advertisements for Hostgator where seen almost 2 million times and they were clicked 4931 + 617 = 5548 times. These people were redirected to our website and about 120 people used the offer.

I was happy with the hosting and transferred some other domains to HostGator as well. For the transfer of the websites and the conversion of the database I paid a Dutch company. €491,28.

Till I noticed all of my websites hosted at hostgator were offline! Due to this reason I lost valuable data and money. My websites have been offline for this reason for 2 days. I even paid my bills for the hosting! I received this message on 25 November 2005. By that time I had more than 120 Sign-ups. Which should have resulted in a value of $125 * 120 = $15000

This was the reply I got.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
All of your affiliate accounts have been deleted today, good luck defrauding another company.........


At the end of the month, we call up every single sign up via phones to check for fraud before paying any commissions.

Thank you for allowing me to work with you!

Sincerely,
Brent

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This sounded very strange to me since I asked in october if my campaign was ok. As I told you I sent about 20 signups by that time and they told me “only one appears to be a fraud”.
I’m very certain I didn’t do anything wrong in promoting HostGator. This is no way of dealing with business contacts, with people that spend lots of time, energy and Money on your company.


For two months afterwards I had contact with Hostgator, but without any result. I haven’t received one penny. I got screwed for more than $16.000.

I’m very, very disappointed. I hope my story will help you in making a good choice for a hosting company. Any help or legal advice in this situation is very welcome. We’re a company from the Netherlands, so it’s quite difficult the get into system of the USA.

Thanks for hearing our story. We hope this will help you in making a good choice.

Yours sincerely,

Well maybe you broke one of their policies or the signups after those initial 20 were all fraud but lets see what hostgator has to say.

I'm sorry that you feel that you got screwed over by Hostgator, but they /probably/ have something in their AUP/TOS that allowed them to terminate your affiliate program for some reason, if any at all.

Sorry to hear about this. It will be interesting to see what hostgator replies to this post

It will be interesting to hear hostgator's retort on this. While paying $60 a signup is good value if you can retain a client... when it builds up to owing an affiliate $15,000 then it becomes risky business... maybe just maybe someone got week at the knee's at the thought of paying out that much for a customer base that you have no idea of retention time for?

When you have over 115 confirmed fraud signups out of your 120 like were going to pay you............



Doesn't anyone else here find it a little funny he asked us if his first 20 were fraud? I know I can't recall any affiliate ever doing that besides him.

When you have over 115 confirmed fraud signups out of your 120 like were going to pay you............



Doesn't anyone else here find it a little funny he asked us if his first 20 were fraud? I know I can't recall any affiliate ever doing that besides him.

Well, I guess it comes down to your word against his... and seeing the OP has only 1 post, I think you win. :)

And there is the confirmation we all expected. Thanks for clarifying hostgator ;)

The advertising model made sense, from the affiliate's position - using an adwords campaign to drive traffic to an affiliate website, to generate sales for the host paying the mega commission per sale.

So HG is saying that all of those 120 new accounts you sent them, were fraud, either by you, or by others buying hosting through your affiliate link.

I would love to hear HG's side of this story. There's some very serious allegations made against them. :eek:

edit:, they have now replied

. . . Doesn't anyone else here find it a little funny he asked us if his first 20 were fraud? I know I can't recall any affiliate ever doing that besides him.
That's not how it happened -
I asked in October if the campaign I hosted at downdiscount.com was ok. They confirmed the campaign was ok. They also warned me that some appeared to be fraud. So I asked them how many are fraud to see if my campaign was ok. They told me at 20 October that 1 was a fraud. Till that moment I sent around 20 signups, so I decided to go along with this campaign. If 5% is fraud it’s acceptable for me.
He asked you if the "campaign I hosted at downdiscount.com was ok", and you replied and "warned me that some appeared to be fraud". It seems you bought up the fraud issue first, and not how you described it above.

Just keeping things accurate. :)

The math does not add up here.

with 20 sold the fraud was 1, meaning 19 were ok.

If all the rest were fraud that would be a total of 101 fraud sign ups and 19 payable, not 115 fraud and 5 payable.

regardless you owe himn for the non fraud signups.

This guy is the reason we had to stop giving away coupons for a free first month and switch to charging a penny to prevent fraud.

Please do share with wht how your site was setup. I'm sure they would be interested to know.

Also.........
"At that moment they offered $50 tot $150" We have never paid $150 per affiliate sign-up. The highest I can recall ever paying out is $125 per signup which we are currently doing and paying out over $140,000 a month in affiliate sign-ups.

Aussie if he contacted us asking if they were ok I am not sure how we brought it up first? When he contacted us a few days after the campaign started most of the ips seemed to be matching real orders, just all the information ended up being fake for everyone. We didn't pickup up on this until the day we terminated him.

I do not remember the exact stats, but somewhere around 99% of the ones I checked had fake phone numbers, domains, and no credit card on file. We are not going to pay someone based on the 1% we cannot confirm beyond a doubt as fraud.

The math does not add up here.

with 20 sold the fraud was 1, meaning 19 were ok.

If all the rest were fraud that would be a total of 101 fraud sign ups and 19 payable, not 115 fraud and 5 payable.

regardless you owe himn for the non fraud signups.

Agreed with that.

It may not have been his fault there were frauds, but it sounds like he had no idea what he was getting into. If I were him, I would at least provide hostgator with a copy of some google adwords reports, so they can see they were receiving advertising as a result of his efforts.

We should really petition against posts like this on WHT. I think new sign ups shouldn't be aloud to create a new topic until at least 30 posts. This would take care of frantic posters that don't know how dangerous it is to post things regarding companies like this before they have all of their ducks in a row.

...The highest I can recall ever paying out is $125 per signup which we are currently doing and paying out over $140,000 a month in affiliate sign-ups.Nice, paying out over 1.5 million per year to your affiliates. Must be signing them up in droves. I hope you can compensate for this for at least 3x this in revenue and a long-term retention rate over 75% to make it worthwhile in the long run.

- John C.

I saw this post over at SitePoint also. Hopefully, it gets responded to by someone from HG there, too.....

:D

and digitalpoint................

Looks like we are going to need to contact are lawyers and sue for damages/fraud.

Looks like this guy tried to scam HostGator on their 1st month free offer, by getting them 120 fraud sign ups for the first month (who would leave after first month or simply choose not to pay) and then run off with $15,000 and leave them with nothing.

Maybe the sign ups were not fraudulent, but maybe they signed up for first 30 days only and leave afterwards.

Who knows... :rolleyes:

If we are to believe that both parties are saying the truth, that the OP did not actively try to fraud HG, but that in the end, somehow, only 5 sales were (barely) not fraud, as per HG's affiliate terms, this means the OP should receive $250. Not anywhere close to the $15000 the OP mentioned.
From HG's affiliate terms:
We will not be responsible if you use another party's copyrighted or other proprietary material in violation of the law. In addition to the foregoing, we will immediately terminate your participation in the Program if we believe you have engaged in any of the following:

- Unsolicited mass e-mail solicitations, IRC postings or any other form of spamming, including but not limited to, newsgroups or AOL customers or otherwise violate the anti-spamming policies of HostGator or state law;
- Provide inaccurate or incomplete information to HostGator concerning your identity, address or other required information;
- Attempt to cheat, defraud or mislead us in any way;
- Misrepresent to the public the terms and conditions of our sites or your sites;

Apparently they had some reasons.

From http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=359286 where HG also responded on the issue:

We pay out over a $140,000 a month to our affiliates and the majority of them have a very load fraud ratio unlike this affiliates 99%+ I believe the reason for all his fraud has to do with him building a web site instructing people step by step with pictures how to sign up with us for a free month, and get around entering billing information.

Seems like someone got around the free trial loophole. I do believe that he should be compensated for the legitimate signups though, if any of them can be deemed legitimate. I'd like to see how this turns out. :popcorn:

Hostgator is very repitable. I have been paid on time everytime money was owed. They are very professional and legit. They even do the tax filing process correctly. I got my 1099 for last years commissions. Over all they are a legit company with some strong financial backing in place.

The op tried to defraud the system or just abused the policies.
Not knowing the 100% truth, however knowing hostgator I can only believe hostgator on this one.

I dont mean to pull up an old thread, but there were some adwords complaints about an affiliate using copyrighted terms for their adwords, I don't see dates except October in the OP's post, so I don't know if the time frames match up for not.

However, worth pointing out in this is that sometimes affiliates will cheat, lie, and con their way into getting large commissions. My question is, in the end is it really worth the time, trouble, abuse, and money it costs to get the customers when you are paying $125 commissions?

http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=488011&highlight=hostgator+%2B+adwords is that other thread.

I dont mean to pull up an old thread, but there were some adwords complaints about an affiliate using copyrighted terms for their adwords, I don't see dates except October in the OP's post, so I don't know if the time frames match up for not.
This is not an old thread. The thread was started yesterday. :)
However, worth pointing out in this is that sometimes affiliates will cheat, lie, and con their way into getting large commissions. My question is, in the end is it really worth the time, trouble, abuse, and money it costs to get the customers when you are paying $125 commissions?
Offerring $125 commissions for signups is like waving a red flag at a bull. You're going to deal with a LOT of fraud, and quite frankly, huge commissions on cheap plans don't make sense.

My question is, in the end is it really worth the time, trouble, abuse, and money it costs to get the customers when you are paying $125 commissions?Maybe if you're already paying similar amounts via other means of advertising, it is.

Leaving aside the fraud risk, affiliates only have to be paid if they bring in valid sales. That's means almost a guaranteed ROI -- if the host does its calculations right.

There are hosts that advertise a lot, and there are hosts that rely more on word of mouth. In the end, all is good, as someone likes to say. :)
and quite frankly, huge commissions on cheap plans don't make sense.Funnily though, for years now, the cheaper hosts have been paying the largest commissions.

I dont mean to pull up an old thread, but there were some adwords complaints about an affiliate using copyrighted terms for their adwords, I don't see dates except October in the OP's post, so I don't know if the time frames match up for not.

However, worth pointing out in this is that sometimes affiliates will cheat, lie, and con their way into getting large commissions. My question is, in the end is it really worth the time, trouble, abuse, and money it costs to get the customers when you are paying $125 commissions?

http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=488011&highlight=hostgator+%2B+adwords is that other thread.

Not the same person. The past thread was a person from Illinois, this guy is from the Netherlands.

I am not interesting the matter between you and hostgator but let me analyze the advertising scheme here.

Dear Readers

We spent more than €1000 on running an advertising campaign for this company and transferring our domains to this company. We got about 120 signups in this period with their affiliate program. Which should have resulted in a payment of 120 * $125 = $15000. In the end we received nothing! Please take some time to read this story and draw your own conclusions.



During october and November the advertisements for Hostgator where seen almost 2 million times and they were clicked 4931 + 617 = 5548 times. These people were redirected to our website and about 120 people used the offer.




[ lets assume €1000 = $1201 ]

So you are claiming you have genereted 5548 clicks via adwords for $1201 within 2 months.

Approx. Daily Average Clicks: 92
Approx. Cost of a Click: $0.21

Now if your claims are accurate [ just for what you spent for how many adwords clicks]

Could you please tell us which keywords have you used to generate as much as 92 clicks per day from 21cent?

- for anyone experienced Google Adwords to advertise a hosting company knows that it is like impossible to buy hosting keywords clicks under $2 which may generate tens of, hunderds of clicks daily.


We should really petition against posts like this on WHT. I think new sign ups shouldn't be aloud to create a new topic until at least 30 posts. This would take care of frantic posters that don't know how dangerous it is to post things regarding companies like this before they have all of their ducks in a row.
It is impossible me to not agree with your statements. Not due to similar reason but I have worked for a week to catch a manipulater whom was posting bad reviews [unstandable slander] at sitepoint and several big forums under different names, I make him banned finally but costed me a week.

At least if someone has big claims regarding a service, The claimer real name and address have to be publicized at the same forum via their domain registrar details because the badvertised service web-site, company and all details addressed when you tell mention the brand.

Otherwise this is an injustice for hosting services being trashed here with claims by anonymous names, no name, no company name , nothing to identify.

If someone would like to post big claims regarding a hosting service then what is wrong to know about the poster name and address details also?

I believe even this have to be a common rule. Every hosting review and forums have to provide poster name and address to release their reviews and complaints.

Yeah Agreed

Being in the hosting business for quite sometime, I can simply recognize, that spending $1000 or $500 in advertising will not bring in that many good leads in a single month. Definitly not on Google Ad Words. I can't see Host Gator offering out $15,000 for $1,000 in marketing. Makes no sense. Isn't adding up to me.

and digitalpoint................

Looks like we are going to need to contact are lawyers and sue for damages/fraud.

Good idea, perhaps you can then afford to touch up on your grammatical skills and represent yourself a little bit more professionally.


All of your affiliate accounts have been deleted today, good luck defrauding another company.........


At the end of the month, we call up every single sign up via phones to check for fraud before paying any commissions.

Thank you for allowing me to work with you!

Sincerely,
Brent

Customer service at its best!

Dear readers,

Thank you for the replies. I feel bad that what happened is told in bad way and the conflict seems to get only bigger. I’m not at all willing to do anything bad with this post. I’m just telling what happened to me. I just felt bad and frustrated of all that happened and wanted to tell my story. I prefer to work normally and don’t have these big conflicts. To be more complete and answer some questions I’ll describe some things more clearly and display my thoughts on this matter.

Beginning of October 2005 I was looking for a hosting package for a website. I decided to go for Hostgator. I read many good reviews on Hostgator. After I saw the offer on your website: $50 to $125 per signup. I thought this is interesting: "there is a business opportunity".
I setup a webpage and went advertising for this webpage on Google Adwords.

At that moment Hostgator had an offer for a free month on Hostgator. I decided to advertise with this action of Hostgator. This might be the cause of our conflict. Let's say Hostgator is talking the truth when they say didn’t receive any money from the 120 signups. It might have got something to do with this free month. People could have come in to my website and went to Hostgator, not to take hosting for a full year but just for a month to try it only. That is why I asked if my campaign was ok. They have seen my website and said it was ok. That’s why I trusted it was ok and I went along with the campaign and invested so much money in advertising on google (see screenshots).

Before Hostgator send me that email on the 25th of November. I was really thinking: Wow this is going very, very well. I received a confirmation from Hostgator that my site was ok and thought all was well. They said only 1 is bad from 20. The money was just coming in, I got more than 120 signups in these 2 months and read online in the affiliate part of Hostgator site that this was a value of $15000. I just calculated even if 1 in 20 is bad, this is still a very good score. And I thought I'm really doing a great campaign on Google, having a great website and am making good business for Hostgator too. I have no insight in the leads I sent to hostgator. The only thing I see is numbers and the money I will receive on the Hostgator website.

Then I received the mail. "Good luck defrauding another company" I hope you can understand how this must have felt for me. At that moment I expected a check of several thousands of dollars and this was happening to me! I really felt robbed at that moment. I had just been working very hard for 2 months, investing time and money in making a good campaign and website for Hostgator. And then at once all is gone. My websites are offline (where I paid my bills for), the statistics of signups I brought in are offline, the websites that I transferred were deleted. Without a warning all I built up during 2 months is gone.

For Hostgator I think it must have felt different by then. They saw many signups coming in, which must have felt good for them too, good business. They gave the people an account, also invested time in the new signups. But in the end they told me none of them converted into real customers. For me this is still difficult to believe because of the mail in October where they said only 1 was wrong from the 20, but let’s stop about that. It’s all about trust in this matter because I can’t look in their administration. They must have drawn the wrong conclusion then that I was frauding and probably they were angry at that moment, when they deleted all my accounts and websites.

I’m trying to understand how Hostgator must have felt and have been thinking and why they have reacted this way. I hope you can understand my feelings and conclusions too and understand. The thing that frustrated me the most was that we didn’t get any conversation going. I felt like I got no chance to explain my story to them. My websites were just deleted at once, so I couldn’t save important information and I couldn’t log into the affiliate program anymore, because everything was deleted without a warning. They could have contacted me earlier instead and talk about it. I am a reasonable person and we could have thought together on what might be the reason of the bad conversion.

We had some contact afterwards and we just couldn't get together in any way. They never provided me with a full list of people that signed up through me. I would be willing to check them myself. I felt I can do nothing from the Netherlands. I wanted to be heard and I decided to post my story and feelings about it online and how I think of it. I have no bad intentions with this.

I wish Hostgator good luck in their business. They are obviously a great company because of all the good reviews on their business that are online. They proved in their past they are good at what they do. But I find it also important too that people and businesses listen to your story before they judge and get into action like what happened to me in November. This is a forum where people tell their experiences and this my experience. Maybe I should just accept that the cooperation with hostgator worked out bad for both of us, because of a bad communication.

I hope this message gives some more clarity to the story and I hope you appreciate this message. I wish you all good luck in your businesses and life!

Greetings

Hi meesterweb

Thanks for sharing your views with us, most of us do understand your trouble and its good that you shared this with everyone.

What was sent to you was not worded nicely at all. Customer service should always be good, even after you have given them your money.

I can see both sides to this, so I can feel for hostgator aswell on the trouble they must of had to if all was true.

Good luck with your next provider.

The screenshots of google adwords

Very nice response thank you. I will respond to your email shortly.

Very Well Spoken, Hopefully everything works out

and digitalpoint................

Looks like we are going to need to contact are lawyers and sue for damages/fraud.


With all due respect, I hardly think that you are an attorney nor do I think that your company had acted in a professional manner. Who is going to sue who? You want to sue a man who you accussed of fraud without providing any proof and expect that you can sue him? After all you provided him with no proof and simply cut him off. :rofl:
What did you expect?

By the way, brush up on the grammar it looks like an ESL writer. :)

I think its time to audit everyones posts who believes they are an english teacher.

Give up huanting the big guys. I think it is time a mod closes this thread.

Dear readers,

I just wanted to let you know. Hostgator and I solved our conflict.
Hostgator paid me out for the very few signups that were good on the condition
that I will have to pay them back any chargebacks they get.
This is fair to me.

Greetings

Dear readers,

I just wanted to let you know. Hostgator and I solved our conflict.
Hostgator paid me out for the very few signups that were good on the condition
that I will have to pay them back any chargebacks they get.
This is fair to me.

Greetings

Strange, why do companies only try to resolve issues when someone posts something against them on public forums only ? why dont they take efforts to resolve issues like professionals?

Strange, why do companies only try to resolve issues when someone posts something against them on public forums only ? why dont they take efforts to resolve issues like professionals?
I think it is obvious why this was brought into the public forums. Hostgator refused to pay and in desperation meesterweb came to the forums to post his experience. I have noticed quite alot of comments like the one you just posted in the past and I dont find them constructive, this is just the same as the many fair trade programs on TV investigating business mistreating their customers.

I don't think that's the thing.

When people like meesterweb post things on WHT that say to stay away from X company because they're bad, it's generally because they're riled up and extremely frustrated (correct me if I'm wrong). Chances are by the time the company responds, the poster has calmed down some, and will contact the company again privately and the two parties come to a mutual resolution.

That's what I've noticed. Neither party is wrong - one gets riled up, and the other gets defensive, then they both calm down and resolve the problem.

I have noticed quite alot of comments like the one you just posted in the past and I dont find them constructive.

Flammable,
If some company doesnt find it constructive comment than it reflects their narrowmindedness. A company should never be brought into public unless good things are to be told about the company, if something bad is posted about a company, its either the client at fault or company at fault in this thread clearly it was hostgator at fault and it really affects the image of the company. So a company should take care that all the matters are solved internally amonst the customers and the customer should never be forced to go public about their companies doings.

Flammable,
If some company doesnt find it constructive comment than it reflects their narrowmindedness. A company should never be brought into public unless good things are to be told about the company, if something bad is posted about a company, its either the client at fault or company at fault in this thread clearly it was hostgator at fault and it really affects the image of the company. So a company should take care that all the matters are solved internally amonst the customers and the customer should never be forced to go public about their companies doings.

After reading customers' and hostgator.com 's response, I will have to agree with your statement that in this case hostgator is clearly at fault.

Very glad to see your problem resolved

Dear readers,

I just wanted to let you know. Hostgator and I solved our conflict.
Hostgator paid me out for the very few signups that were good on the condition
that I will have to pay them back any chargebacks they get.
This is fair to me.

Greetings