This thread will eventually contain my review of HostNine however because I'm a recent customer, I can only offer a first impression.

Initially, I was floored by H9's impressive offerings and immediate availability to field my pre-sale questions. After finding the website by way of a recommendation posted here on WHT, it was only a matter of minutes before I located the plan that best fit my needs, spoke to a sales representative named "Frank", and signed up. Frank was kind enough to check and see if they were still honoring a coupon code only intended for use in January, and indeed they were. Bonus, I got 50% off my first month, which was cool.

I chatted off and on with Frank during the creation of my account. He also helped in initiating a transfer of all of my accounts from my previous server to the new one. This is where things start going in a less positive direction. Not at the fault of H9, the transfer stalled while in progress because the server that the data was being retrieved from became unresponsive for 8 hours (not an uncommon occurrence, hence my reason for relocating). I received an email the next day from someone named "John" saying:
Hi,

The whm has just stopped working for us from few hours now. Will keep trying though...


Thank you for choosing HostNine!

-John


Immediately the brevity of the message irked me. So WHM has stopped working? Care to explain why? It didn't take me long to determine the cause, however, it would have been nice for my new web host to take a few extra moments to type a more informative message updating me on the progress of the transfer. How far completed was the transfer before it stalled? There are multiple relevant bits of information I can think of that should have been included, but weren't.

So, off to hostnine.com I went to make contact with someone via Live Chat (which I find myself at here again, btw). I explained the situation and asked to know the status on the transfer. I asked specifically how many accounts had been transferred and where progress was at present. Again, I was presented with extreme brief and poorly formed responses which ultimately left me confused and still uninformed. Another small qualm I have is with the quality of the contact offered via Live Chat. Although a staffer is readily available to tend to your support inquiries, the quality of the communication is lacking and each time I've spoken to someone via Live Chat, I'm always told that I'll receive an update via email once a tech updates my ticket. It almost feels dismissive and I'm sure it's partly due to the short and delayed responses that eventually lead to informing me that a tech will update my ticket. To add insult to injury, the tech updates the ticket telling me "the transfer is in progress, we will update you again shortly". Not only aren't they giving me any specifics but the support representatives seems to lack a true understanding of the English language. I may seem overly critical here, but I place a great amount of importance on one's ability to communicate, especially if that person is representing a business, and to have responses lacking uppercase letters, proper punctuation, and grammatical errors, leads me to two possible conclusions; either these people are lazy or the tech support is outsourced to a country where English isn't the native language. Further to that point, and not that it matters a great deal, every sale or support representative working for H9 that I've come into contact with has an ordinary American name like Jeff, Ryan, Tim, Frank, or Matt which really strike me as more of assumed monikers than actual names. It's possible that the names are simply these people's names, but the whole experience smacks of outsourced tech support, and I get a feeling Matt is really Abu Karim Muhammad and Tim is Badi al Zaman.

To wrap this up, I should say that I'm by no means entirely dissatisfied with my experience with HostNine so far. Although I think the communication could be significantly improved, I still think that H9 has great offerings, competitive prices, and satisfactory tech support. Although the communication is lacking in several respects, my issues are still being resolved in a relatively timely fashion. I hope that by posting this, H9 will make the necessary effort to improve in the areas mentioned above.

I look forward to continued hosting with H9 and do believe these minor quibbles of mine will be no more in the future. I'll update the thread with more information as my situation progresses and my experience with them continues.

This post turned out to be far more lengthy than I intended.

We greatly appreciate your feedback and thank you for your detailed post as it will only help us improve our widely known service and support.

We do not outsource our support as all of our employees are either local or remote for hurricane precautions. I agree that you should have had more detailed responses and we are constantly working with our employees to provide our customers with the best possible service and support but please understand that we're always hiring new employees which does require training.

This week has been a bit unusual as we always have a customer service manager in chat for quality control to help with the responses/situations but we had a loss in the family which did not allow us to monitor and train as we normally do. I apologize as I'm not saying this is an excuse but that is the reason things were not as they usually are.

I have however just checked on your transfer and it appears that it was completed. There was a slight delay due to the fact that your old host's server went offline for a large amount of time but as soon as we saw it back online we resumed the transfer and got it completed.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me directly at anytime.

Thanks for the detailed review. (my eyes hurt a little after reading all that :-P )
Being a current customer it was evident to me (and I hope to you as well) that there is nothing they can do when it comes to up time and server availability of your current host. ;-)
Little secret: Although the live chat guys are great and I use them a lot, but emailing support or sales (which creates a helpdesk ticket) is a great way to get really fast proactive support. They seem to have some awesome admins handling the help desk.

p.s. hostnine - Sorry to hear about your loss in the family.

Ok, here's a bit of an update. First, let me begin by saying that I truly don't want to be the kind of customer all web hosts dislike (and if you're a web host, you know what I'm talking about.) I'm talking about the customer that never quits bothering you, always has a problem, and never seems to be satisfied. I really mean this when I say: I don't want to be difficult. I just want to get things running smoothly and get this transitional period out of the way. Anyway, on with the update...

After having been informed that all of my websites had been successfully transferred, I was lucky enough to connect with Frank again to get things wrapped up. During our conversation we discovered a few things:

First: I made the mistake of registering at H9 with a different username than I had with my previous web host. This will cause some discrepancies in PHP and mySQL applications (and perhaps other things as well) so be sure to sign-up at your new web host with the same username you used with your previous host if you intend on transferring over data.

Second: At my previous web host I had root level access. When transferring over my account and restoring on H9's server, I quickly learned that my root level access had transferred as well and was granted to me automatically upon account restoration. Luckily, I'm not a malicious or exploitative guy, so I quickly informed Frank of this and he adjusted my account privileges accordingly.

After getting all of the data successfully restored, I attempted to proceed with my ModernBill 5.1.4 installation. During the installation I ran into a license problem and was unable to continue. Exhausting all of my options, I decided once again to get ahold of someone via Live Chat. To my dismay, Frank was unavailable and so I ended up getting Jeff. Unfortunately, it seems there are only truly a few useful members on the H9 sales/support team as every time I connect with someone other than Frank, I am either told to email support@hostnine.com or that a tech will make contact with me via email shortly. I politely refused to rehash the same stuff I just finished describing to Jeff in an email to support and kindly asked that he forward a transcript of our chat to the support email he provided me. He never did, nor did anyone contact me regarding the issue. I was then told that if my issue was urgent I should call the support hotline. I called 3 times and each time received an automated message telling me that my party was unavailable.

To summarize, here the things I like about H9 and the things I don't:

Pros:
- Fast server
- Free MB license
- Great plans
- Competitive prices

Cons:
- Live Chat support. Almost every rep asks me what my issue is, waits about 10 minutes to formulate a reply, and dismissively responds with either "contact support" or "a tech will contact you shortly regarding this matter". All in all, a pretty frustrating and futile experience unless you get Frank. Also, because it seems to be a roll of the dice each time on who you to connect with via Live Chat, if one operator is already familiar with your issue and you get another, you have to re-explain everything all over again.

My faith in HostNine has been restored!

I was starting to get a bit concerned today after experiencing some difficulty getting Modernbill installed. I hope H9 recognizes what an asset Frank is to the sales/support team. Not only was he polite and informative when I registered, but he's still the most helpful and knowledgeable person I've dealt with to date.

I spoke with multiple support staffers today, all whom of which were unable to solve my problem, and barely even convinced me they were willing. Only moments after speaking with Frank when he returned, he had my situation straightened around and was already willing to do a little something to compensate me for my troubles.

I believe Host9 is a good hosting company with a lot of promise, and while some of their sales and support people need further training, I believe my experience with them will be an enjoyable one. I really hope that these observations are viewed as constructive criticism and not as negative rhetoric intended to drive away potential customers.

I plan on updating this thread as time goes on and I have more involvement with H9. For now, they've left me satisfied!

Another update! :)

This thread has somewhat evolved into a journal documenting my dealings with H9, but I figure it will help other customers in postulating a decision as to whether or not to sign up with them.

Today I noticed that somehow I'd already reached my disk space quota but wasn't sure how. I decided to give the support line another shot and am glad I did. In a matter of minutes, Rick had the issue figured out and even bumped my disk space up enough for me to continue creating accounts while the matter was resolved. Because I transferred over from my previous host with root level access, the transfer erroneously captured some accounts that didn't belong to me and they were consuming my disk space.

After speaking to Rick for the first time, I then entered WHM to personalize plans and other features. I realized that none of the sub-reseller accounts I'd created on my previous server made it over during the transfer. The arrangement with my previous host was somewhat unique in that, I was allocated resources under a "reseller plan" but had root level access which enabled me to create sub-reseller accounts. I hadn't taken into consideration that this was a unique arrangement and wouldn't transfer over automatically to H9. I called up the support line again and luckily got Rick and he was understanding and happy to accommodate me. He explained to me that a new service would be coming out that I could take advantage of which would be the answer to my problems. Without divulging anything too detailed, it looks like my problems will be solved. I'll post back once the solution has been implemented.

So far, my dealings with support today have been nothing but awesome. Everyone has been friendly, helpful, and prompt in their responses. Things are definitely looking up!

Thanks for the updates. I find it interesting to be able to read the daily issues and solutions as far as dealing with hostnine. Although my move went very smoohtly I did have to talk to support a few times and Rick, Frank, and the the rest of the team where Amazing!
Keep us posted ;-)

What are your average ticket times? Do you get a reply in min-hrs?

RaceJunkie, average ticket times are pretty good. I've not had to wait any longer than 20 minutes or so for a response. My last ticket was answered in 4 minutes which is damn good!

My qualms with quality customer contact are still there for many of the service reps I deal with though. So far, I've had positive experiences with Rick (H9 Founder), Frank (Senior Administrator), and Tim (Support Tech) however there have been numerous support reps who could really stand to bring their communication skills up to snuff.

An example:

Please wait for a site operator to respond.
You are now chatting with 'Jeff'
Jeff: Welcome to HostNine. How can I help you?
Mason: Hi Jeff. Is Frank available?
Jeff: Unfortunately Frank is not available at this movement.
*2 minutes later*
Jeff: moment*
Jeff: Please let me know your issue.
Mason: I'd like to know when more information on Power Hosting will be available on the website.
Jeff: It will be available soon .I will have concern with Frank regarding this.
Mason: Ok.


The only sentence that Jeff composed that qualifies as coherent is the first one, which we all know is a canned phrase that is sent automatically at the start of every Live Chat. Again, when speaking to anyone other than the aforementioned people (Jeff excluded), you really do feel as though you're talking to a robot or someone located overseas. It was mentioned above that some of the reps are still in training, and I'm beginning to think that what he meant by that was that they're still being trained on how to speak the English language.

Right now, I'm still facing the matter of getting my sub-reseller accounts transferred over from my previous host. Because we've already updated our DNS information (assuming everything had been transferred), the sub-reseller's accounts are all offline now. Both Frank and Rick are aware of the matter and have been since early last night. I'm just waiting to here back from them regarding their new Power Hosting plans. Let me add some clarification by saying that H9 isn't responsible for the fact that I hadn't taken into consideration my arrangement with my former host likely would cause some trouble when switching. That was my fault and a result of poor foresight. What I would however appreciate is some kind attention in helping me get the matter resolved, as each day my customer's websites are unavailable is another reason for them to consider leaving.

I'll update as my situation progresses.

Take the above with a grain of salt

Unfortunately I'm unable to edit my previous posts, and if I could, I think I may delete them all together. I think I've inadvertently painted a negative image of H9 when all I was trying to do was highlight some areas where I think improvement is needed. I think in large part I'm responsible for many of the issues I encountered with support, as the Live Chat team is mainly geared for fielding level one tech support inquiries.

The folks at H9 have all been cooperative and have maintained a positive veneer with me despite my being a giant pain in the a$$. In spite of the minor hitches I've had so far, I would still recommend people to H9 as I have faith in their abilities to provide a reliable service. I truly do feel as though they care.

It should also be said that my problems with H9 are primarily with the Live Chat venue for support and nothing else.

The H9 support team has gone to greater lengths than normal to get my situation resolved, at least for the time being. I'm still waiting to hear more about the Power Hosting solution but understand that it's going to require me to be patient.

So at this point, my experience has been a satisfactory one and I hope that it continues to be.

Just to reiterate, for those of you considering H9. Please realize that my rants may have been a tad excessive and fueled by the fact that I have irate customers *I'm responsible for* emailing me to get their service restored. That will make anyone testy and persistent!

So for now, I would like to apologize to the H9 support team for be so critical and say that I'm happy with my service.

:)

Frankly all the 'problems' you've described about HostNine seem very over critical. I've been working with businesses over the net for years and to have the response times and excellent communication HostNine has given you is simply astounding. Oh what I would give to have someone answer all my e-mails in four minutes :)

You're entitled to that opinion. I suppose it all depends on what you consider to be an acceptable answer. After crafting very clear and concise emails detailing my problem and receiving a response containing only a few words, none of which are helpful, I think my criticisms have merit.

Just a bit of an update though. So far, my *service* at Host Nine has been top-notch. No downtime to speak of. Support has also improved.

This is likely be my final post in this thread as my service with HostNine has concluded. It's only fair that I update my review of H9 so that other potential customers know what they're getting themselves into.

To be succinct, my experience with HostNine was a very positive one. I've decided to rent a VPS instead of a reseller account because I needed more control over my accounts. That's the only reason I left. The support improved drastically. Response times were practically instant and the server I was hosted on never went offline.

I think H9 may have just been experiencing some growing pains earlier on and I was assured things would improve, which they have.

I'd like to thank Frank and Ben who are 2 employees I've had the most contact with. They did an outstanding job helping us resolve issues and placating me as admittedly I was a bit of a tool.

I have no regrets hosting with H9, apart from perhaps being overly critical in the beginning of their customer service, and hope that people considering H9 will give them a try because they're totally worth hosting with.

Thanks again to the guys at H9 for putting up with me and doing an exceptional job handling my tech issues. Ben in particular most definitely went above and beyond the scope of this job to even help me relocate to my new VPS, which is exactly why when I decide to upgrade to a dedicated server this year H9 will be company that gets my business.

Keep up the good work guys!
-Mason

Great review and wish you good times on the VPS. Which VPS provider did you select?

Good job done by Hostnine

Frank is no longer with H9 which is a huge bummer :( I really can't say why other than what I have gathered is it had to do with a location issue. Does anyone know where Frank is today? He would be worth anyone's time to snatch up and pay big bucks to. He is an amazing chap with great support experience but more so, awesome one on one report with customers. I have not found another Frank.