Hostwinds Reviews 

They are sad and horrible. I give them two stars because they did host my website and email for many years and it worked most of the time. But some four years ago they lost my website and took weeks to restore an older version and then months to admit they had had a problem. Recently my web builder stopped working and they said it would only again if I paid an expensive upgrade. I moved to namehero which is great and paid a quarter of the price. Hostwinds do have tech support people (and/or ai) trying hard to find solutions (to you I am thankful) but the hostwinds system is rotten to the core. They told me the only way to cancel my renewal was to cancel the account which I did and then they immediately deleted everything without sending me a message saying what they had done or even saying goodbye. The only thing they did not delete on my account was my credit card details and now they say they cannot do that without opening a ticket. I prefer to cancel the credit card because I don't trust their system. I can see other reviewers complain about unauthorized charges and I believe Hostwinds would do that deliberately as part of their sad business model. Goodby hostwinds. I can sleep better without you.

We slipped into the Hostwinds trap as a VPS customer that would have landed them less than $200 a month but wasn't enough for them to be concerned about as an "Enterprise" customer.

I have no idea what Hostwinds used to be or may become - my experience is just based on now.

They have super cute graphics on their website - dragons, dinosaurs, monkeys, aliens in space ships - all happily sitting in front of their computers working on their websites.

They have a VERY convincing about us page - how they are different as a webhosting company - will give you personalized attention at a fraction of the cost.

From there - you call in as a new customer - LOVELY sales people - accommodating - everything is GREAT - they care about you and your sites and your business.

You then give them your credit card information and sign up - it is Russian roulette from there. If you get lucky - everything goes to plan - if there is some weird unforeseeable issue - you are screwed.

Because what they don't tell you upfront - is that the sales people - can't contact the support people - and that the chat people are separate from the sales people and the support people. And that if you have an unforeseeable problem as a customer that you will get the run around - because sales can't talk to support and support can't talk to chat and nobody has any idea what the billing department is doing.

From there - largely all of their responses - are AI generated or assisted. No-one at Hostwinds is responsible - and no-one cares - AI tells them what to say in response - they hit send and call it a day. Customer be damned. Not their problem.

Our experience - we knew it was not a good fit after 4 days - but then were told we were out of luck as the Terms of Use we signed up for CLEARLY stated - no refunds after 3 days.

Seriously.

From there - they removed the "Request Cancellation" buttons from our online account making it impossible to follow their Terms of Use cancellation policy. I'm not kidding - I have it screen captured - and then the problems went on and on from there.

I am co-owner of a business that Hostwinds just completely screwed over and this is just the beginning of my take on things and what I have to say - all documented about our experiences with them.

Just be warned - this is how they operate. I'm sure they will respond with an impressive - grammatically correct - politically correct response - that has NOTHING to do with the complaint.

HostWinds customer support is excellent. I never imagined I would care about customer support for a website but when I'm trying to keep my website up without working on it, it's so nice to be able to tell them to complete the technical part and the site gets going little or no time input on my part. Also, their techs are available all the time, so I don't waste time getting through AI to get to a human being.