Super Green Hosting - www.supergreenhosting.com

This is my first review on the Review Centre; I felt compelled to sign up just so that I could warn others about Super Green Hosting.

I have used them for my business website domain and hosting since November 2009 and following a few initial frustrations where they appeared to ignore some of my correspondence and requests everything seemed to be going relatively smoothly. I was new to the world of websites and hosting etc. so the fact that my website was generally up and running fine and that my emails were working kept me happy. Up until recently (as far as I'm aware) there has only been the occasional disruption to both of these services.

When it came to renew at the end of 2011 my opinion of Super Green Hosting was lowered dramatically for the following reasons:

- Despite paying for the highly inflated renewal cost (3 times more the original) my website 'failed to autorenew' so my website and emails were down for 4 days. (Having called up several times and spoken with someone in renewals to complain they did eventually give me a discount).

- Since they are US based you can only speak to certain departments e.g. billing, at certain times in the UK. When you call you get passed about back and forth between different departments and if they say your issue requires that you speak to both billing and technical support this makes it rather difficult to coordinate. I also find that support ticket submissions are not generally responded to in 30mins-2hrs as another reviewer stated but more like 12 - 24hrs.

- I had been paying for additional services since 2009 including domain privacy and dedicated IP. As I said, I am relatively new to having my own website etc. and only came across the WHOIS type of website recently. I discovered that my website had neither WHOIS privacy - my contact details were there for everyone to see, and neither did my website have a dedicated IP. As a result 'we' (our shared IP) had been blacklisted due to the activities of others on the shared IP and our emails were failing to reach customers.

Contacting billing and refunds departments was a nightmare. I was advised to email them and when my emails weren't responded to and I called up I was told that because my email would have gone to their International Refunds Dep't there was likely to be a longer response time. Any responses I did receive were always from different members of staff who appeared not to have read any of the prior correspondence and would just repeat the same standard response that add-on services were non-refundable.

Eventually, having attempted to get some answers via their Live Chat facility and spending several hours on there being passed between different support staff I did eventually get one helpful engineer who investigated my case properly and put forward my case to the refund department for me. However they weren't able to refund me and have cunningly put a credit on my account so if I want to get the credit I will have to stay with them for even longer which I am not planning to do! I wonder how many other Super Green customers out there are currently paying them for services which they are not being provided with...

My reasons for choosing Super Green Hosting were because of their supposed 'green credentials' as my business sells eco-friendly products however I would advise anyone, especially any non-US based individuals/organisations, to avoid them and try one of the more highly rated companies on the Review Centre which I'm about to do myself.

Like most other 'green' hosting providers, supergreen (a subsidiary of justhost.com) costs a little more than choosing a hosting provider who doesn't use energy-efficient servers and is powered by renewable energy, but if that kind of thing is important to you, then supergreen is definitely a provider to look at. That said, hosting charges are still pretty reasonable.

Tech management of the hosting package is done through CPanel and support enquiries can be sent either via the main website (if the somewhat limited FAQs don't answer your question) or through your billing/contract control panel. Technical support enquiries are typically dealt with within 30 mins-2 hours, but a premium service is available to let you jump the queue. More importantly, unlike companies like 1and1, their technical support is actually supportive and the reps actually know what they are talking about.

Unfortunately, supergreen are somewhat let down by their billing department's response to support requests. For three of the four domains I transferred to my account at supergreen, I ended up having to send two billing support requests as the first was ignored in each of the three cases that required action from the billing department. This is a particular issue for owners of .uk domains who wish to transfer their domain to their account with their hosting provider, as the standard procedure for a .com domain is for the user to unlock the domain at their old provider and then give their new provider the appropriate authorisation code to start the transfer process off; and a different process is followed by Nominet (the registration body for .uk domains), where the transfer process is initiated by the *old* provider. As supergreen will not undertake any domain transfer until they have billed you (and you have paid for it), any delay in billing will mean that a .uk domain will effectively be in limbo once the old service provider has changed the tag on the domain until supergreen do their part of the transfer process. Which is a shame, because once they get round to answering billing queries, the billing department's support is as good as their tech support colleagues. I don't know if their paid-for premium support service improves the response from the billing department, but I'm not sure that it should: why would any business be so reluctant to take a customer's money?

So: that is why my review gives supergreen hosting a lower rating than I would like. For non-UK domains, I'd easily recommend them, although I do have some qualms about having a two-tier support service, according to whether or not you pay extra for a response to a particular support ticket. For .uk domains? Until their billing department response improves, I would say very reluctantly that at this stage, you should look elsewhere.

Good points: Very good value for money, for a business offering hosting on energy-efficient servers exclusively powered by renewable energy. Good technical (and reasonable time) response to technical support issues.

Not so good: billing support isn't exactly wonderful (which has cost a couple of stars in my rating)

After one too many service 'issues' with 1and1, I finally made the break, and being a bit more cautious, chose supergreen hosting, the 'green' hosting arm of justhost.com. Transfer of my root domain was a doddle, even though I'd previously had no experience of CPanel. Tech support from supergreen hosting meant that the only substantial delays in transferring my root domain were caused by my previous hosting provider. Things weren't quite so straightforward when transferring additional domains as supergreen requires payment before they will transfer a domain to their server. OK for .com domains as the receiving registrar initiates the transfer, but for .uk, this is a little problematic as the sending registrar initiates the transfer. As most registrars will only change the IPS tag on a .uk domain (for practical purposes, the starting point of the transfer process) when you are cancelling the domain with them, by the time the tag is changed, it is removed from your account and stays unavailable until you have received and paid the supergreen invoice and the billing team forwards the support ticket on to the transfers group within tech support for them to complete the transfer. Unfortunately, the billing team are the major stumbling block in this process and three of my domain transfers took several days (and a repeat request to the billing team) to be completed.

I'd hold off on recommending this provider to owners of .uk domains until the company improves the response from the billing team, which is sad because their tech support is excellent.