Mecca Hosting

[mojo]

I tried this hosting service. I was disturbed to learn that they have a practice of changing your url to their own without your knowledge or permission. This is done so that their site piggybacks on yours. Consider all the sites they do this to that they host. It makes their site much bigger naturally. Note it is targeted to google. My bad was that I didn't remember the adage "you get what you pay for". I was out of there as fast as I could.

Once they changed my url, there were certain elements that wouldn't show up for visitors (the gpwa seal for example). Google picked it up and as we all know it takes a bit to recover on its own, once I got rid of it. Damage was done.

I'm posting this in hopes that anyone considering a hosting service use a trusted and true host, recommended by someone you trust. Never pick a random server like I did!

[Chips]

Thanks Mojo for keeping us informed of this nasty host, I hope you recover quickly.

[pgaming]

MeccaHosting buyers beware perhaps an understatement. In my wildest dreams never figured a hosting company would Domain Mangle. EG. Your domain/url before mydomain.com after MeccaHosting is done zeus.meccahosting.com/~a0004f6d/ But it doesn’t end here. Even when the domain holder disengages from Mecca the garbage continues. Negative seo or call it Google bowling occurs on a scale beyond any honest businesspersons wildest dreams. Shocked and downright dirty, the only beneficiaries are MeccaHosting themselves. Buyer beware, if you spent countless hours developing your website MeccaHosting is not for you. All Smoke and Mirrors SAAS here is the complaint. Thanks greek39

[mojo]

Thank you for your help greek. This has now been reported to google.

[pgaming]

No problem mojo anytime!

greek39

[LiveCasinoPartners]

That sounds like a nightmare Mojo. I can't imagine that they would run their business like that. Have you been able to straighten it out yet?

[mojo]

It is a nightmare WagerX. I am off of their "service" however, this still remains and goodness knows what else.

xxxhttp://zeus.meccahosting.com/~a0004f6d/

Thanks, I'll recover.

[universal4]

This is a horrible and disgusting practice.

It gives those of us honest hosts a bad name and makes it more difficult to generate new business.

I agree that word-of-mouth recommendations are a good place to start when searching for hosts. And remmember, just because a host is big, does not mean they will service your account the way it is needed.

Some of the largests hosts out there, have rules and restrictions hidden in their terms of service that they can use against you to turn off your account or restrict access to your sites unless you pay additional fees etc.

Rick
Universal4

[Nandakishore]

Is there any way of blacklisting such a provider?

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[mojo]

Is there any way of blacklisting such a provider?

When I closed my account and offered them (more than) a few choice words, it was my impression that they are proud of what they offer. Which, they explain, "helps" people get "more traffic" that they couldn't do on their own.

I indicated that I would report them and they didn't seem to mind this at all. I did report to google but I don't know how effective I am, not being a tech wizard.

One reason I posted here was to try to spread the word. I am afraid they are going to continue this practice on unsuspecting victims. If anyone has a regular seo/webmaster forum that visit, feel free to pass this on.

[pgaming]

One of the representatives of Mecca is an active participant with many public forums, a beginning perhaps? Whoever it is they sure love Redhat Linux.

Just a thought

greek39

[Nandakishore]

I am member of WebHostingTalk forum. I may contact them although I have not visited that forum for a long time, but they sent a birthday greeting on my last birthday.

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[meccahost]

At Mecca Hosting, we take customer complaints very seriously, and I hope that we can have the opportunity to respond to this complaint.

First, I would like to point out that these special URLs -- that are used to help customers get listed on search engines -- can be removed upon request. The listing would be set to be "disallowed" and is removed the next time the search engines visit; unfortunately, we can't control when the search engines will visit us next.


I would also like to explain that this special link does not point to our website, nor does it in any way infuse Mecca Hosting advertising into a customer's website; it is only another link through which search engines can find the website. The URL address does have the meccahosting.com address, but few visitors actually look closely at the URL; they only visit the website.


In this particular case, this customer requested that we remove the listing, which was done by specifying that search engines were no longer allowed to view the site; unfortunately, it can be several weeks before the search engines visit again to update their listings. The customer would only be satisfied with an immediate removal of the listing, which was outside of our control.


We do not benefit from these listings in any way; we have never received customers as a result of these links, because the visitors are viewing our customer's website; not our website. We offer these links solely to help our customers gain a presence in search engines. A Mecca Hosting customer does not have to work towards promoting their site to search engines; often within 24 hours of a site being uploaded on our service, the site will be ranked on Google and Yahoo, and typically very highly. This is actually a very valuable feature of our services.


Of course, it is never our intention to conflict with current rankings; if a customer is currently listed under their own domain, we remove our listing as soon as requested.


In this case, the customer felt that we were interfering with their search engine visibility, which never actually occurred. They asked us to remove the listing (which we did), but wanted it to be removed from Google immediately; however, we have no control over the Google search engine or any other for that matter, and cannot immediately remove any listing from those engines.


We are very proud of this service because no one likes to spend time and money towards search engine promotion; it is time consuming and expensive ordeal. We provide search engine listings to help our customers be successful, and most of them are very successful; we often receive positive comments about the sales generated from these free listings.


Thank you very much for reading our response to this complaint.


Very Sincerely,


William Howell

[pdjoe]

It is flat out wrong to tamper or change any url that may come through your services....the end!

[mojo]

I would also like to explain that this special link does not point to our website, nor does it in any way infuse Mecca Hosting advertising into a customer's website; it is only another link through which search engines can find the website. The URL address does have the meccahosting.com address, but few visitors actually look closely at the URL; they only visit the website.


In this particular case, this customer requested that we remove the listing, which was done by specifying that search engines were no longer allowed to view the site; unfortunately, it can be several weeks before the search engines visit again to update their listings. The customer would only be satisfied with an immediate removal of the listing, which was outside of our control.

I am not going to fully answer this right now, but let me just say that stating visitors don't look at urls is ludicris. Of course they do! The "customer" (me) would only be satisfied if you stop this practice! That is what I told you. Have you considered that it disabled some elements of my site? Certain things only work on my url. As I told you before, you do not have the right to take liberties with other peoples URL's. This should never never happen.

Sorry, I am still angry right now. However, I am glad you came by to address this.

[meccahost]

We do not "tamper with" or "change" any URLs in any way. We have an alternate URL from which all customer sites can be accessed, as do many other hosting companies; this URL has nothing to do with the customer's domain. We allow these special URLs to be visible by search engines which allows our customer's websites to get fast and highly ranked listings.

We don't benefit from these listings in any way; if you click on the listing, it takes you to our customer's website, period. You do not see any advertising from us or any thing else that associates it to us, other than the URL, but as I mentioned, no one really pays attention to it.

I do understand that this is a service that not everyone wants, but the majority of our customers do want the service, which is why we provide it. If a customer is not happy with the listing, we remove it from search engine visibility immediately and without question; unfortunately, it takes some time before search engines visit again and see that the link is no longer valid.

We reply to all customer queries in less than 15 minutes (30 minutes guaranteed), and we resolve all issues within 10 hours. In this particular case, we had the listing removed from visibility within just a few hours of their request.

[pgaming]

Finally decided to show up Mecca. I would feel foolish posting what I really thought. Mecca you know what you did and your rebuttal makes absolutely no sense.

Ridiculous!

greek39

[mojo]

I do understand that this is a service that not everyone wants, but the majority of our customers do want the service, which is why we provide it. If a customer is not happy with the listing, we remove it from search engine visibility immediately and without question; unfortunately, it takes some time before search engines visit again and see that the link is no longer valid.

How bout this..How about you ASK your clients FIRST and give them the OPTION instead of just shoving it on everyone!!!

It may not be YOUR fault that google takes time but it sure the hell isn't MY fault. I did NOT want or ask for that HEADACHE!

Please don't keep doing this to your customers!!

[meccahost]

I'd like to say that we have to gear our services towards the majority; we would not be successful otherwise. I understand that this service did not work for Mojo, but it does work for over 90% of our customers, and we do receive a lot of positive feedback on this service. For people that are unable to obtain good search engine visibility on their own, we are driving free traffic to their sites that has been proven to generate sales.

The special URL that we use does require that links use "relative" addressing, and not a full path; we do try to help customers to understand the difference and change their pages to work under both. I'm not sure what happened in your case, as to why we didn't assist you with the conversion of your site.

We've found no evidence that any person looks closely at the URL; if you've found research to the contrary, we would certainly be interested in that information. The research we have shows that people searching on the Internet want fast access to information and spend little time assessing the source of that information; they click the link and briefly peruse the content to determine whether they feel it is relevant.

I can tell you that in the past 7 years, you are the first person to ever cancel an account because of these special URLs. We do receive a lot of questions from customers about them, but customers have rarely asked that we remove the listings.

In any case, I am very sorry about how things have turned out. We are certainly responsible for not working with you more closely to come to some sort of a compromise. We have modified customers sites on occasion to allow them to work with the "relative" addressing, but it would appear that we didn't offer this to you.

Sincerely,

William Howell

[pgaming]

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache...ient=firefox-a