Mecca Hosting

[mojo]

The single most important asset in this business (or any online) is trust. In this day and age your reputation online is all you have at the end of the day IMO. Unethical practices may not get caught today, this month or even this year but the day will come. By then it is extremely difficult to rebuild yourself. That’s why we see people reinventing themselves with new names etc. That usually gets caught too.

I gave Mecca Hosting my trust. They destroyed that. Now they have been given the opportunity as Rick said to begin to rectify the problem and their now horrid reputation. They have no interest in doing this and are stubbornly continuing to damage clients.

C’mon Mecca! Do the right thing!

Ps. Hope it’s ok to say this...If anyone is looking for a trustworthy hosting service I can 100% recommend clicking Universals signature link.

[meccahost]

We have over 10,000 customers that all know about the existence of these links; one customer did not like it and complained about it. What amazes me is that everyone here can believe that getting a free listing is a bad thing?! If you were not listed on any search engines, and a hosting company is listing your website at no charge, how is that a problem? If someone already has a listing, we mark that URL as not viewable by search engines and it goes away after awhile. If there is a problem with the way the site displays, we help the customer correct the problem immediately.

I'd also like to point out that I became aware of this thread through a new lead; this person signed up for our service even after reading your posts. I would have to say that, although you all believe that this service is somehow bad, the majority of people will disagree with you. The true is that the majority are not savvy in the ways of the Internet, nor search engines; they would have no real chance at having good search engine visibility otherwise. However, if they do obtain their own visibility, they ask us to remove the listing, which we do.

We only provide this service to help our customers, which it does; these listings do generate sales for our customers. If they want it removed we do that; we just can't control how fast it is removed from the search engines.

Cheers,

Bill

[mojo]

We have over 10,000 customers that all know about the existence of these links; one customer did not like it and complained about it. What amazes me is that everyone here can believe that getting a free listing is a bad thing?! If you were not listed on any search engines, and a hosting company is listing your website at no charge, how is that a problem? If someone already has a listing, we mark that URL as not viewable by search engines and it goes away after awhile. If there is a problem with the way the site displays, we help the customer correct the problem immediately.

Bill,

You have not answered a very straight forward question I have asked you so I will try again.

Question: Why don't you offer an opt-in option? Why do you persume that everyone wants this? Will you give your customers the choice? If not, please state why? A simple opt in shouldnt bother you a bit if everyone loves it so much.

one customer did not like it and complained about it.

Sorry Bill, I don't buy that all your customers know for one minute. I sure didn't! Some may not even be aware! There is a long thread of talented webmasters here, some with there own hosting services. If you choose not to listen that is unfortunate. Mecca Hosting is now considered rouge by many until you can correct this. Not just here at the GPWA but at other webmaster forums as well.

[mojo]

Bill,

What you fail to understand is that by automatically changing ones url when they are trying to run a business hurts. Having to wait up to 6 weeks for google to correct the mess hurts that business. Period. I don't see how you can fail to understand this.

ps..

Apparently I am again not going to get the answer to this question:

Bill,

You have not answered a very straight forward question I have asked you so I will try again.

Question: Why don't you offer an opt-in option? Why do you persume that everyone wants this? Will you give your customers the choice? If not, please state why? A simple opt in shouldnt bother you a bit if everyone loves it so much.

I guess Bill just wanted to let us know about his 'lead'.

[meccahost]

We don't offer this as an opt-in because in over 7 years in the hosting business, no one has ever had a problem with this service. Why would we pay an engineer to design a feature when no one has ever asked for that option until now.

You don't buy that all of our customers know about this service? Everyone pays attention to their domain, everyone uses Google to check their site; everyone is concerned about having their website found. I can certainly assure you that every customer hosted with us is well aware of this listing, and has checked on how well they can be located on search engines; it is their livelihood. We do regularly receive inquiries about these listings, and the only time that we've been asked to remove a listing is when their domain was already ranked and ranked highly, which is less than 1 in 10.

I understand that you didn't like this service, but please feel free to Google our company and complaints; I think that you'll find that everyone is quite happy with our service. If a company spends money to change their services to suit the needs of less than 30% of their customers, they're most likely losing money; in this case, your asking that we change our services for 0.01%.

I know that you're unhappy with the way things turned out, and I'm sorry that we didn't assist in helping you get the website displaying correctly with that URL; however, the things that are being said on this blog are not all entirely correct.

We always listen to our customers and if our customers don't like this service or want us to change it we will. We didn't get to where we are without actively listening to our customers; however, we do have to focus on the majority and not the minority.

Please feel free to research our company online; you'll find almost no complaints and a lot of kudos.

Bill

[mojo]

Bill,

Thank you for answering my question. That is a positive step. I don't know if you are interested in rectifying your rouge status or not but it helps. Thank you.

There is nothing you could say here to justify what you do. It is wrong. You know it, I know it, everyone here knows it. All your arguments in the world won't change that. Please do not take us as fools.

I would like to offer one more option.

Would you consider, since you don't want to spend money on "me" the ONE complaint lol. I won't even argue that. Anyway, how bout you simply provide on your HOME PAGE that this is your practice? It wouldn't cost you a dime. Simply explain that you change urls so everyone can see BEFORE they sign up.

How bout it Bill?

[meccahost]

You've mentioned "changing URLs" a few times, but this is not true. We don't change anyone's URL; we advertise another URL through our domain that points to the same website. The customer's domain, if it gets ranked, will also appear along with ours. Let's please keep things factual, if you please.

As far as listing this service on our website, we have had many discussions about this in the past. The reason that we do not is because it will set an expectation that Mecca Hosting will always be able to provide good search engine visibility. Unfortunately, there are too many other factors involved, so just because we have this listing does not mean it will rank well under the keywords the customer wants.

We don't charge for the service and we don't promote it, so why do we do this then? We are a business that caters to small business users, which are the majority of our customers. The average statistic in the US is that around 40% of all new small businesses will fail their first year, which means we have a higher churn rate because these are the customers that we sell to. It is in our best interest to help our customers beat this statistic and stay in business for a longer period of time. This is why we offer all types of free advice and do everything we can to help our customers; if they succeed, then we succeed.

Bill

[pgaming]

We don't change anyone's URL; we advertise another URL through our domain that points to the same website.

So which is it? either you do manipulate the URL or don't?

The customer's domain, if it gets ranked, will also appear along with ours.

Why does the customer domain have to appear along side yours?

good search engine visibility.

IMO your domain would benefit more than the 10,000 happy customers. My feeling is Mecca is taking a free ride of other people's domains for profit.

pgaming

[Fergie]

One more time. Let me see if I understand this:

You have a domain name, let's call it mydomainname.com

You sign up for hosting at Mecca, then change the nameservers to theirs. So far so good.

You then upload your site to your new hosting account.

Sometime after you type in "mydomain.com" in your web browser and find your browser has been redirected to somewhere at meccahosting.com ?

So you realize that your domain has been redirected to a folder or subdomain ON mecca hosting?

Is this correct?

[mojo]

Mecca Hosting hijacks YOUR DOMAIN. They completely REMOVE your own URL and replace it with THEIRS. I am bumping this thread so it remains in the searches.

Thank you GPWA.

Sometime after you type in "mydomain.com" in your web browser and find your browser has been redirected to somewhere at meccahosting.com ?

Yes Fergie. That is correct. Never seen anything like it!


Fergie..get this.. this is how mecca explains it..

You've mentioned "changing URLs" a few times, but this is not true. We don't change anyone's URL; we advertise another URL through our domain that points to the same website.

[mojo]

This was posted in April by a concerned member on Digital Point. Digital Point is a large forum with thousands of members.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showt...37#post9842288

Mecca Hosting has been in business for the last 7+ years. With well over 10,000 satisfied customers and presumably growing questions arise regarding their underhanded practices.

As any well established Webmaster regardless white, grey, blue or black this is one hosting company to avoid. Never in my years have I seen a hosting company be so Naive and reckless as to cause financial and personal trauma.

Upon hosting with Mecca the following happens:

1. Cloaking
2. Domain Hijack
3. Google indexed pages removed
4. Content theft


A lengthy public discussion took place here:

https://www.gpwa.org/forum/mecca-hosting-174816/p4.html

I post this public service message to inform others, buyer beware!

Suddenly today, Mecca Hosting decided to respond.

Mecca Hosting does absolutely none of the things that have been listed here. Google permanently removes sites that are involved in cloaking, which involves displaying different website content to search engines versus human visitors. ICANN regulates domain registrations and we would not be able to resell domains, if we were involved in domain hijacking. Further, we have no control over search engine listings and could not remove an indexed page; only the search engine can decide to remove a listing.

The incident that occurred had to do with Mecca Hosting's search engine promotion efforts that we do on behalf of our customers (included at no extra cost), leveraging our own promotion efforts on the MeccaHosting.com domain. We are able to get new clients a first page listing in many cases within 48 hours of activating their account with us; something that could not easily be done on their own. In this particular case, this customer did not want the listing so we removed it immediately after their request; however, the search engines do not visit sites frequently, so it took some time for the listing to be removed.

Mecca Hosting has been a member of the Better Business Bureau for many years and have an outstanding record with them because we are a customer-oriented company that genuinely works to help our customers. If we did not help our customers run successful websites, we would not still be in business after almost 8 years. In addition, we actually work hard to protect our customers from content theft and hacking through our proprietary bot-blocking system; something that other companies don't even try to do.

The discussion on this topic has been based on hearsay and not fact. It seems that as the thread continued, the story changed through the grapevine. The problem was solely with a search engine listing we helped them attain to promote their website that they did not wish to have, and we could not get it removed fast enough for them, which was not within our control.

Please feel free to research Mecca Hosting online, as you'll find that there is a large amount of positive feedback, and currently, this is the only negative one that came from a single customer and does not speak for tens of thousands of other clients.

Thank you for listening to our side of the story.

Sincerely,

William Howell
Mecca Hosting - Fast. Reliable. Secure.

[mojo]

The incident that occurred had to do with Mecca Hosting's search engine promotion efforts that we do on behalf of our customers (included at no extra cost), leveraging our own promotion efforts on the MeccaHosting.com domain. We are able to get new clients a first page listing in many cases within 48 hours of activating their account with us; something that could not easily be done on their own. In this particular case, this customer did not want the listing so we removed it immediately after their request; however, the search engines do not visit sites frequently, so it took some time for the listing to be removed.

Hey thanks Mecca Hosting for changing my URL and taking me OUT of the searches. I certainly couldn't have done that on my own!

Seriously, I may not be the most savvy webmaster but even I know when I have been totally fleeced. To this day you REFUSE to warn webmasters on your home page that you AUTOMATICALLY take over their url whether they want it or not. How can you live with yourself?

The discussion on this topic has been based on hearsay and not fact.

It is 100% fact and I thank goodness I brought it up here so you CANNOT dispute it.

Apologies for getting excited about this but every time I look at it I get more upset. If you only KNEW William, what hell I went through to get my sites back that you hijacked you would understand. Please THINK about what you are doing!

[mojo]

For those of you who are coming in now, Mecca Hosting changed my url, nodepositmojo.com to redirect to http://zeus.meccahosting.com/~a0004f6d/.

Of course I requested it to be put back in the original form before the damage was done. For some reason, Mecca Hosting is maintianing that my problem is that it wasn't done fast enough. Not 'their fault! It's Googles fault!' In actuality, my problem was that it was done AT ALL! That is my domain DAMMIT! Same with the rest of my sites. They did so without my authorization, permission and with no warning. To "help" me.

[mojo]

this is the only negative one that came from a single customer and does not speak for tens of thousands of other clients.

Mecca Hosting has been a member of the Better Business Bureau for many years and have an outstanding record with them because we are a customer-oriented company that genuinely works to help our customers.

From the Better Business Bureau:

http://southerncolorado.bbb.org/WWWR...&firm=17000272

Service Issues BBB Definition:

Service Issues - Claims of alleged delay in completing service, failure to provide promised service, inferior quality of provided service, or damaged merchandise as a result of delivery service.

Resolved BBB Definition:

Resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.

3 - Company resolved BBB Definition:

resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.
the complaint issues. The consumer acknowledged acceptance to the BBB.
1 - Company offered a partial (less than 100%) settlement which the consumer failed to acknowledge acceptance to the BBB.
Administratively Closed BBB Definition:

Administratively Closed - BBB determined that the complaint could not be satisfactorily settled using standard methods of voluntary dispute resolution

1 - BBB determined that despite the company's reasonable effort to address complaint issues, the consumer remained dissatisfied.

Customer Service Issues BBB Definition:

Service Issues - Claims of alleged delay in completing service, failure to provide promised service, inferior quality of provided service, or damaged merchandise as a result of delivery service.
BBB Definition:

Customer Service Issues - Claims alleging unsatisfactory customer service, including personnel's failure to provide assistance in a timely manner, failure to address or respond to customer dissatisfaction, unavailability for customer support, and/or inappropriate behavior or attitude exhibited by company staff.

Resolved BBB Definition:

Resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.

2 - Company resolved BBB Definition:

resolved - The company resolved the complaint issues.
the complaint issues. The consumer acknowledged acceptance to the BBB.

[mojo]

Ok done now.

TY GPWA for letting me get that out in the open.

[Chips]

Thanks Mojo for showing what a pack of thieves they truly are! I remember all you had to go through this year thanks to them. Hope you have bounced back nicely. Very important for our members here to know where the "bad boys" are.

[mojo]

It really destroyed me for a bit. Thank goodness I had friends here to help me recover. Many of you offered to put my links up. Thanks Chips.

[pgaming]

Hey thanks chips for helping out another, only if there were more of you!

pgaming

[mojo]

Hey thanks chips for helping out another, only if there were more of you!

pgaming

You are to modest pgaming. Thank you for staying on top of things for all of us!

[republican]

Saved me some time and money. Thank you for sharing this information. None of us want to loose money! Its too hard to make