Is anyone else here a HostGator customer? I have been for years, I've always sung their praises regarding support, I'm an affiliate, and I use them for all my websites. I haven't used support much recently, but a few years ago when I was I'd get almost instant responses to tickets, second level was incredibly knowledgeable, etc.

I'm doing a little work on the side to help small USA based business change from HostGator email to Gmail for business, and edit SPF to enable other servers to send email. HostGator support has been just abysmal this week - when they bother to reply:

• First cpanel's advanced dns editing didn't work to edit the SPF records so I had to have it changed by support (voice call by my customer). If it was working I'd have made the change I needed in 30 seconds. I'd half prepared the customer for the switch over to gmail for business but wasn't ready to switch them yet, things like MX entries were there but not activated. Instead of doing what I asked and simply edit the SPF records they decided to switch the user over to gmail. My customer made the call to the support line, not me. We asked them to undo it and...


• The person half undid it, including deleting MX records that I set up in preparation for the changeover (not necessary and creating more work for me), but...


• The person had put in domain aliases so mail.theirdomain.com was now pointing at gmail, so the customers HostGator email was in accessible. Which I fixed, but...


• The SPF records had been messed up, removing some servers that needed to be authorised. So my customer called up again and....


• They fixed them, kinda. They messed it up again. Instead of including sensible SPF records they copied and pasted almost my whole email into the SPF record including some free text. So...


• We called again, they took the junk out, but at the end of the record they didn't put a space in where we explicitly asked for it before the ~all, and...


• So I raised two tickets for them to fix cpanel and insert a space in the SPF record. It's been three days and they haven't even replied to the tickets. They're still "open". I emailed a complaint in yesterday, no reply.

So it's cost my customer a significant amount of extra money for my time to fix up the HostGator stuff ups, and a simple email server switch has turned into a two week epic. So if anyone's considering HostGator I strongly suggest you reconsider.