Locked out of HostGator account and support can't help. Any advice?

Seeking Advice
1

I have a HostGator account. I know everyone here isn’t a fan of HostGator, and looking back, signing up was probably a mistake. Back in 2018, it didn’t seem so bad, and in 2021, I renewed my plan until 2024 because I hadn’t had any major problems, and they offered a lower annual price. I don’t update my site often, and FTP worked fine for small HTML updates—until now.

This week, I couldn’t log into the web portal. I didn’t forget my password since I use a password manager, but it stopped working. I was trying to cancel my renewal, but since I can’t log in, I can’t do that. My login worked on Monday when I checked my renewal date, and I updated my expired credit card (big mistake). But when I tried to log back in, it wouldn’t work.

I tried resetting my password, but I kept getting a generic error message: “something went wrong, contact support.” I’ve contacted support at least 10 times over the past 3 days. They’ve tried sending me reset codes, and one rep said to wait a few hours, but nothing has worked. Another rep escalated the issue and gave me a ticket number, saying it’d be fixed in a few hours. It’s now been days, and still no luck. Every time I call, I get the same story: “admins are working on it.”

I can’t even log in to cancel my renewal. They’ve got my credit card info, and I’m afraid they’ll keep charging me. Has anyone else dealt with this? Any advice on how to cancel my account if I can’t log in? I don’t mind if my site goes down temporarily since I have it backed up, but I really want to stop HostGator from charging me.

I’m worried they’re purposely keeping me locked out to force an auto-renewal. Can I block payments on my credit card without logging in? Any ideas?

2

What a mess. If they can’t reset your account, I don’t know what else you can do. You’ll have to keep pushing them to fix it. I wouldn’t trust them to cancel it even if you ask.

You might want to contact your bank and see if they can block payments from HostGator. Maybe cancel your card and get a new one if needed. It’s also good to keep your bank updated about the situation so you can file a chargeback if they try anything shady. For future reference, using PayPal for these kinds of services is safer since you can cancel payments from PayPal directly. Revolut is also great for virtual cards.

3

@Scarlett I hadn’t thought of using PayPal for that, but it makes sense. Thanks for the tip!

4

You could try stopping the payment and let the service expire. They’ll probably cancel everything, delete the data, and eventually close the account. Just make sure you’ve backed everything up before it expires.

5

@ethan_johnson I used a credit card and can’t log in to cancel. Would reporting them as fraud with my credit card company work?

6

@DomainWhisperer Depends on your bank, but where I live, we can ask the card issuer to stop specific payments. Maybe your bank can do something similar.

7

You can call your credit card company and explain the situation. They should be able to block the charge. Good thing you have a backup!

8

@daggy Do you think they can block any future charges from HostGator too?

9

Cancel your card and tell HostGator support to close your account and delete your data. Trying anything else will just give them more chances to mess with you. This is why r/hostgator has the same reputation as r/godaddy.

10

Here’s an update: After about 5 days of being locked out and talking to support, I finally got an email asking for a photo of my driver’s license to verify my ID. I was hesitant, but they were using a legit 3rd-party service for validation, so I did it. The email said to reply once I completed the verification, so I did, and they replied, saying my ticket was closed, and my account was unlocked. I thought maybe HostGator wasn’t so bad after all… but when I tried logging in, I STILL COULDN’T! And I couldn’t reset my password either.

I called support again, and they said I shouldn’t have replied to the email because it triggered a script that locked my account again. What?! So, they opened a new ticket. After another 48 hours, I finally got a response saying my account was unlocked, and this time it worked!

First thing I did was remove my payment info (though they make you add a secondary payment method before removing your card), disabled auto-renew, and started the countdown to leaving HostGator for good.

One question: I added PayPal as my backup payment method, then removed my credit card info. I can’t delete PayPal since they force you to have one payment method on file. But when I check my PayPal account, it doesn’t show any permissions granted to HostGator. Does that mean they can’t charge me through PayPal?