I have had a few of my larger sites hosted at Green Geeks for a number of years now. At one time I used to use them exclusively for all of my hosting, years ago the prices were good, and the service was great. However, over time the level of service seemed to drop massively and the number of issues that I experienced seemed to grow exponentially. 

One issue that kept rearing it's head was unexpected server updates. The techs had a habit of making server configuration changes without any prior notice meaning that you would come into work and find that 100 out of your 200 sites had features that had stopped working. These changes were usually in response to server security compromises, and amazingly on some of these occasions there was even a root breach. Such changes were an absolute nightmare and sometimes would result in losing two days or more to update code to work with the new convoluted configurations. In the end I simply moved everything to another host.

Whilst this was easy for most sites, I have a couple of larger sites that simply were not an easy task to migrate. The sheer size of the sites meant days of FTP time to transfer the files. I simply kept putting the migration off until the inevitable happened.

Well that inevitable moment happend recently when the billing cycle was unable to renew as my credit card details had expired. Instead of emailing me to let me know so that I could update my details they simply flipped the switch and took the sites offline. The first I knew of it was receiving an email from an irate client saying that their service had been suspended. Great.

So after migrating the sites to the excellent Digital Ocean I cancelled the account. Good riddance Green Geeks. That was the end of the matter, or at least thats what I thought. Well, apparently not. On the next billing cycle I received a payment reminder. So I happily emailed them to explain that the account had been cancelled. I was told that I had to pay the outstanding amount and cancel my account. WTF? Great, it would appear that even on leaving them they had issues. I had issues with hosting, issues with billing and now issues leaving. I replied informing them that I considered that the matter was closed and that I would not enter into any further correspondance with them.

So I have been receiving a steady stream of reminder notices, which I have duly ignored, they have even added additional charges onto the reminder for late payment. The final culmination is that they are now threatening to send bailiffs around to collect the outstanding $30. Are these wankers for real? 

This is typical of how Green Geeks now conduct business, if you report an issue they will make you feel as if you are the problem, the nice friendly service that they used to give when they first started has long since disappeared. They also massively oversell their server space, which is a contributing factor to the many issues that you will experience with their hosting.

My advice is to steer clear of Green Geeks, there are many cheaper and better hosts out there. If you really hung up on using Green Geeks due to the 'green' aspect. Make sure that you do some research before committing. They say that they are 300% wind powered, which implies that they exclusively use wind power, but the truth of the matter is that they use fossil fuelled power generation like everyone else, they offset this with the purchase of energy credits. (RECs). What they don't tell you is that these same RECs can also be sold on, usually for a profit.

/DM