Hello John,

Spoiler Alert: This guy is (mostly) full of it.

I am sorry that you had a negative experience with GlowHost. I would like to address your concerns for transparency for our potential clients.

Certain orders may be red flagged by our system in order to prevent fraud. Those accounts that meet specific criteria may be asked to produce additional information including identification to ensure we are not charging a stolen credit card or hacked PayPal account, for example. Accounts that complete the one-time verification process are whielisted in our system so that those checks do not need to be performed in the future, and all future orders are processed automatically and instantaneously. We do this to keep our network at the highest quality possible because by performing these important checks, we prevent fraudsters from using our systems, and it ensures our networks are not home to scammers, carders, spammers and other bad people. This is a good thing for people who run professional businesses on our network and is one of the many reasons we're known for having reliable servers.

Our control panels are multi-lingual and by default display English when the account is generated. If there was another language set then it could only have been set by the account owner once they login and adjust settings. I hate to contradict your complaint, however, what you describe is factually impossible on our systems. The account owner is the only one that can set the language once they are logged in.

I do confirm that your Shoutcast radio was down during an unscheduled update by the Shoutcast service. This was resolved promptly once you alerted us to your specific issue, and I can personally apologize for that. We've worked with the software vendor to make sure it does not happen again in the future. Again please accept my apologies for the incident. It was a bad welcome to you and not a normal thing for the Shoutcast servers to experience.

Regarding the charge for your domain name, our policy has not changed in almost 15 years. All third party products, e.g. products that you purchase from other providers like an SSL certificate, domain name, or software is non-refundable. I can not only assure you that the statement you made about "terms and conditions that differed from what I'd already read" is either an embellishment of the truth, or a mistake, but I think we both know what it is, and it burns me up.

Readers can verify this for themselves by using the internet archive service (https://archive.org/web/) and comparing our Terms of Service now, and in the past and during your time with GlowHost which was July 24, 2016 to August 8th, 2016.

You will see their snapshot of our Terms Of Service (the contract you agree to when you order hosting) located at https://glowhost.com/tos . Section 9.4 which deals with domain names has only changed one time since 2012 and the changes was actually a reduction in the cost of the domain in the customer's favor! 2012 is the first time the archive added that page to the repository, thus the oldest date I can prove, and readers can verify, but I can assure you it is much older than that.

It's not often I've had to call BS on a review, in fact, this is the only one I've had to in almost 10 years of the 15 we've been in operation. We certainly understand and welcome leaving a negative review when it is legit, but when there are egregious misrepresentations which can be verified disproven like your claims, we've got no choice other than to protect our brand which is known for operating well above board which is a rarity in the web hosting industry. Changing the entire service agreement which affects all of our valued clients, to cheat one customer in order to make a measly $14 bucks is a ridiculous claim!

I am saddened to see that because you failed to read your contract, or the advertised offer on the main website itself, or the FAQ, or even just simply asked our live support, phone support or email support how the offer works, that it has promulgated into a bogus review formulated out of spite because you did not receive the refund that you wanted and feel entitled to. I can assure you if the registrar gave us refunds, you'd get one and the policy would change for everyone.

When people leave less than truthful negative reviews it can affect people's jobs because without new signups, a company's growth can slow down which can mean loss of jobs or no more hiring of new staff as a growing company. I'm not willing to see that happen on even one hopped-up review without a fight. Our staff are too important and work too hard for people like yourself to spread a bunch of bologna across the Internet. They've got families to feed, and I'm happy to defend them, and I'm happy to defend our brand.

Matt Lundstrom
Founder / CEO GlowHost.com, LLC