Don’t use Main Street Host for Web Hosting!
Someone just called me at work about “Main Street Host Dot Com”. Now, whether that’s mainstreethost.com or main-street-host.com or mainsthost.com, whatever. They telemarket, so they obviously can’t make money by offering good/fair service. Don’t use them. And as long as I’m on a rant about crappy web hosts, if you want to procrastinate whatever it is you’re doing and have a laugh read this account of Lunapages misguided insertion of link farms on their customers’ 404 pages. The comments become puerile and ranty. In fact, I haven’t seen such childish bantering since 1996 bbs flame wars. I even get called a spammer for offering my referral discount code that gives people $90 off (I get to keep $7 of the total possible referral of $97) at Dreamhost.
Wendy Hacker said,
April 24, 2008 @ 2:25 pm
Main Street Hosts is so desperate they’re going to dog breeder web directories and calling dog breeders for business. My client and her friend received calls to buy their services for $20. My client immediately called me to see what I thought. I thought no one does SEO for $20, it had to be a scam so I googled the company and read a lot of negative comments about Main Street. I’m sure it’s smart on their part to target people who won’t know what they’re talking about but it’s a shame for the person who falls for it.
Jerry P said,
May 6, 2008 @ 1:01 pm
I just got a call from Main Street Host as well. Their price was still $20 and I asked them how they can make money from charging $20 and they said that basically they don’t. That this is a special that they are running. And that they do it over the phone. They analyze your site and then call you and walk you through the process of updating your web pages for SEO, meta tags, etc. They don’t like to send it in email form because the masses don’t understand what the information means or how to implement it. It seems to me that using a live person on the phone to walk someone through what can be a complicated procedure can be time consuming and expensive on their payroll. I don’t see how they can do it. And I’ve googled them and the comments are overwhelmingly bad. I’m going to pass on them. I’ll do my own SEO.
Jerry P said,
May 14, 2008 @ 10:55 am
Just a follow up to the last post I made. I’ve been on the phone again with Main Street Host to talk over what they can do for me. They showed me many results where they got their client to the first page of google. And it turns out that they do email results to you on the diagnostic deal that they were offering. I got that wrong. And they do follow up with a phone call to walk you through it. But since I’m operating on an ultra shoestring budget I’ll have to wait to use their services until the budget allows for the investment. Not that I can’t afford $20 (their full service costs more of course) but I don’t want to start a program until I can see it through to the end. I’m not sure about the bad comments from before, but they certainly are willing to work for your business and work with you to find a business solution that suits your budget. If I had the money I might give them a shot. But for now I will have to fend for myself.
mahalie said,
May 14, 2008 @ 11:26 am
They cold call telemarket…that’s all I need to know. If you want to rank highly the best thing you can do is offer quality content on your website so that REAL people link to you. I would NEVER refer a client of mine to a service that obviously spends a lot of time and money on their phone sales force.
Jess said,
August 2, 2008 @ 2:48 am
I received a call from Main Street Host yesterday afternoon. I agree with the previous posters that they are obviously targeting small businesses assuming we have no idea what we are doing. In fact, thanks to my website statistics that I check daily, I even know where they found me LOL… My used clothing store has been open for only 2 months, I do have a small website that I use to market online, and do all of my OWN SEO, and have done very well with it since I originally started out in eCommerce and have a pretty good knowledge of what I am doing and have had previous websites get some very good rankings. They obviously thought that they were talking to someone who had no clue what they were doing when they called me, by the way they threw words around trying to make themselves sound important and talented. Though it was obvious that the person on the other end of the line was a salesperson, and not a good one at that, they spoke very unprofessionally, and was probably hired as one of those work at home telemarketers. They offered me these services for a whopping $9.95 ONE TIME FEE… YEAH RIGHT lol! Im not stupid! Too many red flags in the phone call itself, so I decided to come online this morning and check and have found nothing but NEGATIVE reviews… good thing Im on a tight budget and couldnt even be tempted by them LOL! I will continue to take the free GNC Web Creations SEO Courses and improve my Search Engine Standings on my own… for free… hehe
Tom Corwine said,
August 12, 2008 @ 9:28 pm
I came across this blog while Googling for “main street hosts.”
I got an email from my mom saying she renewed her contract with them, and I had no idea who they were. After a quick search cam my suspicions were confirmed. Their cold calling method is a red flag.
The only person who has the login credentials for the server is me, so how can they be doing any SEO? My mom told me, “They submit her site to search engines for her.” Man these people piss me off.
Gusero said,
September 23, 2008 @ 8:16 am
I just got a call from these people today as well. It started off a promotional rate of $19.95, and that also included diagnostics for my second website, which I didn’t have. Once they found that out, then they were able to instantly give me a $10 discount since I only had one website.
At first, I was tempted to give it a try for only $10, but I wouldn’t be here if I had fail for it. I just wanna say thanks for the post and the comments.
canndee said,
October 28, 2008 @ 10:48 am
I also have received a few telephone calls from Main Street Host for a “diagnostics” of our website. I Googled them to check out what they are all about and 99% of all the comments are not good, but the comments are from people who have not utilized their services. Is there anyone who can comment on their services?
Flak said,
November 11, 2008 @ 10:42 am
I’ve been using them for several years, and I would say I’ve had mixed results. They are very hard to deal with, and to get them to do what you want. They are always trying to sell you more stuff, high pressure calls. Their SEO service is questionable, I am not ranked where I want to be, but I do think that I would have a lower rank without their service. They point to my page rankings on 3 word phrases, but 2 word search terms are where I really need to be ranked, I am missing 70% of my business because they can’t get me up there. I am thinking about a new SEO, any recomendations? I would have switched a long time ago but don’t want to hurt my rankings during the switchover, but at this point I’ve dropped so low in my primary search terms it hardly matters. When I tell them this they say I need to buy more optimization from them, bah.