A friend of mine, knowing that I surf the boards asked me who people are using for an SEO host. I said, theres a guy on GFY who posts all over the place and his site is called 'gotwebhost'. I never heard anything bad about the guy other than he's 100 years old and spends alot of time on this forum. So my friend decided to contact baddog.
Let me explain a bit about my friend. He holds a number of top 5 and many number 1 positions on competitive mainstream keywords and he owns a number of keyword rich generic domains, which are perfect for SEO. He is an SEO expert himself and has hundreds of sites and was looking for an SEO host with multiple c-blocks and IPs and whatever (I'm no expert in SEO myself). Like anybody at the top of his field, he's always looking for new innovative techniques to get that edge over the competition.
First I hear back from my friend, he told me that he contacted baddog and that baddog will only converse through some archaic support ticket system. Never by chat or phone or even email. Furthermore, he will not discuss anything unless you purchase a package. With the package you supposedly receive a free one hour SEO consultation and that will be sufficient to get all the sites mapped out and integrated into the network. Seemed strange but oh well, I have no experience with SEO specific hosts. So I said, 'fine, the guy might be a little eccentric, I mean he does wear t-shirts with his own cartoon caricature on them, I would just order his cheapest package and if he can offer any helpful advice on how to set up your SEO network then you can upgrade to the package you really need'.
So my friend ordered and emailed me today a link to the support ticket thread which is just a back and forth over a week and about 20 Q and As with baddog who now wants $500/hr. for the supposedly 'free 1 hour SEO consultation', and is now saying that he can only provide the consultation after month two and that it is only done via the support ticket channel also, not on the phone or chat or whatever. All baddog says in the support thread is basically accusing my friend of trying to get his 'secrets' for free. My friend holds a number of very prominent SEO positions, after doing some research on baddogs own website, he holds no prominent positions that I can find. All my friend wanted was consultation on how to set up the network (he was willing to move 100 of his sites over to this new network, which is a pretty valuable hosting account), but baddog would not give him even 5 minutes of his precious time on the phone, only to belittle him constantly through the support ticket system.
I would love to post the support ticket thread, I will ask my friend's permission. Meanwhile, what did my friend get for signing up with baddog? Here is his latest email to me:
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I can't even tell you how joey they are. I'll put it this way, they tried to pawn off a free report you can get from ibusinesspromoter (you have to have heard of that) and claim it was a $500, custom report. It's one of those "put in your url to see where you rank" programs...Amazing.
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Thanks for embarassing me baddog. If you actually took 5 minutes to talk to my friend and help him set everything up on your servers, you would be sitting on a $300+/month account. Instead you chose to get very confrontational and provacative right from your first contact and just got worse and worse. I guess this fits your argumentative board personality to a tee. I know alot of people (myself included) who are dicks on the boards, but to be so in real live business and you will end up a broke failure with nothing but an old harley, beat wife and apparantly a single t-shirt.
