MainStreetHost.com
Reviews and Complaints

We are a result driven company with over 6 years of experience making professional website, doing SEO & Optimizing and powerful designs. Irrespective of the size of a project, from an early stage, we have gone all out to deliver quality work keeping results paramount. We always use latest and best methods and technology to optimize and build websites. We create personalized strategies and take a dedicated hands on approach to each project that we work on. And we deliver exceptional results with 100 % client's satisfaction every time!

On 12/29/15 Sterling Clark a sales rep in Las Vegas, Nevada called me for the third time representing Main Street Host.com. I had told him repeatedly that I was not currently interested or ready to make any decisions on his pitch and that I am not comfortable with cold calls so if I decide to use his services after I have time to research my options then he would hear from me. Instead, he followed up again to let me know about a "special discount" of $10 for my website diagnostic. He bragged about how the company was listed organically on the first page of google searches under the term "search engine optimization company" or "website marketing company" but could not identify any third party industry websites that endorse Main Street Host nor any media coverage seeking out their expertise. When I conducted a industry search of my own I encountered this very disturbing article about Main Street Host. http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2296366/fake-online-reviews-cost-19-companies-usd350-000# Sterling also did not mention any third party sites where I could locate rave reviews about the company but when I searched for company reviews I discovered many sites with COUNTLESS complaints and not a SINGLE positive one nor a response from the company. Sterling said they use paypal to process credit cards and he kept asking me if I was ready to purchase the diagnostic. I declined and told him there were many reasons I was not interested at this time especially due to the bad reviews and that he should not call me again. He dismissed all the bad reviews as a normal part of doing business with thousands of clients. I have thousands of clients and I have less than 10 bad reviews. I could not locate any glowing positive third party reviews about them. Follow your gut instincts and do your homework.

Buyer Beware! Mainstreethost.com claims to be an SEO Marketing Company. HA They gladly took our money, but when it came to doing anything for us, they creatively tried to get US to do all the work for them. They typically waited until the end of the month to pretend to do any work for us and actually finished about 1/3 of what they promised to do in 90 days what they were supposed to do in 30 days. Part of the deal was to write 2 Blogs per month. With no research on the topics that WE had to give them (no creativity on their part), they submitted blogs that looked like a C- high school student had written. We ultimately had to rewrite the blogs, but received no returned compensation for our work. The rest of the contracted work was never completed. All we got was a great deal of back peddling and excuses. They were fired before they even got to 3 months. At $2K per month...that was an expense lesson. I strongly suggest you look elsewhere. They will promise you the world and waste your time and money.

These "people" are experienced thieves. We have spent over $6000.00 to get a web site developed by them and instead got a giant headache. They have no clue how to construct an e-commerce site. They have tried using Volusion but that was too difficult for them so they switched to CS-Cart and the result is not much better. These thieves are very combative if you question their results and inexperience at accomplishing anything. When we decided to switch servers during the site construction (because they have rip-off prices to host sites) then Mainstreet-predator-looking-for-a-host.com dropped any contractual commitment they had with us declaring that we "abandoned "them when the reverse is true. How they can remain in business with their "take the money and run" attitude is a mystery. The next stop for us is Better Business Bureau to try to force these thieving clowns to refund some of our money back for a "job NOT well done."

We were recently contacted by curtis martin of mainstreethost.com. He called us to tell us how he could get our website up to the number one spot on search engines. He offered a web analysis and then a phone consult regarding the results for $10. We decided to try it out. The report was a joke and trying to get the phone consult even worse. Curtis would set up a time and then never call me. After a couple of weeks i finally got a chance to speak to him. At that time he offered me all kinds of things he could do to improve our search results for only $800. Wow, this sounds great i thought, however knowing that there are too many bad seo companies out there, i decided to check them out first and am i glad i did! There are 100's of complaints and bad reviews out there on this company. Anyway curtis sent me a proposal and then called a couple of days later. When he asked if we were ready to pay the money and get started i told him we didn't have $800 in our budget for this at this time (Didn't want to get into an argument with him like so many have according to all the complaints) . He then told me that i was stupid, the owners of our company were stupid and what kind of idiots spend a bunch of money on a website but then don't spend money on getting that website in better rankings etc. I politely told him we still had to decline at this time. Curtis then went on to further insult us and then like only an idiot would do, he says if we ever change our mind to give him a call - seriously curt? Why would we call you or your company after reading the reviews and then you confirming we were right to not do business with you or your company with the way you treated us? Oh and to top it off he then says that if we do call him we won't get a deal offered like $800 again, next time it will be $4500. All i can say is stay away from main street host! As far as i am concerned all the reviews and complaints about them are true! They are rude obnoxious crooks!

I paid $3000 to mainstreethosting to design and enhance it in Apr.2010.
I have only a few calls or email in this pass 8 month from potential customer.

MSH called me and offered a statistical analysis of my site for $19.95 (or thereabouts). Geve them my credit card, got the report. Very interesting. They called me back to sell me their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) service. Long story short...sales rep was really good. I viewed her computer screen as she showed me sites they have optimized (see later info on this) and how their clients ranked on Page 1 of Google over and over. Showed me LOTS of "proof" of their efficacy in getting a site to the top of the heap in Google. I fell for it, agreed to their service, she charged my card BEFORE sending me the contract (which was in direct conflict with NUMEROUS things she had VERBALLY promised they would do). $3300. Ouch. But I figured, what the heck, these guys do great work...duh. After one week of working with two different reps (one creating Facebook and Twitter business pages and one doing the SEO work on my site) I found the following: (by the way, I do my own web designs, everything except the most complex special programming needed for some of my offerings). FIRST: the Facebook/Twitter stuff...she was distorting the images I sent to be used (putting landscape images into portrait shapes), created dead end pages (you go there, then cannot get out!), created all sorts of problematic links that did not work properly...refused to use the images I had sent her, instead used images she pulled off my site (she did not want to use the images of my most popular products!). A week of nitemarish back and forth. MEANWHILE the SEO gal started on my site. I had been asked to send in search engine keywords/phrases for my site, and exterior links. I had done so. (Tho the contract had indicated THEY would do research to determine the best keywords, etc...but I had my stats reports from my site, so used that information plus info gleaned from competitors' metatags and keywords). She totally ignored my list, created REALLY STRANGE keywords that had nothing to do with the products sold. Keywords using the small town where I have my home based business, for product sold nationally on the web. When I pointed out that NO ONE would ever google "Pittsburg Decals" because it MADE NO SENSE...she got angry. Also, she created really odd links at the bottom of the page in a navigation bar (I had been told by the sales rep that Google IGNORES navigation bar links and wants internal site links to come from keywords/phrases IN THE BODY OF THE TEXT ON THE SITE. I was told the SEO person would REWRITE the pages to incorporate those links. Did not happen.) Anyhow, the link for PITTSBURG USDOT NUMBERS" went to my page which showed the FONTS that were available...huh? (I had a page that had information about USDOT numbers...but she ignored that!) Then she DEACTIVATED some of the elements on my website used by customers/prospects to CONTACT ME...anyhow, she had done all that, messing up my LIVE site! She created a horrible "LINKS PAGE"... ignored all the links I had sent that were totally related to the business/industry I serve, and instead slapped on some totally irrelevant links. When I checked those links, I found one was a site that apparently had lost its contract for the site name, and was filled with DVDs and books on how to commit suicide! I was furious. I immediately contacted her with questions about what the heck she was doing. She blamed it on a new trainee. I asked her to revert the site to the original status and then first run any proposed changes in keywords or online text by me first, for my approval. (Hey, I am not an idiot...html code is pretty easy to read!) When I pointed out all the discrepancies between the WRITTEN contract and what was going on, she did not respond. The next day (by this time it had been a week, and I had spent easily 10 hours trying to correct/undo the mess that these two "experts" were creating) the "Social Networking" expert decided to QUIT and turned over the Facebook and Twitter duties (which she was refusing to do what was in the contract) to the SEO person. The following business day, the SEO expert reverted everything on my site (including the stuff that I had corrected) back to its original status, pre- Mainstreethost. The Facebook and Twitter stuff disappeared along with it (I did not have an address for that, just the link on the website, so I could not find it. I have searched and it seems to be gone...not sure WHICH expert deleted those elements...I had spent HOURS fixing the mess that they had made to make the sites work!) So I am told a new SENIOR SEO Expert would handle my stuff. Several days later, he contacts me. I figure, OK, maybe now I get someone who is better at this. WRONG. I had told him to just send me the changes he wanted to make. He asked which three pages (Verbally I was told the ENTIRE SITE would be CLEANED UP and optimized for the best ranking with Google...the written contract only indicated 3 pages would be optimized, but also included that they would CREATE a page SPECIFIC for SEO ranking...again, their employees were refusing to honor that part of the contract). Anyhow, the wonderful SENIOR EXPERT did a horrible job, again, manufacturing strange - VERY STRANGE - keyphrases, and then told me that one of the three pages I had chosen to be done COULD NOT BE OPTIMIZED because it is an e-commerce page. The only pages he can optimize are my "About us" page, and my FAQs page, and the index. Well, he was not totally sure about the index, as it is somewhat admin-generated as well. Hello? I called him, and explained that my site is indeed an e-commerce site but it is built on TEMPLATES, which are the FOUNDATION for every page. And those TEMPLATES can indeed be optimized, because they are PAGE FORMATS. His response was that he does not do web design and does not understand the use of templates, so he cannot do any SEO work on a site that has e-commerce generated pages. WHAT THE #!%$&*! Are you kidding me? SEO can not be done on e-commerce sites? I am sure Amazon would love to hear that! And if you do NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT WEB DESIGN...how the heck can you call yourself a SENIOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION SPECIALIST? That was the final straw. I called the credit card company (it had only been about 7 days) and canceled/disputed the charge, explaining that I had been scammed. They reversed the charge, saying that MSH had 45 days to dispute the reversal. I waited...after 60 days, I received a FEDEX from the credit card company saying that he had disputed the reversal, and if they had not heard back from me by THE NEXT DAY, the charge would be reapplied. I received this at 4:30 pm, had until midnite to get my rebuttal in to them. I faxed over multiple pages...copies of emails, copies of their written contract and notes on what they refused to honor in the written contract, a letter outlining the main issues. By the way...all those sites they had shown me...guess what. On MY computer, when I put in the EXACT SEARCH TERMS they used on Google, those sites are not on the first 10 pages, much less page 1. I contacted one site, where she had spent a LOT of time showing me all the fancy stuff they had done on that site, and with the facebook business account...and the owner emailed me back and told me he has NEVER USED MAINSTREETHOST and was really angry that they were showing "his website" (actually, they had rearranged some of the stuff on his site, created their own version of his index page, added facebook and twitter links, internal links, etc...all totally bogus). I am convinced that they had created their own "Google" pages to show "their customers" on page one (one of those customers wrote back to me that he had only been with them a couple months, and was surprised that they were using him as a reference for their success!) When I went to their customer's real sites online, and checked the VIEW SOURCE, I found that they had used really poor keywords, misspelled keywords, non related keywords in the metatags. I am sure those customers just never bothered to check the work being done, thinking it would be too complicated. Anyhow, I sent in my fax, the credit card co. again credited my acct., and now they are AGAIN allowing MainStreetHost 45 days to refute the rebuttal. I have dozens more pages of stuff I can send...emails from the MSH service reps showing their complete lack of understanding and refusal to honor the
WRITTEN contract, emails from other customers of MSH saying that the company ripped them off, the BBB report showing they get a D+ rating. THEY are the ones who TOOK AWAY all the work that I had put into the site when they were doing their SEO changes...they reverted the site to pre-MSH condition, and now they want $3300. Does that make sense to anyone?

I was charged $1, 200 for website optimization. I was told my website would appear on the first page of major search engines. This did not come close to happening.

When I repeatedly brought my concerns to Mainstreethost, in writing, they were not addressed. I was told it would take months, at my cost.After 6 weeks I could not find any value to their service.

The company did not perform as promised. My website is not appearing anywhere near the top of the search engines, let alone the first page. Value has not been added, and this is something that can be measured.

Keyword Phrasing Optimization – NO OF PAGES: 8 - The company asked me for keywords instead of researching them for optimization

Links Management – Not Done
I already had a links page. They added a new one (?) and Added COMPETITORS and not relevant links such as an awning manufacturer from NH, distracting people from VALID links. I later found out they simply added random customers of Mainstreethost to my page

Professionally Written Page Content NOT DONE

Basic Facebook Management Package – Done without value. They duplicated my current site. Any 10 year old can make a Facebook page, I expected some value.

I received a call from Main Street Host telling me they would guarantee our company high ratings and even 1st page placement on the search engines for our Bed and Breakfast. They called me 3 times and finally convinced me they had the integrity and ability to help me build my business. They charged me

$5, 000 to do this, and told me within 6-8 months I would see a huge difference in our business. They were very professional and business like,

so I believed them. A year later, with no returning my phone calls about us not seeing any changes, and trying to talk to a supervisor, I gave up.

I am still paying off the credit card and have seen NO results.

They are unprofessional and untrustworthy. I was trying to transfer a clients site and Sam who i believe is the only one working there with a receptionist... probably out of his garage [protected] #2023 would give us the story of them being a big company and we need to sign a fax that never gets to the client. he a a reseller of domains at wildwest and he is not co operating with the transfer of the domain as well. we were ready for this and we copied the clients site the hard way. we have also started a force domain transfer to Godaddy. Im sure there are a lot of other people that have complaints with MainStreetHost.com "Main Street Host "

I guess he didn't know he was dealing with professionals that would help a small business man.