tombempty, a prominant user of sitepoint, made a few great points about why Homestead sucks:

Hello All:
I was hired to create a website for someone recently and I just needed a post on this forum as to why this service called "HomeStead" sucks so bad.

I am going to list the reasons and let it just be......to be continued that if anyone would like to contribute go for it. 

If there are enough, I might make a site called, whyhomesteadsucks.com just for kicks.

1. They use a propriety language that only the people at HomeStead know called SSML. (not the voice over IP language) with little or no instruction on this language leaving you to read it all in thier handy 40 chapter manual.

2. Overpriced - Paying thier design team $100 a pop to do some simple tasks to the site that you already pay $89 for hosting for is outrageous.

3. The back room administrator is riddled with JS errors when it opens from time to time. With that happening, the site does not update properly.

4. Slow bandwidth makes uploading images a death march. You wonder why you are sitting there after a while. Like oh right, i was uploading ONE IMAGE AT A TIME......sheesh..

5. Support..... HA! go ahead....call that 1-800 # they have after sign up. You will find very quickly that you know more than them 99% of the time.

Well not as many as I thought but thanks for letting me vent and please add to the list if you have experienced this crappy service.

CNet customers share the truth behind Homestead's horrible product:

MLindsay12 says,

While the website was only $8 a month, the interface used to design was absolutely absurd. First of all, to access all "features," you were required to download some sort of program that looks (and acts!) like it belongs in Windows 98. In addition, this ridiculous program is not Mac compatible, which further proves that your company is not "with the times." What really did it in for me was that the memory space available gave me nothing to work with! Add in a few mp3 files and a image "slider," and you're over your limit exponentially. If your company wants to stay on the market as a viable website host, you really need to address the basics of what it means to be "user friendly."

MelKirkpatrick says,

Avoid at all costs. It's too late for me, but save yourselves. Much better, much cheaper options out there. Tons of them. HORRIFYINGLY, jaw-droppingly, soul-crushingly bad customer service. Not even bad customer service. I think non-existent is closer to the truth. So bad that I went out of my way to create this account so I could write this review, something I have NEVER done for any company ever in my 43 years. This is literally the first time I have experienced something so awful that I felt the need, the drive, to warn others.

Check out why SiteBuilderReport struggled to even justify 2 stars in its review of Homestead.

Homestead sucks. Why? That's a good question. We don't know why they choose to suck so bad. We just know they do.

As customers of Homestead, we suffered from horrible customer service, business-crippling email failures, non-responsive web building software, and mind-numbing compliance issues.

Every time we try to contact Homestead, we're on hold at least 25 minutes. Not 1 minute. Not 5 minutes. Not 10 minutes. Not 20 minutes. Twenty-five freaking minutes! We just learned to put the phone receiver down and check it every 5 minutes or so. Shameful!

Earlier this year, Homestead switched their email hosting service on all their customers. We were given no warning. We only found out after all of our emails failed to respond. Customers started complaining. Vendors were unable to contact us. And sales were negatively affected by our inability to communicate with our market. We were without email for...wait for it...our email was down for...you're not going to believe this...Homestead's email service was down for...OVER TWO WEEKS!

Why would anyone in their right mind continue using such a horrible solution? Great question. We've asked ourselves that many times. The problem (for us) is their high switching costs. You spend hundreds of hours fighting their unresponsive website building software to create your website. But Homestead will not give you access to the CSS (website code). So you can't take the website with you when you leave. You're kind of forced to stay with them after you build their site. It sucks.