Hosting Situation Update
- Filed under: Wpdesigner.com
Before I say anything at all, let me admit that I’m ONE BIG SUCKER for making this decision. I’m not very happy about it. For several reasons, I decided to stick with the host that I paid to set up a dedicated server (last week), the same host that I wanted a refund from because I couldn’t get through to their customer service on the weekend. (Granted, their sales department was supposed to be off on the weekend, but customer service shouldn’t be as well.) Despite that, here are my reasons:
- Access problems with current host – About a week ago, I was getting 406 errors and this blog was timing out for me. I took this problem to my current host. They fixed it alright, but for me only. I was told that the firewall blocked my IP for too many login failures.Brian (one of the authors on this blog) also had the same problem. My host couldn’t fix it for Brian. If you’re wondering why he hasn’t been posting, it’s because he can’t see this blog right now. He’s completely blocked off. If Brian is blocked and my current host can’t fix it for him, I wonder how many other readers/users are blocked as well.Whatever the problem is, it seems to be mod_security related. I’m not a tech savvy person so this is purely assumptions based on my research about 406 errors. I was told that the problem was fixed and if Brian continues to get blocked, it would be his machine’s fault.Frankly, I’m not convinced. I don’t believe the problem falls solely on the user’s machine. I’ve been with my current host for several months now and they’ve been absolutely great for me up until this point.Brian and I are the only known cases. However, who knows how many other people have the same problem.
- I paid already so I might as well try. Getting a refund and waiting around to search for another host means I’ll be losing traffic, from people that can’t access the site because of my current host; again, this is what I’m assuming, but my host believes the problem is on the user’s end.
- My HiVelocity account manager called me this morning. I’m glad he did. Otherwise, I would have to go through with the refund and find another host, which would be a big pain in the butt. Usually, I’d prefer to endure that pain to find quality service, but I don’t have that luxury right now.Basically, he explained why there was delay, why I couldn’t get through to customer service and customer service is 24/7, and that my server is going to get set up by tonight. Although I doubt that customer service is 24/7, I have to admit that I didn’t start a support ticket, which is one of the options to reach customer service.I felt good about the conversation and I’m an impatient person. That’s what it took for me to give this host a second chance to impress me with their customer service.
Also, I know that hosting is a thankless job. It’s impossible to provide 100% satisfaction for every client. Most of us don’t thank our hosts when they come through with something, but we sure tend to write thousand-word diatribes when they don’t respond to and resolve all ten support tickets within 24 hours, which would be a ridiculously time consuming and frustrating task.That’s why you’ll rarely read anything bad about web hosts from me and I try not to refer to them by their names if there’s a problem or I’m unhappy with something. Usually, I try to refer to my hosts by their names only when there’s something positive to say.The only host that I have a gripe with and the only exception is iPower or iPowerweb. They suck waffles.A good review site, web hosting choice, top 10 hosting list with rating and reviews.
I know exactly what that’s like, I also have a side business that relay on online sales. 90% of my sales come from my site!
My current host is wonderful, they helped me with a lot of issues from the start. I’m happy with them so far.
But that’s not why I’m leaving a comment, I LOLed when I read your comment about ipowerweb!!! we used to have them too and they never ever answer their phone, we called and were placed on hold for HOURS and no one picked up our call!! We lost money on that host becasue we decided to move away from that non-sense. They DO suck waffles!!
hehee.
I would bet money that both of us could go on for hours about iPowerweb, but let’s spend our time wisely now; now that we’re not with iPowerweb anymore hahaha.
Haven’t actually heard of iPowerweb, but I was a bit bored and put ‘iPowerweb sucks’ into google. There are so many results complaining about them! The first three were: iPowerweb Sucks, iPowerweb Sucks Vol II, and Ipowerweb just plain sucks!! I think many people must share your feelings about them.
I am reading your WP Tutorial now, and ended up on this post. I pay $50/month for a dedicated linux box at rackmounted.com, easy to admin through webmin. No down time in 9 months so far and most issues have been resolved within a couple of hours by Deakin or Andrew.
good luck with yours, and thanks for the contribution to humankind.
Hosting support is the bane of any website. We recently went through similar issues when we were fortunate enough to have a traffic explosion and were held hostage several hours until we had to hack in and get our own files out and relocate our site in the midst of our most busiest time ever.
In other words, I would add Polurnet to the sucking waffles table at breakfast.
At one point, I thought you were with dreamhost?? What made you decide to move from your old host company for dedicated instead of just upgrading your plan?
I was never with DreamHost. I’m currently with BlueFur, which is a great host, take nothing away from them.
I mentioned in the post that Wpdesigner has unresolved access problems. Also, I can only upgrade so many times. BlueFur is not known for dedicated hosting.
And I’m moving to dedicated because my blog is going to grow very quickly from now until the end of August.
I aslo forgot to put this link on my comment on the last post… http://www.liquidweb.com. Once again, I don’t know what you are looking for and if my link will even be any help to you, but I trying to help. And you could always use them in the future.
Thanks Tyler, I appreciate it.
same problem with me small potatos,
I am outgrowing the server.
I just ordered a virtual private server from zone.net for 65$ monthly.
quite a sum, compared to my 6,95$ monthly with dreamhost.
but I do get, believe it or not, 7000 to 15,000 uniques a day and internal server errors are showing up more than anything.
my sites is more often down than brewster last weekend in his fight (boxer).
Jez – It’s tough to give up shared hosting features, especially the oversold resources, isn’t it? Hehe. I have to move on thinking that I’d never be able to use those 2000gb – 3000gb from shared hosting anyway.
Zone.net website looks exceptionally clean and easy to navigate. I hope their service is as good as their site looks.
I just want to let you know that when I’m in the office your website is blocked, I would need a proxy server just to access your site. Our IT dept usually blocked websites such as myspace, youtube and the likes. The thing is, I can access most of the blogsites I visited at home in the office only yours that I cant.
If you are looking for a dedicated webhost I’ve seen a lot of people using mediatemple.
I wish that someone will sponsor your site just like what happened with n-design.
I will keep you posted about the quality of service, if it works out well, I might even post an article or two about them.
I was also convinced by their website, nice, clean, solid and good design.
I had some insane 2000gb traffic per month at dreamhost, never even touched 100
Good to see you got the hosting worked out in the end, more or less. You’re right though, we don’t usually make a big deal of something, whether it be hosting or a product we buy in the story, if it works better than we initially expected it to. But the minute we feel that we’ve been slighted by something, we’ll spend hours typing up a scathing post about it
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Ipowerweb is one of the worst nightmares I have yet run into. If you don’t mind being on hold for 90-120 minutes, don’t mind illegal charges on your credit card, don’t mind children running a company, and don’t mind tech support who don’t offer any technical expertise and don’t offer anything but BAD service, then ipowerweb is for you!
They used to be mildly acceptable. But they have gone from mildly acceptable to an absolute nightmare.
I recently spent about 7-8 days, waiting for a single 5 minutes issue to be taken care of, and after spending some 7-8 days waiting, and roughly 14 hours on hold during all the calls during this time, get this; They inform me that my account is overdue. And they can no longer provide “technical support” until the account is paid up in full.
I explained to them that one of the techs earlier in the day mentioned this, and I told them that I never received a bill from ipowerweb. And would gladly send them a check in the mail, but wouldn’t give them my credit card # because they illegally charged it in the past.
So after 7-8 days of spending 1-2 hours on hold a day, over a simple, yet very critical issue, they cut me off from tech support, and this was a blessing, as I am now, as I write, migrating my files to a new provider.
Ipowerweb is by far the worst company online that I have ever dealt with, and this by a wide margin.
STAY AWAY FROM IPOWERWEB AND DO NOT BE LURED IN BY ALL THEY “CLAIM” TO PROVIDE, because it is all an illusion.
Ipowerweb is by far the worst company on the web, at least of all the companies I am aware of, and I have 4 years of waiting on hold with them under my belt, so I am more than qualified to tell you just how horrible this company is.
Sincerely,
Phil Jayhan
Admin
http://www.letsrollforums.com
Let me tell you a little something about ipowerweb. I power web is based out of phoenix Arizona. They have 3 companies before the merger with endurance corp. The 3 are ipowerweb, startlogic and dot 5 hosting. All three companies have better business bureau complaints up the Wahoo! Just recently 3 on your side which is a new station in phoenix Arizona went over to the ipower and startlogic head quarters because there was a huge complaint against startlogic web design. You can view the article here http://www.azfamily.com/…. Ipower, startlogic and dot 5 hosting don’t design websites. They out source to a company called design var in California. So if you buy a website lets say at 600 dollars. Ipower, startlogic and dot 5 keep 300 and design var keeps 300.00. So basically your web design is only $300.00 and you paid $600.00 (and it takes 2 years to get your site finished)
They recently started doing website optimization and search engine optimization. They do very basic stuff. All they do is meta tags that’s it. I don’t think you want to spend 2 to 4 thousand just on keywords. Im sure you can Google all kinds of complaints about their seo.
Getting back to endurance international. Endurance international is a company that buys hosting companies that are basically going out of business. They have biz land, powweb, a bunch others and now the lucky 3, ipower, startlogic and dot 5. Im sure endurance didn’t do enough research on the 3 companies. Good luck with that endurance.
Be careful who you choose for internet services because it could result in a loss of money and a pain on your butt. Always look at review sites and research.
The Host Review Guy
At first I thought my issues with Bluefur and Gary Jones were isolated until I started to check the internet and see that other people had very similar issues with Bluefur.
I decided to move to another hosting service, my error was being honest and letting Bluefur know that I was not happy with their service and had asked Gary Jones to let me know when my services were paid up to. Within hours my reseller package was terminated and access to my client sites were denied. To make matters worse 2 of the domains registered on my behalf by Gary Jones were registered incorrectly and now I do not have access to make the needed changes to the DNS. Gary Jones and Bluefur have not responded to any requests to provide access or to make the changes to the registration. So before choosing a company to host your business, check them out carefully or you just may have a big Blue headache on your hands.
Morris please have your lawyer contact us.
Your continued harassment of our staff and violent threats are not acceptable. You violated our TOS and as our many emails have explained you are not wanted as a customer.
Here’s an email I sent to Polurnet 4 times before I got a response. “This is my 4th attempt at sending this email; however no response from the otherwise prompt customer service Polurnet has given me in the past. If billing isn’t the department which i should send this information, then please inform me of what direction to take to resolve this issue.
I have noticed my account has been suspended despite the invoice stating that I would have web space retained from Feb. 14th, 2008 to Aug. 14th, 2008 as stated on Invoice 10172; however it has been suspended 2 days prior to when it should have expired i.e 3 days of downtime. I understand you have financial obligations of your own however based upon the previous invoice my site should be up until 14th. Nevertheless I would rather my billing for shared hosting be reverted to the monthly rate of $3.89.
Numerous times I have attempted to log into my account and I constantly have to reset my password to a string of alphanumeric characters; at times even then I can’t log in. There’s no “log in” hyper link on Polurnet’s site, which makes for a cumbersome experience when trying to navigate for customer service. The inaccessibility of the site means I can’t “change” the naming of my password to my choosing nor can I change my web hosting plan when needed.
I have sent a copy to the billing, sales, support departments, in addition to the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in hopes of getting this matter settled. However i am no longer inclined to use the 6 month billing cycle for your services only monthly. If this can’t be settled then I am no longer concerned with using Polurnet’s services in any context.”
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Here is the 1st reply to my email. Take note the representative wrote a 4-paragraph response and never addressed the issue I clearly stated and went on to further insult me.
“This is the first email we have received from you, we don’t have any other tickets regarding this on file from any of our departments. I’m also not sure why you’re emailing the “Canadian Chamber of Commerce”, this is the first time I’ve heard any user trying to do this without trying to email us first from an alternate email address or using our other contact options.
We always require payment in advance of the renewal date, this is the same policy as when you signed up. If you did not pay for a renewal when the invoice was due, then your account gets suspended after numerous warning emails sent to you. Ignoring them without contacting us can lead to the suspension of your account by our system automatically.
You didn’t include your account information for us to change the billing cycle, so let us know these details. Moreover, I’m not sure why you’re looking for a control panel link, since it is mentioned in the Welcome Email you received. There’s no way for us to include such a link either, since we have dozens of different servers, and there is no uniform link for this. There is also no need to change your password unless you explicitly want to.
Finally, I’m also not sure where you’re going for customer service; it’s clearly visible on our main website under the Support link, and all the options to contact us are listed. I suggest reading our Welcome Email again since it appears you have overlooked much of the information we provided you to contact us directly and to access your account.
Regards, Richard P., Administrative Representative, PolurNET Communications”
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“I’m really not sure why you sent 4 different emails within the span of a few hours to our billing department, without even waiting for a response, then stating you never received one. Did you read our support pages that replies are made within 12-24 hours? We can reply earlier, but it really makes no sense at all to send multiple messages within hours of each other, then accuse us of not replying. Anyway, this has been responded to on the helpdesk already by another technician
Regards, Brian S., PolurNET Communications”
If another technician already responded to the issue, what is the point of Brian S. taking the time to insult me? Mind you Brian didn’t address the issue at hand nor absorbed what I was trying to convey to him. I decided to choose Polurnet web hosting services b/c of favorable opinions from consumer review boards. I have dealt with them for so long b/c of the same reason. When questionable dismissive customer service was rendered I just pushed it to the side as an isolated incident. I am far from stupid as their email responses would suggest. Even if I was a misinformed customer there is no reason under any circumstances to treat a long-term paying customer so disrespectfully. I wouldn’t be surprised if they acted out vindictively, if they were to see this message. I guess you get what you pay for. Their site has usability issues and huge customer service issues which most message boards mysteriously don’t suggest. I would suggest paying more money for a reputable company or going local for web hosting.