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RegisterFly
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Date Submitted :
May 15th, 2007
Length of time hosted by this company :
1 - 3 years
Overall Rating :
1 out of 5
Reliability :
1 out of 5
Support :
1 out of 5
Pricing :
3 out of 5
Verdict :
Having watched the total meltdown of this registrar and hosting provider, I should have seen it coming. My email service through them was poor at best, with horrible response time and high levels of downtime. My emails were often blocked due to server blacklisting. Ultimately, my server dies after their tech support disappeared.
Please don't get suckered into this low cost service. You will regret it.
In a word "awful". I've been a customer of Ipowerweb for 4 years. In the beginning it was great. Then I started to have problems where the support staff doesn't give clear cut answers. They never, ever notify customers when they're bringing the servers down for maintenance, etc. More recently, my website was down for 84+ hours which translates into 4 days. I never got a straight answer why I couldn't get to my website. The so called "live chat" is nothing more then a bot. I had to hunt around on the net to message boards to find out what was going on. It was allegedly a migration move that caused a lack of service. I haven't received an apology or offered any type of compensation for the loss of significant business hours. Ipowerweb doesn't give a rats butt about their customers or loss of business effected by servers put offline. My advice - find another host in a different part of town.
iPower has arguably the worst user support I've ever dealt with, and experiences downtime deep into the realm of unreasonable. The price you pay for your package is only mediocre, and can be matched by many, many other hosts out there with much better records.
Our baseball league has hosted our website on iPower for a number of years, but the recent experiences we've had with them are simply obscene.
On Saturday, May 6 the website went dark. No big deal, that happens all the time. I sent a request to tech support to bring it back up. I got back a canned response stating that "This is a known issue related to a server move. The problem should be resolved in 24 hours." Twenty-four hours came and passed with no resolution, so I sent another problem ticket. Same response. Another twenty four hours, and another problem ticket. Same response.
It was Friday May 11 before our site came back up again, and that lasted for all of 24 hours. By Saturday, the site was back down again; this time with a 404 error.
Any guess what the response was to my tech support request?
I would never, ever recommend iPower to even my worst enemy based on their horrific downtime and their canned, meaningless tech support responses.
My work email has been down for 3 days (no email all email to me being rejected), in addition it has been down 4 times in the last 6 months for hours at a time. Support does little more than provide canned responses. It is worthwhile if you count on your email for business or would have a problem being without it for what could be days, then find a different provider
IPowerWeb upgraded their servers without informing its customers in advance. Our web site has been down for at least as early as May 9. Today is May 14. My inquiry e-mail to the company's tech support on May 12 has gone unanswered. After 1 hour of waiting on the phone, the tech support answered my call and said the service would be up in 1 hour. That is not the case. I have been waiting for another hour on the phone trying to contact the tech support once more to let them know that they had failed to deliver service again.
My problems began 10 days ago. Ipowerweb downloaded 145 emails which had previously been deleted from the server...then no further email service, no web site, no support; no nothing. Has cost me unknown business and aggravation. Finally am switching to a host which has much larger base and exposure.
I powerweb constantly does maintenance that can take days without notifying us. I'm a reseller and have many, many sites at Ipowerweb and will take them all away. I can't take the DOWNTIME anymore.
The last couple of weeks, Ipowerweb has been migrating all of their cpanel sites to vdeck servers. DOwntime averages Fri-Weds: imagine your site down and no email during that time. This is happening to all of my sites.
This is the second time this year that my email has been down for several days. This is what my customers see when the attempt to email me: PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 553 sorry, mailbox unavailable (#4.7.1). I've contacted support 3 times (with at least a 30+ minute wait) only to get some variation on "we're working on it". The last support rep told me it will be another 24 hours. This is really bad and hard to imagine why Ipowerweb would think this to be an acceptable business practice. Come on Ipowerweb, take a little pride in your work!
Recommendations for a reliable web host are welcome.
i have been with ipower for a wile now and i have found there customer service very good so far. in comparison to what some of my friends get with the hosts it is outstanding.
they also offer domain names at the cheapest prices i have seen around.
over all they are a very good host and i will definitly be sticking with them.
I was recently contracted as a system administrator for a business person with two websites hosted at ipower web.
The first thing that struck me was how bad the vdeck control panel is. Compared to a solution like cpanel it is very limited and many obvious features are missing or disabled.
Two examples:
* In the file manager there is no modification timestamp for each file so no way of determining when the file was last modified.
* Each database must be backed up and accessed individually. There is no way to backup all databases at once, or log into phpMyAdmin and switch between databases easily.
The control panel was bad enough but the actual hosting service and support turned out to be much worse.
One of the websites we were running on ipowerweb was experiencing for rapid growth - from 100 to 1000 visitors per day.
That's not much traffic compared to many websites and yet it was more than enough for ipowerweb's mysql databases to start corrupting on a regular basis - at least once every 24 hours.
Mysql database tables would start to generate massive overhead and suddenly all the websites would crash.
When it first happened I contacted support who denied anything was wrong at their end - it was our software. Yeah, right.
In the end I figured out that I had to reset the permissions for each database user and then I had to log into phpMyAdmin for each of the 20 databases (having to look up the username & password for each one grrrr!), check all the tables and repair them. Each time I repaired a table we would experience data loss.
After a few days I recommended we dump ipowerweb in favour of our own dedicated server for these projects.
I then tried to back up our website to move it across to the server.
There was 2.1 gigabytes of data to move so I absolutely did not want to do it via FTP. So I tired to use the "site backup" function.
Only it didn't work - the backup would start but never finish. And it took 5 days of constantly chatting and phoning technical support to get any action.
I'd complain to technical support only to be told that the "level 2 tech support" were right on top of it. They would then reset the backup but not fix the problem - so as soon as I started the backup again it would freeze once more.
Eventually on the 5th day I managed to beg the support person I was chatting to ask a tech person to do a manual tar backup for me.
I wasted no time at all getting that backup copied to our new server.
From there I had to manually, one at a time, log into phpMyAdmin for each database, export and save the data, before moving to the new server. A very time consuming and frustrating process.
With all our data moved we switched the DNS to point to our new server and held our breath.
It worked perfectly. The database errors disappeared completely. The websites performed much, much better.
The difference is incredible.
Ipowerweb was an unexpected and truly horrible experience to deal with. Their support was bordering on non-existant and to see such bad database corruption occurring on such a small volume of traffic was disgusting.
What's the point of offering hosting services to customers if your servers corrupt customer data regularly and then blame it on the customer?
Stay away from Ipowerweb unless they truly change the way they operate.
I have two websites with iPowerWeb. Both sites have been down for 6 days. It took 5 days for them to restore email on one of the domains. When I ask them when it will be back up all they can say is that they are working on it. Obviously they don't have backup servers or the sites would have been up by now. As I write this I am waiting for them to answer their online Live Chat service(5 minutes and counting). I have had it with their service.
Do not host a ecommerce site with them, if you have issues it will NEVER get resolved!!! I have been FIGHTING for almost 2 weeks now at a loss of $3k - $5k per day, and yet they have NO sense of urgancy to get anything resolved. I have to check with them to see if there is a update. Be Beware if you thing they are reliable they are not!! we will proablaby be out about 50K by the time this is fixed, I should of spent that on a lawyer.
Hosting performance is extremely quick compared to my last hosting company. The Red Network Hosting Company has a quality service for a quality price. The Red Network Hosting Company seems to market towards small businesses, like my self.
My experience with iPOWERWEB has been good. I have several domains with them at the present.
Their support, for me, has been terrific. Hold times can be a pain now and then, but for the most part they get to me within 10 minutes and their techs are pretty good at figuring out the issue.
Pricing is very competitive, and I'm happy with it.
Reliability -- a handful of times over the last 5 years I've been with them, my site(s) were down. Usually, they were unaware of the issue and were able to correct it on their end.
I would, and have, recommended it to others.
ps.. their reporting tools are terrific. they need to fix a bug in their awstats so i can see international visitors, but other than that i really like their vdeck application.
OK this has to be the best host I have come across. In the past 2 years, I have gone through 5 hosting companies due to unreliable servers. With these guys, they provide 100% uptime by placing your site onto 2 different servers within 2 data centers. When the primary server goes down, the backup takee over. I am a reseller with them and they have bent over backwards to assist me. With my prior host I was on a VPS and now I am on just a shared server and my sites and WHM/CPanel are way faster... Check them out. I am still in shock on how great their service is.
Hosted web site without too many problems. They had problems with FrontPage Extensions and had a lot of problems with email. Small company with only a couple tech support people. When I called several times about email problems I was told for the price I should not expect tech support. You should expect LESS from this company. I have now moved to a reliable company.
This hoster is not very reliable. Problems with mails not coming in. Hangin MySQL databases. ODBC driver that is not working correctly. Slow ASP.NET app performance. Lately they moved to better servers but since that time replies to issues is very bad. With luck you get an answer within a week (or 2) and with no luck you never hear a thing.
If the things you pay for really work, the price is very reasonable.
Ipowerweb is a wonderful provider if you never have a problem on one of their servers.
We are packing up to move away from ipowerweb after 4 years on their shared hosting 'pro plan'. We spent the better part of four weeks with severe database problems. The problem was finally solved by moving us to another server, at no cost. Unfortunately, in the 3+ weeks that it took to finally convince someone at ipower to look into our problem our site traffic dropped almost 40%!
For anyone who prepaid and is hesitant to move away from ipowerweb for that reason, their one saving grace may be the fact that they will refund you the unused portion of your prepaid balance.
If you are ever on with a chat agent or live agent and you hear the words, '...be assured we are...' That means they don't have a clue what the problem is and you should just go away and stop bothering them.
Nothing but the best you could expect from any hosting company. Support is always available, with patience,understanding,and intellegence. This outfit really knows what they are doing. They supply the kind of affordable service that anyone would appreciate.,that's why we have been a steady, satisfied customer for more than 10 years.
A++++ hosting.
I've had numerous hosting companies over the years this is on par with my private servers I've had.
May not get the crazy Dream Host space but at least it stays up and the customer service is awsome.
I had some apps updated for my plan with in hours
While receiving answers from tech support was always fast - not always very good. if the site needed to be restarted fixes often came quickly - if there was a database or network issue - sometimes waited days. It is sad to know their are companies out there that take so little pride in products they sell.
Any problem that I've had was immmediately dealt with by the support, the site has been down for more than a few minutes maybe twice in two years, and that was for maintenance. The site is always improving their plans, adding more features. I noticed that the same plan I was under had been upgraded for new customers, brought this to their attention, and I was upgraded to 10x my space and 2x my bandwidth for FREE. And the download speed is amazing. I can regularly pull down about 1.5 megs a second, and sometimes more just from a plain old cable connection. And the site tends to leave me alone, I don't get constant spam emails, only a few every few months about maintenance, so I can just go about my business without being bothered. I definitely recommend Vistapages any time my friends are looking for hosting, I even got one of them to sign up and he loves it! Another person is planning on switching as soon as their current hosting expires. It's not the cheapest, but I think $7 a month is a great price for the speed, reliabiliy, and support of this great website.
DomainDiscover is expensive, but their servers work and the customer support is generally very good. I had the opportunity to compare their service at the same time 1and1's servers were shutting down my business because of some dns issue with 1and1 nameservers.
I started with a basic package with iPowerweb a few years back. For what I ordered, I believe it was a good deal: A basic package with good features at a fair price. They have their own proprietary interface, vDeck, which was relatively easy to use, and had a decent feature set.
Over the years, I had a few issues. First, they failed to notify me at renewal time to renew my domain. They waited till it was well past due, at which point they flipped the switch off. I contacted them immediately, and they were helpful enough in restoring my domain, if and only if, I would renew for a five year period. I don't like being held for ransom, but I had no choice at that point. I had a backup of all my webfiles, but not of all my email accounts. So I renewed it. Since then I have had a number of small issues. Nothing major, or catastrophic, other than when some nut hacked my home page, and put up an advertisement for his Church Youth Group up on my page. I found it disturbingly ironic. But the little support issues received litte to no real support. Just a generic cut-and-paste answer, which never directly applied to my problem. I pretty much learned to live with these problems, until I had a big mail disappearing problem, which they just gave me the response 'It's not on our side', and got the brush-off. At that point I ended up changing webhosts, as I could not get the problem resolved. Even when I still had almost 4 years of paid hosting left.
I think this was a good company, but has deteriorated, as they have oversold their hosting, and their support has gone down accordingly. Sorry to see it happen.
I used Ipower to set up a web site for my Mother. It worked fine for about a month. Then the email was out of order and I called a tech. The tech reset something and the site crashed. I have called about 12 techs since then and not one has any idea of what to do. I don't think they are trained to know their product. We have been down over a week now don't know what to do. Everyday I call with long waits to reach a tech. Their support is bad and obviously their product is inferior or it would work. I cannot recommend them.
We provide corporate and non-profit web development. We have 8 accounts with ipowerweb. Their service has been tolerable however requiring troubleshooting on one of the accounts each week. Last Saturday they must have experienced a serious event. We have been unable to upload files since Sat afternoon (4 days ago) on our prime account. This coincided with our launch of HD production services. Very bad timing. We are now 4 days into the lack of access. Customer service assures us the problem is being handled by their Tech2s and has been given the highest priority. I contacted the ipowerweb administrative offices and left a message for the CEO Thomas Gorny. No return call. I asked the Live Chat customer service to provide a reason for the problem... Response: "the problem is being handled by their Tech2s and has been given the highest priority." Will you please forward my concerns to a Tech manager ... Response: "the problem is being handled by their Tech2s and has been given the highest priority." I have contacted Thomas Gorny's office leaving a message with Alice, would you please forward a copy of this message to his office? ... Response: "the problem is being handled by their Tech2s and has been given the highest priority." Is this an isolated problem, or a system wide ipowerweb failure? ... Response: "the problem is being handled by their Tech2s and has been given the highest priority." Obviously you're stuck with the company line. ... Response: "the problem is being handled by their Tech2s and has been given the highest priority."
We will begin migrating our accounts to another provider. What a waste of time and effort!
The worse webhost in the world is Registerfly! They will steal and sell your domain names. They have the worst customer service in the world. Don't trust this company or the owners Kevin Medina or John Narusewicz, these guys are nothing but thieves!
If anyone that is going to build a website, I can tell you from experience to stay away from the following web hosting companies.
Awesome reliability, offers very helpful online control panel for sites, great customer service with people who actually know what they're talking about. And come on, how many hosting companies do you know of that offer a starving artist discount? :D
Update: I have been fighting with Ipowerweb over the refund they promise if you cancel. I paid a year in advance for a VPS system and my review of it is below, horrible!
But when I went to cancel they are now saying they are keeping my money, its outside the range in which I can chargeback ( THEIR WORDS! ) and they are right, nothing I can do.
Its suppose to be a refund of any months I dont use. Instead they are keeping 5 months at 30 bucks a month (just because they can).
This is by far the worst hosting company I have ever worked with and I have worked with many.
I changed from Canaca to Priority Colo after my ISP started blocking external connections on port 25 and were not knowledgable enough to understand the idea of using an alternate.
After several other disasters with Canaca, Priority Colo was a breath of fresh air.
First they're located in the building of TORIX (Toronto Internet Exchange). It's purely Canadian.
Support is ace. They notify you well in advance of any maintenance activities that would impact you. They get back to you by email promptly and with DETAIL. I've never had to phone them because email support was so prompt. They know what they are DOING.
Pricing is realistic. Too many companies either overcharge "for quality" or oversell their bandwidth (they put hidden limits on you for example for daily transfers, even if you haven't exceeded your monthly quotas).
In 15 months they have not gone down once in an unplanned crash. I wish I could say that about previous hosts.
For anyone who wants a Canadian "In Canada" host, then these folks are right up there. (Many Canadian hosts are resellers of US based hosting)
I have 10 sites hosted with HaveHost (www.have-host.com) and their support is absolutely First Class. Their hosting fees are extremely reasonable when you look at what you get. And any problems or questions you get a response usually within the hour, and if not certainly the same day and I'm in a different time-zone.
I doubt they can be beaten on a Price/Service/Package basis.
Can't recommend them highly enough.
Howard Fillingham
This is truly the worst webhost I have ever encountered, in over a decade of web development, which is no mean accomplishment. iPower seems dedicated to a mission of constant, barely restrtained hostility towards any customer- a complete absence of ser ver support, poor customer service- support requests ignored or responded to irrelevantly. One person I sopke to admitted they were simply in over their head, and I presume a lot of them may be just out of college, perhaps part-timers working out of their parents basement. That is, at least, about what it feels like to be dealing with iPower. In short- if you are serious about maintaining a web presence online, iPower is to be avoided at all costs.
Ipowerweb used to be the best hosting available just couple years ago Lunar hosting was close, but ipowerweb was obviously better.
Now things changed greatly. I have 3 accounts and for the last year went from happy customer to ipowerweb intolerant.
Constant downtimes, ftp is not working more than half the time. I had 3 months of combined ftp downtime during the last 4 months!!! They agreed to move my website to another server if i would move all my files (20 gb) myself.
Today the control panel failed and now i am writing a review while waiting in 40 minute waiting time hot line for tehcnical support. and from my previous experience, it will take them at least couple more calls from me to solve the problem. It's another 2 hours of my time.
Do yourself a favour- don't use ipowerweb, maybe then they will improve service and become the leader they were 3 years ago.
they used to be great 4 years ago, now they are worse than terrible.
Constant problems, tech support is impossible to reach with waiting time above 40 minutes. It will take me hours to describe all exhausting problems i had with them.
Today i havew a new one- control panel is simply dead...
Pricing is good, vdeck is not bad either (from the first look) but do you need cheap host which will be down 1% of the time ( does not sound like much but that's the actual situation i have right now and it's not nice.) vdeck is glitching most of the time.
Stay away from RegisterFly. I had my hosting with them for a few years, but recently my site was down. I contacted them since I had not made any changes and it took them 4 days to respond to my support ticket (they would not help me over the phone). Their response was that sever #18 was down and they were working on it.
I have a longer description of my interaction with them on my blog at: http://www.andymerrill.com/rantreview/2007/02/why-i-left-registerflycom-for.html
I have been with them for over one year. I have had great response to all the customer service issues over the year. I have had almost perfect up time for my website. I am a real customer who has not had a bunch of messy problems to fix.
I've been a customer of iPowerweb for around 5 years now and never had a problem with them.
That is, until this week.
Although they will give their customers 200 Gb of disk space to play with, they fail to mention that customers can only upload a maximum amount of 50.000.
This is something customers discover only once the 50.000 file limit has been reached, which in this day and age of php websites and digital photo albums is sooner than you may expect.
Again, not a WORD about this file limit upon signing up. iPowerweb promises new customers 200Gb of space.
They just neglect to tell that there's no way customers will be able to actually reach that limit unless they upload DVD ISO files to their server!
So here I am, with only 1% of my 200Gb available disk space used and a server telling I have reached the maximum amount of files I am allowed to upload.
You have got to be kidding me.
I have contacted both sales and technical support and neither are willing and/or able to raise this ludicrous limit.
Needless to say I am in the process of making a backup of my files and will transfer my site to a new host who doesn't impose such crazy limits.
lately these clowns are making me regret recommending them to my clients. they were dependable for the longest time, but all of a sudden a wave of issues have come up and its ridiculous how they dont seem to care to fix things. their attitudes have changed from friendly to a-holes, and they're just taking your money and not giving you the service they promised. their ridiculous service and downtime of lates is making my company look horrible.
I am with ipowerweb for more than 4 years, but i won't be renewing this year.
It used to be great host. they always had the best prices around, and 2 years ago everything was great, and i would give them 5 in each rating field. But now they are really bad.
1. Servers are very unreliable now. My server is badly glitching for 4 months already and they refuse to fix it. Ftp upload was not working (it paused for 34 seconds after uploading EACH file) imagine how long it took to upload a gallery with 1000 files in it...
When i asked to fix it they told me they are on it. They remained "on it" for almost 4 months. Turned out to be that several servers had unknown problem causing this delay. Couple times i asked them to move it to different server, they agreed to give me a new server, but proposed that i would move almost 10 gb of files from old server to new server myself and refused to assist. So i had to download 10 gb from old server (glitching and notworking normal speed) and then upload it to new...
2 Waiting time on technical support line used to be 5 minutes- 10 minutes couple years ago. But now it went up to 40 and sometimes an hour.
3. As i am writing it, my server is down once again. It has been down 4 times this week for periods more than an hour.
The only way to correct this situation is response from clients, from us.
When Ipowerweb will start losing clients then and only then they will start doing something.
Experience multiple eMail problems where it has taken iPowerWeb 5 or more days to correct. eMail that was sent to accounts have been lost due to problems on iPowerWeb eMail servers. Responses form iPowerWeb very very poor and with little or no information.
Because of the poor support, we are looking to move our account.
Don't waste your money with registerfly hosting, I was lucky I only signed one month. My site is every few days down, and they usually give a quick answer when I place a support ticket, but this doesn't mean they solve the problem. During the last three days my site was down, they told me they were rebooting the server where my site was hosted, and I should give it a little time, three days is a little time for this guys!!!.
Price is cheap, but for the quality they offer you should better find another host.
We originally switched to iPowerWeb hosting because it was so cheap compared to our previous host. For a while, the service seemed ok and vDeck seemed pretty useful.
My main problem right now is that I have prepaid for web hosting and thus, I am stuck with it. (Only 6 months left until I can switch!). Otherwise please read my complaints below, as they help you decide your own web hosting service.
First Key Problem:
Restore Backup in vDeck control panel does NOT restore backup files. Vdeck has a Create Backup function, which creates a backup on the server and allows you to download locally. The restore backup function merely copies a backup file locally and puts it in its compressed form (ie. one file) on the server. It does not uncompress the file and restore your website to some previously saved state. Thus, if you want a backup to be restored, you have to ask iPowerWeb to do it and they charge $20-$50.
2.
iPowerWeb hosts websites that send spam emails. If you are on a shared server (ie. not the expensive VPS Servers, Dedicated Hosts, or anything where you pay for a dedicated IP), then you will experience problems w/ emails. Because there may be a spammer sharing your IP address, your IP address can be blacklisted by major email sites like Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, etc. (ie. the majority of your customer base). So all of your emails will be bounced. When I called iPowerWeb about this problem they "fixed" it and yet it happened numerous times again.
Note: when you sign up for iPowerWeb service, there is a disclaimer that sites that spam will be kicked out from iPowerWeb's servers. However, they do not kick out spammers. 3 months ago, I couldn't send emails again. They did not look for a spammer let alone kick the spammer out.
3.
Support Personnel have no compassion for pleasing customers. I pay money to be able to email my customers. I expect that when I call tech support about my email problems, they would be sympathetic and would work hard to make sure that I am getting what I am paying for (including emails). Recently, they though a solution would be to transfer my website to another server, so I would be far away from the spammer. However, they were asking an additional $50 to transfer the files to the new server. They were asking money to solve a problem that was their fault. One tech support person actually hung up on me after talking with him for 10 min. That was the 2nd call I made that day and not the last. People in these forums talk about wait time on the phone, but you also have to consider the wait time for a technician who actually cares and is smart enough to help. Some days its takes hrs on other days its just impossible.
4.
Chat service is awful. Whenever I've had a problem, I first try the chat, because companies use live chat to deliver quicker results and to save themselves money in personnel. However, the people I have chatted with do not speak English. Thus, they have a real problem trying to help and solve problems.
My advice is to not be fooled by web hosts that offer large amounts of web space and bandwitdh (because most likely you won't use above 10% of the limit). Look at the services the host offers, the control panel included, the free web apps ready to install. A good control panel can be alot of help, because it can do things at a click of a button that other hosts would charge for them to manually do. Make sure that the host provides installation for all mySQL and php components, etc. that your website needs.
A warning! I used PayPal to set up a $100 account with Registerfly and ordered a SSL for a site. While their pages are extremely professional looking, do not be deceived into thinking that the services are equally professional. I was unable to complete the form due to an error being generated the reason for which could not be solved. I sent in a Service Ticket, received one reply asking for more info to which I replied and now after 8 days am no closer to being able to proceed. Their telephone service lines are either busy or you wait for 30 - 40 minutes, time for which I do not have. Their "live on-line chat" is deader than a door nail.
Do NOT use this company Unless you enjoy truly wasting your time and money!!
I am a reseller with iPowerweb. Initially they were great, and then the day that you need customer support arises. If you want to talk to someone, average hold time is 15 minutes during the day, so you want to wait until the evening. If it is a billing question, then you have to call during the day, and plan on being on the phone for 30-45 minutes. The live chat takes just about as long, and they are limited to the answers they can provide.
They auto renew everything, which in many cases can be nice. Unless of course you have requested not to auto renew and they still renew it, still bill you, and refuse refunds. At the moment I am trying to get the auto-renew feature turned off of 400 accounts. So far they have not complied with that request and I have $520 of unauthorized charges, with the potential of many more if they continue to renew accounts. I have turned in several tech tickets, emailed several times, and had phone conversations, making sure that nothing would auto-renew. Now since they will not refund the unauthorized renewals, I will be forced to dispute credit card charges. I don't know about you, but my time is valuable, and this is ridiculous!
At one time they were #1, I guess that slipped when customers started having the same problems I am having.
I have recently started transferring my accounts to www.hostgator.com, so far the experience has been extremely pleasant. No need to be on hold for long, over the top answers to your questions.
DO NOT USE REGISTERFLY!! They are crooks. They will lose your domain name, delete all support tickets, and refuse to accept your emails. They don't answer phone calls. The only thing they will do is take your money, right before they screw you over. Their systems are completely broken. I would encourage you to google Registerfly and you will see for yourself just how many people they have burned. Only a fool would choose them after seeing the results.
I’ve been hosting with Ipowerweb for years now. I have only good service. I read all these articles that they are such a bad host and this is NOT true. I have over 300 domain names and shared hosting account with Ipowerweb also two awesome fast dedicated servers. They just upgraded their servers too.
I strongly recommend Ipowerweb for web design, hosting, domain names, search engine optimization, eCommerce. They are good for everything they do. I will never change hosting companies and I will don’t continue to use Ipowerweb and never change.
I wanted to use Registerfly just for Domain registration. For 5 days I tried to transfer 3 domains under their $6.99 special but their shopping cart wouldn't accept their special code to get this price. Tried several times and even called and was told to retry in a half hour and it should work.
Well an hour later their code still didn't work. Tried to back order domains that were mine but my last register didn't transfer them in time before they expired (why I am looking for a new Registrar) and the back order Hot deal code didnt work either. And in trying the shopping cart deleted the cart contents. I saw that they were having a .info domain sale for $.75 so I thought what the hell and tried ordering it. Went thru the entire shopping cart entered payment info and when the final checkout came about what was charged was the 3 domain transfers at the NON SALE price.
I immediately did a support ticket telling them my problem and with a day they told me they were having a problem but its being fixed and to retry everything the next day.
Well I tried again 5 days later and their shopping cart is still not working, their hot deal specials dont work. and was on the phone to tech support for 30 minutes before giving up
Read all the reviews and then run far away from this company...
I would never recommend iPowerWeb to anyone. In fact my experience was so poor with them that I told them if they did not reply to my multiple emails that I would do what I'm doing now and post my issues with them everyplace I can possibly find. I'm now on a mission to inform people of what they are getting into with this joke of a company. Currently, we have pulled our site from their server and are hosting our site elsewhere. We now only have our email with iPowerWeb... which will also change very soon.
Seriously look at all reviews before venturing into this abyss. When reading other reviews from other sites, take notice that quite a few of them are hosted on iPowerWeb. Makes you think huh? Well, I'm here to share my absolute disgust with this service. As a customer my company was insulted and ignored.
Yes, they do have a semi-pretty interface but that's a far as it goes. Let me share with you what I went through and the nice information provided to me from their reps.
We frequently have our site down as they have issues with their server. Now, this can be forgiven in most cases but this wasn't the only issue we encountered. No, instead the account quite consistently would revert to having 0MB available after purchasing 500MB space. This would usually happen after our site would be down. Now, let me prepare you for what you may go through if this happens to you as this was the standard procedure for us. If your site is down you will call and be on hold for 10-15 minutes. Unfortunately you will most likely get hung up on like we usually were, then forced to call back and be placed on hold for another 20-30 minutes. You can tell that quite a few more people have noticed their site is down. But wait there's more... It slices, it dices it drops your site in seconds. No more pesky people trying to look at your site because it's not there!!! *ahem* So, you finally get through to support, CONGRATULATIONS!!!! And what's behind curtain number 1? Why, it's a completely unhelpful rep that could care less what your problem is or when it will get fixed... Bob. Okay, you've now got a rep, unless it's one of the very few that we've come across; they are not really going to help or let you know what’s going on. Instead they will give you a cryptic ETA as to when it may be resolved. My personal favorite was, “It may be up sometime tomorrow.” Ummm. "It may be up"... Hmph well, serves me right for expecting some form of service right? You can't hear me right now but I'm banging my head on my desk.
The real kicker to this was when I was told by a rep (whom I assume was telling the truth), that the reason that our account is at 0 when we have paid for the space is.... you ready? Okay, so, when a customer on the same server requests more space, the server then re-allocates said space providing them with the space that you have already paid for leaving you with nothing. At this point I'm guessing your reaction was something like, "What?!?!" Yeah, this is no joke, they were dead serious. After our less than adequate experience with iPowerWeb I decided to email them regarding these issues and our concerns regarding them. After emailing them I almost immediately received an automatic email stating that we would be hearing from them within 24 hours. YES! Finally, something is going to be done. Well that was premature now wasn't it? No, instead 3 days later I still have no email so I write back again only this time sending to the sales email as well, in hopes of hearing from somebody. This time I was quite annoyed and stated that unless I hear from them within the next business day that I would do exactly what I'm doing now and that is as I said, making our experience known. In case you haven't guessed. Yeah, they didn't get back to me within that business day. Oh, they did get back to me though. Eleven days after the initial email was sent I received a semi-generic email that did not address any of the issues I had brought up but instead said:
"If I could ask you to elaborate on your issues, I will be happy to assist you in any way that I can. Please respond with specific details including your domain name, and/or a reference number, as well as any other helpful information including exact error messages and how they can be duplicated (if applicable), usernames/passwords, etc... and I will work to resolve all matters as quickly as possible."
I honestly had to laugh at this as all of my concerns were expressed quite clearly in my email as to what was happening and I was asking for an explanation. I was giving them the chance to rectify the issues and basically assure me that they were going to work towards solving the issues so we would get the service we were paying for. I shudder to think that we may have been getting exactly that. In which case, I pity all who unknowingly choose to go with iPowerWeb's service. So, enough of my rant, I thought that some of you may actually find this information valuable to your decision as to if you want to go with them or not. Who knows, this may have been an incident solely contained to each of the businesses that share this office and use iPowerWeb. Unfortunately, as it IS happening to multiple businesses that I know of, I am willing to bet this isn't the case. If you decide to go with iPowerWeb, you may very well be a masochist. In which case, I hope you enjoy!
I have 2 websites with ipowerweb and I can't wait to dump them.
As others have said, when everything is working well, they're great. However, as soon as something goes wrong, forget it! Their tech support staff are rude, don't reply at all or just plain don't know what they're doing.
Recently I was without access to ftp for over 3 months. I was not notifieed that there was a problem and hen I asked if they had an estimate as to how long it would take to fix I was told, "It's not just your website that's affected, you know".
My experiences were solely with registration services, but those were sufficiently bad that I would not recommend them for web-hosting, either. The main thing I wish to point out is that their customer service is exceptionally unresponsive, especially as to issues entered through their "trouble ticket" system. In fact, on the current issue I'm working with registerfly, they've tried to close the ticket at least three (3) times w/o resolution, and now literally 18 days later, I'm now being informed that the problem is being investigated.
So far, I've not actually been ripped off. If that proves to be the case later on, I will go back and update this entry.
Over the past few years I had hosted a few sites on IPower. When everything is working, things are fine but once something goes wrong, forget it! The service is the worst I have ever seen. They don't know a thing, especially about Windows hosting.
Once I tried to leave IPower it was impossible to get the information I needed to take my domain name with me. Several times they insisted that I was the one that purchased my domain name, even though it came free with the package I bought.
One time I called them to renew an extra domain name that I purchased through them. They said all was good, but the next day it turned out that someone else actually purchased the domain name so now my site had no domain name. When I asked for a refund, since they never actually purchased the domain name for me all I got was the run around until I gave up, it was only $8.
Since then I have moved all of the accounts away from them, which they make very difficult. They bill you anyway. You call and complain. They appologize and say it will be taken care of, but it never is.
Beware of ipowerweb! They have stolen my email folders and files. Hundreds of hours and contacts have been deleted with not even a "sorry" for my troubles and it has happened not once, but several times. The dysfunction they call 'support' will not deal with issues like this because they don't know what to do except to be rude and hope you go away.
It is no coincidence that almost every honest review you read about ipowerweb is BAD, BAD and WORSE. I am of the opinion that the rare good review is only by an affiliate of theirs or by them anomimously. If you go on a website and they say ipowerweb is a good deal or if you read a "good" review consider going somewhere else to get your information because what you are reading is a set-up by someone that has something to gain by lying to you about ipowerweb.
If you value your business and your website go away from ipowerweb. I have no reason to lie. I am a very unhappy customer and I am looking for a new web host because I have had enough of these Bozos (with all due respect to Bozo the Clown).
Support is horrible -- the only answer is "We are aware of the issue and should be fixed shortly". Even they did not have a clue about issue before. Reliability -- bad. Our site was down for more than 60 hours for last three months -- 30 during prime time. No FTP access (and as result -- no backups) for 30 hours.
Hands down the worst web host I've ever dealt with. At one point, I had 3 or personal sites with them and our business had close to 10. Things would happen like they would delete all the mailboxes on one of our clients mail server - they did this because the clients actual website was hosted outside of ipowerweb - they actually have a bot that goes through their domains deleting mailboxes. Is that insane or what? This happened more than once and finally the customer pulled their site and took it elsewhere. I've had many similar issues and dealing with their tech support department makes me want to poke my eyes out with a sharp stick. Even managing sites and making payments is a huge hassle with these guys, nothing is consolidated and even when you call their Billing department they could not tell me which site they had just automatically billed my bank account for (the day before)! I pulled all of my sites and we're in the process of pulling all client sites. I am currently involved with a 5 day (so far) tech support nightmare because one user's mailbox disappeared, and now when you recreate it (or any other new mailbox) you can't get any outside emails (senders get a mailbox unavailable). You'd think getting a mailbox to work wouldn't take 5+ days (and 3 without any response from tech support at all, ignoring all my requests for an update), but maybe I'm just expecting too much! ;-) Save yourself some heartache, go anywhere but ipowerweb for your hosting needs.
Beware of ipower.com and ipowerweb.com! I purchased a VPS (virtual private server) back in March 2006 to host my up and coming website business, www.listasaurus.com. After getting the wrong advice on what kind of server I needed TWICE (and finding there was NO support for their dedicated servers, which no one told me), Sean Green in Account Development and Sales advised the best solution was a virtual private server. Sean was actually a very good support person in that he helped me with many problems I encountered with bad technical support people (I have transcripts of chats with rude support reps and getting the runaround).
The website advertised numerous features with the Ipower Pro Plus Package that I purchased, including Daily Tape Backups and 24/7 network monitoring. I did not have any problems with server downtime until last Thursday, October 12, 2006. I found the server was down and when I inquired with technical support, they told me they were aware of a problem and working on it. The server was down for about 9 hours and then I contacted Sean who told me there was a multi-drive failure and a problem with the RAID drive.
He said he would let me know what the status was as soon as he found out. I inquired about backups and he said he hoped they had done one, and asked if I had done a backup. I told him no, because it was my understanding ipowerweb did backups.
Next thing I know I received an email from tech support that evening, advising that "all data had been lost" but the server was being rebuilt and as soon as it was available we could upload our data.
Well that would be FINE if I had known I needed to make a backup of my database, but I had never done that because I understood based on ipower's advertising in my package, and the fact that no one had ever told me otherwise, that they were doing nightly backups.
When I called tech support that night, they told me there were no backups and they do not EVER do backsup for VPS and dedicated servers. Again, this had never been disclosed to me.
I called Sean Friday morning and he confirmed that he never told me there were no backups, that he also understood standard backups were made and he was surprised to learn about this.
So basically I just lost 8 months worth of work on my website, which stores all the information in a CMS system/MYSQL database. My website was finally due to go live today, but of course I lost everything and I will have to start over.
Friday Oct 13, 2006 I spoke with David Sipes in the technical support and he told me an image of the server was going to be retrieved and they would try to get my data back. He did not call me back that day.
October 16, 2006 - After sending many emails and leaving voicemails to Sean, since David would not give me any contact information, I finally got a call back from David who informed me that they had "done everything they could" but there was no data on the restored server image. I find this outrageous, considering what if there were a disaster on site at ipower/ipowerweb? How would they resume business? (David said it is not possible they could ever have a fire. Amazing.)
Because of this company, I have lost countless hours worth of hard work on my website. It will take me countless more hours to rebuild this from scratch, which is what I will need to do. I have also found numerous similar complaints online about ipowerweb, where people have lost data and they were also told there were no backups.
Their site advertises this, this is FALSE ADVERTISING and misrepresentation. I want everyone possible to know about this so they don't go throught the nightmare that I am living.
On October 17th I was contacted by a James Murphy, a manager I believe in Sales, who advised me that backups WERE indeed done on the server where my website was hosted--only they lost the backups too. Because the backups were being done on a different drive on the SAME server...not to offsite backup tapes as the ipower.com website advertises.
So this a) contradicts what I was told by tech support that NO backups are ever done, and b) contradicts their clearly false advertisement online about daily backups being done to offsite tapes. In fact, Mr. David Sipes advised the company is in the process of creating an offsite backup process at a new data center, but it's not currently in place.
Mr. Murphy called me back late Oct 17, 2006 to advise that my suggestion of having a company like Drive Savers work on the corrupted drive to possibly recover the data would not be possible, as "an executive decision was made not to pursue the option of a third-party data recovery company". When I reported this to a Quality Assurance rep, Warren, who responded to one of my emails, Warren told me this was complete misinformation from Mr. Murphy, that TWO third party companies had already analyzed the disks, and nothing could be recovered.
Pretty amazing that this was done not by one, but TWO companies between Friday and Monday. Wish I could get that kind of service from ipower.
Lastly, Mr. Murphy's offer to me, when I asked what the company was going to do for me now, was 6 months of free hosting with them (worth around $300). then he said the most they could offer was one year of hosting (worth around $600). Wow, what a great offer. Yes, that'll surely make up for all of my lost time and rework that I now get to do. That will help my business get back up and running! Oh, and I'm SURE this type of thing will NEVER happen again...yeah, right, take a look at some of the other postings out there if you search on "lost data and ipowerweb". I am not the first person this has happened to (though according to David Sipes, I am the ONLY person upset about this, apparently all other clients were a-ok with it).
I will never do business with this company again. I can only be thankful my site wasn't live yet, only because I would have lost who knows how much customer data and it would have been even more disastrous.
I have had other issues with ipowerweb, I get different answers from their tech support people (when you can get them on the line, usually it takes 20-30 minutes of hold time), and no one seems to really know what is going on there. Sean Green is the only person there who has ever taken a personal interest and done everything he could to help me. But surely someone needs to inform their sales staff of critical issues like backups not being performed. Had I been told this initially I would not have chosen this company.
I honestly don't know how this company stays in business. A bunch of monkeys could run a better business than this.
Reliability extremely poor, I lost everything (web site, mysql databases and email) on several occasions following failure of their hardware. On one occasion the hardware took over three weeks to resolve, importantly no email service for this period. I eventually had to force them to migrate my account to a new machine. No apologies or anything.
Subsequently I have not renewed by subscription and they have not released my domain. Be warned, if your are looking for poor web hosting services, Registerfly is for you!!
Price is not an issue if your server is always down and/or tech support does not exist. Such is the situation at IPowerWeb. I have had them since the start (First account was on server 10, now they have hundreds).
They NEVER update software so that same account from years ago was never upgraded. Once it failed I was told by Ipowerweb to consider upgrading or cancelling and signing up again as they were writing off that server.
What do they mean? Well its still up and those that host on it just dont have email and never will. They simply stopped supporting it.
So, since they have been so good in the past I make a HUGE mistake and upgrade to the VPS account.
SO far I am at 81.7% uptime over 6 months! The money I saved with Ipowerweb was lost in Google advertising within a week. We are just now finding out how bad things were.
No support, site down for days at a time and billing has no clue. They offer refunds but dont actually process them.
If you have a business DO NOT use these people. Any money you save you will lose in sales. I always have to explain to customers why we are down and its getting old.
I do plan to move which is a MAJOR headache! But since I cant get the top rated sites from here to even call back to make some money I doubt they will be much better.
I am now willing to pay 100-200 a month for 99.9%. In the end I saved about 800 hosting with IPOWERWEB and lost one 60,000 account and about 35,000 in Google advertising.
This company is run by total incompetents. I just got off the phone with their support department. They lost the DNS settings for 2 of my domains _again_. Their web configuration interface is not responding, and their support team is unable to fix the problem from inside. Their solution yesterday was "try again in 20 minutes". Their solution today was "try again later, we can't do anything".
A month ago they couldn't extend a few of the names I've had registered with them without a week of downtime and major hassle. Find some other place to spend your money.
On the outside, they look to offer good value with a good package, and initially they come up with the goods. But once you are going problems start to come up, and customer support is not proactive in any sense of the word. Here's what happened to me, we registered a domain name and retained ipower's web hosting, the domain was not too active - we used it for email and FTP mainly, but after a year we renewed it, and paid Ipower our fees for another year. Then we had email problems, but no response from ipower support. After a week we found by chance that our domain name was released and free in the market place i.e. ipower did not renew our domain registration. Now how would you feel if this happened to your domain name, which you put a lot of time, expense and effort into, and it suddenly became available and someone else took it? Well ipower said sorry and offered to refund a partial of the fees to us; later they offered the full amount, but no real feedback or explanation as to why this happened. I'm not sure they really cared, perhaps it happens a lot. Do a search "ipower + problems"and you will find a lot of similar stories, worse than mine. I was lucky and caught it and re-registered with a more reputable company
Just a short story which shows their ethic and work style.
I've used their service for 2 years and finally decided to move out, no matter why, it's another story listed somewhere below. My domain had to be expired on May 28th, 2006. One month prior to the date, on April 27th 2006 I've sent them a cancellation notice. They've replied (auto message had come shortly) only on May 10th 2006 and asked to confirm. I've confirmed on the next day providing the last 4 digits of my credit card. Auto confirmation had come 5 days later (!). It was 11 days prior to expiration and plenty of time to do what they've had to do. But after that they've been keeping silence almost a month. After my reminder I've received sorry and request to confirm cancellation once again. Only after the second confirmation the account had been cancelled. However it was after an expiration date and they've charged me for an extra year of service.
No doubts, their service is highly NOT recommended.
I have been using iPowerWeb as the host of my personal site for several years because it's cheap and they give you a fair amount of space. Beyond that, I can't say anything good about them. Their tech support is worse than useless. I ask a question, and get a wrong answer, and when I tell them it didn't work and ask again, I get the same wrong answer. If they answer the question at all. I don't have the space as advertised on their site, apparently that's for new customers only. I've never had a positive experience, or felt I was talking to a real person. Avoid.
I do not host with iPower, but I do buy my domains from them. I have only had one issue so far, but I expect the same issue to come up when I try to point my second domain. When I went into the "manage your domain" folder in VDeck, I selected "domain pointing" and immediately received the message that this feature was not available unless I upgraded to a monthly hosting account!
I immediately sent them an email and asked what kind of shady business practice was this? Coercing people into buying a hosting package so that they are allowed to manage their domain? This was no mistake on their part as far as I am concerned. A completely inexperience user might actually fall for this. I am noticing more and more sites are beginning to get like this.
After seeing all of the negative reviews here, I am going to renew my domain registrations with another site when the time comes unless I see some real improvement in their reviews by then. At the moment, I highly recommend HostGator for hosting.
I left them to go to go to another web host because I use Netscape Dial up service and the cpanel would always take 20 to 30 minutes to load. The tech support worked with me non stop for nearly a week trying to resolve the issue so that I could work with it. I finally canceled, and received a confirmation within one hour that cancellation of my account had been completed! I tried another test drive on their cpanel in July, and it loaded almost immediately! I just purchased another hosting site from them today, and can't tell you how relieved I am to be back!!
I have been very happy with iPowerWeb since day 1. The customer service has also been very good to me. Most recently I noticed that newer customers were getting more storage and bandwidth than I got with my original offer a couple of years ago. I mentioned this to them and they upgraded my account with no questions asked. It took about a day for the reply like usual. My sites are almost never down. I am very happy with my experience. Maybe I'm just lucky, but from this programmer's perspective, things are looking up with iPowerWeb.
I felt I had to write this review after reading so many negative statements on this site about iPowerWeb. It occurs to me that mostly people who are having or have had problems are writing reviews as a way to vent and those like me are just keeping silent because things are working great.
Two years ago registerfly were a good cheap registar and we had no real problems. However, all that appears to have changed.
I fear that we have just lost one of our websites due to registerfly's complete incompetence. The site went down three months ago and on contacting Registerfly we were told that it was nothing to do with them and we had to deal with enom.com
After four emails to enom.com (whoever they might be) we got zero replies to our emails and we got back to registerfly to explaiin this.
All we got back from Registerfly was 'plaese contact enom.com' and now they don't even bother to respond to our trouble tickets!
These days the Registerfly support desk people appear to struggle with the english language and completely useless at dealing with their customers problems.
We lost our website (and business revenue) 3 months ago and it is still down. So please be warned - steer well clear of this company.
I have had to write more than 100 help tickest to either get the site back up or enable a feature that I had and then was missing. My site has been known to go down for more than a week at a time, only to be told every 24 hours that it will be up in 8-12 hours. Registerfly has tried to bill for services that I have paid for and it took numerous phone calls to correct. If you look for customer satisfaction on the web you will see how bad this service is. I know of no other vendor that seems to be has bad, Registerfy is just the worst.
Nothing but trouble with their support. They were absolutely horrible and rude to us on more than one occassion. The site was down several times this month that we knew about (probably many times we didn't) and no compensation. They also just cut off our service 10 days before the expiry date then refused to help sort it out until we provided more and more verification that it was our site. Totally outrageous and ridiculous. We have a business and clients trying to contact us. Do not go with them under any circumstances. Their service has gone downhill BIGTIME since we initially signed up with them.
Here is the text of a livechat session with ipowerweb It speaks for itself.
Pete A.: Thank you for contacting iPower Live Chat. How can I help you?
frank maloney: Hi - I STILL cannot access my sites (travelforteens.com & loringbaker.net) via FTP. Several hours ago I contacted ipowerweb and was told that admins are working on it. Nothing has changed and the helpcenter page is still announcing a vague situation as of 11:30 PM PST yesterday.
Pete A.: Hello
Pete A.: I'll be happy to assist you.
Pete A.: We do apologize for the inconvenience faced by you.
Pete A.: Admins are aware of your server problem and they are working on it.
Pete A.: We have been advised that the problem has been isolated and that the issue would be solved soon. For quality's sake, our admins tend to spend a slightly longer time investigating the root cause of an issue to completely fix it, rather than merely applying a temporary/unsafe fix, we've taken every possible step to ensure that this does not happen again.
frank maloney: TYour reply is not helpful. When will I be able to transfer files via FTP?
Pete A.: There is a issue on the server and therefore you are facing the problem but as our system admins are working on it and it will get resolved as soon as possible.
frank maloney: When?
Pete A.: It will get fixed within 5 - 6 hours
Pete A.: Is there anything else I can help you with?
frank maloney: Yes. 5-6 hours is not acceptable. If you cannot resolve this right now please connect me with someone who can.
Pete A.: Frnak I am sorry but there is a issue on the server and our system admins are working on it and it will get resolved as soon as possible.
frank maloney: You have already said that. Here is what you said "There is a issue on the server and therefore you are facing the problem but as our system admins are working on it and it will get resolved as soon as possible." Can you connect me with someone else?
Pete A.: We are technical department and we don't access to server issue it been look by our system and our system admins are working on it and it will get resolved as soon as possible.
frank maloney: So your answer is "no"?
Pete A.: Frnak I am sorry but our system admins are working on it and it will get resolved as soon as possible.
frank maloney: I am cutting and pasting this excahnge to each and every web hosting review I can find.
Pete A.: Is there anything else I can help you with?
frank maloney: no, since you cannot help me with anything at all.
Pete A.: Thank you for contacting iPower Live Chat.
Pete A.: Enjoy your day.
Pete A.: Good-bye.
Chat session has been terminated by the site operator.
Ipowerweb support is really sucks I have a dedicated server with them My server down more than 12 hours becasue they had outage.If I call the support they say my server will be fixed with 24 to 48 hours.
Thats all I get from them it is still down. Ipower support really really gone so worst. I will try to switch my account ASAP
Please heed this warning this host was at one time pretty good they have now gone the way of many companies this big, where they could care less about your site, you or any problems you may have. I am a web-master for some well known sites and used them for a while as there servers were reliable and the client liked them, but as for support forget it you will be better off figuring it out your self and by the time you do get a response you probably will have figured out the problem on your own, as they do have what I would call the worst most inefficient support team and system of any I have ever had to use most responses are canned and do not relate to the question asked, there are only a few exceptions were some of the support team is actually good but its pot luck you will most likely get a different support person every time so its pretty dam difficult to get anything fixed quickly. I found sometimes questions went unanswered for over 7 days that is just insane, so i can tell you what others are saying is 100% true I have never been more frustrated in all my time dealing with hosts, if there's an award for the worst support they win hands down so IPOWER if that's what your going for you win.
The VDeck ah the VDeck where do we begin actually it could be a very nice panel if they would get all the bugs out, but so far in my opin it is still buggy. The next section is mainly for the tech savvy the average consumer will not care or understand what im going to point out in this part of my review, none the less there is a major problem that I have not seen on any host ever, and i think its worth mentioning to any webmaster or business that might be thinking of using this host do not if you value your time and your sanity.
If you have many scripts and you do a lot of on server editing as i do and im sure other dev's do your CHMOD permissions will not be held, let me explain. OK you have a script you set it to lets say 666 or 777 if you edit it or modify it even once your permissions will be reset to server default this can be a real nightmare if you have a lot of scripts with specific permissions set and you need to upgrade or edit something to that nature all will be reset. This is not correct should not ever happen and is not acceptable a file should only be reset if its deleted and or reloaded not just updated I have brought this to there attention and i have yet to see a fix they act as Though this is not as important as it really is, it seems that this problem stems from the use of PURE which has this very bug, so if anyone reads this from PURE get on the bandwagon and fix the permissions reset problem STAT. I feel that any host or panel manufacturer that uses such a buggy FTP back end should not have it deployed till they fix the dam problem.
Bottom line is do not use this host if you need to work with any type of serious business site. I can only tell you it will most likely be your worst nightmare VDeck = Nightmare. also make sure your actual name is not in control by IPOWER use a good name registar to hold the name separately, if you for some odd reason you do decide to try IPOWER.
I'm not goning to tell you the long story about the awful service they have. You can look that up on my website.
But they have the WORST cusomer service, from billing to tech support. They don't know what they are doing, they will seem your problmes like a joke and will take at least 2 weeks (4 hours on phone every week (literally four hours)) to tell you that your problem can not be solved.
They also charged my card three times what they were supposed to and it took them 15 days to refund my money.
I can't give a zero? Shame.... their customer service deserves it.
Considering the time already invested in trying to get resolution to an email problem, I don't want to invest too much more time here. Suffice to say that the next moments of time I will get will be looking for another hosting company and transferring my site to them.
If you are even THINKING about choosing iStruggleAtWeb for hosting, be forewarned: you will regret the choice.
These guys continue playing unfair games. I've been with them for 2 years. By the end of April 2006 I've notified them that I completely cancel their service. In two weeks I've received a message to confirm cancellation and I've done it immediately. However they charged me again for the next year of service. I had plenty of problems with their so called "technical support" before. They support themselves but not customers. So I've left iPowerWeb completely and forever. I just would like to warn everyone - NEVER DEAL WITH THEM!
Registerfly is definately the worst host I've expericenced. All on has to do is search the internet for their name and it's nothing but trouble. Do not think because they have a nice looking site that it reflects their hosting and domain name business ethics.
This company is heard to be under investigation by the State of New Jersey for fraud.
I repeat, do not use registerfly for any service because you will be dissapointed, you will have lots of downtime for your hosting, and you will end up losing your domain name. Registerfly is not only bad company but theives. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!
I would recommend Hostgator for your hosting and name.com for domain names.
Hosting is Ok (though, I'm currently moving out from RegisterFly).
Worst part is that they don't honor whatever they advertise!
Right now they advertise that with the new domain registration you will get whole package of services, including E-mail CatchAll and PrivacyProtection (ProtectFly). Well, that's a one (two, actually) big lie!
CatchAll is disabled for ALL new domains, and even old domains will lose this feature very soon. Customer support explains that they are afraid of spam, and thus decided to destroy this service. And it is STILL advertised on their front pages!
PrivacyProtection works ONLY on .COM domains. If you are going to register something different - be careful! You won't find it anywhere on RegisterFly website, but it is not available for non-.com domains.
Otherwise - fairly stable service with fairly good prices.
iPowerWeb is HORRIBLE. If you want to do anything beyond hosting files and basic webpages they are not the host to use. My main problem was with their SQL support. First when I tried to import my old SQL database, their system would not handle the 20meg file. I e-mailed them to ask if their techs could do it and they said ok yet after 5 days nothing was done. I ended up breaking my database into about 20 pieces to be able to import it into their SQL database.
After the database was set up my site was running fine for 2 weeks. Then I started getting the error "You have exceded your maximum connections (50000)." I asked a tech about this and they told me they have a limit of 50,000 queries per hour per user on the SQL database. This was supposed to reset every hour yet it NEVER did. My site continuously went down for 8 hours never resetting the query number. Their solution was to edit all my php files and set up multiple user selection or change the user whenever the site goes down... Ya right, I'll find a better host.
These guys are the worst I ever had to deal with. They didn't notify me when the hosting account was the time for renewal. They took it down without even sending me a SINGLE email. Their CS folks have admitted to it. Then when I provided them with a CCard, they’ve double charged me. They are yet to refund it after over dozen emails, two phone calls and a month or more. They are not even responding to my emails. Never use them.
All of what you have read above and below appears to be true. I cant tell you the regret I have...
I have the VPS service for less than a month and its been down for 3 days... then Plesk is "misconfigured" after they migrate people off of this server and they tell ME to reinstall it and by the way I will loose everything...
WHAT !?!?!?!?!!? You mean the "backup" I did on the server is gone ??? INDEED !!!!!!!
As we speak they are trying to fix it again without me loosing ALL OF MY DATA THAT I SPEANT HOURS CONFIGURING BY HAND since the sales person was incorrect about several issues and I had to install as root via command line...
Anyway, I will post again if it gets fixed, but for the life of me I wish that I had not gone after the cheap hosting... I did read that they had gotten much better, but this CHEAP HOSTING has costs me about $500 in time...
Today I sit looking like a moron to my customers... I cant access anything in Plesk, and am looking forward to changing the DNS to another comapny over the Memorial Day weekend like having a root canal...
I THOUGHT I DID MY HOME WORK ON THIS SO YOU PLEASE BE SURE TO DO A SEARCH ON YOUR HOST AS THIS "xyz host sucks" and if you get numerous responses all about the same issues take it to heart... I only wish I looked up "xyz hosting sucks" rather than "xyz hosting reviews".
Now the "fair" person in me... at least some of the people want to help at IPOWER, but if they dont know what they are doing its worthless... Im on hold now with a good as gold guy trying to get it wokred out... time on phone 57 min 13 seconds... he has said they will do what it takes even if it means extending my refund period... I will let you know...
If it werent for my further looking like an idiot to clients and not wanting to change the DNS and setup new server it would be done deal GONE... but I can hardly afford not to stay... I hope it gets better but sadly I still feel like puking in the garbage can.
I've had registerfly for a few years now and up until the past 3 months I really haven't had any problems at all. The price was right and service was stable. However, a few months ago they recently changed hosts/servers and the stability has greatly declined with that switch. In the previous 2.5 years there was barely any noticeable downtime with my domain. Since the switch I've had at least three several hour periods where the domain didn't dns, the registerfly site didn't work and it was impossible to get a hold of anyone at registerfly. When it came time to renew my domain it took over a week for my domain to transfer from their old servers to the new ones when transfers should only take a day or so. They have done several upgrades to try to make their site easier to use - and if the upgrades were functional and didnt give errors they would have been great. Currently I'm lucky if I can login into my account on their website once every 5 visits. Also, getting hold of a customer service representative is extremely difficult. Several times I was on hold on the phone for 20+ minutes only to get disconnected by something on their end. Response time to email support tickets vary from pretty fast to not at all. I'm still waiting for a credit to my credit card they claimed went through two weeks ago and it hasn't appeared in my account yet. Overall, 2 years ago I would have said the site is sufficient if you just want a basic domain hosting service for a cheap price... Now I'd say stay away and don't even bother with this host since the problems greatly outweigh the benefits.
We started 2 years ago with IpowerWeb (ratings were quite good at this time) - From time to time we had to deal with support generally by chat and have never been able to quickly fix issues as most of the time their were forwarded to tech. level xxx that would answer couple of days later.
When we started to deal with e-commerce we've had to buy THEIR SSL certificate and wait that THEY transfer our account to a secure server ....
result :
- many account passwords lost
- many calls to (incompetent) support to have this SSL connection up and running
- expect one week of delay (stress, depression, hanger ...) if you plan to use your own ssl with this company
Now the worst....
-----------------------
We oppened a new e-commerce site 2 weeks ago although we started to notice performance problems in term of server responses.
This week was critical for us as we had made strong marketing campains and the number of connections was quicly rising and customers were starting to buy.
RESULT:
- at least 15% to 20% of server down time during these last 10 days (!!!!) to finally be told that their techs had to migrate many sites on less overloaded servers
- following this migration we lost (again) our accounts passwords (control panel ftp .....) and best of all our production database was corrupted.
Finally, NEVER EVER go for this company if you are looking for reliability (do their guarantee any on their site ???) and plan do deal with e-commerce.
These people are unable to promptly react in case of server outage and you can find yourself in the 'dramatic' situation where you have to close your business until their decide to do something about the mess their bring their customers in.
A nightmare company in every sense of the way. A crooked company who would charge your credit card even though I have not hosted my web site with them for over a year and even transfered my domain out of them.
Cannot call anyone at their company!
Please please, DO NOT NOT DO BUSINESS WITH THESE GUYS.
DO NOT SIGN CONTRACT WITH IPOWER.
Their support is really terible. My email is down for the past 4 days.
in 2005 IPower was upgrading their win 2000 to win 2003 and my site was on and off for more then 2 weeks plus when they finally solve their problems all new files and documents that I have put on server in the past 2-3 weeks were gone. They simply restore whatever they want. They never let me know that such a upgrade was schedule so I had no chance to get my backup. They simply went and did their changes. And 2 weeks. I work with windows platform and when our sites are unavailable we have max 1 hour to fix them. I don't know where they are getting their network guys from but I don't think anybody with some windows expirace would have so much trouble to fix problems as they do. My email is constantly down at least once a month or every other month. I'll wait until my contract expire and I'm switching to other hosting company.
Anyway, this hosting comp. is OK for personal web sites but not for any kind of business.
I'm sorry for my bad english.
This is my story:
Recently one of my "friend" asked me to register a domain name in .ca zone, and also asked to order hosting for him.
I ordered the domain name and hosting for my name and paid with my credit card. Hosting managing panel was supposed to be managed by me.
Registration took some little problems...that's fine.
Hosting at first time was perfect.
Then this "friend" called to Customer Service....and asked them to give him my Username and Password for hosting. And you know, they gave him my Username and Password without asking me any permission....
I was in shock...I thought that they are respectable company and take care about clients....
Next time, I'm afraid of ordering hosting service from them...
Is somebody calls them and ask "Give me Username and Password of that guy..." And RegisterFly will give him all information about my account including how much money I've paid to them and me credit card information.
This company is terrible! I signed up for a small fee and the next thing I know i'm beng charged over $150 more than what I had been told I would pay! Then I try and get the problem fixed and get put through the red tape! This company sucks! DO NOT USE THEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! All you will get is a headache and ripped off! I even waited 21 minutes on hold to speak with someone and when I finally get through, the call suddenly ends! Go figure!
This is an awful company. The domain transfer took weeks--I have since learned how to do this myself and know it can be done in minutes.
Then they automatically charged me for another year, only notifying me after the charge went through. Now they say they'll CONSIDER giving me a partial refund.
I tried calling them and was on hold for 20 minutes, only to get disconnected.
An awful company--do not use.
If you never have a problem then the price is right. Customer support is run by arrogant jerks that don't care about you. They shut down my domain, my email, everything without notice. I would really like to sue and if I had time and money I would.
Can you afford to have your website shut off suddenly with no access to the files? If you can live with that then ipowerweb has a good price. Three years no problem, then no service. Been without a website for week. B*st*rds
PLEASE stay away from Registerfly!!! They have stolen one domain from me and have redirected my DNS to advertising which is generating revenue for them. The whole story is at bluestateupdate dot com... These folks are CROOKS and should definitely be in jail... Amazing how they continue to get away with this.
I have been trying for 3 weeks to getthem to correct my domain they misspelled it the first time when i sentthem a notice to correct it the did but left the other domain as my registered one now I can't enable dynamic dns for my site and it's been going on continously when I tell them what the problem is I've been told they don't support dynamic dns for .ca, then I was told it was an upgrade to thier platform, and finally I was told their admin is looking after it and still I can't enable dynamic dns it keeps telling me "domain name not found". What a bunch of incompetants.
They should be in jail.The service could not be any worse!!!
They are a joke. If I would have done my DUE Diligence I would never have used them. oopsmybad.
Stay away from them!!!!!
Ipowerweb has the best prices and a ok user panel. Outside of that I would never use them again. The customer service~ from their live chat to on phone tech support and billing support is horrible. Their concern isn't customer satisfaction or timeliness. They are purely concerned about money. Additional services although advertised as only taking 24~48 hours take excessively longer and their are no apologies or courtesy emails acknowledging the delay.
In addition, staff is uninformed and will say anything(or transfer you anywhere to get you off the phone and on to the next customer.
Let me start off by saying Im not here to bash this host. Im here to share my culmination of over 5 years of experience with this company. I want to make fellow webmasters and IT proffesionals who run small buisinesses aware that this provider is in trouble. There is no accountablility at this company, they grew too fast and you are never going to get any sort of "technical help" if your site is down or if your having any problems. What you will get is legions of cut and paste experts reading a scripted dialouge. That being said, lets look at the meat and potaotes of what prompted this post.
Today is 2/2/2006 I have a dedicated server with these people and I am a reseller with over 20 sites hosted with them. The dedicated server went down a day ago, and I have called and spoke with 3-4 "technicians" to get it back up. All they can tell me is they will try to "page" someone to reboot the server and then hang up. I pay $99 a month for this thing and was promised 24/7/365 monitoring.....its false. When one makes the decision to get a dedicated server they do so for reliability issues, I have clients to answer to, what do I? Bottom line. I move my accounts, I learn my lesson. Do not use these folks if you want reliable hosting and solid tech support. They will leave you hangin and not look back. I am totally at these peoples mercy right now and I have clients calling every ten minutes.
The tech guy who works in the dedicated server area actually told me that his day would be good no matter what happened once he got off of work. He honestly did not care and said there was nothing he could do to help...all he could do is send a page to some guy. When asked to speak to a Supervisior I got put back on hold for 20 minutes, after 1 hour of waiting only to find out, "He just walked out"
To make matters worse they changed a bunch of settings and protocols on their shared hosting (cpanel) servers without letting anyone know. This has completely disabled several of my clients ability to send and recive email. They have no answer and I currently have clients going on 1.5 weeks with no email service. Again, no one can tech the issue on their end, they give you cut and paste responses and there s no chain of command you can go through to escalate a problem.
I tell you these things being one of IPOWERS oldest reseller customers. I have had enough success to stay with them over the years but have also had several times like this and the honest truth is they rely on the technology too much. When everything is working well, things are fine. The moment there is an issue, of any sort, they completely fall apart.
If you want more info on any of these claims, or written proof in the form of emails let me know.
UPDATE it's now 10:00 AM EST and no word from IPOWER, my dedicated server is still down, they dont know where the Admin is and cant tell me anything about what is going on.....also, my cpanel hosted sites still cannot send mail....going on 2 weeks now.
Ipower used to be a good host, I had both my work and personal web hosted by them. the past couple years have completely gone downhill though. Our server got blacklisted because of spammers they were hosting. We Can not get ANY email out of our company, and tech support has been IMPOSSIBLE to get hold of. When I finally do, all they say is they will open a ticket. Then nothing changes. We will be changing though.... changing service providers.
Same as everyone else's experience: poor or non-existent support. Emails and support tickets go unaswered for weeks - and that's been my experience for over two years that I've stuck with them.
AVOID THIS COMPANY. There are cheaper and better options.
I was with iPowerweb for several years and was responsible for four other sites signing up with them as well, based on my recommendation.
One day, my site went down with no explanation. I contacted iPowerweb and was told it was due to excessive bandwidth usage. I was baffled by this -- my site is a personal blog site. I have a couple of video clips (non-porn!) on there from projects I've worked on and they've been there for ages. That's the only thing I could think of that might be a problem.
iPowerweb informed me that they were canceling my service. I asked them if I could see my access stats to figure out what the problem files were, or if they could give me any more information about how this happened. They refused and said I had absolutely no recourse. That was that.
For all I know, my site was the target of a malicious attack. I have no explanation for why one day, after a couple years of service, I would suddenly be using bandwidth. By that time I had even shut my blog down months earlier!
iPowerweb was fine while I was a customer. But when something went wrong, they dumped me without any information and refused to provide my access logs so I could figure out what the heck happened.
I wish I had checked into this company before giving them my money. You get what you pay for. I will be calling my credit card company and cancelling payments going to this S***hole operation.
We have several hundred domains for our business as part of our marketing and branding strategy. Over 100 are through iPower because of the low cost. I do not plan on registering any more domains through them as the time and expense of trying to deal with them is not worth it.
Unlike Network Solutions where you can manage all your domains through one account dashboard, iPower gives you a separate username/password for each. You use their Vdeck to log into your control panel for that domain. Don’t try to bookmark the Vdeck link as there is a different one for each domain though the landing pages all look the same. If you want to have full control of your domain you have to send them an email requesting it be unlocked. Plan on sending several emails as it seems to take them a minimum of three tries before they get anything right. They will then send you back another username/password to get into the extended control panel (yet another link). All this means that with one domain registration you have two sets of logins and two links to manage the domain. Multiply that by a few and you need a spreadsheet to keep track of it all.
They want to do everything via email which wouldn’t be so bad if they handled them promptly and efficiently. I sent them an email for one issue and got back a reply on something completely different. This is typical of them. Its like they are in a bizzaro world. Their replies come back in a poorly composed form-letter email. You have to scroll down to a specific space in the email and insert your reply otherwise they ignore it. On a typical issue with them that should have been resolved with one round-trip email it took 11 emails instead before they corrected their error.
They have an online chat also but it is as frustrating as email. No matter what issue you address to them online they always end up telling you to phone their billing or transfer departments. Its totally worthless and more of the same bizzaro world as they ignore your issue and give a non-sequitur reply.
So that leaves phoning them as they last communication option. The several times I tried this over a three week period and during different times of the day I was on hold for an average of 90 minutes before I got a live person. But once you do you might as well be speaking to a robot. It’s as if they are reading from a script. Their reply will be from whatever script they can find that is closest to your issue—more bizzaro world. BEWARE: don’t let them put you on hold for anything because YOU WILL get dumped back into their automated attendant and never hear from the support rep again. If you call back you’re into the same loop again. Nothing ever gets resolved.
The funny thing is that they routinely send you automated emails asking them to rate their service!
I consider it my duty to warn anyone thinking of using them. Do not use them. You will regret it. Their service is shameful and might actually be a scam. Watch your credit card billing carefully and keep track of when domains are due for renewal. If you do use them expect to be abused, expect to get really angry, and expect to get more frustrated than in your worst nightmare—which is what they are.
I have been with iPowerWeb for over three years and had always had relatively good experiences - maybe because my site is relatively simple and there've been little chances of such a basic site going wrong. Sure, I've had the yearly panic as to whether my subscription has actually been renewed or not (the endless stream of robotic e-mails is very unhelpful and leaves you unsure whether or not your renewal's been confirmed) but other than that everything was ok - until now.
Recently my site was hacked and a malicious script put onto it, so my site was immediately suspended - trying to resolve this issue has been a complete nightmare. Their customer service is ABSOLUTELY APPALLING. The instruction page on my suspended site gave me a number to call... at international rates I don't appreciate being made to wait so long. The conversation went much like this (this is obviously a very condensed version) -
(after 25 minutes of indecipherable 'press 2 for x, press 3 for y' menu instructions)
Me: Hello, my site's been suspended and I've not received any notification or warning from you, can you let me know what's happening?
IPW: I'll find out.
(left on hold for ten minutes)
IPW (finally): It's abuse.
Me: Sorry? What does that mean exactly?
IPW: Abuse.
Me: Yes, I heard you, but I don't understand what you mean by that.
IPW: I can't give you details. You need to send an e-mail to abuse@ipowerweb and they will contact you.
Me: But I've just spent more than twenty minutes on the phone already and I'm calling from London. And I don't know what you mean by abuse.
(Silence for 20 seconds)
Me: Hello?
IPW: Yes.
Me: I was asking if you could tell me what you mean by abuse?
IPW: It's abuse. I can't give you any more information. If you mail abuse@ipowerweb they'll contact you.
Me (losing my temper): Look, I'm your customer. It ought to be me who decides what medium of communication I choose to deal with you on this. I don't want to send an e-mail when I'm already talking to you on the phone.
(More silence)
IPW: You need to send a mail to abuse@ipowerweb.
Me: I'm not getting off the line. I'm your customer and I do actually pay you for the support you're supposed to be giving me. If you can't help, can I speak to someone else please?
IPW: You need to contact the abuse department.
Me: Fine. Can you put me through to them then please?
IPW: No. There's nobody in the abuse department, so you need to mail them.
Me: Can I speak to your supervisor please? If I'm going to mail this abuse department where nobody is, I'd like to have at least a bit more information about why my site's been suspended because maybe I could resolve the issue quicker then?
(Silence)
Me: Hello?
IPW: Hold the line please.
(Silence for about 8 minutes).
IPW: Hello. You have a malicious script on your site so it was suspended.
Me: Sorry I don't understand what that is. Can you explain for me? What is a malicious script?
(Silence)
Me: Hello?
IPW: Yes.
Me: Could you tell me what you mean by malicious script? Because I don't understand exactly what you mean.
IPW: It's malicious script.
Me: You've told me that already. I wanted to know what you mean by it. What a malicious script is.
(Long silence)
IPW: It's like, you know... like bad.
Me: I do understand the meaning of the word malicious. What I was asking you is what you mean by a malicious script and why you're saying there's one on my site.
IPW: I can't give you that information. You need to contact the abuse department.
Me: But you just told me that there isn't anybody there.
IPW: You need to mail them.
Me (now thinking I'm actually going insane): But there isn't anybody there. So who's going to read it if I do?
(TOTAL SILENCE).
Me (trying now to go for the friendly approach out of desperation): Does this mean somebody's hacked into my site? Because when I was uploading some files a couple of days ago the directories in the top level did look as if there were some scripts which I hadn't put in there. I assumed you'd done something your end.
IPW: It could be. I can't say.
Me: But that does seem a bit weird, doesn't it? Could that have anything to do with it?
IPW: Could be.If you mail them they'll know.
Me (now broken): Alright, what was that address again? Abuse@ipowerwebcom?
IPW: Yes.
Me: OK I'll mail them. And they'll be in touch with me, yes?
IPW: Yes.
Me: OK.
IPW: Thank you sir for your co-operation. (Reads off screen standard have a nice day message).
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
So I mailed abuse@ipowerweb.com. The automated response I received back told me that I should contact www.contactipower.com.
So I typed the mail out again. The automated response I received back to THAT mail said they couldn't help and I should contact the abuse department.
I'm fast beginning to feel like something out of Samuel Beckett. My site's still down, I can't get to talk to anybody, I'm in an e-mail robot loop which seems to be like infinite death.
IF I COULD GIVE THEM A CUSTOMER SUPPORT SCORE IN MINUS FIGURES I WOULD.
Registerfly has been spamming my mailbox with their services for years advertising their services, and one day I decided to give it a try. They advertised that the setup would be within a couple of days, and any queires would be within hours. After signing up, there was no news for 3 days, but they had taken the payment from my Amex account. Numerous e-mail went unanswered. Finally I told Amex I've been cheated and Amex promised to investigate, and several days later they told me they didn't get any response from Registerfly, so the payment was credited back to me. 10 days after my signing up I got mail telling me my account has been set up, but I couldn't access it. As I got my payment back, I left it alone. Over a month later Registerfly mailed me for payments, otherwise they would close my account. I said to myself "Be my guest".
They're still spamming me several days a week with their 'offers'.
I saw a post related to abusive ipowerweb service on your site. I just had a bad experience with them recently too.
Here is my story:
I registered a new domain + web hosting acct at ipowerweb on Dec 31, 2005 and got the confirmation of purchase and acct set up emails. After the successfully registration, I went further process and progress for my new business such as advertisement and so on. I was so happy with my decision at the very beginning of the year 2006. The webmaster has already been started working on the temporary web space which they provided. After 48 hrs, I found my domain as a spam website when I tried to browse it. I went to chat with their agent and he/she said that it would sometime take more than 48 hrs for the new domain to be sync. Well, so I waited for more. I call their office again yesterday and talked to the agent lead "Chris", he said that the domain was unfortunately taken over by someone else on Jan 01, 2006 even though I was successfully registered it on Dec 31, 2005 on their site. Isn't it too funny and shameful? Were there any normal employee working at that time? Were they leaving it with the automated web script for the new customer on that day? So, I tried to talk to the management and he said no other managers were available at that time. Later he then let me talk to his supervisor named "John". They both put me on hold for long time and awhile later, John came back and told me that he talked to one of the "CEO" of their company and the answer was "sorry - nothing can be done".
I am very upset for their insecure/inaccurate service which I thought was a great and trustful. I sent email to their CEO (named - Tracy) and requested for a direct response to solve this problem. I also think this happen on purpose such as one of their employee resold it or something. If not, I need the reason. I know, I will get my money ($95.40) back in 30 days regardless of this inconvenience but what about the other related expenses that I did for this new business? Why do I have to let this domain name gone to someone else hand?
I chat again with their agent last evening and he said that I would receive a response in two hours. It is more than 24 hours now but no response what so ever. Please think and feel as if you were me. I am so upset.
I found your site as an helper. Please advise me what to do. How do I contact the Better Business Bureau? I this can be a big law suit?
Horrible! Their tech support instead of investigating a problem invests all their efforts to defend from customers. I would rate it as zero or even negative if it would be possible. After they've upgraded PHP from 4.3.11 to 4.4 in Dec 2005 one of my web sites totally crashed. I'm spending hours to correspond with tech support team to find out the problem. First they tried to assure me that the problem is in my scripts which are outdated. I've designed them in PHP 5.0 by the way and they ran in their old environment without any problem. And all they may say now is that "oh, you know, there are different systems - unix, windows etc, different versions, and there might be some incompatibilities blah-blah-blah...". I am just curious - did they ever read even a popular books about what Internet has been designed for?.. I host two web sites with them, the first is hosted for almost two years and during the first year the quality was reasonable for their price and I haven't had any serious problem. Now I am looking for another hosting. I would not advise to anybody to host anything serious with them.
The Good - Overall up-time is good, customer support does eventually respond to everything.
The Bad - It seems like tech support gets a little dumber each year.
Most of my applications require SQL databases, and 2 years ago when I had my first problems, they quickly acknowledged it was a server error (maxed out users), and fixed it quickly. Now when I get the same exact errors, no one seems to know anything.
DO NOT USE IPOWERWEB FOR ANY CRITCAL SQL APPLICATION - PERIOD. You will experience downtime. My webstore was down for 4 days - 100% of the error was the Ipower server configuration.
I have 2 hosting accounts with Ipower, and both have numerous errors on the control panels. Even after several years of reports, none of them have been fixed. Overall, shoddy network administration on their part.
We've used iPower for many years, and are a reseller. Their prices are excellent, reliability okay, customer service...terrible.
There is a runardound regarding what is actually going on when their servers die or are blacklisted, and nothing but "we'll get to it ASAP" when a business customer is attempting to learn how much email or business they will be losing with iPower's outages. That email doesn't always get saved to a cache for later transmission is also challenging. A business looks as if it is ignoring customers because emails are bounced back, or no delivery failures are sent at all.
In order for them to survive long term, they will need to seriously overhaul their tech support and customer service.
My email has been blocked and I have been trying to get ipowerweb to fix it. The tech support is abysmal. They keep demanding that I forward the headers to them even though I have told them over and over that I can not send mail. Also, when I try telephoning them the wait is far too long and then I end up with a junior tech who insists that he can help me, until after 30 minutes of trying he acknowledges that I need a senior tech....who is unavailable.
I am VERY unhappy with this host. My email has been down for almost 2 weeks!
This is the first time I have posted in one of the review forums and it is for good reason. I purchased several domain names through their discount program and only have had problem after problem and no refund as promised -- or even any acknowledgement of my requests for a refund.
Some details of which to be aware before wasting $1 on them:
1. Setting domain nameservers after purchase will take a minimum of 2-3 days since they do not allow the user to do this without requesting a domain unlock & relock via email. Each and every time -- and emails usually answered by autoresponder within minutes first -- and then by a human the next day.
2. Their phone support is the worst. Have used it 4 times -- on hold 15-20 minutes each time and disconnected after 15-20 min in 3 of the 4 times. 4th attempt got customer serv rep who echoed same old "can't help you from" here line received at live suppot." All refers domain nameserver change requests back to the slow email support submission process.
3. Live support -- have used numerous times and never get help but that telephone language directing back to email support.
4. Email support -- 90% automatically generated email responses - the 10% that appear to come from humans are terrible and rarely address problems or questions directly -- and actually refer you back to live support or phone support!!! Have been in this loop for 2+ weeks now on 6 domain names purchased from Ipowerweb..
5. And if you want to sell your domain name? Forget it -- a whole new set of hoops requiring notarizations, mailing personal id, etc to their location for verification of ownership of both parties involved, etc. etc. -- estimate about 1-2 months best case scenarion for that to happen.
After wasting many days trying to change nameservers on several domain names purchased from Ipowerweb, and then get the domains relocked with only a 50% success rate I requested the refunds.
By phone, by email to several email addresses as directed, and by live support. All directed me to fill out the request to their billing dept -- which was done each time as directed and never done -- with no response from anyone at billing - but several emails directing me to call customer support for this request(!).
This has been going on for 2+ weeks now and all I have is a mailbox full of 30-40 auto-responses from Ipowerweb, with each informing me that since they have not heard from me in last 48 hrs, they will assume my problem is resolved(!!!).
THE WORST SO FAR FOR DOMAIN registrations -- and know there are many bad "captive" one to look out for -- Add ipowerweb to the red list.
Cannot even imagine what correcting a hosting problem owuld be like with this customer "support" system that cannot respond in a timely fashion to something as basic as nameserver changes. This usually is allowed with a few user clicks by most other hosting services.
Rating ZERO(0)/5 -- Avoid -- their bargains will waste you $100s in not $1000s in lost time & runaround silliness - their game appears to be to offer cheap domain names regs that require much time and hassle to redirect to nameservers other than ipowerweb's and make it Kafkaesque should one decide in 3-4 months to try to transfer a domain name to another party.
Just terrible experience all the way around. I have sent them some very heated (with no profanity) emails and have yet to have ANY problems fixed or any refund notice given or acknowledged - let alone any refund itself as they advertise 30 days refund policy. Into 4th week now with two other domains and still no reply -- seems quite an easy refund policy if it takes more than 30 days to understand a refund request.
I registered and hosted a site www.consolidated-creditbank.com with Ipowerweb about 10 months ago. A month after registring it for a client, I recieved a mail from them informing me that the site had been suspended due to misuse (bank fraud). The client was said to have misused it. However, they had not yet paid me for it.
I contacted them and they confirmed it. Seeing this as a serious crime, I reported the client to the Police and I was asked to produce evidence. The client has not paid me because the site was suspended, all evidence to contact Ipowerweb to give me some form of evidence to help me retreave my money has proved futile! The refuse to reply my mails, I spent 1:30 mins of international calls with them from Ghana, but they never gave me any evidence or even close the account and refund the rest of my money. They also refused to change the name so I can sell to someone else.
Their technical/customer support is one of the poorest I have ever seen.
DOnt risk hosting with IPOWERWEB!
If you doubt me, contact me, my address is ds1116@yahoo.com or call me on +233 24 4668 402.
Kallulu.
Absolutely horrible! Tech support might as well be moved to India because the people they currently have working for them in the US have no clue what they are doing! Horrible support and service. We use them for domain e-mail hosting and we have constant problems. Support via phone or e-mail is horrible! Do not give your business to this company at any cost. Instead use a quality host like cedant.com (good service/support/good prices).
RegisterFly.com has fallen WELL below what should be expected in terms of customer support. My latest (and my last) troubles with them occurred when I attempted to transfer a domain. Their interface was apparently having issues. It kept failing, and then instructing me to check the domain and try again. I did so five times, after which it asked me to logon again. After logging in it told me my account has been suspended, and to email risk@registerflysupport.com to find out why. I did so. Nearly a week later, I still had not heard back from them, so I decided to give them a call. 45min on hold later I finally got a hold of somebody who simply told me I would need to wait for an email back from the risk people. "It will be very soon" he assured me. Several days later, and still unable to access my account, I emailed the "risk" people again. Still no response. Then the kicker came! I found that my credit card had been charged over and over again for each of the failed transfers! I called RegisterFly again, and waited on hold literally all day! I waited for more than 2 hours, and then was simply hung up on. I would call back again, and after about 10min got hung up on again. All day long we played this little game. Time after time I would hear the "on hold" music cut away, and I would hear them pick up and hang up the phone again. They refused to communicate with me, be it through email or phone.
I am now working with my credit card company to get the charges dropped, but I am afraid of what will happen to the domains still hosted through RegisterFly. After reading what other people have to say I am afraid I will lose them.
Steer clear of this HORRIBLE company, which is clearly going belly up!! They have extremely poor business ethics, and don't deserve a single cent from your bank.
I do not know what is going on. I have been with Ipowerweb for many years. Even signed up as a reseller. However, I am now having serious problems with my family's account. Suddenly 12/8/05 in the evening, we could not get mail, etc. I logged into the reseller panel and saw that it was suspended. Keep in mind that the reseller panel ALSO showed that the domain and hosting was to expire in 2006 (months away). So, it was not billing. Spent over an hour on Live Support. Resolution: You need to contact the abuse or legal department. Nothing more. After "begging" for more info, I was told that it was suspended for "paypal phishing." Sent email to abuse@ipowerweb.com and legal@ipwerweb.com. Logged into Vdeck later on only to see ALL the email accounts gone. Could not even access the website folders to upload or download files. Got an email from Tech Support telling me that if I promised to remove pages they would reactivate my account. Then got a threatening email from someone name "Raynelle" telling me that I must agree to 3 things:
Dear Sir/Madam,
As you know your account is suspended for paypal spoofing. I will have your account reinstated if you agree to the following terms:
(i) You must agree to remove any and all links, forms etc. having to do with the Paypal spoofing;
(ii) Contact our Support Department and change your account password;
(iii) Agree that if the links are not removed within 24 hours of reinstatement, and/or if we receive another complaint regarding your account we will suspend your site again, you will not be reinstated, and no refund will be issued.
You will not receive a credit for downtime as phishing is a violation of our Terms of Service. Once you agree to these terms, I will reinstate your account.
******
I was livid. I was offended by the accusation. I DID not do any phishing or spoofing and now I had to agree to remove pages I no longer had access to. Each time I tried to create a new email account, it gave an error. Many, many problems and NO resolutions.
Do not use ipowerweb.com to host your site! Should I use ipowerweb? NO! Ipowerweb is not a good hosting company. They have really pushed me around and I have lost a lot of money because of them. They have deleted my site "in error," they have suspended my account "in error" and they never answer service calls. They are too big to handle themselves. Too greedy, not enough staff. Don't bother with this unreliable, sloppy and simply disgusting company!
ipower has the worst customer service I have ever encountered. I called them numerous times to speak to the domain transfer department. It takes forever to get a hold of someone and when you do talk to them, they just give you the run around, not providing any help at all. If you are thinking of utilizing Ipower, DONT. Steer clear of them and go for someone with better support and service.
For some reason they wanted to talk to me about my account. After I tried to mail and call, with no response, my site went down. After many, many emails, one of their workers, anonymous of course tells me that I have to give them my details. So I did, but my site was never up again.
I say, keep away from them. Their service after you have paid sucks. I used them to save some money, since I am a student, but look where I am now. I don't think you can get any closer to a hoax if you ask me.
IPower web is the way to go, I have had hosting with them for over two years now and my site has only been down one time. Support is readily available and always leads to a correct answer. I am a reseller of IPower web hosting and I have nothing but positive reviews from my 20 customers. Thanks IPower
Used to be the best hosting company.
Now: Useless customer service. Had to waste hours trying to get some help. Customer assistance personnel don't have a clue what they are talking about.
Advertise nice storage and transfer, but if you are already their customer you will never get their advertized services.
My site was down numerous times, but cust. support did not have a clue why that happened.
As soon as my agreement with them ends I'll switch to the more honest and reliable company.
I have been a customer of theirs for over a year. I had a few bumps, but nothing major.
I was recently approached by a person in Taiwan to purchase one of my domains I had. Ok..fine... So I asked for $1500.00 US Dollars and he agreed.
I decided to use RegFly Escrow to protect buyer/seller - but I never thought I would need some protection for the protection(escrow)!
The sale completed fine. The buyer paid by credit card. My domain was moved over to him in 48hrs (he had a regfly account - so it was an internal transfer). Buyer was very pleased.
This was August 26th 2005.
Then the trouble began.
1. I contacted Sales to ask what happens next - to my money.
They told me I can have a check sent or leave the credit in my account and use it against any future regfly purchases. I wanted a check issued.
I was advised that it would take 3-5 business days.
2. After waiting more than the required time..nothing arrived. So I started opening up trouble tickets. Each one would be closed with either "Assigned" or "We had sent this to the proper department" - Still no reply.
3. I started calling. I called EACH day. I was on hold for over 1hr just to have some snot-*** woman answer the phone and tell me I need to send an EMAIL to 'sales' to ask for status. I asked to be transferred. She told me "sales does not have phones" - I certainly dont believe that. I told her I sent many emails - all un responded to. She told me there was nothing more she could do.
4. I then (after opening up more tickets and email to 'rapid') - was told that a check would go out Sept 6th 2005. At this point I felt better. I left for out of town and expected the check when I returned.
5. I returned on Sept 18th. No check. I called and was again told to email 'sales' as there was nothing the cust service lady could do.
6. I then opened up ticket after ticket..Each day, hoping to invoke some response. They would again close them with 'assigned' or 'Investigating'.
7. I received an email from the trouble ticket stating that this check must have been 'lost in the mail' and they were verifying with the bank that it was not cashed. I was dumbfounded after reading that. YEA RIGHT.
8. Days and days go by. Each time I am told they are checking with the bank.
then on Sept 25th I am told a check will go out FEDEX to me ASAP and that this will solve my case. I was excited. As usual, nothing arrived.
9. Sept 28th - I contact cust support. Was on hold for 1hr 10mins. This time "David" answered. (He reluctantly gave me his name). He placed me on hold and told me that the reason for the delays were that this buyer was in Taiwan and used the Bank of Seoul and that in this case the deal had to all be confirmed to prevent fraud. Well that made sense to me and then I asked him about the 1st check that was 'sent out' - He told me it was impossible that a check was ever sent. But that my funds were 'just released' and that I would be fedex'd a check no latter than Sept 29th via my own fedex account. I asked him what to do next when the check won't arrive. He told me to contact 'sales' email and put his name in the subject line. That made me nervous. I noticed about an hour later that the $1500 in my account on Regfly is now gone..so I felt that was a good sign that the check was 'in the mail'.
10. Sept 30th. No check arrived via FedEx. I immediately called RegFly and asked for David in sales. I was told "David?? David who??" - Oh isnt that just special. I yet again explained my situation - I was promptly told to email sales and that someone would indeed get back to me. Of course the entire day goes by and no one called/emailed. I opened a ticket up...it's still open.
11. Sept 30th. I called RISK (ext 125) (the only people that seem to have phones) and was as polite as I could be to the lady that answered. I explained the entire situation. She told me she would certainly help me and make sure someone would return my call. I told her very nicely, that if this kept going on, that I would be forced to either contact the NJ Attorney general's office or sign up to participate in a class action lawsuit. I told her I certainly dont want to have to go to that extreme, but that $1500 was alot of money to me....No return call and no return emails still as of now.
The worst hosting company I have ever used. I have one site that's been down for 5 days and they just tell me there having problems, so I need to be patient. I also have over $60 on my account and they will not refund me. It's worth it to me just let them keep the money just so I can be away from their company. HORRIBLE. NO ONE SHOULD EVER EVEN CONSIDER HOSTING AT REGISTERFLY
