Review of ipowerwebAll reviews of |
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This is the WORST hosting outfit that I have ever seen ! I'm quite sure their "customer service" center stays busy with all of the problems they have. Their "tech support" sucks just as bad because they have NO technical knowledge of anything ! The e-mail system shuts down on a daily basis. We did have web hosting with them, but I had to move it because of reliability issues. My web site was down, more than it was up and calling support was absolutely worthless ! My contract runs out next June (2009). I will be moving my e-mail elsewhere, if not sooner. Its quite simple, IPower is simply worthless. Use someone else. Followup comments:
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Personal Site: I installed gallery using their vDeck control panel, and had about 80 pictures loaded. After more than a year of running fine, I went to the site one day and the gallery started kicking a ton of php & mySQL errors. Apparently, iPowerWeb had upgraded the version of gallery on the shared host, and the new version was incompatible with my existing database. I received no warning the upgrade was going to happen, no message the site was giving errors, nothing. When I asked Tech Support what the heck happened - they responded that an upgrade had occurred and that I "may need to reload my gallery software". No offer to fix what they broke - I had to delete the gallery, reinstall, recreate all the albums and sub-albums, and reload all the pics. Business Site: This site had run fine for almost 2 years. We had the occasional SQL error that seemed to show the site had lost connection to the database, but that was only every couple of months, so no big deal. Suddenly, in Feb '07 the X-Cart scripts started throwing a ton of mySQL connection errors nearly every day - and the shopping cart would crash in flames. I tracked the error down to a limit on the number of SQL queries per hour each database user is allowed to have. The limit is apparently 50,000 queries per hour - and once you hit that limit X-Cart is going to crash until you login to the control panel and reset the database user. This is not a big or busy site - we get about 10 concurrent customers at the busiest times. Tech Support was no help - they simply sent me a canned message telling me my scripts needed to be rewritten. X-Cart Support said this is a fairly common problem at iPowerWeb and other restrictive shared hosts. Google showed that to be the case - the same problem is seen by other database driven apps like forums, drupal, etc. I finally found a php hack that rotates through 10 database users for every query so that the number of mySQL hits per user is kept within the restriction. A stupid hack for a stupid restriction. NOWHERE in the documentation or the EULA are these restrictions listed. I was also recently told by iPowerWeb tech support that they also have a total file limit of 50,000 files per account. I haven't hit that one yet... I am looking for a new host - maybe it's time to step-up to a VPS - I am tired of not being able to configure my own web server and database. Followup comments:
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The control panel setup is fairly slick for web pages/sites/photo albums/etc, but their email service is very, very sub-par. The web mail client is acceptable. The SPAM protection is bad from both angles: low hit rate and a high false positive rate. Outbound email access was extremely spotty and at one point I was denied all access from Verizon DSL lines in spite of using SMTP-AUTH. There is no 'easy' way to cancel an account. E-mails to 'billing@ipower.com' or 'billing@ipowerweb.com' are responded to by the tech support department, asking you to forward to 'billing@ipowerweb.com', this went through about 4 iterations before someone in billing got a hold of it and then asked for my username, password, and last 4 digits of my credit card OVER email! Simply checking my DNS records to verify that they didn't have any authority over the domain wasn't good enough. They automatically charged my card for a renewal even after recieving the email notification to discontinue service and not enter a bill (i.e. request in writing). A phone call after the charge occured recieved a response that the service would be stopped the next day and a credit would be issued. I call back 3 days later to see where the refund went garnered the response that 'all refunds take 10-15 business days to process', so basically they are holding my money captive for a charge they were never authorized to make in the first place! My advice: Look for someone else... Followup comments:
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Hosting has gone down on occasion because they share one server with over 50 domains I think that number could be well above 50 these days. Email problems they are plaged with bad dsbl.org messages that other host providers do not have. Example, all of southern California verizon.dsl customers are unable to send email to me because ipowerweb.com has blocked all of verizon thinking all email is spam. They're unable to fix this problem, if email is important do not use ipowerwe . If using this for business to not use Ipowerweb.com A few months ago they accidently moved my domain to another server, I had to re upload the whole website and re setup all emails, and lost any emails that were not recieved in between. This was due to an error by somebody at ipowerweb. No one responded to complaint inquiries. For the money this looked like a great deal until things went wrong. Often email is delayed for several hours. Again a business cannot afford their slow mail servers and blocking of people's ability to send domains email. When something went wrong in the vdeck configuration it took over two weeks and 7 phone calls to resolve. Consider the hold time of at least 30 minutes per call and you get the idea of how this works out. I have four domains that were moved there out of me being cheap, moving four out of here as soon as I can. If your just hosting a website for family pictures or something this service is for you. If you are using it for a business you must buy a dedicated server plan and hope they dont block your customer's ISPs from sending emails. JK Followup comments:
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ipowerweb
El Dorado,Union,AR
Business customer
$29 per month (24 month contract)
"Haven't found any yet."
"Too many to mention"
"Go somewhere else !"
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dedicated server
about 12 days