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Reliability...don't make me laugh ! 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. member for 16.5 years, 2807 visits, last login: 6.9 years ago lodged 15.6 years ago
I've been a ipowerweb user for a couple of years. In general, their online development system is fairly good - but really basic. Newer web providers are out stripping their abilities quickly, and they are begining to close doors in the name of security that they shouldn't - which causes anyone about the average html website builder to start looking elsewhere. In the begining, their uptime was fairly good - and they're still fairly stable - but I've noticed occassional prime time outages a bit more often. Also their webmail site is pretty kluggie and slow. I plan to keep them for my own personal website, but anything new I do - will be with someone else. They don't provide any good CMS packages, like DruPal support, and their postnuke package is pretty lame. In short, if you can set up an FTP connection and just do html - you'll probably be fine. Anything more, and you should probably look elsewhere. member for 17.5 years, 294 visits, last login: 14.8 years ago lodged 17 years ago
I have two domains hosted at iPowerWeb, one personal and one business running X-Cart. Both ran fine for well over a year, then suddenly I had problems on both accounts. 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. member for 19 years, 16 visits, last login: 10.6 years ago lodged 17 years ago
I have been an ipowerweb customer for 1 1/2 years. Initially they were great in getting a website setup but I recently needed a domain name change As I am writing this, I am on hold with billing now for over 20 minutes trying to cancel my old domain web hosting account. Finally my other account is working correctly, however I do have another problem with emails - I sent an email to tech support on Sunday - they responded today Monday and said they would elevate it to the next tech level - so to resolve this email issue, it is now over 24 hours.... Suffice it to say that there is a SERIOUS PROBLEM with hold times, resolving tech issues, getting employees to followup on tech support that they handled. It has been a miserable experience to say the least. I lost my website for 4 days because of their incompetence. I have spent over 5 hours on the phone with them trying to get issues resolved - UNBELIEVABLE!!!! It is also impossible to contact anyone in the corporate offices with customer service since they do not give out that info! (review was emailed from domain cox.net) lodged 17 years ago
They've been hosting my website for 4 years, I just recently have been told by only 4 people that are unable to access it at all. I emailed customer service on sept 3, they promised a 24 hour response. no response, i wrote again. no response. i called -- 24 minute wait, which i couldn't do. wrote again. now it's sept 15 and i have written about 35 emails, none of which have been responded to. Now i'm on the line waiting for customer service, have been waiting more than 40 minutes. I am changing servers as soon as my contract expires and i am going to tell everyone about their lousy service member for 54.2 years, driveby review (so far) lodged 17.5 years ago
While quite cheap, I found ipower's service, support, and email services to all be sub-par. 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... member for 19.2 years, 33 visits, last login: 8.3 years ago lodged 18.1 years ago
Again same issues that John points out. They do offer some hosting packages at good prices but businesses shouldn't even bother looking at them. We have had nothing but email issues since day one due to their use of overly aggressive block lists on their email servers. And now that they use the DSBL multihop list it's only getting worse. They have practically shut down my business's email communications. Not only do they fail to recognize this issue, their Tech Support points their customers in the wrong direction instead of trying to help. Overall the hosting packages they offer are good but only for personal use, businesses should save themselves the headaches and look to a host that won't cripple their communications. member for 18.6 years, driveby review (so far) lodged 18.6 years ago
The support takes over 45 minutes to get through to an entry level experienced person. 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 member for 19 years, 1 visits, last login: 12 years ago lodged 18.6 years ago
I admin two non profit websites and have been using this vendor for about two years. The uptime as been very good and the control panel is easy to navigate. Backups are a breeze with zipped files that can be stored locally. I've never needed customer service, so I can't comment specifically, although that's a statement in and of itself I suppose. Overall, I have been very satisfied with the service, generous feature set and scalability. The included features are: 2000 MB Storage 1000 Email Addresses SSL, FTP, CGI, PHP, 2 MySQL databases and FrontPage Extensions Linux or Windows Servers (slight more per month) 5/2007: My latest issues documented here: »Re: IPower Web Hosting have caused my greater heart burn and give pause to my review. I have adjusted it accordingly. member for 22.5 years, 6098 visits, last login: 1.9 years ago lodged 19.2 years ago
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