Don't use iPower

OK. I have been with iPower since 2003. They are my first and only provider. Back in the day I could get support quickly and easily and never had to wait more than 10 minutes for telephone support. I never had a complaint with support, uptime or speed, but in the last year everything has degraded. I have one domain name with them and 2 sub domains. So I publish 3 website. I am a FrontPage user - not a skilled website developer, but I have built a couple sites that generate income and they are an important part of my business.

iPower's new "upgrade" has been a DISASTER for me. Once I was "upgraded" late in 2007 I was no longer able to publish, eliminating my ability to make changes. Telephone support is no longer fast and easy, it takes on average 2 hours now. I spent many hours on hold waiting to talk to support several times, only to hang up - needing to get on with life. To handle the call volume iPower staffed the support lines with unskilled "order takers" who's job it is to put your problems in the computer and start a "ticket" for you. Then you are supposed to wait for 24-28 hours for them to look into the problem. My experience with that system is it is a merry go round that never solved my problems.

Finally, after I got through to support, I spent two weeks being told it was a Fronpage issue and they could not help. So I was supposed to believe that 1) iPower makes "upgrades" 2) FrontPage no longer works so it's my problem. I must have done something! The merry go round system would tell me the FP extensions were reinstalled and everything was working fine now. I would call again to tell them I still could not publish, only to be told "It's working fine on our end" it's a FrontPage issue you need to fix. Then suddenly they resolved the issue and I could publish to my domain!

So we made progress, but unfortunately, I still could not publish to my sub-domains. What did iPower telephone support say? It's a Frontpage problem, you need you make the proper adjustments to ForntPage we cannot help you. It's working fine on our end. Imagine that. About 48 hours later I received an email stating in a matter of fact way "We apologize any inconvenience this has caused you; Unfortunately, sub-webs are not supported. You need to publish only to the account URL." So after 4 years they suddenly don't support subdomains (with FP anyway) and they don;t bother to notify anyone.

Sorry, this is extremely poor customer service. No one there at iPowers seems to know what is going on.

Now I am working to move my domain name to a new provider.

Biggest Pro: Good pricing.
Biggest Con: Service and support has been eliminated with "upgrade".

AVOID ipower.com at all costs! They are a NIGHTMARE!!

Avoid ipower at all costs. They are unreliable, unresponsive, and technically ignorant! They were a nightmare during setup, averaged downtime more than once a month, and eventually deleted my account with NO backup accidentily, leaving me no choice but to rebuild a two year old, 100+ page website from scratch.

Typical average service

To put things simple, there are good traits with this company, and there are definately bad ones as well. Lets start with the good:

-Easy management for new hosters.
This is one of the things I like. They have a nicely designed control panel that lets you easily modify all the website settings and design. You could pick out a template, add an autoresponder, and even set up creditcard payments easily, and they provide the help of their more then 100 nicely designed interactive flash tutorials learn how to do what.

-24/7 support with bearable waiting lengths.
I chated with the support more then once, and they could always help. But the waiting times were very erratic: Sometimes I would get support in 5-10 minutes and other times I experianced up to 35-40 minute wait periods, and once while I was surfing the net waiting to ask just a simply question, I found out that the chat widow doesnt signal a response when they start to reply. No flashing of the chat window, no nothing. I had to manually pay attention to the chat box to know when they would reply.

-Their big
Ipower is one of the biggest hosting companies and they even provide their services even to a few fortune 500 companies, so Ipower is recognized, its a brand name.

-They have every feature that other hosting sevices provide.
The same amount diskusage/bandwidth, many pop3 email accounts (2500), the abillity to host 25 domians, website builders, sofware & scripts, google adwords and yahoo search marketing PPC credits etc.

But like I said, Ipower.com has its cons too:

-Not the most competetive priceing
Yes of course what they claim on their homepage is that they have some of the best prices, but youd be paying for around 50% more here for the same services you could get at a really competetively priced hosting service like Powweb.

-Experianced server failure many a time
Far more then just a few times Ive received the "CPU Quota exceeded" error, and that was only the times when I personally tried to check out my own site. Who knows how many times it came up when I didnt even know about. And I have absolutely no idea why. The message is only supposed to come up when you receive large amounts of traffic, and I was definately not receiveing even moderate amounts when I saw this comeing up. I first thought that maybe I was just doing something wrong, but no. I talked to other Ipower users and many of them also enquired that they experianced the same problems.

So as an overall conclusion, I would say you should rather pick another hosting company to do buisness with. I payed out a 12 month subscription in advance already, so Ill still be stuck with this provider for another 9 months, but as soon as the service expires, make no doubt about it, Im moving to another hosting company.

Biggest Con: Server connection problems

Bad All the way around except for price

I've been with ipowerweb for almost 7 years. They were great when they first started up, very few issues. Over the years I'd seen how their service level had gone down. I noticed things like the uptime decreasing, and a persistant and continuing spurts of outages throughout the day, some for a fraction of a second to several minutes at a time.

Tech support is a joke. I never waited less than a half hour for customer support or tech support in my numerous calls to them. Their system was compromised this year and they did not inform not a single customer of this compromise. They are currently going to a different platform, hopefully a secure one, but the problems at this point in the transition make their service useless. I have gone weeks without email for my domain, mainly because they have a very poor support system. I've decided to change my host and am going through the process of finding a more reliable service. After reading the reviews here, I felt the need to add my reviews as I have 3 domains all hosted by Ipowerweb.

I attempted to ask for a refund of the second year of my 2 year agreement, but had the billing agent transfer my call to tech support without listening to what I had to say. I waited 45 minutes for the tech support agent to answer. This is absurd.

I will NOT recommend this service to anyone who is hosting a professional or ecommerce site. You will lose more money than you saved by going with them.

Biggest Pro: Cheap
Biggest Con: Very bad system overall

IPowerweb

I have been using them for many years, and I must say that they were great so far. I just can't remember the last time, my server was down.

The only negative thing that I can remember about this web host is that from time to time the server is going to be a little bit slower than it should.

The best thing about this web hosting is that it's very affordable. They have some great prices and promotion going all the time. I'm sure that iPowerWeb is going to be a great solution for many online businesses around the world.

Biggest Pro: cheap
Biggest Con: server is slow

Awful, Slow and Unreliable

I can't say enough bad things about this company. They've gotten worse and worse over the years. When changing servers (3 times in the last year) I've lost email for over 3 days each, web site function for 24 hours at a time and I wait at least 30 minutes in the queue for a service rep (telephone) and over 2 hours for "live support."

ipowerweb is the very worst

After a little over a year of service from an ipowerweb VPS server, I can say it has been the worst host I have ever used.

Their support is horrible. The techs are rude and the wait is long.

As of right now, my sites are down for the third time in three months. This time they say that someone hacked in and Spammed using my account. As a business, we do send our customers news and specials via web, but we use constant contact services to do so.

We don't even use this service to send our own E-mails. We use the local service providers SMTP.

My two sites have been down for over 12 hours and they will not give me an ETA for a fix.

Stay away guys.

Biggest Pro: was history on a shared plan
Biggest Con: tech support and down time, plus the cpanel was always very slow

Steer Clear

Horrible....... steer clear. If you call to tell them your site is never up they put you on hold for over 2 hours. NO SUPPORT AT ALL. The site is down more than its up.

Terrible for message board

If you plan on having a message board, DO NOT USE Ipowerweb. They were quite good for a time but for at least the last six months you can expect at least once a day but most days several times per day to not be able to connect to your message board. And with support there's never a problem, everything is always great. It's getting worse and worse, I would not recommend in the least.

Biggest Pro: Price
Biggest Con: Message board is down constantly

Awful service when they transfer to new servers

They never used to be like this. They have been moving web sites to new servers and they aren't debugged before hand. Web sites and emails are down sometimes for an entire day with no idea when they are coming back up.

They apparently have grown to fast to provide quality service anymore.

At this writing my website was down for 5 hours today and my email is still not working 13 hours later.

We are looking for a new provider.

Biggest Con: Down time is a regular occurrence now