Ipower hosting

I have been using this company for years and changed to other company last year. I changed my credit details to prevent direct payment in case. Suprisingly they took the money from my credit!

I asked this company many time for the refund and they agreed this and was told that the money was refunded. But it did not happen! I had to change my credit card details.

I am not happy about this company at all and if they read this review then please contact me on email that I left to solve this.

I don't recommend this company!

Soo

Run, don't walk away from iPower

The recent spate of MySQL problems (do a Google to check posted experiences across the web) have finally convinced me that iPower is one of the poorest web hosting providers. When I orginally went with iPower almost 5 years ago, they were a cost effective alternative providing reasonable service. I beleive they have far out grown their capacities and capabilities.

Over the past year, I have frequently experienced slow web response times (for a VERY modest personnel web site), e-mail unavailability and recent database performance that is nearly nonexistent. Even the database fixes of the last few days have only made performace satisfactory, not good or above.

In a highly competitive business like web hosting there are good alternatives (I moved to HostMonster).

Biggest Pro: Nothing really stands compared to alternatives
Biggest Con: recently - database performance, longer term - addressing problems

More trouble than it's worth

Where would I begin? Yes it's that bad. Ever since they went with shared hosting all my hosting accounts went south. The tech help is untrained, you'll wait for hours on the phone just so you can tell them how to fix the problem they caused. The billing is a nightmare. They just charge what they want and there's no decent way of figuring oput what, how and when they charged yoiur credit card. If they paid me $100 per account I would still not use them because it's a full time job. I don't have time to be a web host, that's why I outsource this but what's the use if it ends up being more work.

Biggest Pro: Nice guys if and when you get them on the phone
Biggest Con: Technicle ability is in the toilet.

Website? What website?

I've had my site at Ipower for a little over a year now and at first it was fairly trouble free and running smoothly. However, they recently transitioned my site to "new, improved" servers and it has been absolutely horrible ever since. It would take anywhere from 40 seconds to 5 1/2 minutes for pages to load, the Sql server decided that it didn't want to function anymore due to the fact that Ipower required a password change after migrating to the new servers, but that change didn't propagate to the Sql server, so Sql just ceased to function.

I've spent most of the month of March on hold with Ipower tech support it seems like. I got the run around for almost two weeks on the slow page loading problem before they admitted that it was a known issue and was being worked on. For the record, it has been 3 weeks since I first contacted them on this and it is still taking 40 seconds to 5 minutes, at times, for pages to load.

Then, last week, someone from their tech support team in Bangalore, India (I have his name and Ip address in my files) was playing around with an ftp issue I had reported and he deleted my whole site. So, another day on hold with Ipower and it finally got restored, and, of course, they recorded in their trouble ticket that I had deleted my site. No apologies, no admission of culpability, no taking responsibility for their own screw-ups, nothing.

So now here I am with a website that I had just renewed in January for a year that I can barely get anything done on (things that used to take me an hour to update and test now take more than 4 hours to complete and I just don't have that kind of time to waste sitting in front of the computer waiting for pages to load, and by the time that happens I have to log back into the control panel because it has timed out) and that tends to disappear when you least expect it and when you need it the most.

Now, just when I've had it up to "here" with Ipower, I found out this morning that out of the 135 files in my downloads section, only 40 of them got moved to the new platform, and that's just the ones I know about. Who knows how much more they "forgot" to migrate over. Not only that, but their "New and Improved" file manager will not display files greater than 5MB in size.

I'm currently in the process of manually downloading everything from my site, backing up my databases and moving everything to a new web host. I can't continue to pull my hair out dealing with Ipower when I have so little to begin with.

Biggest Pro: It was a good deal, and was trouble free for a year.
Biggest Con: Slow load times, disappearing sites, inept tech support.

IPower is Too Slow!!!

Many people have said that technical support is slow, and it is true. I have been having problems with my server for over two months. It started when my email address suddenly disappeared. I still do not have my original email address. When I try to recreate my email the server tells me that it is currently in use.

Another big problem I am having with IPower is very slow access to MySQL database. At first I thought it was my programming. So, I spent two weeks rebuilding the website to make my queries run faster. End the end, the website still runs slow. I am dependent on this website because it is one of my sources of income. No one wants to advertise on a slow website.

I am a web designer and build websites daily. At this point I am no longer placing my customers websites on IPower. If you are considering a good hosting company, don't choose Ipower. You will be disappointed if you use IPower

Biggest Con: Very Slow

Slow Servers & Slower Tech Support

We have been a client of I-Power’s for almost 4 years with the particular domain that prompted this review. We found our email down or unresponsive many times over and over. Though it used to be about a 15 to 20 minute wait for tech support this last 6 months it seems to be a minimum of 35 to 50 minutes on hold. The last support call resulting in being transferred to their "Help Desk", as 24/7 Tech support was not available.

We had been waiting since last December to move to their "New Platform". As of today’s cancellation of our account with them, they had still been unable to perform this task. When new clients are put right on it. We would have received better service in this aspect had we been a new client. They obviously cannot handle their existing clients and I think it was actually unethical of them to take on new clients without providing properly for their existing clients.

We waited patiently to no avail. We held up planned changes waiting for the "New Platform". After slightly over 3 months our site passed their "Quality Assurance Tests" even though I site did not function with the Front Page Server Extentions properly. Even so I would have thought I would be happy just to get the transition over. However, 2 weeks later they could not manage to point our domain to the "New Platform".

Needless to say we moved to a new provider. Now we know how fast our site should have been for the last almost 4 years. We realize within days how poor our service with I-Power has always been. I always talk and never take action, but in the end I felt I needed to take the time to write this review to hopefully stop others from making the same poor choice we did. If our service remains the way it appears on our new host I will write them a good review.

I however would advise against I-Power. The service is not inexpensive, it is cheap.

Biggest Pro: Actually at this point, sadly, I cannot think of one.
Biggest Con: Lack of real Tech Support

Overloaded Servers, Poor Customer Service

Due to web site volume, I was forced to upgrade to a VPS server which turned out to be nothing but trouble. The load on the server was always extremely high, even in the middle of the night when traffic was slow.

I phoned in many times and spend hours on the phone telling them about the problem. Each time they assured me that it would be fixed and it never was.

Then one friday night the server shut down completely. I called in letting them know that the server was down and they assured me they were working on it. After phoning again on saturday (because the server was still down) a customer service representative let it slip that their techs do not work on weekends and that the problem would not be fixed until monday. So much for 24/7 technical support. Sure enough, it was up and running monday, for about 24 hours until it went down again.

I then switched to a dedicated server at Superb Hosting and it has been amazing. You can get a lot more done when you aren't constantly dealing with server issues.

If you are just fooling around and building a site for fun, the ipowerweb shared hosting is ok. But do not rely on them if you are running an online business as I am doing.

Biggest Pro: They gave me my money back after all my problems
Biggest Con: Very Unreliable

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