"I would not say NO to ix webhosting, its HELL NO" is right...

I've been a long time customer of IX and as of late, since they have outsourced support to Ukraine, this company is going down fast. If your site is getting decent traffic, it's guaranteed that the site will be hacked. It's not what you do, it's what the support will do to your site; keep in mind that the tech support has full access to your folders, files, and code. They even hide sub-folders in your site directory that you cannot see with the web based or FTP connection to your site. You'll notice the hidden folder when Google blocks your site and it shows up at stopbadware.org site as such:

URL: http://www.yourdomain.com/3wjc9dm/

You check your site directory and there's no "3wjc9dm" folder visible. You go ahead and chat with the support online and asked them, can you see this directory? You guest it, the answer is no.

Then out of the blue, you get an email from tech support that they have opened a support ticket for you. And of course, they do blame you for all of the issues. Quote from their standard answer:

"We regret to inform you that we have found that your FTP password has been compromised. It is likely that it was stolen by a "hacker" (or someone with malicious intent against your account) or a Trojan. This means that your account is now vulnerable to malicious scripts. Your account will be completely cleaned from all known malicious code in the nearest time.

The root of the problem is that your FTP password appears to be stolen by hackers. It means there is a trojan running at your local machine that reads the password when you connect your FTP account and then sends it to hacker. Thus, it is recommended that you scan your local machine and remove viruses and trojans if any found. And please, do not reset your FTP password until you sure your machine is clean. We prefer not to tell you your new password, in order to keep it secure. "

Really???

a. how come tech support noticed the hacked FTP account password, after complaining about the invisible folder?
b. how does tech support know where the hack has taken place?
c. even if the FTP account gets hacked on the "local machine", there's no way to make a folder "invisible" by that FTP account
d. after five years being an IX customer, running WordPress, PHPBB, and PHP websites, all the sudden during the last couple of month, I forgot how to protect my sites?

I did not forget how to run my site; I am moving them as far away from IX as possible.

Biggest Pro: List serve service
Biggest Con: Lack of providing a secure hosting environment

SERVICE GOING DOWNHILL

Do NOT get IX. Note the following email sent to users of their service sent by their CEO on October 19, 2010. Judge for yourself. They have "upgraded" their systems 4 times within a year.

--

I am writing to you to apologize. Last Thursday, October 14th through Saturday, October 16th, our CP9 & CP10 customers were put through frustrating and severe service issues, which should not have happened.

We had become arrogant with our level of confidence in making changes to our new infrastructure, and wrongfully assumed that there would be no problems in the change we had decided to make. In doing so, we put all of you through a lengthy and horrible period of multiple outages. Clearly this is terrible service, and not the kind of provider we want to be.

For those of you that are interested in understanding the full technical explanation of the issues that caused the service problems, please read the "post-mortem" that is posted on our blog. There is one bit of bad news, all customers on CP10 will have to undergo a 5 minute restart on Wednesday, October 20th in order to prevent a possible repeat of Saturday afternoon's outage. Please read the blog post for details.

We have definitely learned some valuable lessons from this outage and we want to commit to all of you that we will not repeat the same mistake again. So we are making some changes. First, we have instituted a maintenance freeze for the time being, so that only emergency maintenances will be allowed to happen for now. Emergency is defined as a maintenance that has to happen to correct or prevent a problem that is customer affecting. Second, we are hardening and cleaning up our testing procedures and back-out plan policies for all production environment changes. Third, a new Change Management Advisory Board made up of our senior leadership team will review and approve all changes to our systems, software, or interfaces from now on.

I sincerely hope that you will forgive us, and give us the opportunity to prove that we are taking this very, very seriously.

Fathi Said, CEO
IX Web Hosting

Ecommerce Inc
1774 Dividend Dr
Columbus, Ohio 43228
United States
614-534-1960

Biggest Pro: none
Biggest Con: poor reliability

IX Victim

This has to be the worst company I have ever had the misfortune to host on, and I have hosted on many being in IT for 30 years, sites down daily, hacked weekly, tech support lying, and I have only been with them for 3 months. PLease dont ever use these people. Your sanity is at stake here.

Biggest Pro: price
Biggest Con: everything else

I would not say NO to ix webhosting, its HELL NO

well i was kind of lured to signup with them coz of the pirce and the self proclaimed gauranteed and reviews on their descent website ,but i didn't know what I am getting into.

1) They dont know how to run DATABASES, or may is say WEBHOSTING , coz a website without a DB is frankly no website. Yeah they claim to have unlimited DB space but even a properly indexed table with a few(7-8) thousand rows that is queried 200 times can OVERLOAD their servers. If you have a descent website that is DB dependent and has a traffic of arounf 100 or more visitors per day, you will wake up on every monday with a "TOS Violation - MySQL Overload" ticket awaiting you for 2 consecutive weeks with your DB not there as it is chmod to 0, and that can only be restored if you assure them of not voilating the TOS (that you will never find as to how you voilated) and on your 3rd week, awaits the "Suspended: ToS Violation". Well thats preety much my experiece and I for a moment thought that may be its just me but visit their blog and you find it all over.

2) "Money Back Gaurantee", "Full money back gaurantee", thats what you find all over, well lets just try it for a moment, ok here you go :
-1- give them explanation for why you are cancelling account
-2- open a cancellation ticket and wait 3-5 days as it takes that much time because CANCELLATION and REFUND is a manual process (unlike signup process that is almost instant)
-3- get on phone with them or on chat to know about your cancellation and refund, only to know that they are EXCALATING your Ticket.
-4- repeat #3 a few times
-5- get to know that THEY(support people, to whom we/their customer have access) DO NOT GOVERN THE CANCELLATION DEPARTMENT and its for the cancellation department to process our cancellation (Yeah, I can imagine the requirement to have a whole department for cancellation requests/tickets)
-6-haven't received my refund as of now

3) You are entitles for a FULL MONEY BACK if you cancel your account within 30 day of signup. well thats only what theysay or have on the website. Their FULL MONEY BACK FORMULA is : AMOUNT PAID AT TIME OF SIGNUP - COST EVERY FREE DOMAIN REGISTERED (fine to me, usually 20 $ per domain) - COST OF FREE ADVERTISMENTS USED

4) A CONTROL PANEL that sucks, BIG TIME. Even if you have not seen any other descent but not extraordinary control panles like cPanel and plesk, their control panel is a place with little or no control and the somewhat control that is there is often hidden at the oddest of places. Dont fall for their talk of 'Developing a new control panel' coz thats all shit that they have been saying for years and are expected to continue to do so.

5) Oh i forgot to mention, if your account gets suspended, there is NO WAY to get the data/contents back. NO DB BACKUP, NO WEBSITE FILES: Thankyou IX, we are all set to be doomed.

6) hmm they got excellent support, thats is if you define support as "A person to talk to, whom you can share your problem with", but thats very much it. To every problem, Firstly, they will tell you to open a ticket and if you have already done so, they will tell you that they have ESCLATED your ticket. Thank you for calling IX.

I AM HAVING THE WORST POSSIBLE EXPERIENCE & I WOULD NEVER EVER REFFER ANYONE TO GO FOR IX, EVEN IF THEY OFFER SERVICES AT $1/YR

Biggest Con: DB Issues. Control Panel, help less Live Support

Your website will get hacked

My website was hacked 5 times within 6 months. I went with them because of the cost, but in the long run it cost way more after Google blocked my website when malicious scripts were inserted. I did everything to prevent this, but their web servers are compromised. If you get any decent traffic to your website it will eventually get hacked and flagged by Google. There are too many other hosting companies to choose from to deal with IX webhosting!

Servers go down daily...

For the past month I've noticed that my site(s) hosted on IX Web Host crashes daily. It may be only a few minutes but typically it lasts for a few hours. I'll never renew a hosting package with this site. Here is the very typical response from their technician that I just received back this morning:

"We are very sorry for this recent inconvenience, please accept our sincere apologies. Our administrators have been notified and they are doing their best to fix the problem as soon as possible. It may take some more additional time to get it fixed. Thank you for bearing with us. We hope for your understanding and cooperation."

-Nate

Going going gone?

For many years I've used IXWebhosting and been very satisfied, but I fear they are heading downhill.

A major reason for using IX is the ability to use SQL server manager to connect to SQL Databases. I have been doing so and writing native windows back ends for websites form many years with no problems.

All of a sudden, something has happened to SQLServer. Response times that were virtually instantaneous have jumped to 5-10 seconds with no changes on my part.

The following exchange with Tech Support sums up my frustration. I would very much like to hear from anyone who believes I am being unreasonable.

Up until two weeks ago, I was recommending them. I'm afraid I can no longer do so.

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Below is a very disappointing exchange with IXWebhosting's technical support. It is the first time they've let me down. I hope they aren't becoming like so many other companies who try to blame their customers for all problems. If anyone thinks I'm wrong or overreacting, I'd like to hear about it.

-----------------------------------------
To Tech Support:
All of my sites using SQL Server are experiencing incredibly slow response times. The server is mssql9.
For example, when updating one row updating one row of a 1000 row table it sometimes takes 4-5 seconds.
I just logged on to the site www.jayalums.com and it took five seconds to verify login information.

So, I logged off and logged back in. This time it took about 1/2 second.
Everything I do with SQL server has unpredictable results. This all started about two weeks ago.
If this can't be fixed can I move to a different SQL server?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Dave,
thank you for contacting our technical support team.
Let me express the most sincere apologies regarding to the issue you were facing. Unfortunately, I am unable to reproduce it now. As I have checked the server logs, there were no issues noticed on the server level for the specified time period. Please, could you verify the problem once again on your side, and inform us once it continues with exact steps for reproducing from our side, so we will initiate deeper investigation regarding to it. Thank you for cooperation. Should you have any further questions, feel free to contact us at anytime, we are available 24/7.
Respectfully,
Vlad Demyan
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To Tech Support:
It is difficult to tell exactly what the problem is but it seems that the server almost has to "wake up" the first time it is hit.

Try this. go to www.jayalums.com.
Below the login button click on "here" to register.
Now, on the left side of the page, click on one of the years and see how long it takes for the name list to appear. I just did this and it took 7 seconds for the class of 1965 list to appear.

Subsequent clicks on a year seem to respond more quickly but they are still much much slower than they were a few weeks ago.

Thanks,

Dave
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Dave,

Thank you for contacting our tech department team.

I regret to inform you but we won't be able to provide you with a better performance due to Shared Server environment. The best we can suggest you is to organize your scripts for better performance. You are using connection to database to get results from a request, maybe you should suggest to optimize your requests or database structure to be able to get requested results faster. We count on your patience and understanding.

Please feel free to contact us if you need further assistance. We are available 24/7.

Respectfully,
Stepan Radibog
Technical Department
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To Tech Support:
Stepan,

I have been a loyal customer of IXWebhosting for many years. During that time I have used SQL Server extensively and I have never experienced these problems. Your response is not an answer but a simple dismissal of my problem. This is exactly the type of response that causes bad reviews and loss of customers.

My scripts haven't changed. My databases haven't changed. Only response times have changed.

If my scripts are bad or my database structure is bad, why are the queries sometime very rapid and sometimes very slow?

Here's are two scripts that are almost identical. The first took 14seconds to execute. The second was executed immediately afterward and took less than a second.

1- update alums set password = '12345' where uniq = 10xxx
2- update alums set password = '56789' where uniq = 11xxx

It doesn't matter which script is run first, it is very slow but the second is much faster.

Please explain that.

Can we move our databases to a different server?

Dave

Don't use this hosting

If you run a web site that’s php or html this would be an OK host, don’t try to run a database site on this hosting as there so over sold you will be disappointed. Really you can find a lot cheaper host for php and html hosting with better support.

Biggest Pro: None
Biggest Con: Slow database servers

ixwebhosting review and the file limitation on unlimited plans

Before you sign up for ixwebhosting, you better consider their imposed 100,000 file limit. They say the limit is 100,000 for windows and 300,000 for linux. Unfortunately, many of the staff at ixwebhosting do not even know this limitation themselves. The terms and conditions are very general and they claim unlimited storage and bandwidth. This borders upon scamming the client to sign up and then tack on a file limitation to get you to upgrade to ixwebhosting VPS account. Is this ethical? No, it's not. Should people sue ixwebhosting for doing this? Yes, clients who have been a victim of such misleading terms and limitations should work on a class action lawsuit. You can perhaps email elawcase@gmail.com but also contact your legal consultant as well. Regarding ixwebhosting hosting itself, ixwebhosting wouldn't be recommended because of their constant downtime and server speed. It will lower your website ranking and people who visit your website will leave the site due to speed. The customer service on the other hand are courteous and you can easily contact them via online chat quite quickly. But unfortunately server and service is lacking. In addition this file limitation and server speed will affect your website's future growth.

1. ixwebhosting file limitation - POOR
2. ixwebhosting server speed - POOR
3. ixwebhosting uptime - Below average
4. ixwebhosting customer service - Very Good
5. ixwebhosting Overall - POOR

Last note, Ixwebhosting should not promote unlimited hosting if they have file count limitations imposed. This is considered false advertising.

Biggest Pro: hsphere control panel
Biggest Con: server speed and file limitation

Bad solution, too many problems

HTTP downloads limited to a 2MB size, bigger files are downloaded corrupted almost always.
SMTP limited to 25 recipients.
Control panel terribly slow, if you want a reasonably speed you have to buy a "Virtual Server".