We are currently moving away from WestHost after over 5 years of putting up with them. We chose them when we were a start-up ISP, and outgrew them quickly. Not only were we hosting our own site on their servers, but we had a reseller account with them as well. Even when we moved our company site off of the reseller account and purchased the semi-ded service, it wasn't enough. I was put in charge of our accounts shortly after I started, and have been disappointed ever since.
Lets begin with the service itself. While they may be able to keep your site up with decent reliability, the same cannot be said about their management portal. Even as I type this one of their servers is down, preventing me from making changes to a customer's email account. When the servers are up, they're dog-slow. I have been persistent in contacting their support about this issue, and each time they say the same thing: "One of the users on our system has a script which is running out of control and slowing the server down. We have stopped the script and contacted the customer." After this claim, we see no improvement in performance.
Our service is on what was called their WH3.0 system. The main gripe I had with this system is that when configuring email or ftp accounts, there is a maximum limit of 8 characters. We were told that we could optionally upgrade to their WH4.0 system, but that we would have to manually enter all of our users' accounts again (all 1,000+!)
We were given no way to keep the software up to date, and their security policies are a joke. As a result, we had a security incident (presumably an SQL injection) which gave an attacker all of the email addresses on our server. A phishing email was sent out and users' accounts were compromised. Upon contacting WH technical support about this, I got a pre-chewed generic response about "best practices" for security, like choosing good passwords. Ironic, since their system does not allow for secure passwords, anyway. We were denied access to access logs to try and build an incident report, and told once more that we would just need to change users passwords.
Within one week of this security breech, they disabled the SMTP daemon on the server. Upon investigation I found that they had emailed the owner of the company (the email address they had on file) informing him that compromised accounts were being used for SPAM and that we had 48 hours to change all of the users' passwords. The only option they offer for this is their web gui, which is painfully slow. With over 1,000 accounts it was impractical for us to meet their demand. Unfortunately, the owner of the company did not forward the email to the appropriate technicians within the company and we did not find out that we were even supposed to do this until service had already been disabled.
Since we were now being forced to change settings for every single user, we decided to finally change hosting providers. This was a change we had previously determined to be impractical because it would mean that all of our email customers would need to change settings within their clients. We were now being forced into making those changes, and without warning to our customers. For the next two weeks, our support staff put in 80-hour workweeks just taking calls for email. Other important projects got delayed. This was the worst PR event we have ever experienced for our company. Estimated company losses incurred during that two week period exceeded the total expense of our hosting over the 7 year period.
Their technical support is all but technical. Their chat support on the website takes 45+ minutes every time I use it. A typical support question ends in the technician telling me that I can't accomplish what I'm asking for, or listing limitations to what I'm trying. Instead of attempting to help me do what I'm trying, they give me obstacles and tell my why I shouldn't try.
On one such occasion, I had a webmail user who was shut off during our email crisis. He had a number of emails stored in his "saved" folder on webmail. I contacted support to find out how to retrieve those emails and was told that I couldn't. When I asked where those emails were stored, the Tier1 technician said that they were not stored on-disk! When I finally got the path to the stored emails, the technician I was speaking with told me that it was in some proprietary database that formatted the emails differently and that I wouldn't be able to retrieve them. Both technicians ended the conversation telling me that I couldn't do what I was attempting. I got FTP access to the server, cd'd to the directory where the "proprietary database" was stored. I proceeded to download the .eml files I found there and put them into the new server. I don't think the WestHost staff realizes how important email is to people. This particular customer would have had to change the passwords of dozens of accounts if I hadn't retrieved the emails.
The only reason this host is getting a 2 overall rating is because they have managed to keep the website up with reasonable reliability. Their support and service has been a NIGHTMARE! I wouldn't recommend the service to my worst enemy.
This person does NOT recommend WestHost.
