CWI Hosting reviews

Fraudulent behavior

Many years ago cwihosting.com had really good up-time and service. Last month I noticed that my website was not available. I logged into my account and find that without telling me the "suspended" the server -- no explanation. I entered a support ticket asking why they were charging me very month for a server they shut down. After no response for 5 days, I entered another ticket asking that they remove my account and remove my domain name from their name servers. I tried calling their 1-888 number and all I got were advertisements. No one answered and no ability to leave a message. It's almost two weeks later and they have they not responded. And they are still trying to charge me! I reported the the BBB today. If they don't fix this quickly, I'm going to contact the Texas DA office and file fraud charges against them.

CWI Hosting Horrible Company

Not only was their service terrible, my website was down more than working, even after I officially ended service with them they continued to robo bill me for 8 months at least three times a week. As luck would have it my credit card on file with them expired so they were unable to charge me but boy did they try, and continued to send me bills and invoices for the next 8 months. I received these "reminder" emails bills from them 3 times per week and every time I forwarded them to their sales department requesting them to cancel my account but they just ignored my requests. I know many customers were billed after they canceled their service so I feel lucky there. All of their phone and technical support lines have been shut down, their only possible contact method is if you want to sign up for service. Just don't use CWI Hosting, I promise you will regret it.

Biggest Pro: Absolutely none
Biggest Con: Too many to list here

Where did CWI Hosting go?

Last week, I started to get calls from my customers that their WEB sites were down. I discovered that all WEB sites were down including my own. I tried to go into my portal No luck. Page could not be displayed. I tried to send emails. No response. I tried to FAX a letter to them. Their fax would not answer. I tried every phone number I could find. All were disconnected or no longer in service.

I set up a new host and was able to get my sites back up by Monday of this week, but I am unable at this time to get copies of my data bases to put on the new host.

There was no warning that the sites were going down. However they did send me an invoice on March 1st and tried to withdraw funds from my business account, but were unable to do so because I already had them blocked.

They still have a web page up (one of the few) for new customers to set up service. If anyone wants to use their services, they should have their heads examined!

Biggest Pro: None any longer.
Biggest Con: There is no service, no way to contact them.

Gone out of business???? Shockingly irresponsible

My nonprofit organization's website has been hosted by CWI for almost a decade. And at first it was super reliable. Never crashed. All our PRESS pages opened. We were high up on searches. However, for the past two years it is HORRENDOUS. We need our site's PRESS page to serve as our brochure and history of accomplishment. Unfortunately, for the past 2 years, and on a regularly (as in, more frequently than not), none of our important articles about our work will load. The viewer gets this instead: "The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems."
Now, I can reach NO ONE to resolve this problem. So I will say "DITTO" to the reviewer who says that they are UNREACHABLE. Their support/customer service has never been good, but now I get a recording saying that their phone number is "disconnected" or "You have reached a non-working number". Their own website will not load. Have they gone out of business???? Without contacting or giving notice to any of their customers whose own businesses depend upon an operable website of their own????? Shockingly irresponsible!!

Biggest Con: UNREACHABLE

CWIHOSTING is pretty horrible

I think they are actually off line. None of their phone numbers gets to a person. Technical support number disconnects; sales, never answers, Same for billing. If I go to my "portal" there, and try to submit a ticket, I get "license key expired" and no further web link. Their automatic money extraction works OK, however. I'm trying to move my site to a host where there are actual people. TOTALLY AVOID THEM, in my opinion. I have no way to close my account. None. This is ridiculous.

My overall rating is 1.2 because there is no help line now and no way I can submit a ticket.

Biggest Con: THEY ARE TOTALLY UNRESPONSIVE. THEY SEEM TO BE ON AUTOMATIC.

Web server reliable, but email not so. Support horrible.

I used CWI based on the recommendation of a friend. I never had a problem with uptime of the web server. My site was always up. However, the email server was very unreliable. It was bad enough that I stopped using it. The support is horrible. When I requested the auth code so I could transfer my domain, they ignored it and never responded. I had to go to the registrar to get the auth code.

Biggest Pro: Cheap.
Biggest Con: Email is very unreliable.

CWI - incompetent and unethical

We are so worn out from dealing with this company. Our site has been down possibly for weeks. Most of the time the main pages were viewable but the pages customers need to actually do business with us, we discovered, have not been functioning due to a server error. CWI takes hours, if not days, to respond to emergency tickets. When you call their main/support number, the recording says you must have a support "extension" to speak to a real person. The sales people say you're out of luck getting a call back if your package doesn't include call back service, regardless of the situation. When it does respond, they say there's no problem and that everything is working with our site, despite our specific instructions on how to duplicate the error. Finally, we discovered *their* specific error and still no response or resolution. Little response, practically no updates and neglecting then actually closing the ticket!
We had been with them for several years. The first few were ok. The last was the worst, our site being down for a total of a few months out of the year. We would contact them. Sometimes the answer was "we're doing maintenance". Sometimes the site would magically go back up - after having contacted them - and then they'd say there's nothing wrong with their servers or our site. With each ticket that last year we would tell them to initiate an uptime guarantee claim. Every time it was ignored. Pretty suspect. If they say there's nothing wrong, why would they consider it downtime? They may no longer offer an uptime guarantee (couldn't find any info about it on their site recently, which sends the message that they don't stand behind their service), it was part of the offer we accepted so they should've honored it for us. Otherwise, it's unethical at minimum. Update: CWI deleted the original support ticket (one with most of the history on our last case) about a day after we submitted a complaint with BBB...interesting timing.
By the way, their Chief Technical Officer (Jason Taylor) is the same guy who says "there's no problem".
If you prefer competence and ethical practices, stay far, far away from CWI.

Biggest Con: host service/uptime, customer service, problem resolution, etc.

Numerous outages, terrible customer service

Please do not use this company. Our site has gone down for days on end, as well as our email. It is impossible to reach a human being to talk to about the problems. When we you do get a response from someone (typically JT, who is apparently the owner), it is usually a flippant email that contains no explanation. He usually just states, "We don't see any issues," as if we are making up the fact that no one can access our site and that our emails are bouncing.

Of course, these responses are few and far between. Most of the time, we put in a support ticket, only to check in on it later to see they have "Closed" the ticket with no explanation and no investigation into the problem.

Their online chat service is a joke. You do not speak to anyone who knows what is going on with your site. PLEASE DO NOT USE CWI HOSTING!

Biggest Con: Lack of customer support, specifically JT (I believe his name is Justin Taylor); down website time for days

website down, poor tech support, no way to cancel account

I've been with CWIHosting for about 5 years. I've never had outages until recently when my website failed to load. Their online chat never had a technician when I tried (3 times) to get support that way. Sometime recently they removed the option for phone support entirely in favor of just online support tickets and the unresponsive live chat. It left me feeling less than loved. Apparently there were some php 4 commands in the root-level .htaccess file. I guess it was my fault and they went in and corrected it, but the mystery is, did they update to PHP 5.0 and not at least send me an email? I can't find one and I'm a prestiguous archiver of email.

But the reason I'm writing this review is what happened when I tried to CLOSE my account.

I went onto my customer portal and looked through every page trying to find a way to close the account. Then I called their number, followed the phone tree to billing and was told that, for security reasons, you must go online to close the account. My only option seemed to be to open a support ticket, which I did with the following: "Please cancel my account. Thank You." I didn't want to get into the reasons why. I get a response about 2 hours later: "Unfortunately this is not the correct information needed in order to cancel your account. You would need to submit the information shown in our policy which you had agreed to." and here's the kicker, the support tech then CLOSED the ticket!

And that's why I'm writing this review. As I've said I've only had minor complaints during my time with CWIHosting. I could never get SpamAssasin to NOT SEND high-scoring email to my email client. I never could resolve this. Not a big deal. They have a pretty standard Control Panel with the usual options. I never used the web mail feature because out of three offerings, only one seemed to work and I didn't like the look and feel of it.

So I will say that they were a reliable hosting provider, had very few outages and have a responsive support ticket system. However, no phone support now it appears and the live chat has a ghost operating it. Their tech support FAQs could be more robust and their Control Panel is acceptable but doesn't have as many user-friendly options (HostGator's mail setup was very helpful. It even provided scripts for auto-configuring Apple Mail, which made me feel very loved for about 5 minutes until the scripts failed).

Reasons for my ratings:

I based my ratings on the academic scale, 0-100. So a 9.0 would be equivalent to 90 or an A, 80 a B, 70 a C, etc. C is average, which means they didn't suck in that category but they didn't stand out.

uptime & reliability - 8.0 - only once or twice did I experience short outages
server & connection speed - 7.0 - I can't say that it seemed particularly slow
technical support & knowledge - 7.0
customer service & billing - 7.0 - billing has been smooth for 5 years but no phone support is less than average in my opinion.
price value for money - 7.5 - neither good nor bad
overall rating - add up the categories and divide by 5 = 7.3

I think that's a fair rating for them. Not abyssmal but not sterling. Just average. Again, maybe I over-reacted when I decided to cancel my account, but I like to feel a little loved.

Biggest Pro: SSL email, good uptime
Biggest Con: No Phone Support, lackluster cPanel