Webhost4life reviews – Page 2

Web Hopeless 4 Life

What a waste of time it is trying to deal with this conmpany and their technical support....
The web chat take 20 inutes to tell you that their systems are not working and that they cannot help you.... DUH!!!!
Their phone support is obviously in India and most of the opperators are almost impossible to understand.
They just revoked my mailbox as FULL with no warnings.. or even documentaion it may be.

THIS COMPANY IS NOT ONE TO TRUST YOUR BUSINESS OR PERSONAL INFORMATIN TO.

Biggest Pro: NONE
Biggest Con: uninteleigable telephone opperators

Everything is an issue with them....

We have had nothing but issues with this company over the last year and half. While I have only used this for small personal projects, nothing ebusiness wise, we did end up utilizing them for our company email server. I just found out today that after transferring our domain to them a little over 6 years ago, they just up and decided to stop, and gave it to some other company..

No consent or notice given to me the owner of the URL... I knew that the renewal was coming due because I had purchased the URL for the max number of years that their system allowed.

We had issues when they transferred to their new platform. All kinds of emails lost, down time, server outages or taken down without warning.. When you call their technical support they state nothing is wrong. Even though you could tracert all the way until you hit their system, so there wasn't an issue in between.. It was happening on more than one machine in the office, but according to 'one of their knowledgeable technicians', it was because my computer was garbage.

Never again...

Poor performance when it works

I've been having alot of problems with my site either not responding or taking 5 minutes to get a response.

I've asked many times to get moved to a less busy server, but it falls on deaf ears.
I'm about to change hosts, despite all the pain it requires...

Biggest Pro: Cheap
Biggest Con: No Response

website goes down for day at a time

Our church website is hosted by webhost4life via BT Intermedia, so I don't have a lot of information on what the arrangements are. However, ever so often our website will go down and we will get an error message somethng about dot nuke. We contact our contact person and the site will come back up and then in a few hours back down again. Then it will start timing out when we try to long on. Getting issues resolved seems to take for ever.

Horrible

My site is constantly screwed up, with the same sporadic problem which started in about 2009, revealing the same error to my customers. The dozens of times I've reported it, I always get a "canned" answer asking for the same information I've provided them time and time again which never changes. I'm pretty sure their strategy is to frustrate customers until they shut up and stop reporting problems. This is what my customers see:

You are not authorized to view this page
The Web server you are attempting to reach has a list of IP addresses that are not allowed to access the Web site, and the IP address of your browsing computer is on this list.

Please try the following:

* Contact the Web site administrator if you believe you should be able to view this directory or page.

HTTP Error 403.6 - Forbidden: IP address of the client has been rejected.
Internet Information Services (IIS)

Technical Information (for support personnel)

* Go to Microsoft Product Support Services and perform a title search for the words HTTP and 403.
* Open IIS Help, which is accessible in IIS Manager (inetmgr), and search for topics titled About Security, Limiting Access by IP Address, IP Address Access Restrictions, and About Custom Error Messages.

Biggest Pro: cheap
Biggest Con: horrible support, constantly wanting you to pay to get your problem looked at sooner

Horrible hosting company

Last year they made changes of their datacenter, since then service has been crap. My site goes down weekly, support will verify and escalate only to tell me 3 hours later they cant find out whats wrong and that its working now.

When I finally had enough and cancelled, they charged me a cancellation fee. They treat you like **** and then charge you for leaving.

Do not host here.

RUN- DO NOT USE

Customer Service is awful. Tech Support is clueless. Look at the reviews. I used them because a friend recommended them. He must be the only person who isn't having problems. I lost my entire site three times with this company. I stayed since they promised a free year of hosting and they charged my card anyway. They blame your local software when it is their problem. They just erased my site again. I HATE THIS COMPANY. Find another- there are lots to choose from.

ABC BRIAN ROSS SHOULD INVESTIGATE WEBHOST4LIFE

My developer recommended Webhost4life to me. I had four domains with Godaddy, two of them were active and hosted by Godaddy. I have NEVER had a problem with Godaddy. My developer swayed me to transfer my website hosting to Webhost4life because "they are good with ASP/Windows hosting". When my website was completed in June 2010 - we uploaded and it seemed everything was fine until in late September I visited the website as my custom is and realized all the pages except for the home page had this error message
"A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: Named Pipes Provider, error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server)"

Needless to say I am in the process of suing my developer to recoup the development fees I paid him and the advertisings fees I continue to incur due to future commitments I made back in September when I started a vigorous ad campaign for the website.

Per my conversation with Webshost4life, the data loss is blamed on my developer. Please help me determine (if apparent) based on the error message above the likely party responsible for the loss. My website has been continuously for two months!

I would suggest that we request Brian Ross at ABC to investigate their practices and expose them before another innocent small business owner gets "duped".

Additionally, there is a class action lawsuit that is being proposed - I think it is worth looking into if you are aggrieved.

Biggest Pro: None
Biggest Con: Every aspect of their business

Webhost4Life lost all my data and won't refund my money

Here’s my experience with webhost4life:

> From: support@webhost4life-inc.com
> Subject: [P07579604000000000] Sharepoint site not working
> Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 18:58:02 -0400

Hello, Unfortunately, we did not consolidate your legacy server. All legacy data has been deleted and you will need to either locate a new hosting company for your share-point services or use our new platform with it's current restrictions. Your domain has been pointed back to 66.96.146.85 (the default IP for your windows pool). If you have any further problems or questions, or would like me to contact you by phone to explain this further please provide me your details. Thank you,Troy R

-------------------------

Attention Webhost4Life,

On October 20, 2010, I was notified that all my Sharepoint data has been lost. This is all important business data since I started my technology company in 2006. I hold you company liable for this data loss and am outraged that no warning was given before you deleted my website off of the Sharepoint servers. I have submitted numerous tickets over the last few months to get back my data. All these tickets were quietly closed but not resolved.

I am forced to take legal action against your company to recoup the damages caused by your company’s negligence.

Please contact me if you are able to recover my business data. In the mean time, please refund my hosting fees paid since 2006. The total refund is $709.12. This is 4 years of service that was billed and paid at $177.28.
—————————————–

My name is Ryan and I represent the Legal Team at Webhost4life, I am writing to you in regards to the loss of data for your sharepoint server due to the migration. First I would like to take this opportunity and apologize for any inconvenience this issue may be causing. Secondly, I wanted to confirm with you that we no longer have access to the Legacy servers, and therefore are unable to provide any backup of any data for you. Lastly, we are unable to provide any compensation due to loss of data. I did notice we have canceled out your account. If you decide to open a new account with us, we would be glad to provide you with 6 months of free hosting due to this inconvenience. Please let me know if I can be of any additional assistance regarding this matter. Ryan S.Legal Team

legal@webhost4life-inc.comlegal@webhost4life-inc.com

Send email
Find email Add to contactsTo @hotmail.com
From: legal@webhost4life-inc.com
Sent: Mon 10/25/10 6:24 PM
To: @hotmail.com

Hello Miles, Due to the privacy policy in place, I am not required, nor obligated to provide my full last name within the signature of my emails. At this time you may simply refer to me as "Ryan", "Ryan S", "Mr. Ryan", "Mr. Ryan S", or Mr. S. Thank you

Biggest Con: Data loss, no refund

WebHost4Life.com = WebHost4Nobody!

WebHost4Life.com - what a joke! WebHost4Nobody should be their name! WebHost4Life.com is totally incompetent and has been for me the cause of nothing but troubles, headaches, and sleepless nights for almost 4 months.

I have been with them for several years, and slowly they have been deteriorating, in terms of features offered (less), price increases, slower and less competent support, and increased downtime and website slowness. However things have gotten really bad since January, and affected me directly since June when they started to run all the websites they host (including those expensive dedicated servers) of their new, apparently improved, platform. It looks like as of August 2010 they have completely moved all their clients to this new platform. And all new clients will be on their new platform automatically. And I can only feel sorry for them, because that new platform is new indeed, in that it totally ruins your website. Please read my review to find out why...

WEBSITE MORE DOWN THAN UP and "EXPERIENCED" SUPPORT TEAM:
For a start, expect your website to constantly go down, and expect the support team not to be able to do anything about it for weeks! Yes, weeks! While the support is available 24x7 as they say, they are practically useless. The way their support works is quite entertaining, if only it wasn't so sad... First they turn you into a parrot (a little bird that can repeat phrases after you... you know) by making you restate the problem to them like 5 times over (because they will either answer a question you did not ask, or ignore half of what you asked), to which they give you one of their two favorite responses: "we are sorry for this inconvenience..." or "we are investigating the issue..." or both, if you are particularly insistent. The way they decide which response to pick is by throwing a dice btw. After about a week, once you have received 5 or 6 as you have probably guessed terribly informative messages; you request that the issue be looked by a supervisor or a higher technician. This turns them into a different mode of operation with you... Now they tend to reply in a "things are working fine now, please check on your end..." fashion and closing the ticket. And after that, Oh Miracle! Indeed, the website works for 30 minutes, or even an hour... unbelievable! (Though if you can call 5s-10s response times working is a matter of a debate). But that "miracle" time does not usually last more than an hour... the website goes down for some time, and then spontaneously up again for 10 minutes, and then down for oh maybe several hours, and then... you get the pattern! So, then you realize that, after all, they are just humans, not some deities that could work a true miracle, you so hoped for! After all, it must be insanely difficult to have a website you host run for several days uninterrupted... isn't it? Thus, you submit another ticket, and you are back to the beginning of your entertaining, but sad, time-consuming, counter-productive, and costly endeavor of communicating with their so-called experienced 24x7 support!

WEBSITE ACCESS PROBLEMS:
But if the roller coaster-like responsiveness and availability of your website didn't disappoint you enough, I have another lovely surprise: guess what: you may not even be able to access your website for weeks to upload or download files via FTP, or to back up your database! I have been cut off from my website FTP-wise for 10 days! They could care less! Just imagine what it's like to urgently need to update your website and not have any means to do it! Their support this time was beyond just incompetent, they were totally clueless! I was asking like what is 5x5, and they were telling me that 2+2 = 4 (bad analogy but you get the point - they were totally unaware of the problem or did not want to fix it). I tried retrieving a backup for one of my databases for 1 month! They could care less! It was fortunate that I was able to migrate my database nevertheless by first using an older backup and then importing data from their database server (which thank God was accessible at that time) over to my new database server. So, even after you realize how terrible they are, unless you do regular backups that you have access to, you might have a very hard time trying to migrate to a different host, like I did.

DIRTY PRACTICES with BILLING:
And a few words about the billing. BEWARE they do not stand by their guarantees! First of all they do not refund any add-on features you purchased in addition to your plan - at all! So, even if you spend more than what the plan cost you on those extra features (like extra domain) - they will not you refund a buck! Second: regardless of what your issue is they will impose a hefty cancellation fee! Third: when issuing partial refunds for the hosting plans they calculate the amount by looking into complete months of hosting left, and rounding the amount in their favor! So if you have left 117 days with them, they will refund for 90 days only, not 117! Fourth: if you have prepaid for the hosting (like I did - I paid 40 days before my hosting would expire), they will turn it on its head and state that your real payment date was the begging of the new billing period, and the beginning of the new billing period was the date when you paid! That's what they told me on the phone: literally they accused me of late payment, when in fact it was the other way around! So, not only is their support incompetent, but their accounting department is incompetent as well! Fifth: I have asked them several times not to put my account on auto-renew; and over the phone they assured me it was off, but when I logged in to the control panel, the auto-renew was on - they disrespect you completely! Finally: when it comes to arguing that you want to cancel the account and get a refund, stating unacceptable downtime as the reason, they tell you literally: "Yes we do provide and guarantee 99% uptime, but that is cumulative, not during any particular time period". In other words, if you host your website for 5 years with them (that's 60 months), it's ok by their terms for your website to be down for 2-3 weeks in a row, because the uptime guarantee is cumulative! Ridiculous! So, basically, you would be very lucky if you get anything back from them! Do not trust them, and stay away!

PROOF of THEIR POOR PERFORMANCE and CONCLUSION:
I am glad that I have finally ended my relationship with them and moved to a great asp.net alternative - ARVIXE. I am btw not their affiliate or anything, but thought its important I mention a good place where you can go if you want to host a moderate asp.net websites with SQL Server databases.

And here's a response time chart generated by Pingdom for my website when it was hosted by WebHost4Life.com and later when it was on ARVIXE's servers! It's real data, and to me the difference is astonishing:
http://i52.tinypic.com/2dc5o20.png

The bottom line is that if you want your website to be constantly inaccessible, offline, slow, and unresponsive, and if you like repeating your questions and explaining your issues 10 times over to the support team only to hear that they "are sorry" or that "it works fine now", then WebHost4Life.com is for you. Otherwise - don't even consider this terrible web host!

PS:
Sorry for the lengthy and at times sarcastic review, but I really wanted to give a thorough and comprehensive review with specific examples and facts, and to warn people to stay away from WebHost4Life.com!

Biggest Con: frequent downtime, unexperienced support, shady billing