Just Say NO To IPowerWeb

That’s a place to vent but if you want your complaint to be heard and something done about it, file a formal complaint with the Arizona Attorney General’s office and the Arizona Better Business Bureau.

I’ve been using iPower for years and although I probably have more technical (i.e. module installs, specific cfg changes, etc…) needs from their support personnel than most, I just figured the poor customer service was the caveat to getting cheap web hosting.

Like most customers I’ve never had one single support instance resolved CORRECTLY the FIRST time. It just doesn’t happen. If I need to add a domain to an existing domain, have a PERL mod installed, etc… I know in the best case scenario it will take two weeks, three to four phone calls, and approximately 4 hours of being on hold.

Also understand that the aforementioned experiences existed long before they started this supposed migration.

Well I reached the end of my rope after setting a new iPower support record. I started a trouble ticket on the 16th of December, which is still unresolved as I write this. This issue has been such a cluster f**k, that you’d swear it was some comedy sketch about incompetent IT support. The trouble ticket itself, which is extremely long, reads like this: describe problem → tech support doesn’t comprehend problem and claims problem is fixed → re-open ticket and start over.

It was only Wednesday, Jan 9th, that I finally got a tech support person to understand what the actual problem was (I had to create a web page with pictures – yes, pictures – outlining the problem). And trust me it was nothing – in a nutshell certain e-mails were not forwarding to a central account. Their most recent solution is that it’s related to their SPAM filter and I should migrate to the new platform.

I did schedule to make the migration; however, that date has come and past. What a surprise.

Right now I’m in the process of moving off iPower. Unlike alot of folks I only lost my own money (as this was my personal site) and not that of my customers.

Over the last 24 hours I’ve done some pretty exhaustive exploring on the iPower issue.There are a lot of unhappy folks. The majority of which I believe are valid complaints and if I was an attorney “actionable”.

Thomas Gorny keep up what you’re doing and your sure to become an MBA case study around your company’s less than stellar business practices.

Good luck everyone,
A soon to be former iPower customer.

We are still searching for a law firm to represent us in a class action suit against IPowerWeb and Endurance International. Anyone knowing of a firm in the Arizona/California area (or other geographical area) that would be interested in handling the case, please contact news@northcountrygazette.org. Also, currently compiling a list of people who have suffered economic damages as a result of IPower’s actions since Oct. 23, 2007 and their “transition” who could be potential plaintiffs in a class action suit. If you are interested in joining the suit, please provide your name, email address, website address and briefly state how you have been damaged by IPower and a realistic dollar figure of loss.

I have had problems with ipowerweb for years. I have slowly been migrating my accounts away from them as they came up for renewal, some under dire circumstances due to ipower’s lack of response, I had to remove prior to renewal.

I moved all DNS services away from them since they seemed to “forget” to renew the domain names. I had a site down for three days and had to explain to their tech support how DNS worked before I could get them to fix it. Once it was fixed, I had them take off the administrative lock and promptly moved it over to Network Solutions. I would highly advise anyone who remains with ipowerweb to get control over your domain names while you can. This not only protects you from their incompetence, but if you have to move your site off their servers because their servers are not reliable, you have that flexibility.

BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP. When you go down with ipower, and you will, and need to move off their servers, you’ll want to make sure you have a recent backup to migrate over to someone stable.

In January 2008, my site suddenly had a redirect on it pointing to a non-existent file. I did not do this. According to the last login, which shows up on the cPanel pane, no one else had logged in. After waiting the average time of 1.5 hours for someone to answer the support line, I was told there were no known issues (though there was a known issue posted on the 11th in their help support).

A week later, I went to check on the site only to receive a 403 Forbidden Error. Again, 1.5 hours to get someone on their 24X7 support. They said they would have to turn it over to an engineer. FTP, SMTP, CPANEL all were inaccessible.

The next morning the 403 Forbidden error was gone, but now the entire directory tree of the site was exposed. Unable to use FTP or cPanel to fix the issue, I again waited 1.5 hours for support. No help…“it will be corrected in 24-48 hours” A canned response I got numerous times throughout the next week.

I finally got a tech support who told me the reason the directory tree is exposed is because I need an index.html at the root. Wow, is that all!? I explained to her AGAIN, that I know this, the problem is I cannot log in to the main account to effect any kind of changes. She put up a “testing” page. The directory protected, but still unable to log in.

Multiple emails, multiple contacts with tech support, nothing new. I created a PDF document showing step by step with screen snapshots how I am unable to use cPanel, SMTP, FTP services. I thought perhaps the pictures would make it easier for them to understand and save me the time of repeating the story over and over to the different tech support people. The response…“we can’t open the pdf, can you send as a jpg”! This explains a lot. There is nothing wrong with the PDF, I have had many people open it on both PC/Mac and various versions of Acrobat reader to verify and no one (even the technically incompetent) had an issue opening it.

Furthermore, it’s an 11 page PDF, I asked for instructions on how to convert an 11 page PDF to jpeg. No response. So I went through the trouble of attaching a bunch of jpegs and text referring to each one. No response. I posted the information out on a website that is up and running fine on a competitors hosting service, so now they can view it as html, or even download the original pdf if they discover how to use Acrobat or some other pdf viewer.

8 Days have gone by, nothing. Site is still down. FTP seems to be working now. So I deleted the site and am migrating over to a hosting service that I found reliable. I had a question for this new hosting service. I sent an email, and got a response in under 5 minutes. They needed additional information for security purposes, I provided it. They resolved my problem completely within the next 10 minutes and followed up to let me know. What a refreshing change!

Ipower is by far the worst hosting service. I gladly join this effort.

I represent a non profit organization in Houston that has been using iPowerWeb to support an interfaith activity that in November drew more than 800 people to participate in interfaith home dinners to talk about faith, religion, and spirituality. The website was absolutely essential in allowing signups, helping to assign individuals to homes, etc. We also purchased a number of additional domains at iPowerWeb, but since mid December we have been unable to access the site, unable to contact support, unable to contact the company. Please join this effort to force them back into compliance. But get your website away from them as soon as possible. It is the best revenge.

I am currently trying to get off of Ipower. The main issue here is access to my site. This happened the first time (2 months ago), and it took them 2 weeks to fix the problem. At first their “support” sent me something like a 92 character password (Duh, what do you mean it doesn’t work?). This time around, access is still down after more than a week, and I can’t get a password from them that works – at all. Oh, and this wasn’t a case of me forgetting the password, in both cases, it just stopped working period.
I can file a complaint with the Attorney General, but my real problem now is getting on a working host, I mean I’m losing money and time with Ipower. Question:
How am I going to get the :authorization code from Ipower (to move my site), when they can’t or won’t even give me a proper password?