messageCustomer support has not resolved my website’s down time and has not addressed the errors on my website. I am unable to pursue my goals with my website production at this time due to iPowerWeb.
-
Recently joined:
-
There are 1 announcements, 4 topics, 28 posts, 18 voices
-
-
Charles Khaikin replied on Dec 23, 2007At roughly 12pm EST on December 21st, 2007 I noticed my site charleskmedia.com was down for no particular reason. I contact iPowerWeb support which confirmed there were no financial or DNS issues with my configuration.
I am very disappointed in iPowerWeb and in its completely random inability to support my needs to represent myself on the world wide web.
I also Googled “iPowerweb crash” and found over a hundred complaints and arguments about the company. The Attorney General in Arizona even knows about this company and the things they have been doing.
I think this is a great start and hopefully we can sue the pants of these evil bastards and get not only our money back but the damages we’ve incurred.
Thanks, I am a video editor, a Flash programmer and graphic designer. I also do museum installations and am a growing artist in New York City and Boston, MA. I am currently employed as the Senior Media Designer at John Hancock Financial Services.
-
Charles Khaikin replied on Dec 23, 2007
Here is a common iPowerWeb Response, mind you I have all of next year paid for,
__________________________________________________________________Hello Charles,
Thank you for contacting Support.
I have noticed that domain ‘charleskmedia.com’ is associated with account ‘charlesk’ and your account is deleted on December 21, 2007. This is the reason you are unable to access the Web site. If you wish to host the Web site , you need to sign up for a new account. In order to sign up for a new account, please refer the link given below:
http://www.ipower.com/ipower/hosting.bml .If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We are available 24×7.
Sincerely,
Benita Hardy
Customer Support
———————————————————————————————————————————————
> To Whom It May Concern,
> Today at roughly 12pm EST on December 21st, 2007 I noticed my site
> charleskmedia.com was down for no particular reason. I contact iPowerWeb
> support which confirmed there were no financial or DNS issues with my
> configuration.
>
> I am very disappointed in iPowerWeb and in its completely random inability
> to support my needs to represent myself on the world wide web.
>
> Should this issue not be resolved immediately and preferably by the end of
> the week, I will look to take my services elsewhere with a full
> reimbursement of the money I have paid to use iPowerWebs services.
> Regardless of any scenario, I feel iPowerWeb owes my at least 2-3 months of
> free web hosting based I was given no notice, no understanding or basically
> any suitable business excuse for why I am not getting what I have paid for.
>
> I have been a major supporter of iPowerWeb and there services. I have been a
> customer for over three years, please keep me updated as to when and how
> soon my website will be back up and running.
>
> Thank you.
>
> Charles Alexander Khaikin
> CEO, Founder,
> CharlesKMedia Inc. LLC
-
John Bevan replied on Dec 23, 2007
I, along with June Maxam, have already begun the fight. June and I have contacted a large number of upset customers and urged them to contact the State of Arizona Attorney General to get the ball rolling toward resolution and recovery of financial losses by those who have so suffered (such as me).
-
John Bevan replied on Dec 23, 2007
Charles,
Besides your account being paid through the next year, you may have another problem on the horizon. I just checked your domain’s whois information and it says that the domain registration expires on January 25, 2008, only about a month away. If you have paid up for both the hosting and the registration through the next year, then you have yet another beef with the enemy over at IPowerWeb/StartLogic/DOT5.
For your convenience (as it is public information), I have attached the found information below:
Whois Record
Registrant:
Charles Broggi
99 Clarlemont Ave
Arlington, Massachusetts 20476
United StatesRegistered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: CHARLESKMEDIA.COM
Created on: 25-Jan-04
Expires on: 25-Jan-08
Last Updated on: 09-Dec-04
Administrative Contact:
Broggi, Charles
99 Clarlemont Ave
Arlington, Massachusetts 20476
United States
7816486067 Fax —
Technical Contact:
Broggi, Charles
99 Clarlemont Ave
Arlington, Massachusetts 20476
United States
7816486067 Fax —
Domain servers in listed order:
NS1.IPOWERWEB.NET
NS1.IPOWERDNS.COM
If there is anything that I can do to help, be sure to let me know. Both June Maxam (publisher of The North Country Gazette found at www.northcountrygazette.org) and I (owner of Best Deal Computers at www.bdcusa.com) have spearheaded the recent action against IPowerWeb (et alius), having contacted as many dissatisfied customers as possible and urging them to contact the Attorney General for the State of Arizona with formal complaints about our favorite web hosting (dis)service. If you have not sent in a complaint to the Attorney General, please do so.
It does seem that the AG’s office is beginning to take action as June has been contacted by someone from that office stating that they are speaking with IPowerWeb at this time and shall share their response with her when they receive it.
Further, it seems that Gary Engel, the Vice President of Customer Support for IPowerWeb/StartLogic, has contacted both June and me (and maybe others; I have no idea since no one has yet told me) with this to say (excerpted from an email that was recorded in one of the work tickets I have open but that never arrived to me, as one of the problems I have reported is the inability to send or receive emails):
I am truly sorry for the frustration that you’ve clearly expressed in using out services;
it is our goal to provide a low-cost, user-friendly experience to all of our customers.
If you feel that we are not the right host for you, I accept that, and would be willing to
refund any monies paid for this current term that you have with StartLogic. With
regards to all of the legal issues that you’ve raised in your correspondence, I will be
honest with you, I am a Customer Service person; I deal in trying to make our
customers satisfied and reaching resolutions to issues. If you feel that a legal
remedy is something you wish to pursue, that is your decision, and not something
that would we would address through support.
Please let me know about any current issues (questions #1 and #2 above) and if
there is anything else that I can do to assist you at this time.
Sincerely,
Gary Engel
Vice President, Customer Support
StartLogic
781-852-3302
In other words, despite the fact that he has contacted me only over the last 48 hours or so to deal with the situation that has been ongoing for the past two months and I have given him the information he has requested, he is trying to blow me off rather than deal with the problems. My guess is that he has been trying to play nicely for the past 48 hours so that he could document it in an attempt to show the AG’s office that he has “tried to remedy the problems experienced by the customer but the customer was unwilling to accept our resolution.” Well, that will not fly here, not if I have anything to say about it. Gary asked for a thorough explanation of the problems so that he could be clear as to the complaints. I complied and gave him that explanation as well as steps that he and his staff could take to remedy the complaints that I have (such as plugging security holes that allow their email servers to be used for sending out spam, the reason that many of the domains to which I have tried to send email have blocked messages coming from a StartLogic email server). He then asked me to explain why I felt these problems were at their end rather than something that I should be resolving, so I explained that the errors have to do with problems on hardware owned by them and issues that are beyond my control (such as security patches for their servers). It was after all this that he sent me the letter containing the above excerpt.
I shall also point out that at no time has he addressed the issue of why it has taken two months of continuous attempts at contact through phone, live chat, updating of the various work tickets I have opened, contacting my account representative (Matthew Mades) on his Yahoo Messenger account (which he gave me when I first signed up with StartLogic, maybe as a way to try to lull me into thinking they actually cared about their customers), and finally contacting the Attorney General with a formal complaint before someone actually started contacting me. Of course, up to this time, they have done absolutely NOTHING to resolve any of the issues as they still continue (though Gary says that the network administrators “are looking into the problems”).
I personally hope that the AG decides to come down hard on StartLogic since there is a clearly established pattern of taking money for services that are not provided as advertised. The complaints that we, as a class, have against StartLogic are at a minimum breaches of contract but can also be classified as negligence (taking over two months to respond to a work ticket) and potentially criminal negligence (as it has cost some clients to lose money while StartLogic has refused to do anything about the problems; it has cost me $4000 in lost sales).
StartLogic should start getting worried because there is plenty of evidence against them to show that they have not done what they promised to do for the monies paid by their customers. They need to be held accountable at least in civil court and maybe even in criminal court.
If anyone who reads this has not contacted June or me (or been contacted by either of us) about the class action that we are arranging, please get in touch at your earliest convenience. June may be contacted at news@northcountrygazette.org and I may be reached at jbevan@bdcusa.com
There is strength in numbers!
-
Heath B replied on Dec 28, 2007
I have also been contacted by John B.
BTW, I received a response from the Arizona AG today
To Charles, if your Domain is set to expire soon, you should transfer it to a 3rd party registrar.
You can see the last of my communications with ipower at www.mytechdirect.net/forum and then look for “Ipowerweb, The problematic host”
-
Matt Koglin replied on Jan 9, 2008
Post your iPower web horror story at http://ipowercomplaints.com/
-
Michael OConnor replied on Jan 11, 2008
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.
-
Lewis Garvin replied on Jan 16, 2008
I am on hold with IPowerweb right now because they stole $95.40 from me Saturday night Jan 12, 2008 when the account was suppose to be closed back in November 2007.
-
North Country Gazette replied on Jan 16, 2008
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.
-
Sarah Scace replied on Jan 17, 2008
I am a graphic designer and I have lost 3 clients and its getting worse. I’m looking at a major income cut, due to ipowerweb. Please do not use Ipowerweb.
-
Ryan Minnig replied on Jan 21, 2008
Customer service is horrible and even web based control panel and FTP access is excruciatingly slow on a 15Mb cable line.
-
David Kramer replied on Jan 21, 2008
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.
-
Calvin Preece replied on Jan 29, 2008
I represent a nonprofit organization that is suffering harm from iPowerWeb’s inability to respond to our requests for moving our website to another server. We have paid for domains with them and had an active website that was suspended without adequate cause.
-
Calvin Preece replied on Jan 29, 2008
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.
-
Brian Vaughn replied on Feb 4, 2008
I’ve been having reoccurring problems over the last year. Customer Service is HORRIBLE. I starting moving last night. Count me in.
-
