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Review 10/5/2010
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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. 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 another server! 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!
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