Have you experienced hosting problems with WebHost4Life starting February 2010? This blog is trying to determine the extent of those problems and if compensation is possible.
Please list your problems and indicate if your plan is Windows. Provide an estimate of the time invested to date trying fix the problem. Also, provide an estimate on financial losses attributed to the problem.
The migration for my account was planned for 3/3. On 3/5 I got the message about my account migration completed. I did a check to my space and I have seen something wrong. Right now 3 days in which my space is down and the space is still down. The support doesn't want to tell me the kind of problem and the real time they need to solve. They continue to repeat the same things: they apologize, a lot of engeneers are working on my matter and in few hours all will be solved. They don't want to consider to use friendly pages to explain the bad services and they let the errors on the public sites. I think they also have lost some part of my web contents because they have made a too early copy. Noone want to explain how I may have some kind of refund for all this, I should have 99% uptime!
My site was migrated to the new platform on 12 Feb and I've got a lot of problems since then.
First of all they dropped support for a few Perl modules without notifying customers. I had to rewrire a few scripts from perl to php in a hurry.
The 301 redirects stopped working after the transition even if I specifically asked support about that before the transition. And 301 redirects are PAID service. They are fixed right now but I had to raise a couple of tickets for that.
After the migration both my MySQL databases constantly are locked because of excessive load (more than 75000 queries/hour). Before the migration I didn't have that issue at all. It started right after the transition. Webhost4life is refisung any investigation of the issue. Constant problems with accessing DBs via MySQL manager - asking for password and the password doesn't work even if it is correct.
Live Support is not able to help at all. They are just updating tickets and nothing else. Tech support cannot properly read tickets - tehy ignoring important things. Somethings like that: "Try to change the password." Well... I already tried that without any luck. And it's in the ticket. Even if I provided doco how to fix a few issues it took ages for that to follow it. People at Webhost4life and not helpful at all. Looks like they just don't care about quality of service they are providing.
So after three weeks of battles with techsupport I decided tochange hosting provider. Now I'm in a process of finding a good, reliable and relatively cheap Linux hosting provider.
@Ilya: Try www.hetzner.co.za they have a good Linux hosting service in Germany.
My problem with WebHost4Life has nothing to do with the migration, and everything to do with the fact that after 5 weeks they still haven't registered a domain name.
See http://donnedwards.openaccess.co.za/2010/03/webhost4life-domain-registration-fiasco.html
I was "migrated" over this weekend. Reading all of this doesn't bode well. I've had a similar experience to what I've read about. I manage two windows-based accounts with them.
One was migrated, but they never told me about the migration taking place, and now the site (http://jaycerenner.com) is now redirecting to a starter DNN site, whereas before the migration it pointed to my real site! I just submitted a ticket with them on that.
The other account was migrated this weekend. The site is totally down. We receive a 403 error on it at the moment. They've been pushing back the ETA on resolution.
If they can't get their act together, we are probably out the remaining hosting fees on these two accounts. Other than that, neither of these sites brought in revenue. The costs will be in terms of hours of transition support we will need to commit.
I definitely feel victimized by this company. What they have done is irresponsible, and the people responsible need to be forced to never work in IT again. They have completely ruined their company. And we are left with no choice but to spend hours migrating to a different hosting company.
Update - I finally tried calling them. They told me that I was misinformed by the support staff. They did still have the old servers, and they flipped the DNS back, and now my sites are up again, for now.
The person I spoke with said they are having particular issues with DNN sites, both of which these were. They said they would continue to investigate the cause of the issues with the intent of flipping us back to the new servers.
Wouldn't it have been a much better customer experience if they could have flipped me back the first time I asked? It would have saved ~24 hours of downtime.
This migration is a mess. I have many sites hosted here and none of them has been smooth. They break code and features without telling you how to resolve it. The support is a waste of time with most answers just being "we are sorry for the inconvenience"... yada yada...
I was hosted at ValueWeb when they were bought by Hostway. The debacle that followed was infamous. I moved everything to Webhost4Life....now I'm going to move it all again. In the end we estimate this will cost us about 10k to rework all of it. I too feel victimized (again) by thoughtless people. I may just have to roll my own to get around all of the un-thinking hosts out there.
Well, WH4L provided the worst support that I have ever encountered in over 15 years in the IT industry.
First, let me save you a bunch of time, don't even think about using the Chat support. After having several verbatim experiences with them I have, unfortunately, concluded that they are only running a Stop/Start script on your website in IIS when you chat with front level support.
Here is the pattern that I have experienced.
1. 3-5 minutes to start chat (no biggie) 2. They ask what they can help you with... 3. You construct a well thought out question 4. They ask you to authorize the chat (ok i like security) 5. They say TY for authentication. 6. Then you'll get a canned response to the effect "Please wait 4-5 minutes while they reseearch" 7. 5 minutes later you get "Sorry the the delay, can you wait another 2-3 minutes?" 8. You agree (grrrr) 9. You get the exact message Please wait 4-5 minutes while they research 10. Then the, "Sorry the the delay, can you wait another 2-3 minutes?" AGAIN
11. This cycle repeats in my case 3 iterations. 12. Finally the support person says they cannot fix with their back end tools, this needs to be escalated. Submit a support ticket...yadda..yadda
Because this had happened on two other occasions after *migration I asked the support person, after ONLY 1 cycle of the "WH4L support shuffle" of the series above, to please not make we wait if it was going to end with an escalation, I stated, "Please escalate now if this is something that the tools would not fix".
Because, I was quite perterbed, I asked the support person to outline exactly what they had done in the past 36 minutes? Their reply was "We ran a backend tool", I followed up with, "What exactly does the tool do in relation to the issue I had outlined to them"
They just kept giving a canned answer, I don't think they even knew what it did. Again, my speculation is that frontline support at WH4L is only trained to verify your account then run a Stop/start on your website. If that doesn't work,then you get escalated.
Phone support was not any better, just an EXACT telephone version of the same chat support descibed.
If I am right, about the IIS - start/stop website scripts being the only thing being done, this could explain why the site is so SLOW now. Someone with more IIS knowledge, please enlighten me doesn't stopping then restarting the website tax the CPU more than just running?
If you have 100 queued up script jobs firing every few seconds on the shared server how would this impact other sites running on the same server? My guess, if would grind on your CPU and provide a much slower response time to the other sites running concurrently.
Ok, nuff already, but it is really shocking to me that a company who had built a solid reputation could be bought out by such incompetent bafoons who are going to watch a ONCE great company worth millions disolve into the history book of buyouts gone bad.
I am so infuriated with them, that it will be difficult to restrain myself from writing a novel of my trials and tribulations over the past month with them. My site consists of a general information/company profile and a hosted project management application (www.Differenceengine.net)
"Luckily" I am in the initial stages of growing the company so we offer the tool for free. The problem is that I have quite a few customers that were using the tool and my site *was* generating hundreds of unique visitors per month. During WH4L transition debacle, it left my site down for over two weeks and killed off my customer base and set my marketing efforts back by untold amounts. All of my external links and blogs were driving traffic to a site that was down. I now look like an idiot.
How do I put a price tag on losing a month worth of work fighting trying to get my site up? How do I put a price on losing hundreds of new customers when my product is currently free?
I have several sites that have migrated, none of them work. But the worst happened this morning. One of my sites has been up for renewal for a couple of months. Whenever I try to make the payment at the control panel, I get a message saying something to the effect that the site is in the process of being updated and my payment cannot be made at this time. There is another sentence which states that my account will NOT be affected while I wait for the problem to be solved (again the actual wording is a bit different). It turns out that my account WAS affected and they sold my domain to some porn company. This morning, people who went to my site expecting to see a website that helps poor people with legal problems, and there are many, were sent to a porn site instead. I got nothing but apologies from WH4L but nothing more. Very unhappy, and I just hope I don't get fired!
Ugh, how can hosting that was so good and so stable get bought out by imbeciles?
In my case, subdomains all broke. Databases were renamed. Standard .NET navigation broke. An old ASP site can't map the path to its Access database.
Most of what I've seen appears to do with server setup. All my domains are in subfolders of /root. Links on the site are set to point to the application root (~/Page.aspx), but it adds the domain's subfolder to the URL.
I have spend the last 4 days fighting with Webhost4life trying to get accounts back, missing emails - they even tried to tell me that they are a email provder not an email store -- err why then did i buy an advanced plan for the extra email storage they advertised
we are currently missed 2 months email on 2 major email ccounts and we are trying to run a business. as well as personal emails
Its been nothing but a joke working with the new platform. I have had simple tickets that take over 10 days to resolve, and our SQL server IDs are constantly getting locked out and that takes 2 days for someone to re-activate the id. 2 days! That means the application can be down for 2 days! The support staff seems to have no technical understanding of web hosting, and takes way too long to solve the simplest issues. It's as if they don't listen to you, and DON'T CARE. I gave the new platform the benefit of the doubt for over a month, but after constantly getting ill support for multiple problemtatic accounts, I was left with no choice but to move to a different provider.
I was migrated to the new platform last week and I have never seen the level of incompetency of technical support in my years (many years) in the IT industry. I have an ASP.NET that uses a SQL Server database. The database was not moved created, and after finally getting it functioning, one of the tier 2 reps overwrote the working db with a non-functioning backup version. This is quite frankly the worst technical support that I have ever had the misfortune to experience. I have moved to another vendor, but I still a works worth of transactions that I'm trying to recover. I have db backup from their utility that is "incorrectly formed" and currently is unusable.
I was migrated in february/march time frame, I had to open a few support issues.
Two issues are still open for over 4-5 weeks. My frontpage extension are corrupt. Should be simple to fix but not for these guys. The other issues was a two DLL's I needed installed to run my demo site, again should be simple to fix. So basically I can't access my website and my demo site has been down for over 4-5 weeks.
WebHost4Life isn't the same company anymore, their horrible. I hate to say it but I'm going to have to start looking at another web hosting company - pain :(
My DNN website has been down for weeks, my support calls get escalated and then nothing happens. I've demanded a refund, but everything I try just seems hopeless.
I have 20 years in IT and I've never experienced such complete incompetence. I spent a lot time building my site and now it's gone, completely de-indexed from Google.
The guys who are doing these migrations cannot have any experience at the level required to run a successful hosting company.
I have been communicating with webhost4life since 2/25/2010 when they started to migrate my account with 4 sites hosted on it. Since then I have opened 9 service tickets. These tickets have been upgraded to urgent and sent to their Tier 3 engineers numerous times with out success in fixing my problem. The current ticket has been reopened 4 times. No one checks to see if the whole problem is actually corrected before notifing the the customer and closing the ticket. As of today my 4 sites have been down for over two months and there appears to be no correction in sight.
My problem is exactly the same as M RKrino I am so glad I found this blog. I started saving the live chats about 5 chats later because I suspected this may become a problem. There lack of knowledge and inability to help is amazing
>On Thursday 6th May 2010 I added a new email and it did not work. Called support. First thing they did was switch me to "new control panel". As a result the website went down. I get SQL Server login error, a simple thing to fix it looks like but nothing fixed so far and it is Sunday 9th of May. Here are some of the comments from tech support over the four days. I have an email from the Tech Director "...will be fixed soon"; that was 2 days ago:
>ON FRIDAY 7th MAY: Obaid Osmani: So if it is not resolved in the next hour I would like it switched Vincent Powell: Sure!
>ON SATURDAY 8th May Obaid Osmani: Well my problem is not getting fixed and its been more then 30 hours since my website went down Herman Ray: I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you. .... Obaid Osmani: But this really is the same story since yesterday. I have requested that this issue be sent to the CEO four times. Why has this not been done? Herman Ray: I understand your concern regarding the matter and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused. We seriously value your business and will make every possible effort to make it online very soon. One of our highly skilled engineers is working on this issue. I hope it will be fixed very soon. Herman Ray: Is there anything else I can assist you with today?
>SATURDAY 8th MAY Obaid Osmani: So if it is not resolved in the next hour I would like it switched Vincent Powell: Sure! Vincent Powell: Is there anything else I can assist you with today? Obaid Osmani: Will you do that automatically or do I come back here? Vincent Powell: Please contact us again.
This email came on Saturday from: Robert Brodeur, Customer Satisfaction Manager "Thank you for your continued patience, and I am optimistic that we can reach a resolution for this soon."
I have sent him three emails since then with absolutely no reply! What a bunch of... They are ruining my business!
Anyway, I guess, Monday morning (I am in London, UK) I will be moving my account but it will take another 5 days to propagate the dns! Just can’t win. Regards Obaid Osmani Owner CaraClean.Com Ltd. A London Dry Cleaning Collection and Delivery Service (but not for long if webhost4life have anything to do with it) May 9, 2010 6:13 AM
I have cancelled my account with webhost4life due to migration problems. I have a SQL Server database that was connected to my account and when the database was migrated it wound up with no tables and no data. It took almost a month of repeated calls to try to get this resolved and the whole time my web site was non-functional because the database wasn't working. After a month of this, I was so fed up that I left them and went to anothe web hosting company.
So they did switch datacenters and tech support. They acquired a company and they are moving the hosted servers. To summarize, they are absolutely horrible, clueless, and you should consider moving before you have a simple request.
I have a website that I host on DotnetNuke. I have two domains that would point to the website. I moved the first one and set it up and it was working great on the old company. They created a temporary host name for me to setup the new site.
When I was ready to move the domain and re-point the host name, the trouble started. I started in February...I'm still experiencing problems with currently 4 open support requests.
It took 3 months for me to be able to even get the domain transferred to Tucows, because the old provider would unlock the domain for about 3 weeks, before it would automatically lock again. WebHost4life, would then not do anything until it was too late and already re-locked out. Get them to be responsive and getting it moved took 3 months, and the final straw was when the other provider started billing me, because I had to maintain a redirect pay to our temporary new site.
So I buckle down, call them and they start with trying to get it done. This takes about 2 weeks and finger pointing. You’re on the old platform, the other team said you’re on the new platform, and neither would deal with the issue. I finally got someone to admit it was on the old and I needed to be migrated (note, they had missed my migration by 3 months, based on the date they provided to do it). They tell me that I could be down for 1-2 days, why they make the move..(***...they blamed it on domain refresh issues...Ummm TTL, Hello). Anyways they started on Saturday and Monday I was still down, and was calling them Sunday, Monday all day.... I finally get a support update saying it's resolved. The didn't move the servers. The didn't fix the domain, they just created their own redirect. So...another week of calls. They then manage to move the server and database to the new site. We'll kinda of. They lost data from the database. They moved everything and provided me with no information, server, usernames, passwords, etc.. I finally get that but I don't have permissions to see the databases in MSSQL. I end up figuring out that they now have two servers. One is on the old site, with one domain pointed to it, the other on the new site with a domain pointed to it (with no DB abilities).
They still haven't correctly moved and setup the domain...(a one hour task) They still haven't resolved the server issues. They still haven't resolved the Database issues.. I've escalated to the managers, a couple of times with no result. They were clueless.
They keep telling me things are fixed, but never address the original request, they just keep addressing things they've broken along the way.
Once on the new platform, the performance is so slow, it's unusable. They're comment...we'll in 2-3 months when the migration is done, they'll be fine...***!!
Avoid them! Don't use them! Switch off of them! Don't wait, they are an absolute joke.
Their support ticketing system is absolutely awful!
I was migrated last friday. An entire subdomain of my site that runs calculators for hospital-based physicians and nurses was down through the entire weekend. Over 20 hours of time invested on my part alone. Additional time invested in the hospital by employees doing the calculations by hand. The site redirect solution for the subdomain involved changing my site dramatically without explanation of what they had tweaked. The site continues to not function correctly and it is 6 days post migration. I have spent over 15 hours on the phone with support who can never talk with the actual technicians about what they have done or are doing because "they are out of the country." I had a team lead, Alan, tell me at 8am that he was contacting the technicians for an explanation of what they had done to the site. I called back at 2pm and they had not been contacted yet. I called back at 4pm, got hung-up on. I called back again and another Tier2 technician told me that he had not submitted anything of substance earlier in the day, and i needed to type out the full explanation of the problem and submit a new ticket. The problem was that they had totally botched my site during the migration and their fix for the subdomain redirect was to do all sorts of unexplained modifications that don't allow me to manage the site anymore. I was told that if i paid for the premium service, i could get faster service. i am so frustrated and have put so much time into this already that $24.95 seemed like a bargain, so they got me to pay more money in. I have 23 accounts with webhost4life since they were <1year old and will be moving all 23 of them to another hosting company.
An update to my site migration woes (from 3/15/2010). Tech support saw (after more than 4 weeks of not resolving the problems) that they should move it back to the old platform. They did and the site instantly worked the way it originally was designed.
Then 6 weeks later, yesterday, I get an email that the site was transitioned again. No warning, and EVERYTHING THAT WAS WRONG BEFORE WAS WRONG AGAIN.
How can a company screw things up twice? All they had to do was look at the support records to see what all the problems were.
The old adage applies here...fool me once - shame on you - fool me twice - shame on me. I'm just stupid for thinking (hoping) that they get it straight the second time around. Now I really am moving all my sites to a new host.
The migration of our Windows platform web site to the new platform began randomly, without time sensitive warning, and took our shopping cart down each time. It also pointed us to a new IP address, took hours of time for me to fix, had my web master involved and lost many days of sales opportunities.
Failed migration hit our shopping cart at least five times until this last time when we finally realized the migration would never work with our Windows platform web site.
Tech support kept running us around. Tech support often times had no clue - especially when using the online chat support because the wait times on the phone were 25 minutes and beyond.
A very frustrating time which has tarnished my reputation as a business, as a business person, as a reputable and dependable company to buy from.
The lost sales are so hard to take as we were trending up in sales and experiencing great service for years with these guys. Then all of a sudden it went downhill and downhill fast.
I need to collect money for what I have lost. ($2,200) I need to collect money for the hours spent trying to recreate the database that they could not recover for our site. ($800.00) I need to collect for the new web hosting company, a tech support person to convert me to PHP from ASP and recreation of the database that WebHost4Life could not give us. ($920.00)
"In my case, subdomains all broke. Databases were renamed. Standard .NET navigation broke. ... Most of what I've seen appears to do with server setup. All my domains are in subfolders of /root. Links on the site are set to point to the application root (~/Page.aspx), but it adds the domain's subfolder to the URL." --- Alan Volk
Ditto that. My sites were in subdirectories, these paths are now added to every subdomain, making them rather useless. I have had other random errors too (domain pointing not working, 503 errors, etc.). To top it off, I feel like there has been a performance hit too (didn't they promise the new servers would be faster and more stable than ever?).
I was recently so frustrated with the poor level of service that I sent a letter to all 5 Sr managers listed in Hemsher's Webhost4life main blog (Are We Collateral Damage). The response was astounding. I sent the letters certified mail, got a delivery receipt from noon on a Friday. I got a call from a support supervisor at 4pm that same day, by this time some of the issues had already been resolved. I worked with them over the next few days and all problems were resolved within 5 business days. I feel bad to get preferential treatment while others are still dealing with the poor 1st level support, but I now know that there are some people at this hosting company that know what they are doing and can resolve the issues. You just have to figure out how to get their attention. My advice - write a letter...you might get some attention.
Part of the lawsuit should address the issue of false advertising. Their website claims 99% uptime but how can this be when my site was down for 6 weeks over the course of 2 months. They also claim to host DNN-based sites which their tech people now tell me they can't do on the new servers, only the old servers, but the support people for the old servers say that those servers will be retired. So they can't really host DNN. Amateurs.
Spent about 40 hours of programing and tech support trying to correct issues. These include email, SOAP web services, REST HttpHanlders, database connections, a few more things I'm not thinking of right now. I am still having problems.
I've had nightmares too. We are running Dot Net Nuke with a SQL database. Were were migrated around 5 or 6 months ago with disastrous results at which point they rolled us back to the legacy server and we were fine right up until they just tried migrating us again (no advance notice, btw). Again disastrous results. The site that appeared on the new server is a version that is 5 months old. I have at least 60 hours of revisions performed to the site since that time - and another 15 to 20 just dealing with this nightmare. I concur with everything written here about the support.
I called the CEO after finding his number here, left him a message stating this is where I found his contact information, and received an email from an attorney there promising to oversee this situation personally. Well, it's been about a week since that time, and a total of about 2 weeks that the wrong version of our site is up. We no longer have access to the legacy server so I can't pull the correct database down. we have 7000 subscribers who receive links to this site and the phones are flooded wot people wondering where the articles are. We've also got sponsors not happy at all. This is costing us real dollars on several fronts. I'm anxious to see if anything develops here.
Worst experience I've ever had. They are totally incompetent. My website would go down every few minutes every time they switched me over to the new platform. I spent hours on the phone with tech support, and they are useless. Used an uptime tracker to track how often the website was down, and it averaged 10 times per day. They would change my mail pointers, MX setting, etc. without notifying me. Sign me up for a class action suit - in my 20 years of business I've never come across a more horrible experience.
BTW, there is certainly a case to make for misrepresentations - they claim a 98.whatever% uptime, which is clearly a lie. And They also claim 24/7 tech support, which they do not provide. These folks are scumbags.
As good as the old company was I feel they should accept some responsibility for selling their loyal customers into the abyss. I have managed to transfer my websites but have just discovered all of my emails are now missing pre migration. I have never harbored so much anger as I do against these people. If even 0.1% of their customers took proper legal action against this company they would be out of business so quickly. We owe it to the world that these guys are put out of business. If anyone knows of a legitimate class action please let us know.
They screwed up my account and database and acted like it was my fault. Restored my database to a later date and now I have a bunch of pissed of clients. It was a huge ordeal, they suck big time. They should have just admitted they screwed up instead of just acting like nothing happened. I've had nothing but problems with them for that last few months but I had to throw in the towel after messing up my database.
Oh yeah and when I asked for a refund this is what they said, "Unfortunately, we do not have any records for the services that you paid to the former owners. Hence, you need to fax us the proof of the payments made on the old platform. You can provide us the receipt or the credit card statement showing the payment for the account 'domain'. The fax must be sent to 1-781-998-8340 and it should include your account username and the ticket number."
I had to prove I'm a customer when the account is freaking still on their server?
Webhost4life have cost me tens of thousands of dollars this year in lost time and customers. I am a web developer who hosts for my clients. They moved me to a new server, broke my websites during the migration, then didn't respond to support requests for 48 hours!! 20+ customers websited down for 2 days. Unbelievable.
I haven't tried phone, but live chat is waaaayyyy below useless. They've never answered a single question, they're apparently only there to enter tickets. And my last ticket had no notes whatsoever, only a title, which was wrong.
They haven't cost me a lot of money, but several customers and a lot of credibility. My site has been hacked twice, or employees themselves added code to my default pages to make the browser report a virus. But currently, I've been without database access for 5 weeks at the very least.
I assumed that they had been sold sometime within the last year, because I had nothing but good things to say about them up until that point. Now I just want a backup of my database so I can find a new host.
Brilliant! They just asked me if I had a backup of my database for them to use. They trashed my database, and expect me to have a catalog of backups on hand for them. Unbelievable.
in the process of leaving them. they "migrated" my site in early May and I've spent countless hours since then trying to get the site working ever since. I'm so fed up and FINALLY decided to leave them. They "migrated" the site but in doing so forgot to bring over some important elements of the database like THE TABLES and THE STORED PROCEDURES!!! and of course, the old server where the databse resides has been taken offline permanently. What a terrible, terrible company. Is anyone starting a lawsuit?
My database was migrated to a new server about a week ago (they never told me they were doing this). When they restored my database, they overwrote it with somebody else's database entirely. Mine was a blog site, and it was overwritten with some kind of accounting, billing database. They only keep three days worth of backups, so by the time customer service got back to me (about a week) my database had been overwritten with the accounting database and was wiped out of their backups entirely. I had a backup from about a year ago, so I lost an entire years worth of data. Their attitude was that it was my fault. I canceled my account. Let me know if you move forward with a class-action lawsuit. I can't believe how many people this has happened to. I'm just glad this was a personal site and not a commerce site.
I have had nothing but problems since the migration. My site does not come up most of the time and I am preparing to migrate to a different provider. It is unknown the monetary loss I have had as this is my main source of advertising. If you move forward with a class action lawsuit I am definitely interested.
I don't even know where to start, the list is long and infuriating. My sites and databases were working great for nearly two years. That all changed after their abortion of an upgrade. Everything broke, and I mean everything. All my .Net 3.5 web apps crashed with every variation of error from database connectivity (I didn't use ip's in the connection string WH4L!), AJAX web controls, nothing worked. Worst is they blamed me for the issues.
Customer (dis)service is obnoxious. It seems that the reps are trained to push different buttons based upon what key word is used thereby displaying some prefab garbage that answers precisely nothing.
Now they are billing me for "Additional Domain Pointer - 1" but they won't or can't tell me what domain it's for. I was on my way out of the business, and this farce of a hosting company has only strengthened my resolve to ditch it all...
Went from 4th in the world for the term Flash Developer to not 3rd page of SEO results. Most of my site went down and the 404 errors were replaced with landing pages with ads from Webhost4life. I would LOVE for someone to start a class action lawsuit.
Problems, geeze where do I start. I have been with Web-hose-4life for about 9 years. I have a bunch of customers that I host there. The company always bent over backwards to help and meet your expectation right up until the merger take over and later server migration. What a mess. I was migrated 3 times. Yes three times old to new, problems, back to old. Old to new with new problems but fixed with a month of complaining. Then migrated by accident with a month delay to be migrated back. Meanwhile I lost about 20 customers as a result. Customer service is clueless. Nothing seems to work right months later. PHP, MySQL, IIS all through the Control Panel are a mess. Even their own "installcentral" push button aps like Wordpress don't work and they don't know why. I am constantly having service disruptions. I complained asking for my money back. They suck so bad. How did a company get taken over and get so bad so quickly?
Did you got something I have chats from Support Staff about my problem I lost almost all my clients due to this company and was on the verge of bankruptcy please send email to amoralex@hotmail.com
One of the several sites I hosted with them was migrated several months later than planned. It was a TOTAL DISASTER, nothing worked, they lowered the security. After weeks of struggling with Tech Support I shut down the domain and the account.
I still have a few other sites and it is TERRIBLE. Performance is lower, technical support is deficient and have no idea what they do. For example, the previos team knew how to setup Web.config file section encryption to enhance security, the new team (after migration) doesn't even have an idea what I am talking about!
Prior to the migration you could create allow/deny lists of IP addresses for your FTP connections (to prevent unauthorized modificatins). After the migration that disappeared and they have no understanding of what it is and have no plans to put it back.
I have now a recurring PHP problem, they do something (they don't know) and without modifications on my part the whole PHP site stops working. I have reopened the ticket for the Nth time, now the ticket has been open for 4 days and nothing is fixed. I sent an urgency request via Live Chat and that didn't accomplish anything. Now I have been trying to get to Billing and Tech Support for about 30 minutes and NOBODY answers.
This company is very crappy, I want to migrate to some other company, any suggestions?
I had a windows premium plan, I was lucky the migration disaster came just when it was a bout to expire, i had about 3 months of hell and decided not to renew and make a whole week dedicated to rescue my information, unfortunately I lost about 3 months of information from a small .net/sqlerver app, the rest (joomla website, 2 other small apps with their mysql databases)was saved. Tech support was infinitely clueless to any problem that migth occur they took more than a week sometimes just to activate directories so I can make backups, of course I did not tell anything until I had all my info and got a message stating they had erased my sql server database, as my credit card had expired I received no extra charges and got out safe, but I recommend anyone to STAY AWAY from webhost4life!!.
OMG, Webhost4life is telling me they cannot save my sites!!! Soooooo many problems after the migration, which got fixed with about 12 hours investment of my time. That was months ago, but last week I had an issue, so they changed app pools, and now everything is DOWN! Who is the attorney for the class action? I have detailed emails, and a passion to make them pay! Now I need to learn how to move a DNN site, and this is the most critical time for my site :(
I was in a car accident and coudn't check my site for a few years, (I had over 1K in hosting commissions due to me.)
I have originally paid then 1K for a branded reseller site.. Still have the contract, and my original fee's I was to earn.
When I got better and went to look at my site, they had deleted it all, put it in storage because I "wasn't using it" ????
Then, I got them to get it out of storage, and we've had NOTHING but problems.
in 2009 I had paid 5 years in advance, along with Extra monies to be moved to the "Fastest" servers they had.
My control panel hasn't worked in MONTHS I CAN'T HAVE .NET 4.0 Unless I UPGRADE??
One ticket tells me I can have up to 3.5, 10 reponses down another person tells me oh, no, only 2.0
I respond to her by copying the above content the other tech had placed in the ticket And Explained to them, since I was running DNN 6.blah that yes, 3.5 WAS AVAILABLE for my account.
I've been with webhost4life sine 2002, I remember Erwin, being down there at 2am helping us to deploy the first .net application on his severs, to ensure all the permissions were correct.
These guys were wonderful, really great.
I don't know what happened because I've been outa the tech field for 4 years now, but I'm catching up slowly, and the ONE thing I am certain about is 1. They were a good company 2. They are not a good hosting provider now.
So who out there is the best for .net hosting guys???
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ReplyDeleteThe migration for my account was planned for 3/3. On 3/5 I got the message about my account migration completed.
ReplyDeleteI did a check to my space and I have seen something wrong.
Right now 3 days in which my space is down and the space is still down.
The support doesn't want to tell me the kind of problem and the real time they need to solve.
They continue to repeat the same things: they apologize, a lot of engeneers are working on my matter and in few hours all will be solved.
They don't want to consider to use friendly pages to explain the bad services and they let the errors on the public sites.
I think they also have lost some part of my web contents because they have made a too early copy.
Noone want to explain how I may have some kind of refund for all this, I should have 99% uptime!
My site was migrated to the new platform on 12 Feb and I've got a lot of problems since then.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all they dropped support for a few Perl modules without notifying customers. I had to rewrire a few scripts from perl to php in a hurry.
The 301 redirects stopped working after the transition even if I specifically asked support about that before the transition. And 301 redirects are PAID service. They are fixed right now but I had to raise a couple of tickets for that.
After the migration both my MySQL databases constantly are locked because of excessive load (more than 75000 queries/hour). Before the migration I didn't have that issue at all. It started right after the transition. Webhost4life is refisung any investigation of the issue. Constant problems with accessing DBs via MySQL manager - asking for password and the password doesn't work even if it is correct.
Live Support is not able to help at all. They are just updating tickets and nothing else. Tech support cannot properly read tickets - tehy ignoring important things. Somethings like that: "Try to change the password." Well... I already tried that without any luck. And it's in the ticket. Even if I provided doco how to fix a few issues it took ages for that to follow it. People at Webhost4life and not helpful at all. Looks like they just don't care about quality of service they are providing.
So after three weeks of battles with techsupport I decided tochange hosting provider. Now I'm in a process of finding a good, reliable and relatively cheap Linux hosting provider.
@Ilya: Try www.hetzner.co.za they have a good Linux hosting service in Germany.
ReplyDeleteMy problem with WebHost4Life has nothing to do with the migration, and everything to do with the fact that after 5 weeks they still haven't registered a domain name.
See http://donnedwards.openaccess.co.za/2010/03/webhost4life-domain-registration-fiasco.html
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ReplyDeleteI was "migrated" over this weekend. Reading all of this doesn't bode well. I've had a similar experience to what I've read about. I manage two windows-based accounts with them.
ReplyDeleteOne was migrated, but they never told me about the migration taking place, and now the site (http://jaycerenner.com) is now redirecting to a starter DNN site, whereas before the migration it pointed to my real site! I just submitted a ticket with them on that.
The other account was migrated this weekend. The site is totally down. We receive a 403 error on it at the moment. They've been pushing back the ETA on resolution.
If they can't get their act together, we are probably out the remaining hosting fees on these two accounts. Other than that, neither of these sites brought in revenue. The costs will be in terms of hours of transition support we will need to commit.
I definitely feel victimized by this company. What they have done is irresponsible, and the people responsible need to be forced to never work in IT again. They have completely ruined their company. And we are left with no choice but to spend hours migrating to a different hosting company.
Update - I finally tried calling them. They told me that I was misinformed by the support staff. They did still have the old servers, and they flipped the DNS back, and now my sites are up again, for now.
ReplyDeleteThe person I spoke with said they are having particular issues with DNN sites, both of which these were. They said they would continue to investigate the cause of the issues with the intent of flipping us back to the new servers.
Wouldn't it have been a much better customer experience if they could have flipped me back the first time I asked? It would have saved ~24 hours of downtime.
This migration is a mess. I have many sites hosted here and none of them has been smooth. They break code and features without telling you how to resolve it. The support is a waste of time with most answers just being "we are sorry for the inconvenience"... yada yada...
ReplyDeleteI was hosted at ValueWeb when they were bought by Hostway. The debacle that followed was infamous. I moved everything to Webhost4Life....now I'm going to move it all again. In the end we estimate this will cost us about 10k to rework all of it.
I too feel victimized (again) by thoughtless people. I may just have to roll my own to get around all of the un-thinking hosts out there.
Well, WH4L provided the worst support that I have ever encountered in over 15 years in the IT industry.
ReplyDeleteFirst, let me save you a bunch of time, don't even think about using the Chat support. After having several verbatim experiences with them I have, unfortunately, concluded that they are only running a Stop/Start script on your website in IIS when you chat with front level support.
Here is the pattern that I have experienced.
1. 3-5 minutes to start chat (no biggie)
2. They ask what they can help you with...
3. You construct a well thought out question
4. They ask you to authorize the chat (ok i like security)
5. They say TY for authentication.
6. Then you'll get a canned response to the effect "Please wait 4-5 minutes while they reseearch"
7. 5 minutes later you get "Sorry the the delay, can you wait another 2-3 minutes?"
8. You agree (grrrr)
9. You get the exact message Please wait 4-5 minutes while they research
10. Then the, "Sorry the the delay, can you wait another 2-3 minutes?" AGAIN
11. This cycle repeats in my case 3 iterations.
12. Finally the support person says they cannot fix with their back end tools, this needs to be escalated. Submit a support ticket...yadda..yadda
Because this had happened on two other occasions after *migration I asked the support person, after ONLY 1 cycle of the "WH4L support shuffle" of the series above, to please not make we wait if it was going to end with an escalation, I stated, "Please escalate now if this is something that the tools would not fix".
Because, I was quite perterbed, I asked the support person to outline exactly what they had done in the past 36 minutes? Their reply was "We ran a backend tool", I followed up with, "What exactly does the tool do in relation to the issue I had outlined to them"
They just kept giving a canned answer, I don't think they even knew what it did. Again, my speculation is that frontline support at WH4L is only trained to verify your account then run a Stop/start on your website. If that doesn't work,then you get escalated.
Phone support was not any better, just an EXACT telephone version of the same chat support descibed.
If I am right, about the IIS - start/stop website scripts being the only thing being done, this could explain why the site is so SLOW now. Someone with more IIS knowledge, please enlighten me doesn't stopping then restarting the website tax the CPU more than just running?
If you have 100 queued up script jobs firing every few seconds on the shared server how would this impact other sites running on the same server? My guess, if would grind on your CPU and provide a much slower response time to the other sites running concurrently.
Ok, nuff already, but it is really shocking to me that a company who had built a solid reputation could be bought out by such incompetent bafoons who are going to watch a ONCE great company worth millions disolve into the history book of buyouts gone bad.
I am so infuriated with them, that it will be difficult to restrain myself from writing a novel of my trials and tribulations over the past month with them. My site consists of a general information/company profile and a hosted project management application (www.Differenceengine.net)
ReplyDelete"Luckily" I am in the initial stages of growing the company so we offer the tool for free. The problem is that I have quite a few customers that were using the tool and my site *was* generating hundreds of unique visitors per month. During WH4L transition debacle, it left my site down for over two weeks and killed off my customer base and set my marketing efforts back by untold amounts. All of my external links and blogs were driving traffic to a site that was down. I now look like an idiot.
How do I put a price tag on losing a month worth of work fighting trying to get my site up? How do I put a price on losing hundreds of new customers when my product is currently free?
Epic fail for me: See here:
ReplyDeletehttp://webhost4lifecustomers.ning.com/forum/topics/my-webhost4life-migration-saga
I have several sites that have migrated, none of them work. But the worst happened this morning. One of my sites has been up for renewal for a couple of months. Whenever I try to make the payment at the control panel, I get a message saying something to the effect that the site is in the process of being updated and my payment cannot be made at this time. There is another sentence which states that my account will NOT be affected while I wait for the problem to be solved (again the actual wording is a bit different). It turns out that my account WAS affected and they sold my domain to some porn company. This morning, people who went to my site expecting to see a website that helps poor people with legal problems, and there are many, were sent to a porn site instead. I got nothing but apologies from WH4L but nothing more. Very unhappy, and I just hope I don't get fired!
ReplyDeleteUgh, how can hosting that was so good and so stable get bought out by imbeciles?
ReplyDeleteIn my case, subdomains all broke. Databases were renamed. Standard .NET navigation broke. An old ASP site can't map the path to its Access database.
Most of what I've seen appears to do with server setup. All my domains are in subfolders of /root. Links on the site are set to point to the application root (~/Page.aspx), but it adds the domain's subfolder to the URL.
I have spend the last 4 days fighting with Webhost4life trying to get accounts back, missing emails - they even tried to tell me that they are a email provder not an email store -- err why then did i buy an advanced plan for the extra email storage they advertised
ReplyDeletewe are currently missed 2 months email on 2 major email ccounts and we are trying to run a business.
as well as personal emails
(oh we're on a windows account)
ReplyDelete:)
Buzz
Its been nothing but a joke working with the new platform. I have had simple tickets that take over 10 days to resolve, and our SQL server IDs are constantly getting locked out and that takes 2 days for someone to re-activate the id. 2 days! That means the application can be down for 2 days! The support staff seems to have no technical understanding of web hosting, and takes way too long to solve the simplest issues. It's as if they don't listen to you, and DON'T CARE. I gave the new platform the benefit of the doubt for over a month, but after constantly getting ill support for multiple problemtatic accounts, I was left with no choice but to move to a different provider.
ReplyDeletemigration sucked. down 4-5 days to get my site back up that had previously worked flawlessly for 5+ years.
ReplyDeletesubdomains all broken.
XHR object will now not connect. I had custom coded a cms based on xhr doing lots of subtasks.
Never again will I touch WH4L as a hosting company.
I was migrated to the new platform last week and I have never seen the level of incompetency of technical support in my years (many years) in the IT industry. I have an ASP.NET that uses a SQL Server database. The database was not moved created, and after finally getting it functioning, one of the tier 2 reps overwrote the working db with a non-functioning backup version. This is quite frankly the worst technical support that I have ever had the misfortune to experience. I have moved to another vendor, but I still a works worth of transactions that I'm trying to recover. I have db backup from their utility that is "incorrectly formed" and currently is unusable.
ReplyDeleteI was migrated in february/march time frame, I had to open a few support issues.
ReplyDeleteTwo issues are still open for over 4-5 weeks. My frontpage extension are corrupt. Should be simple to fix but not for these guys. The other issues was a two DLL's I needed installed to run my demo site, again should be simple to fix. So basically I can't access my website and my demo site has been down for over 4-5 weeks.
WebHost4Life isn't the same company anymore, their horrible. I hate to say it but I'm going to have to start looking at another web hosting company - pain :(
My DNN website has been down for weeks, my support calls get escalated and then nothing happens. I've demanded a refund, but everything I try just seems hopeless.
ReplyDeleteI have 20 years in IT and I've never experienced such complete incompetence. I spent a lot time building my site and now it's gone, completely de-indexed from Google.
The guys who are doing these migrations cannot have any experience at the level required to run a successful hosting company.
I have been communicating with webhost4life since 2/25/2010 when they started to migrate my account with 4 sites hosted on it. Since then I have opened 9 service tickets. These tickets have been upgraded to urgent and sent to their Tier 3 engineers numerous times with out success in fixing my problem. The current ticket has been reopened 4 times. No one checks to see if the whole problem is actually corrected before notifing the the customer and closing the ticket. As of today my 4 sites have been down for over two months and there appears to be no correction in sight.
ReplyDeleteMy problem is exactly the same as M RKrino
ReplyDeleteI am so glad I found this blog. I started saving the live chats about 5 chats later because I suspected this may become a problem.
There lack of knowledge and inability to help is amazing
>On Thursday 6th May 2010 I added a new email and it did not work. Called support. First thing they did was switch me to "new control panel". As a result the website went down. I get SQL Server login error, a simple thing to fix it looks like but nothing fixed so far and it is Sunday 9th of May.
Here are some of the comments from tech support over the four days. I have an email from the Tech Director "...will be fixed soon"; that was 2 days ago:
>ON FRIDAY 7th MAY:
Obaid Osmani: So if it is not resolved in the next hour I would like it switched
Vincent Powell: Sure!
>ON SATURDAY 8th May
Obaid Osmani: Well my problem is not getting fixed and its been more then 30 hours since my website went down
Herman Ray: I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
....
Obaid Osmani: But this really is the same story since yesterday. I have requested that this issue be sent to the CEO four times. Why has this not been done?
Herman Ray: I understand your concern regarding the matter and sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused. We seriously value your business and will make every possible effort to make it online very soon. One of our highly skilled engineers is working on this issue. I hope it will be fixed very soon.
Herman Ray: Is there anything else I can assist you with today?
>SATURDAY 8th MAY
Obaid Osmani: So if it is not resolved in the next hour I would like it switched
Vincent Powell: Sure!
Vincent Powell: Is there anything else I can assist you with today?
Obaid Osmani: Will you do that automatically or do I come back here?
Vincent Powell: Please contact us again.
This email came on Saturday from:
Robert Brodeur, Customer Satisfaction Manager
"Thank you for your continued patience, and I am optimistic that we can reach a resolution for this soon."
I have sent him three emails since then with absolutely no reply! What a bunch of... They are ruining my business!
Anyway, I guess, Monday morning (I am in London, UK) I will be moving my account but it will take another 5 days to propagate the dns!
Just can’t win.
Regards
Obaid Osmani
Owner
CaraClean.Com Ltd.
A London Dry Cleaning Collection and Delivery Service (but not for long if webhost4life have anything to do with it)
May 9, 2010 6:13 AM
I have cancelled my account with webhost4life due to migration problems. I have a SQL Server database that was connected to my account and when the database was migrated it wound up with no tables and no data. It took almost a month of repeated calls to try to get this resolved and the whole time my web site was non-functional because the database wasn't working. After a month of this, I was so fed up that I left them and went to anothe web hosting company.
ReplyDeleteSo they did switch datacenters and tech support. They acquired a company and they are moving the hosted servers. To summarize, they are absolutely horrible, clueless, and you should consider moving before you have a simple request.
ReplyDeleteI have a website that I host on DotnetNuke. I have two domains that would point to the website. I moved the first one and set it up and it was working great on the old company. They created a temporary host name for me to setup the new site.
When I was ready to move the domain and re-point the host name, the trouble started. I started in February...I'm still experiencing problems with currently 4 open support requests.
It took 3 months for me to be able to even get the domain transferred to Tucows, because the old provider would unlock the domain for about 3 weeks, before it would automatically lock again. WebHost4life, would then not do anything until it was too late and already re-locked out. Get them to be responsive and getting it moved took 3 months, and the final straw was when the other provider started billing me, because I had to maintain a redirect pay to our temporary new site.
So I buckle down, call them and they start with trying to get it done. This takes about 2 weeks and finger pointing. You’re on the old platform, the other team said you’re on the new platform, and neither would deal with the issue. I finally got someone to admit it was on the old and I needed to be migrated (note, they had missed my migration by 3 months, based on the date they provided to do it). They tell me that I could be down for 1-2 days, why they make the move..(***...they blamed it on domain refresh issues...Ummm TTL, Hello). Anyways they started on Saturday and Monday I was still down, and was calling them Sunday, Monday all day.... I finally get a support update saying it's resolved. The didn't move the servers. The didn't fix the domain, they just created their own redirect. So...another week of calls. They then manage to move the server and database to the new site. We'll kinda of. They lost data from the database. They moved everything and provided me with no information, server, usernames, passwords, etc.. I finally get that but I don't have permissions to see the databases in MSSQL. I end up figuring out that they now have two servers. One is on the old site, with one domain pointed to it, the other on the new site with a domain pointed to it (with no DB abilities).
They still haven't correctly moved and setup the domain...(a one hour task)
They still haven't resolved the server issues.
They still haven't resolved the Database issues..
I've escalated to the managers, a couple of times with no result. They were clueless.
They keep telling me things are fixed, but never address the original request, they just keep addressing things they've broken along the way.
Once on the new platform, the performance is so slow, it's unusable. They're comment...we'll in 2-3 months when the migration is done, they'll be fine...***!!
Avoid them! Don't use them! Switch off of them! Don't wait, they are an absolute joke.
Their support ticketing system is absolutely awful!
I was migrated last friday. An entire subdomain of my site that runs calculators for hospital-based physicians and nurses was down through the entire weekend. Over 20 hours of time invested on my part alone. Additional time invested in the hospital by employees doing the calculations by hand. The site redirect solution for the subdomain involved changing my site dramatically without explanation of what they had tweaked. The site continues to not function correctly and it is 6 days post migration. I have spent over 15 hours on the phone with support who can never talk with the actual technicians about what they have done or are doing because "they are out of the country." I had a team lead, Alan, tell me at 8am that he was contacting the technicians for an explanation of what they had done to the site. I called back at 2pm and they had not been contacted yet. I called back at 4pm, got hung-up on. I called back again and another Tier2 technician told me that he had not submitted anything of substance earlier in the day, and i needed to type out the full explanation of the problem and submit a new ticket. The problem was that they had totally botched my site during the migration and their fix for the subdomain redirect was to do all sorts of unexplained modifications that don't allow me to manage the site anymore. I was told that if i paid for the premium service, i could get faster service. i am so frustrated and have put so much time into this already that $24.95 seemed like a bargain, so they got me to pay more money in. I have 23 accounts with webhost4life since they were <1year old and will be moving all 23 of them to another hosting company.
ReplyDeleteAn update to my site migration woes (from 3/15/2010). Tech support saw (after more than 4 weeks of not resolving the problems) that they should move it back to the old platform. They did and the site instantly worked the way it originally was designed.
ReplyDeleteThen 6 weeks later, yesterday, I get an email that the site was transitioned again. No warning, and EVERYTHING THAT WAS WRONG BEFORE WAS WRONG AGAIN.
How can a company screw things up twice? All they had to do was look at the support records to see what all the problems were.
The old adage applies here...fool me once - shame on you - fool me twice - shame on me. I'm just stupid for thinking (hoping) that they get it straight the second time around. Now I really am moving all my sites to a new host.
The migration of our Windows platform web site to the new platform began randomly, without time sensitive warning, and took our shopping cart down each time. It also pointed us to a new IP address, took hours of time for me to fix, had my web master involved and lost many days of sales opportunities.
ReplyDeleteFailed migration hit our shopping cart at least five times until this last time when we finally realized the migration would never work with our Windows platform web site.
Tech support kept running us around. Tech support often times had no clue - especially when using the online chat support because the wait times on the phone were 25 minutes and beyond.
A very frustrating time which has tarnished my reputation as a business, as a business person, as a reputable and dependable company to buy from.
The lost sales are so hard to take as we were trending up in sales and experiencing great service for years with these guys. Then all of a sudden it went downhill and downhill fast.
I need to collect money for what I have lost.
($2,200)
I need to collect money for the hours spent trying to recreate the database that they could not recover for our site.
($800.00)
I need to collect for the new web hosting company, a tech support person to convert me to PHP from ASP and recreation of the database that WebHost4Life could not give us.
($920.00)
"In my case, subdomains all broke. Databases were renamed. Standard .NET navigation broke.
ReplyDelete...
Most of what I've seen appears to do with server setup. All my domains are in subfolders of /root. Links on the site are set to point to the application root (~/Page.aspx), but it adds the domain's subfolder to the URL." --- Alan Volk
Ditto that. My sites were in subdirectories, these paths are now added to every subdomain, making them rather useless. I have had other random errors too (domain pointing not working, 503 errors, etc.). To top it off, I feel like there has been a performance hit too (didn't they promise the new servers would be faster and more stable than ever?).
I was recently so frustrated with the poor level of service that I sent a letter to all 5 Sr managers listed in Hemsher's Webhost4life main blog (Are We Collateral Damage).
ReplyDeleteThe response was astounding. I sent the letters certified mail, got a delivery receipt from noon on a Friday. I got a call from a support supervisor at 4pm that same day, by this time some of the issues had already been resolved. I worked with them over the next few days and all problems were resolved within 5 business days.
I feel bad to get preferential treatment while others are still dealing with the poor 1st level support, but I now know that there are some people at this hosting company that know what they are doing and can resolve the issues. You just have to figure out how to get their attention.
My advice - write a letter...you might get some attention.
Part of the lawsuit should address the issue of false advertising. Their website claims 99% uptime but how can this be when my site was down for 6 weeks over the course of 2 months. They also claim to host DNN-based sites which their tech people now tell me they can't do on the new servers, only the old servers, but the support people for the old servers say that those servers will be retired. So they can't really host DNN. Amateurs.
ReplyDeleteSpent about 40 hours of programing and tech support trying to correct issues. These include email, SOAP web services, REST HttpHanlders, database connections, a few more things I'm not thinking of right now. I am still having problems.
ReplyDeleteI've had nightmares too. We are running Dot Net Nuke with a SQL database. Were were migrated around 5 or 6 months ago with disastrous results at which point they rolled us back to the legacy server and we were fine right up until they just tried migrating us again (no advance notice, btw). Again disastrous results. The site that appeared on the new server is a version that is 5 months old. I have at least 60 hours of revisions performed to the site since that time - and another 15 to 20 just dealing with this nightmare. I concur with everything written here about the support.
ReplyDeleteI called the CEO after finding his number here, left him a message stating this is where I found his contact information, and received an email from an attorney there promising to oversee this situation personally. Well, it's been about a week since that time, and a total of about 2 weeks that the wrong version of our site is up. We no longer have access to the legacy server so I can't pull the correct database down. we have 7000 subscribers who receive links to this site and the phones are flooded wot people wondering where the articles are. We've also got sponsors not happy at all. This is costing us real dollars on several fronts. I'm anxious to see if anything develops here.
Worst experience I've ever had. They are totally incompetent. My website would go down every few minutes every time they switched me over to the new platform. I spent hours on the phone with tech support, and they are useless. Used an uptime tracker to track how often the website was down, and it averaged 10 times per day. They would change my mail pointers, MX setting, etc. without notifying me. Sign me up for a class action suit - in my 20 years of business I've never come across a more horrible experience.
ReplyDeleteBTW, there is certainly a case to make for misrepresentations - they claim a 98.whatever% uptime, which is clearly a lie. And They also claim 24/7 tech support, which they do not provide. These folks are scumbags.
ReplyDeleteAs good as the old company was I feel they should accept some responsibility for selling their loyal customers into the abyss. I have managed to transfer my websites but have just discovered all of my emails are now missing pre migration. I have never harbored so much anger as I do against these people. If even 0.1% of their customers took proper legal action against this company they would be out of business so quickly. We owe it to the world that these guys are put out of business. If anyone knows of a legitimate class action please let us know.
ReplyDeleteThey screwed up my account and database and acted like it was my fault. Restored my database to a later date and now I have a bunch of pissed of clients. It was a huge ordeal, they suck big time. They should have just admitted they screwed up instead of just acting like nothing happened. I've had nothing but problems with them for that last few months but I had to throw in the towel after messing up my database.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah and when I asked for a refund this is what they said, "Unfortunately, we do not have any records for the services that you paid to the former owners. Hence, you need to fax us the proof of the payments made on the old platform. You can provide us the receipt or the credit card statement showing the payment for the account 'domain'. The fax must be sent to 1-781-998-8340 and it should include your account username and the ticket number."
ReplyDeleteI had to prove I'm a customer when the account is freaking still on their server?
Webhost4life have cost me tens of thousands of dollars this year in lost time and customers.
ReplyDeleteI am a web developer who hosts for my clients. They moved me to a new server, broke my websites during the migration, then didn't respond to support requests for 48 hours!! 20+ customers websited down for 2 days. Unbelievable.
Phone support and live chat both useless.
I haven't tried phone, but live chat is waaaayyyy below useless. They've never answered a single question, they're apparently only there to enter tickets. And my last ticket had no notes whatsoever, only a title, which was wrong.
ReplyDeleteThey haven't cost me a lot of money, but several customers and a lot of credibility. My site has been hacked twice, or employees themselves added code to my default pages to make the browser report a virus. But currently, I've been without database access for 5 weeks at the very least.
I assumed that they had been sold sometime within the last year, because I had nothing but good things to say about them up until that point. Now I just want a backup of my database so I can find a new host.
Which reminds me... Does anybody have suggestions for a cheap ASPX SQL Server host?
ReplyDeleteBrilliant! They just asked me if I had a backup of my database for them to use. They trashed my database, and expect me to have a catalog of backups on hand for them. Unbelievable.
ReplyDeletein the process of leaving them. they "migrated" my site in early May and I've spent countless hours since then trying to get the site working ever since. I'm so fed up and FINALLY decided to leave them. They "migrated" the site but in doing so forgot to bring over some important elements of the database like THE TABLES and THE STORED PROCEDURES!!! and of course, the old server where the databse resides has been taken offline permanently. What a terrible, terrible company. Is anyone starting a lawsuit?
ReplyDeleteLet me know. I had terrible experience with these guys as detailed in my blog: http://tinyurl.com/25eu8kq
ReplyDeleteMy database was migrated to a new server about a week ago (they never told me they were doing this). When they restored my database, they overwrote it with somebody else's database entirely. Mine was a blog site, and it was overwritten with some kind of accounting, billing database. They only keep three days worth of backups, so by the time customer service got back to me (about a week) my database had been overwritten with the accounting database and was wiped out of their backups entirely. I had a backup from about a year ago, so I lost an entire years worth of data. Their attitude was that it was my fault. I canceled my account. Let me know if you move forward with a class-action lawsuit. I can't believe how many people this has happened to. I'm just glad this was a personal site and not a commerce site.
ReplyDeleteI have had nothing but problems since the migration. My site does not come up most of the time and I am preparing to migrate to a different provider. It is unknown the monetary loss I have had as this is my main source of advertising. If you move forward with a class action lawsuit I am definitely interested.
ReplyDeleteI don't even know where to start, the list is long and infuriating. My sites and databases were working great for nearly two years. That all changed after their abortion of an upgrade. Everything broke, and I mean everything. All my .Net 3.5 web apps crashed with every variation of error from database connectivity (I didn't use ip's in the connection string WH4L!), AJAX web controls, nothing worked. Worst is they blamed me for the issues.
ReplyDeleteCustomer (dis)service is obnoxious. It seems that the reps are trained to push different buttons based upon what key word is used thereby displaying some prefab garbage that answers precisely nothing.
Now they are billing me for "Additional Domain Pointer - 1" but they won't or can't tell me what domain it's for. I was on my way out of the business, and this farce of a hosting company has only strengthened my resolve to ditch it all...
Went from 4th in the world for the term Flash Developer to not 3rd page of SEO results. Most of my site went down and the 404 errors were replaced with landing pages with ads from Webhost4life. I would LOVE for someone to start a class action lawsuit.
ReplyDeletemichaellong100 (-a-t-) yahoo.com
Problems, geeze where do I start. I have been with Web-hose-4life for about 9 years. I have a bunch of customers that I host there. The company always bent over backwards to help and meet your expectation right up until the merger take over and later server migration. What a mess. I was migrated 3 times. Yes three times old to new, problems, back to old. Old to new with new problems but fixed with a month of complaining. Then migrated by accident with a month delay to be migrated back. Meanwhile I lost about 20 customers as a result. Customer service is clueless. Nothing seems to work right months later. PHP, MySQL, IIS all through the Control Panel are a mess. Even their own "installcentral" push button aps like Wordpress don't work and they don't know why. I am constantly having service disruptions. I complained asking for my money back. They suck so bad. How did a company get taken over and get so bad so quickly?
ReplyDeleteDid you got something I have chats from Support Staff about my problem I lost almost all my clients due to this company and was on the verge of bankruptcy please send email to amoralex@hotmail.com
ReplyDeleteOne of the several sites I hosted with them was migrated several months later than planned. It was a TOTAL DISASTER, nothing worked, they lowered the security. After weeks of struggling with Tech Support I shut down the domain and the account.
ReplyDeleteI still have a few other sites and it is TERRIBLE. Performance is lower, technical support is deficient and have no idea what they do. For example, the previos team knew how to setup Web.config file section encryption to enhance security, the new team (after migration) doesn't even have an idea what I am talking about!
Prior to the migration you could create allow/deny lists of IP addresses for your FTP connections (to prevent unauthorized modificatins). After the migration that disappeared and they have no understanding of what it is and have no plans to put it back.
I have now a recurring PHP problem, they do something (they don't know) and without modifications on my part the whole PHP site stops working. I have reopened the ticket for the Nth time, now the ticket has been open for 4 days and nothing is fixed. I sent an urgency request via Live Chat and that didn't accomplish anything. Now I have been trying to get to Billing and Tech Support for about 30 minutes and NOBODY answers.
This company is very crappy, I want to migrate to some other company, any suggestions?
I had a windows premium plan, I was lucky the migration disaster came just when it was a bout to expire, i had about 3 months of hell and decided not to renew and make a whole week dedicated to rescue my information, unfortunately I lost about 3 months of information from a small .net/sqlerver app, the rest (joomla website, 2 other small apps with their mysql databases)was saved. Tech support was infinitely clueless to any problem that migth occur they took more than a week sometimes just to activate directories so I can make backups, of course I did not tell anything until I had all my info and got a message stating they had erased my sql server database, as my credit card had expired I received no extra charges and got out safe, but I recommend anyone to STAY AWAY from webhost4life!!.
ReplyDeleteOMG, Webhost4life is telling me they cannot save my sites!!! Soooooo many problems after the migration, which got fixed with about 12 hours investment of my time. That was months ago, but last week I had an issue, so they changed app pools, and now everything is DOWN! Who is the attorney for the class action? I have detailed emails, and a passion to make them pay! Now I need to learn how to move a DNN site, and this is the most critical time for my site :(
ReplyDeleteI was in a car accident and coudn't check my site for a few years, (I had over 1K in hosting commissions due to me.)
ReplyDeleteI have originally paid then 1K for a branded reseller site.. Still have the contract, and my original fee's I was to earn.
When I got better and went to look at my site,
they had deleted it all, put it in storage because I "wasn't using it" ????
Then, I got them to get it out of storage, and we've had NOTHING but problems.
in 2009 I had paid 5 years in advance, along with Extra monies to be moved to the "Fastest" servers they had.
My control panel hasn't worked in MONTHS
I CAN'T HAVE .NET 4.0 Unless I UPGRADE??
One ticket tells me I can have up to 3.5,
10 reponses down another person tells me oh, no, only 2.0
I respond to her by copying the above content the other tech had placed in the ticket And Explained to them, since I was running DNN 6.blah that yes, 3.5 WAS AVAILABLE for my account.
I've been with webhost4life sine 2002, I remember Erwin, being down there at 2am helping us to deploy the first .net application on his severs, to ensure all the permissions were correct.
These guys were wonderful, really great.
I don't know what happened because I've been outa the tech field for 4 years now, but I'm catching up slowly, and the ONE thing I am certain about is
1. They were a good company
2. They are not a good hosting provider now.
So who out there is the best for .net hosting guys???
And how does one "class action" a suite when the company is really based overseas??
ReplyDelete