Why I may be saying goodbye to iPower
iPower, also known as iPowerWeb, has been my preferred hosting provider for years. They offer a very affordable hosting package for $7.95/month that goes far beyond what you get from some other providers. My first hosting accounts were at places like Yahoo and Readyhosting. Some were OK, others were downright terrible. After a particularly sour experience with a company whose name I can’t even remember, the search for the Great Provider began, and iPower is where I settled my roots.
Granted, their support has never been great. It would sometimes take over a day to get an answer by email, or 20 to 30 minutes on hold when calling. At times I even felt like I was training their tech support staff. When the MySQL database server was being abused by another customer on the same shared server, my site would go down with the infamous and dreaded “too many open connections” error. When I contacted support about it they acted dumb and I had to tell the tech guys several times how to reset the database. If I remember correctly, that went on for several weeks before they found the offending account holder. Since things usually ran pretty smoothly, I always believed that the features offered far outweighed these minor annoyances.
In Fall 2007, iPower started “upgrading” accounts to the new vDeck 3.0 platform. I’ve followed the transitions closely and, without getting into all the gory details about how poorly planned and implemented the whole process has been, all I can say is that this is going to be the last straw. It’s like having a boyfriend who cries and apoligizes every time he cheats. After a while it gets old and stops sounding sincere. Well, iPower, you can drag your bum *** back to your other customers, because I’ve had it. It’s time to see some REAL change. Seriously, if I get one more canned response from you saying “We’re sorry for any inconvenience…” I’m going to puke.
Today I sent a “support ticket” to iPower:
I chatted with a representative yesterday to find out why I’m getting timeouts 90% of the time when I try to log in to phpMyAdmin to manage my MySQL databases. Even when I finally (after 20 minutes at times) am able to navigate to a database table, the left panel that’s supposed to show the list of database tables still doesn’t load. This has been happening for weeks. Now I’m on a tight schedule and can’t wait any longer for things to magically fix themselves.
Your tech support rep assured me the problem was being addressed and I’ve pasted his reply below. He basically said that a customer was hogging resources on the server, and a team of engineers has been assigned to monitoring the database. That’s an old song and dance. So what happened to the new “balanced architecture” that iPower has touted as the solution to all server problems? When will I be able to get into phpMyAdmin properly?
I would appreciate an honest answer. I’m a web developer with over 50 client accounts at iPower. It’s one thing to deal with server problems and quite another to be given the runaround by your hosting company pretending it’s not really an issue or, even better, the response that I’ve gotten too often lately which is “ho hum”. After waiting over an hour for support, I’ve even had tech guys in chat that CLOSED the chat session while I was in the middle of a conversation with them. No warning, just all of a sudden, “Thanks for contacting us. Bye.” Like having the phone slammed down in my ear.
The vDeck 3.0 transition has been a nightmare. I’ve been a customer for over four years and an affiliate for two years, and I’m a breath away from moving to Bluehost or Hostgator. Thank god I didn’t sign up for a reseller account. I already feel bad enough for my clients as it is… emails not working properly, delayed transitions, passwords being encrypted without warning, domains not being renewed properly…
So, I need to know when I will be able to access phpMyAdmin properly. I also strongly suggest that iPower launch a message board so that those of us who are technically-inclined can help each other and those who are less knowledgeable can get answers to simple questions so the rest of us don’t have to wait 45+ minutes for tech support. Well, who knows, I may be gone before that ever happens… Look at Bluehost, they are doing great things over there… I am a loyal person, it just kills me all the problems I’ve had lately. Answers PLEASE!!!!
P.S. I’ve been waiting for weeks for an answer to a support ticket for my sprayerguy.com account. Every time someone responds, they close the ticket. Read the history. It’s ridiculous.
Thanks,
Dori
Here’s the response from yesterday’s tech support session:
Nigel Atkinson: I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you. Currently we are experiencing an issue with our MySQL server. Our engineers are working hard to resolve the issue as soon as possible. It is a temporary issue and it will be resolved soon.
Nigel Atkinson: Our Network Operations team is aware of the MySQL issues which is responsible for the slow running Web site. To find a fast alternative, we have already set-up a new team of Engineers who will only be monitoring the load on the MySQL servers. Upgrades could be the best alternative, but we are actually trying to find the reason behind the cause of the issue.
Nigel Atkinson: You might have a question about why did it take so long to get this settled. The team had to search each server to trap the account which was using high amount of server resources. We have now found the cause of the issue and it was only because of few customers the load on our MySQL server was very high. These customers were utilizing very high amount of the server resources. Now that we have deactivated the scripts and accounts of these customers, you will not find irregular disturbance while accessing your Web site. To improve the performance, we will be adding more hardware which should actually help the current servers in boosting the server performance. This will take sometime to be implemented, believe me, once the hardware is installed you shouldn’t experience any type of performance issues with your Web site.
I recently had the pleasure of working with InkCloners.com and their hosting provider, Bluehost. Bluehost has hosting packages with similar pricing and features as iPower. The folks at Bluehost are AWESOME and totally put iPower to shame. If you’re interested in moving your hosting account, please contact me to schedule your move. For more information about Bluehost, visit their website at www.bluehost.com.
July 12th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
After 5 years of ipowerweb, I too am a sliver away from moving on. Months of email problems with the same responses you talked about above. Their telephone support never let me down, they have always been reliable, but my email issues reoccur to the point that I’m losing business and frustrating my clients. As a web designer my clients need me to respond to their emails, often daily. I’m considering Blue Host or Lunarpages. Did you end up transferring to Blue Host? Thank you for your excellent post.
July 16th, 2008 at 12:40 am
Tatiana -
Thanks for your comments. I understand exactly where you’re coming from. The email delivery issues at iPower are a serious problem, along with numerous MySQL database issues. They don’t seem to care that their poor service affects their customers’ businesses.
I’ve noticed that a lot of iPower’s System Notices posted to the Support Console are only there for a short time, say a day or two. Not very honest IMHO, but it’s probably their version of damage control. Just today this one appeared:
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Our Network Opertions and Engineering teams worked to resolve this issue, and service has been restored.
We thank you for your patience,
The IPOWER Support Team
We are currently experiencing technical issues with e-mail. Our engineers are looking into it. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We’ll update this message with more information as it becomes available.
Thank you.
Support Team.
- 07/15/08 at 23:07 ET
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I’m sure it will be gone by the end of the week, replaced by another notice about their Exchange servers or some DNS issue or whatnot.
Along with the issue they posted today for all to see, I also experienced intermittent problems with my database connections throughout the afternoon. For about 20 minutes my website was actually down with the dreaded “Cannot connect to database” error. It’s frustrating because by the time I got a chat box open for tech support, everything was working again. And unless those low-level techs can see an immediate problem, they deny that one ever existed.
To answer your question, no I haven’t transferred any of my websites over to Bluehost yet. I actually goofed and forgot that my hosting + domains were scheduled for automatic renewal in May. However, I’ve already made the decision that unless iPower makes some drastic changes over the next year that I will NOT renew with them again in 2009. The client I signed on with Bluehost seems to be very satisfied with their service, and that’s where I’ll probably go.
On a side note, in April I received a personal invitation from Thinkhost to try their hosting. As busy as I am, I just finally logged in a few days ago to check out the test account they set up for me. Funny thing is, on July 2nd I received an email from them saying “We know that at 97% overall uptime, we have let you down. We want to take a moment to explain what happened to that other three percent and what we’re doing to ensure we deliver perfect service going forward.” I do appreciate their honesty, but Thinkhost will have to wait a while before they gain my confidence. And to be frank, I didn’t exactly fall in love with their control panel.
Best of luck to you,
Dori