IPower AKA IPowerweb promotes itself as a low cost web hosting company with state of the art equipment, 24 hour customer service staffed by trained professionals.
Nothing could be further from the truth. As a former insider here's the scoop. If you're hosted by them, or have purchased a domain name through them... God help you!!!
The very future of your E-business will or may already be at stake!
I've observed customers being unable to access their email for "days" i.e., 4-6 days because of outages. Customer websites down, or hacked. Servers down for days versus hours. Incompetent staff attemping to repair servers only to have them fail yet again.
SO why the problems? Start with company training. As of this writing it's about 5 days of training and folks that's up from 1 day on all systems and products. That's it folks. That's why your level of service is sooooo poor!
Level 2 support.. Get ready for this. There is no Level 2 support on the weekend! They may tell you that but don't believe it!
ON line chat. Is it real or a program?
PHP Support. Non existent neither does the company hire folks who know it! Yet they promote it.
MY SQL See above note.
Web Builder program: Sucks, is not flexible yet they dont tell the customers
Technical leads: Arrogant on their best days, worse on others. Unhelpful, level 1 techs usually receive what's called the 1000 mile stare of stupidity for asking a Technical Lead a question from a customer!
Supervisors: No people skills, Zero personality, no followup training programs, usually leave level 1 techs hanging when refusing to speak with customers.
Company still pretty much uses a "yank and spank" (pulling techies of the phone to tell them what a horrible job their doing) technique to intimidate new techies into "upselling more product" makes one wonder how financially healthy IPower is if 50 or 60 level 1 techs are determining your bottom line.
Level 2 support rarely if accurately answers customers concerns the first time and of course only by email!
So is your information safe: I'm not a server expert, but we've been told on the floor not to mention to customers that their host may have been hacked!
E-Mail support: one of the worst areas of support. I've seen companies brought to their knees because of IPower's inability to troubleshoot email problems primarily involving their servers and MS Outlook or Outlook Express.
In the simply just lazy department: Account setup letters never sent out to customers. Customers not informed it takes 24-48 hours for DNS changes or for the Level 2 techs to get back to you.
Software changes are made by engineers in Santa Monica to servers directly effecting thousands of customers and leaving the customers businesses dead in the water!
Another critical area: Moving customers from one server host to another due to Ipower hosting problems. Always a nightmare for the customer. I've seen customers entire databases wiped out only to have Ipower then charge the customer to restore the database they screwed up in the first place!
And lastly for you folks having christian oriented websites hosted by IPower yes you are sharing space with XXX websites.
Oh and for those familiar with OSHA, this company is soooo poorly run.. You cant even find a fire exit plan anywhere in the building. But then again when you have over a 100 people in a building with male employees sharing 1 urinal and 1 stall (can a wheelchair fit in there?) What else would one expect.
So how are they so highly rated. They pay for it! This is America you know.
This company could have had a real shot, but like the Enron's and Haliburton's "greed wins out."