Friday, March 12, 2010

Are We Collateral Damage?

Buying and selling hosting companys is an very active market. To get some insight see:
http://www.resellerguide.com/articles/buying-selling-hosting-company/buying-selling-web-hosting-company/233

This the third time my hosting company was acquired by another. All of my migrated sites were Windows. Each time, I experienced a major reduction of tech experience for the Windows Server environment at the new owner's facilities.

Simply put, the technical people are deficient in their working
knowledge of Windows Server in a commercial environment. I
realize hiring experienced techs of that caliber may seem costly.
However, trying to bootstrap inexperienced techs into a migrating
environment, is a ghastly mistake in providing a seamless transition
for Windows customers.

This deficiently is so blatant that I believe the new ownership of
WebHost4Life, et al, decide Windows hosting customers were not worth the
investment. We are collateral damage in the pursuit to low-cost techs
& users of Unix, which has a better bottom line.

Let's face it, most of us are not mega-sites with a grand income. We can't afford the time and frustrations to obtain compensation of our losses, which realisticaly are in the $1000's range. So, we place our tail between our legs and move on to another hosting company.

Is is not time we take a stand to prevent this collatoral-damage strategy in acquisitions of hosting companies of the future?

Please, if you have a few moments, share your experiences with us about the current WebHost4Life acquistion-migration. (I know reliving it can be painful). See the first blog post below titled: "Describe Your Hosting Problems At WebHost4Life"

73 comments:

  1. I'm in manual migration model. Haven't pulled the switch yet but my pages look okay so far in QA. In case there are issues, I'll move. I need Active Server Pages and am thinking that GoDaddy will be my backup.

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  2. I have 2 account. one has been migrated auto. for the next I will select to make manully. The migration of the first account was terrible! And right now my space on new platform appears stuck, the control panel is poorly (indeed it is a beta version as the title shows). They allowed to rollback my migration after 5 days down. I am trying to work to configure my new space using their new poor tools. At least now my sites are working well on the old space. The tech support is absent... the chat support appears as partially managed by bots. A nitemare for me!

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  3. Francis, thanks for your efforts on this. Would you be interested in joining the Ning community I created for the WebHost4Life community? http://webhost4lifecustomers.ning.com/

    Ning offers a lot of features that will allow us to take this discussion to the next level. I will be actively seeking out new members so that people have a common place to discuss. Hopefully, it will become easy to find in the future.

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  4. Hi carlif,
    The Ning is good idea.

    Hi carlif,
    Your Ning is a good idea.

    Can we go a step further...?

    I've been thinking along the line of a monitoring site for ALL hosting company migration problems that occur following sale of the company. Typically this is when most customers take a big hit. If this process is closely monitored across the industry, then customers won't be blind-sided as we have experienced with WebHost4Life. Also, the new owners would be aware that their migration process is being watched closely by folks who understand the migration process and will alert the industry if it is causing major problems for the current customers.

    Is it possible for you to rename your Ning? Such as "Monitoring Web Hosting Ownership Changes". And begin a new thread, titled: "WebHost4Life New Ownership Migration Problems"
    As new ownerships occur, your members can begin a new thread for the new owner.

    ReplyDelete
  5. 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.

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  6. My hosting Plan: Advance Hosting Plan - Turbo Charged - Windows Server 2008

    I decided to migrate all my sites (about 20) after having done intensive testing that left me satisfied.
    The migration process (wich cost $249,75 via Live Chat) was terrible. The migration team was asking all the time for instructions that we already inform in their primary form.
    Over time the performance was allways falling. Yesterday, I received more than 200 alerts of down time (Error Type: 503 Service Unavailable).
    The responses of support ranging from a simple "after we realized tests we conclude that it's all okay" to "sorry for the inconvenience" or "we put your site on a dedicated server" which was clearly a lie, because I found that it was hosted on a server with more 150 other sites. When I showed the list of my IP neighbors they did not respond.
    Currently I am in a panic because they do not inspire any confidence and I'm having terrible problems with my clients.
    Moral: if you want to go bankrupt host your sites in Webhost4life.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Francis,
    I can change the heading, but not the URL. But, it's easy to set up, so we can just create a different one ;)

    But I'd like to make it either more specific or broader than "Monitoring Web Hosting Ownership Changes". Personally, that's not something I can identify with or really want to do, and so I suspect the same for others.

    I can't find a hosting review site I like - which is amazing because there's lots of good reviews on the web for other products and services. It's the only way I shop for major purchases, but it doesn't work for hosting - why?

    I think your complaint (and mine too) is that the hosting industry needs to become more mature, more stable, and more sensitive to customer needs. And maybe there is a good hosting company that would be stable. So how about "The quest for a good hosting company"? Or "Hosting news"? Or "Hosting reviews"?

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  8. thanks for posting this. my site has been a mess since march 7. support is non existent. trying to decide whom to switch to. we need to vote with our feet. whom would you recommend?

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  9. Hi Paul,
    I'm still trying to get my sites running, and have not yet exited. I guess, choose any company that is resasonable, and not in migration. For the future, if your hosting company gets purchased, leave as soon as you hear that news.
    Good Luck

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  10. Hi carlif,
    Hosting review sites are a joke. Let's face it, they are supported by keeping the industry happy, and not by customers. This business is not going to police itself. It needs a 'Hosting Watch Dog', totally independent, and does not rate companys, but only monitors their sales and migrations.

    So, if you want to start 'Hosting Watch Dog' go for it. To keep it independent, let's also investigate to see if you can get some funding.

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  11. Wow...wish I had hit google and "webhost4life migration" sooner. Everything makes sense. A simple webform (ASP) won't work on the new setup. It is not a complex website, so didn't think the migration would be a problem...this has been a friggin nightmare. But, it is also a lesson learned...as I never put in writing to my customers that I couldn't guarantee 100% uptime, and that code would never break...so, in the future, that will be in writing, as the thought that someone could sue me, because they lost business or potential business because something didn't work in a webform process, makes me irritable, and now, much more careful.
    Everything worked until the migration. I have a few more customers that I switched to manual, but am not going to bother...will just find new hosting and install new.

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  12. Their so called support is such a joke now. Their standard response is "I apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you" This used to be a good hosting company....now they are a joke. I'm looking to move all of my sites to another hosting company.

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  13. The tech support is gone. My migrated applications are completely broken and I will have to go to a new hosting provider. I'd join a lawsuit if it didn't cost me anything :+> Probably won't happen. There are no standards for asp.net hosting providers and no accountability. Thankfully they only migrated one account yesterday and I have had time to fully backup all the others before the shitstorm hits.

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  14. I've had a Google Alert set for WH4L. After seeing a flood of bad news about them, I realized it was time to jump ship, even before I experienced any problems of my own. Smart move. I'm now at GoDaddy for the Windows hosting. Fairly happy.

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  15. What the do is, move your site to an incompatible server, and remove tech support. My site will never be able to run on their system, and it was working correctly for a long time. Has anyone been getting any sort of a refund from them on cancellation?

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  16. I'd like to know about refunds too... I'm paid up till 2012. I started down the "manual" migration path. After 4 days, 2 support tickets, several phone calls and chat sessions, I got nowhere. At one point, I told them not to worry about qa and the website, I just wanted them to flip the DNS to the new servers so I could just start over. That never happened. I finally told them to change the migration back to 'automatic' - which they did. But, after reading all this, I'm kinda glad I am still on the old platform - but for how long? Needless to say, I'm not done with this.

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  17. Here's some of the bad in detail:

    1. automatic migration 2 days ago
    2. all relative page links in all subdomain projects broken, I have no info on how to fix, no support of course. I have no asp.net application in the root so that might have been broken too I don't know.
    3. they copied over a 2 month old copy of the sql database to the new servers, all recent customer additions were lost, I did find the current database on the old server and control panel and luckily I was able to do a backup
    4. I tried to restore the database from the good copy, now I have no database access whatsoever. I tried creating a new sql server db from scratch, and this bombed out with a sql error in their control panel. I can't even drop the old database. I have a 2nd sql database for another app that doesn't even show up in the control panel. After trying to restore the database, I now have no access via sql server management studio. The more I try the worse it gets.
    4. their chat support is worthless
    5. finally after 2 full days I got a reply on one support ticket, and their response shows that they know nothing about hosting sites and feel no responsibility for service. They said I had a scripting issue and this was not their concern. This is a site that has been in service for a year on the old system taking user inputs for a parts catalog.

    I still have my own site and 2 more client sites on the old system and I have fully backed everything up. Choosing a new host that will give me anything like what I had before at that price is pretty much impossible. I can't even get subdomain applications at discoutasp.net without using a routing script. Each host I have looked at has some issue or other.

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  18. I have 4 client sites hosted here and the migration is a nightmare. There is no support and even if we post a ticket there is hardly any answer. Live chats are no more live as one has to wait to get access to any support people.

    The most surprising part that I noticed couple of days back is that when I tried to create a MYSQL database - it was giving some AJAX error.

    I would be extremely happy if someone can take these people to court.

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  19. My drama is ongoing. See http://donnedwards.openaccess.co.za/2010/03/webhost4life-breaks-fishwisepro-web.html

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  20. My entire database is gone with all of my data after the migration. No tables, no stored procedures. Just gone. And they will not respond.

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  21. Hi I just posted about how they are providing strangers with your private logon information:
    http://webhost4lifecustomers.ning.com/profiles/blogs/migration-problems

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  22. This has been a complete nightmare, and I don't think it's going to improve. I would love to take some action against these people. They migrated my site to their new platform, and then we lost all of our access to the site.

    I am hosting an ASP.NET applicaiton that has been working on their servers just fine since June 2006. When they migrated, I could not reslove any relative URLs correctly. I first made them aware of this on April 5th, 2010, and had to go back and forth with them several times over a matter of weeks. On April 18th, they tell me that they have determined it is an issue with the scripts on the site and that I should contact the developer. I told them I am the developer on the site and that their service is completely unacceptable.

    After doing some more research trying to figure out what I could do, I checked out the data. I was going to try and do a remote connect so I could grab my data and get the hell out. But what do you know, I can't reach the data. My profile says the database exists, but there are no tables or rows. I can see a file attachment, but I can't access it. And from what I can tell, the size of the database is nowhere what it should be. I can only imagine how much of my data they have lost.

    This is in combination with the information I haven't even complained to them about yet. They deleted sub domains, changed application roots, removed file protections I had in place for basic authentication. And to top it off, when they were trying to fix the relative URL issue, they exposed the root directories to whoever wanted to come take a look.

    I have chatted with these people, corresponded via their support ticket interface, and I finally made through to speak with someone on the phone. None of them are any help and they just give annoying and general answers. If had any influence, I'd love to take this worhless company to court.

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  23. I've got two commercial web sites with WebHost4Life and whilst performance on the old platform was variable, they have totally failed to migrate them to the new platform. I'm actually hosting one of them at home on my home server whilst I find a new home.

    In their defence, the support I've got in the migration has been good - it's the migration team that needs shooting!

    But there is currently a show stopper with the site. I had three sub domains on the old web site and that worked fine. They just cannot get sub domains working on the new site. I suspect the two sub domain technologies on the two sites are not equal. On the old platform, a sub domain corresponded to a new web site on ISS - which is how it should be. On the new platform, it just doesn't seem to work this way.

    My code uses things like Response.Redirect("~/page.aspx") everywhere (as do most ASP.NET apps). On the new platform, if you have a sub domain called test (http://test.mydomain.com) in a folder called test, the above redirects to http://test.mydomain.com/test/page.aspx, not http://test.mydomain.com/page.aspx. On the old platform, this works flawlessly.

    I suspect if you had just one web app in the root of your system it would work but that's not what we had before and not what we want now. The three sites I have are live, demo & pilot and I need all three in the new platform.

    Cheers, Rob.

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  24. @McKenzie - ah, exactly the same problem as me and therefore glad I'm not alone. Considering moving to DiscountASP who offer similar facilities but for more money. That said, at least we'll get a UK/Europe based data centre which will help with access.

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  25. Same issue I have. Sub Domain pointing to a sub folder. now I get sub-folder in url on redirect!

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  26. Count me in. I'm in the middle of the debacle currently. Same as above - bad redirects, 403 errors...the works.

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  27. I have been using webhost4life for four years. They were great back then. However, I think they have new owners. Two days ago they moved me to their 'new platform' however, they cloned my database from a month ago. Luckily I have nightly backups on my ftp site and was able to download the data locally. When I asked them to please restore the correct database they ignored me and then pressured me to pay $30 for premium support, which I finally did because I needed this done badly. They still never did it and I spent all night scripting the data and moving it back up by hand.

    Then last night my database went down. It still is not up over 10 hours later. All the support people tell me is that they are 'tier 1 support' and that the task is being fixed by 'tier 3 support'. Nothing happens though.

    I signed up with DiscountAsp.net last night at 3 am and my site is now operational with them. Luckily I only have one customer and can just give them the new domain name.

    Avoid the new 'webhost4life' like the plague!

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  28. Count me in! I have been very happy using wh4l for years! Not happy at all ipowers version of webhost4life!!
    What I thought was an upgrade, turned out to be an Ipower takeover.
    Tier 1 support is worthless, standard response will be "someone will contact you in 24 to 48 hours! after 48 hours you get BS answers and another 48 hour wait! Going on 3 weeks now!
    They want $29/month for a $10 hosting to take to tier 2 support.
    I set up sites for not tech people to us Fp and can't get the extensions installed. tech says they are, but control panel says there aren't!
    They disable FP openweb!
    The butchered my dns/ mx records and I have had many problems with email server reject password and imap error!
    Researching other asp hosting option, but haven't found the right mix like wh4l used to have!
    WH4l died and ipower stole its identity!

    ReplyDelete
  29. I have been using them for almost 8 years. In the past 6-9 months the mediocre service has turned into HELL. I was told they no longer offer SSL Certificates (even though it's all over their front page). My WordPress and OSCommerce sites are slower than molasses. The list goes on and on. 503 Errors and 501 Errors are a daily occurrence.

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  30. We've had a few sites go down, and they're literally going page by page updating our include files to work with the new folder structure of the website, but the back end is still not completely working.

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  31. Pure hell. It was good up until a March. Now, it's pure hell.

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  32. WebHost4Life had some hiccups during the almost 10 years I have been using them. But things have changed dramatically in the last few months. For two days my site has been down because WebHost4Life has no one on staff that understands something as basic as transferring a MySQL database from one server to another.

    If there is a class action lawsuit against WebHost4Life--count me in. There is no telling how much damage having my site down for two days has done to my business and reputation.

    My site broke about 5AM. By 9AM I had talked with there customer service and they assured me the site would be working shortly and expedited the issue. When the site wasn't back by noon--I talked to them again. Same thing at 5PM. Each time a very courteous person assured me the issue was actively being worked.

    After 5PM I submitted a ticket to the old WebHost4Life asking if I could get access to the old database. Within 20 minutes the ticket was answered and I had all my data. Unfortunately, even after breaking the 1.2GB database into uploadable chunks--the internal controls the new WebHost4Life prevent me from sending more than 75,000 transactions in some amount of time. The result--after about twenty attempts to fix the databasse myself, I went to sleep at 4AM hoping it would be fixed in the morning.

    Dawn brought a new day. The same courtesy support folks told the same lies and still no database.

    I have now given up and am talking with ICDSoft.com to see how I can get the 1.2GB database to them and running. Fingers crossed their won't be a third day with no website.

    Morale of the story: Run from Webhost4Life. WebHost4Life is not the cheapest, you can find lots of hosts with lower prices and much happier users. So low price isn't even a reason to use WebHost4Life.

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  33. Just as a little follow up--ensure you open a support ticket with WebHost4Life and document everything. For example my ticket states my sites were transitioned to the new host without the databases. Without the databases my sites won't work and it is affecting my businesses and reputation. Make sure to print out the ticket in a PDF. If/when a class action lawsuit forms, being able to show negligence from incompetency and the resulting loss of business will lead to a much larger settlement than simply the hosting fee refunded.

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  34. I've moved from webhost4life to arvixe after they ruined all my sites for the second time..
    Wrote a blog post about it at http://erikzaadi.com/blog/2010/05/23/MovingFromWebhost4lifeToArvixe.xhtml

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  35. We hosted close to 20 projects with Webhost4life and all of them went into disarray when we were forced to migrate last February 2010. We got all those familiar experiences, posted on this site, and we thought there were only a few of us with the same dilemma. This transition is costing us a lot already, while we were already forced to move to another hosting provider some of our Clients who we cannot pacify. I am glad you guys have started this blog. I will definitely join any class action against Webhost4life.
    Enrico

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  36. I have a very successful e-commerce site that has experienced days and days worth of no sales due to the migration. Of late, we now have 5 days straight of no sales (from 5/28 -6/2 and still not working). This is hurting my business and my reputation. I need to have help and have been on hold for hours over the past three months with them as all this has happened. I have chatted with tech support and created work tickets - all to be just bounced back and forth from new platform back to old and back to new and ... well, you get the picture.

    Please find us help!

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  37. I would love to see compensation from webhost4life... they completely screwed all of my websites up. Didn't move over my database, didnt set up IIS properly for any of my sites, and didnt even move over the latest files from the old platform! I was stuck with 6 month old sites that all 503'd or 404'd! Unbelievable. It took me 2 weeks to move off their horrible platform and from their crap service. I have since moved to Arvixe and so far, so good.

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  38. Same terrible experience for months! Class action lawsuit is in my view absolutely appropriate here, and I'm hoping there are some lawyers out there getting it underway.

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  39. They screwed up 2 of my sites
    Still dealing with it after a month

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  40. My site was 'migrated' on May 28th. This has been one of the worst business experiences of my life. I have never felt so completely disposable by people who didn't care about my business or their responsibility to do their job. This has cost me about hours and hours of time which adds up to $1,000.

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  41. Hopefully I can save you all a little agrivation. Under the new WebHost4Life, don't count on using the FrontPage Extensions ever again. If you use Visual Studio to create and publish your site, I recommend making an additional step from here on out. It sure beats waiting over a week for the new WebHost4Life "Support" team to try to figure out that they don't know the first thing about FrontPage extensions.

    1. Build your site locally
    2. Publish/Build to your LOCAL server.
    3. Use FileZilla or your favorite FTP program to upload the built website files.
    4. Optional. If you can't afford downtime while your website uploads, make good use of the domain pointing (folder pointing) offered by WebHost4Life. Essentially you'll:
    a. Publish your files to temp.yourdomain.com (in some folder like yourdomain_temp). When ftp upload finishes...
    b. Point www.yourdomain.com to the yourdomain_temp folder. The change is instant.
    c. Now upload your files to yourdomain_www folder.
    d. When that finishes, you can re-point your domain back to the yourdomain_www folder.

    Other than the short delay while the application starts itself (and the resulting session loss which would be normal anyway), you will experience no downtime.

    If you would rather fight WebHost4Life's tech support "professionals" about getting your FrontPage Server Extensions right... well, it's a losing battle. Consider yourself warned.

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  42. If anyone gets a lawsuit cooking, please call me at 760.213.9973, anything i can do to level the playing field for these bast**rds www.enduranceinternational.com (new owners of webhost4life)

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  43. I am all for a lawsuit too. Our sites were migrated on May 28th. We didn't even know they were doing it. It wasn't until I realized that all our web pages were outdated. They overwrote our entire database with an old backup, changed our IP address, but didn't tell us so I couldn't even upload anything, disabled all our FTP's, all our formmail scripts no longer worked, and on and on.

    Long story short… We had so many tickets out that were answered by about 50 different useless people, talked with live chat and phone support (oh, wait… “premium phone support”), both a waste of time, all to basically figure it out myself. They have wasted 3 weeks of my time to get it sorted out. BAD, BAD, BAD technical service and support. We are looking into switching to Arvixe next week. I've researched for days and this seems to be the best choice by far from reading reviews from their existing clients. Fingers crossed that our website stays up and running until we can make the switch.

    WH4L at least needs to reimburse my company for 3 weeks worth of my pay for all the unnecessary time I have spent on correcting the issues they caused to our websites.

    If anything does proceed with a lawsuit, please email me at webmaster@aemc.com.

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  44. In late May, our site started slowing down and then became buggy, and then went completely down for hours at a time. They could get it back up only for a few hours at a time. They said it was because of the 'migration'. We moved to Winhost.com on June 15th. I received a pro-rated refund from WH4L *shock* because we were paid up thru Feb 2011, and it was more than enough to pay for a full year at WinHost. Better service, lower cost, and much faster.

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  45. I've lost hundreds of dollars in internet advertising due to webhost4life acquisition and potentially thousands in business revenue. Are we going to file a class action suit or what???

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  46. I have lost my site access, email access, db access, web services, SSL, etc. I often found it easier to identify and fix the problems myself.

    Interestingly, I have documented support staff lying to me on a couple occasions. When I reported them to a supervisor, he had no excuse and said they would be "re-trained"

    Bring on the class action lawsuit!!! I've got plenty of documentation.

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  47. I lost one email account and all my FTP accounts. My clients were unable to contact me for two days and lost all access to their downloads. I lost two days of work trying to restore the services that were working fine before the migration. After two days, my email service is still not fully functional and I have to update all references to my FTP accounts and notify all my clients of these changes as the old accounts could not be restored.

    Yet, throughout this ordeal, the support personnel seem to have been oblivious to the clear fact that the new system just fails to operate like the old system did. Rather, at each step, they continue to find flaws in what I was trying to accomplish.

    Seeing that the services are unlikely to improve, I will have to port my sites to a new service provider -- it would be best to make the move now before WH4L goes under.

    Bring the class action on before this outfit evaporates.

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  48. I became a wh4l customer many years ago around 2002. At that time they had an offer called lifetime hosting where you pay one time and have the account 4 life. I accepted that offer, but since then they have downgraded my service and given my all kinds of grief, always with the solution that I should upgrade to a new plan where I lose my lifetime hosting and have to pay every year. I've declined to do so. Then I saw where my account was up for renewal in 2015. I contacted them about it and their response was "Unfortunately we don't offer lifetime hosting." I messaged them back and said "Unfortunately I will sue you." Then I finally got a more sensible sounding response that utterly dismissed all of my other concerns such as the inability TO PAY THEM ONLINE with a credit card, and stated something like "I see you have Webhost4life Basic lifetime hosting. If you decided to cancel your account you won't receive this offer again." If they breach their contract with me I absolutely expect to sue them. I imagine they are trying to drive away other customers that also have this plan. that would explain some of their "issues".

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  49. I've been on webhost4life for about 10 months or so. They started out great. The tech support was reasonably efficient. Then with the migration the tech support has become a totally useless waste of time, with a 48 hour turnaround time for tickets. So instead of taking 20 minutes to fix the current problem is in the queue for two weeks, and still not resolved. Not only did they fail to fix my timeout issue, but they "moved some files around" while debugging, and that broke the functionality of my web application so that it doesn't even load. No indication of which files were moved, so they left me to figure that out on my own. Wow. What a bunch of imbeciles. My sense is that they switched from an American based team that understood the technologies to an Indian based team that has absolutely no clue what they are doing. The migration has been an ongoing rolling disaster since April 20 when they did the migration for my site. What I'd really like is to get at the guy who said "... and we can switch to an Indian support team and save a bunch of money" and sue the crap out of that person individually as a menace to civilization. At the very least that person should be driven into the wilderness and Exiled4Life.

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  50. I think a class action lawsuit is an excellent idea. I now have to honor annual fees that my clients pay me to be on my website by extending their agreements by two months which means that I lose two months of income. I finally had to move the site altogether. There really is no point in trying to get these amateurs to host any website of any kind.

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  51. I have filed a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about the false advertising. They suggest contacting the BBB and Attorney General's office. Here's the contact info for the FTC: * Online: Use our secure complaint form.
    * Phone: Call our toll-free helpline: 1-877-FTC-HELP (1-877-382-4357);
    TTY: 1-866-653-4261
    * Mail: Write to:
    Federal Trade Commission
    Consumer Response Center
    600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
    Washington, DC 20580
    This might be worth an entire post to get everyone on board. Thanks for doing this.

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  52. Complaint can be filed with Massachusetts State Attorney General here: https://www.eform.ago.state.ma.us/ago_eforms/forms/piac_ecomplaint

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  53. I'm shocked!

    I was sure I'm alone on this one but I just can't believe this. I'm going through hell right now (site is being migrated in the most unprofessional way possible) while I can't work with my site.

    Saddest thing is, you can't get back to the old servers anymore, this is it. It's the end of the road and these guys couldn't care less about us loosing money.

    What can be done guys? Is there a lawsuit, what do I need to do to get on it?

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  54. I can't believe I didn't see this sooner. I could go on a RANT about webhost4life. I am also an ehost customer for some domains I have owned since college.

    The crazy thing is I bought my domains with ehost and hosted them on webhost4life. I haven't logged into ehost for at least a year. So today I logged in to ehost to change my nameservers and get the heck away from webhost4life... and they're the same company!!! AYE!

    Agreed above, I have been documenting my experiences with webhost4life. It has been horrible. I almost lost several of my big clients and I can't even begin to think about the amount of time I spent trying to save my sites since the migration. If there is a lawsuit, I want to participate.

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  55. I have been a loyal customer for WebHost4Life for about 5+ years now and have never had issues. I do my own web development and use their hosting exclusively therefore all of my business is dependent upon it. Sometime around March of this year everything went down. I contacted support and they told me they did nothing and it was probably my scripts(which had been working flawlessly for that past 5 years). I fixed everything on my own and now my account suddenly got suspended for no apparent reason. I am a loyal paying customer, I have the highest package possible with plenty of add-ons, I would really like to file suit against this company for it has been destroying my reputation as a web developer and running my business into the dirt since the switch over.

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  56. I can hardly add anything, my experience is similar to the others here. Many wasted unbiliable hours, sites down with no warning, incompetent support, hurting my name with my clients. I gave them a lot of benefit of the doubt because of the previous years of really good service -relative to other "economy" hosts- guess I should have seen the writing on the wall.

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  57. I'll just sum up the problems that happened so far, from the migration, to me leaving for Arvixe, to trying to get a refund:

    1) After migration, we all got moved to Virtual Directories instead of real Websites. This breaks most root paths in hyperlinks. I asked to switch back to Websites, they said no. Over half my websites were down.

    2) I found an alternative, moved my websites (to real IIS 'Websites'), and requested a refund. I had paid my 2nd annual payment on June 20. This was July 17 when I canceled. Within their 30 days.

    3) Upon cancellation I let them know that I think the migration broke their implied warranties regarding Quality of Service, and since I was within 30 days, also wanted the $35 cancellation fee waived.

    4) I receive a cancellation email saying that the fee will be waived on July 17.

    5) July 26 I receive an email asking for information. Some of this is information related to their own internal billing structure, like invoice numbers and Receipt ID, which I would not have! I reply back with the information I DO have.

    6) July 27 I receive a partial refund, in which they apparently have charged me the $35 fee. To top it off, it says "we have canceled your account '**cweb' and have refunded the unused hosting amount of $###.## to your PayPal account on July 27, 2010". No itemized receipt. No explanation of why it's not a full refund. Nothing.

    To top it off, my account name is '***dar'!!? Who is **cweb? And where did this amount come from?

    I have replied with a request for an itemized receipt. I have a feeling they're also charging me for the 10 days it took them to 'process' the cancellation. Or they just completely mixed up my account with one of the many others who are fleeing their incompetence.

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  58. I started as a web developer with a large corporate firm. They host 8 of our sites. It has been an absolute nightmare. I can't even begin to describe how bad these guys are so I wont. Legal action seems reasonable. Ill be with you every step of the way

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  59. I am going through the so called 'migration' with them right now. Horrendous. Cost me a bout $4000 so far. I have already had to move 5 critical sites to another host. They never did get them up and running after 6 days and the sites were critical.

    I still have a few sites hosted there but they are not as critical as the others so I will put up with the problems for awhile.

    Support is comicical, they use scripted messages for all answers to you, I am thinking they are probably in so far away country with limited english language skills.

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  60. Man...they just migrated all my sites and all sites are now down even emails. I asked them for my FTP login....i still haven't get it and this is the 2 day now. HOW FUCKING HARD TO GET MY FTP LOGIN. This company is a JOKE.

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  61. Twice in the last 6 months they attempted this silly automated migration and broke my sites for more than a week each time (they're down as we speak.) They should not be allowed to stay in this business.

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  62. I have been feeling the horror of the migration for nearly three weeks... what is the best host to go to... I cant stand this any more:

    Here is my latest LiveChat where I attempt to get a phone number:

    AA: Hi Wayne. My name is Arthur. How are you today?
    WM: I am after a status update for ticket Tracking Number: 7349576
    AA: I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
    WM: We are 16 days into the problem... what is happening Please dont use scripted answer etc... I am sick of them
    AA: I have noticed that the Support ticket #7349576 is open regarding your issue. Our specialists will work on the issue and you should hear from them soon. You can check the status of the Support ticket at:
    WM: I have been waiting 16 days!!!!! How about some action The ticket doesn't show anything... I have been on the phone to Phoenix today and we had some use and it now has stopped altogether Can you get someone - a supervisior to explai what is going on
    AA: I do understand the importance of your business to you and we are doing our level best to provide you with the maximum support as we can do to resolve your issue.
    WM: Arthur what you just wrote is absolute bullshit... what decent company cant fix a problem in 2 and a half weeks and makes it worse
    Can you ask for an update status of teh SQL migration issue please
    AA: You can contact our Phone Support at: 888-306-3780 and ask for our manager.
    WM: I have done that... I am after a TRUE STATUS UPDATE I am in Australia and it cost many $$$$ to phone
    AA: I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
    WM: Why not tell me IF THE PROBLEM WILL BWE FIXED
    AA: Unfortunately, I cannot provide you with the exact time frame when the issue will be resolved. We appreciate your patience until this issue is resolved.
    WM: I have lost my patience... I need a real answer... your corporate email bounces?? How do I get someone in authority to address my problem
    AA: Believe me, I would have fixed the issue that you have been experiencing if I would have had all the necessary tools. The issue is currently being handled by higher level technical specialists.
    WM: But the issue ISNT BEING HANDLED... can you supply a phone number for corporate head office
    AA: No.WM: Why not??
    AA: Unfortunately, I cannot provide you with any other phone numbers other than the Phone Support number: 888-306-3780.
    WM: What is the street address of WEBHost4life Inc
    Arthur Andrews: Thank you for your patience. I am still looking into your issue. Can you please hold for another 2 to 3 minutes?
    Wayne MAnsfield: What are you doing??
    Arthur Andrews: Thank you for holding.
    Arthur Andrews: Our billing address is:
    Arthur Andrews: WebHost4Life 70 Blanchard Rd 3rd Floor Burlington, MA 01803 USA
    Wayne MAnsfield: And on that letterhead is there a phone number??
    Arthur Andrews: Unfortunately, I cannot provide you with any other phone numbers other than the Phone Support number.
    Arthur Andrews: Did you receive my last message?
    Wayne MAnsfield: You cant supply a phone number for the company yu work for?? You are kidding me??
    Arthur Andrews: May I place you on hold for 4 or 5 minutes, while I check this for you?
    Wayne MAnsfield: I will wait
    Arthur Andrews: I appreciate your patience. I am researching on the issue but I will return in 4-5 minutes with some more information.
    Wayne MAnsfield: ok
    Arthur Andrews: Thank you for your patience. I will be back with some more information in 4 to 5 minutes.
    Wayne MAnsfield: ok
    Arthur Andrews: Thank you for holding.
    Arthur Andrews: Unfortunately, I cannot provide you with the corporate office contact number.
    Wayne MAnsfield: You just sat there for 15 minutes wasting my time and lied to me about trying to find the phone number?? How do you work for people like this??
    Arthur Andrews: No, I have confirmed with my higher level specialists regarding this.

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  63. Has there been any more movement on this? 5 months ago, when they migrated my DNN sites to the new platform, they and to undo it and get me back on the legacy platform. 3 weeks ago, they attempted it again (WITHOUT) notifying me. My sites are messed up now. One is loading a version of the site that is 5 months old (about 50 hours worth of work to fix)and has been this way for 1 week and a half already - much to the dismay of the 7000 subscribers and the sponsors. I'm stuck. I don't know what to do and i keep getting the run-around from their support folks. Has there been any legal action? How do I get results?

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  64. GUYS!!! My big advice...move to another host right now. Any host out there is better than them. I moved to a new hosting after the 3rd day from my migration and I am very happy not have to deal with them anymore. Also, I gave up my SSL from webhost4life too because it takes forever for them just to export me a key. My business can't wait that long.

    *********Cancel your account and move now*******

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  65. My site was down for 2 weeks in februaru. Tech support was non-responsive. I cancelled my account and was told I would receive a pro rated refund. I just got an email that my account (which has been hosted on discountasp.net since February 09) would auto renew in 3 weeks. I logged into webhost4life and, sure enough, my account had not been cancelled, no refund charged back. I went into the account renew section, and even though I repeatedly go through the process of non-renewal, the account is still flagged for auto-renewal. Convenient glitch. Webhost4life is fraudulent from top to bottom. Has anyone actually contacted a lawyer?

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  66. We have (which is about to be 'had') a wide range of global client websites on VPS services at Webhost4life. They were an OK, cheap alternative to hosting in Australia. That was until they were purchased and migrated to some “new beta platform”.

    Since then, they have gone from OK to absolutely terrible (and I’m being polite here). We were given 4 hours notice of the migration of some 8 global sites (that included two for a major global beer brand and two for a major global mobile phone company – so not trivial players) and despite desperate and repeated pleas by our CTO not to proceed until we had domains sorted, etc, they ploughed ahead with the migration.

    The result was all sites being taken off line. We then went through the process of creating support tickets (we also called them and tried to get through to ‘management’ but were repeatedly told that no one could help…) and working through our global client’s IT departments to get DNS changes, et al. WH4L was no help and we still – some 2 weeks later – still have some sites down because they cannot seem to get ASP.NET working on their servers.

    My only advice is stay away from these guys – they are the worst of the worst. There are plenty of great global hosts out there and I’m just sorry we stayed as long as we did. And the biggest insult - they have increased their prices... wow!!

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  67. my dedicated server is F'd Up at the moment. and I really need help

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  68. They've lost all of my email... promised they'd restore it in 6-12 hours. Anyways... 4 days later I am still trying to get them to do it. It's the final thing I need before I can 100% leave them for good. This company and it's employees should be thrown in jail... this goes well beyond incompetence... it is criminal. If this company is managed out of America we need law enforcement to pay them a visit.

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  69. WebHost4Life took down our entire organization for five weeks. All we could get out of them was, "... may I place you on hold while I check into this for you..." and when ask how long it was going to take to get the problems solved, we were told ".. we're working on it..." and they would say nothing else.

    Now that we have removed all of our files from their servers, we will be contacting them for reimbursement of fees and damages.

    Tom Buchanan
    www.texassocialservices.org
    972.838.5798

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  70. I have nothing but problems with webhost4life. Is there any traction on a class action? I would like to be a part of it if so.

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  71. This is why I left webhost4life last year for my personal hosting in September, they were already horrible then. But, after I cancelled, they still billed me this year in Feb which I disputed and had refunded. I had to make a lot of phone calls to finally get them to remove the charge and they still charged me $15.00 for some "tool" they installed that I never agreed to, and they did it after I cancelled.

    I still have not received a refund for the tool but can't bring myself to bring up a small claims for $15.00 (I disputed the charge with my credit card company but they won't remove it until webhost4life agrees to refund it and they won't).

    I also had the account that was supposed to have 100GB of storage and after I used 2GB (over 2 years) I couldn't upload anymore. They told me that's how it works and increased my limit to 5GB. I told them that wasn't acceptable, I was paying for 100, and if they couldn't provide that then they should have just said 2/5/10 whatever you can actually use, they said that's how everyone does it...which I already know is a lie.

    Seriously, I know everyone hates them, but I went to GoDaddy. 1/2 the cost, I get to use all of my storage, much faster, and despite what I've heard their service and support has been pretty good, I do kinda hate their big wonky control panel but at least you have a lot of options and control.

    I've used some other providers for various projects and they're OK too but I'll never go back to webhost4life.

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  72. We at ExpertsHired.com have had the worst experience with WebHost4Life.com.

    Believe or not, Our website is down at the moment and has been for 3 days. Our websites have been down all year long... Off and on. We have a ton of open tickets that verify this on-going problem.

    The service is awful. No other word to even describe this. This has been our worst experience ever with a hosting company.

    Save yourself and NEVER USE these people.

    As soon as we find the time, We are moving all of our websites off this server.

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  73. Yes, because webhost4life sold to it's new owner and the nice old support staff gone away. their windows hosting is no longer recommended for ppl. the new guys doing better in Linux. the full story of WH4L can be found at this site:
    http://webhostpark.com/web-hosting-review/126-web-host-4-life-review

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