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RSSIpowerweb Failed Me
Hey Jon, what happened to the site? Everything ok?
It seems my web host, ipowerweb.com, blew away my site on 9/1, and decided to roll it back to 8/15. They then locked me out of my site for 9 hours (violating their 99.9% uptime guarantee) and set my space quota to 0 MB. I spent the last 4 days talking to 8 different techs who brushed me off and misinformed me about the issue. They never responded to my e-mails and they even tried to charge me $50 to do a restore of a database they blew away.
Nice, huh?
Finally, today, four days later, despite prior assurances, they admitted that there was nothing they could do to restore the data they destroyed. They also suggested that I keep regular site backups, which I think is a good idea, but should you have to keep backups to prevent data loss by people who you pay to host your site to protect it from data loss?
Fuckin’ A.
A few posts, 25 unpublished CD reviews, and a lot of other writing down the drain. This is not to mention the time spent trying to get answers from their technical support. I know it’s just a blog, but it’s a lot of fucking work to write these posts. I can’t imagine if I was some sort of store and they had lost 2 weeks of orders with no explanation.
I need PHP and MySQL, and some reliable web hosting suggestions…
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September 5th, 2006 at 9:48 pm
I registered my site with 1and1.com, and have recommended their service to numerous people who love their hosting plans and the price as well.
I think they have pretty good deals for about $5 a month. It’s just $5 a year to register a domain with them. Not sure what you’re paying now, but I think it’s the least expensive hosting out there that is very good quality.
September 6th, 2006 at 2:02 am
Losing work, whether or not you thought it was great or not, is always devastating. It’s pretty shitty of them to just shrug it off without at least giving you a discount.
September 6th, 2006 at 11:39 am
wingsix.com - a division of servercentral.net. they’ve been my host for almost 10 years, and are bend-over-backwards helpful and rock-solid reliable. i’ve referred literally dozens of accounts their way, including many of my clients, always with great results.
i understand about your lost data, that would really piss me off. i lost the first couple years (1998-99) of my site - partially my own fault, and partially a faulty zip disk - and i’ve always wished i could recover it. i’m sure it was total garbage… but it was *my* garbage… and i wasn’t ready to throw it away yet.
September 7th, 2006 at 10:58 am
wahhh…the intarnets ate the post to aid and abet my 52 in 52…before I could actually visit the links you so kindly hunted down.
i certainly don’t want you to have to repost, but if you have those links handy, I’d love to check them out!
M
September 7th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
Thanks for the direction, folks. I’ll be looking into them immediately.
Michelle: I was able to restore that post from my browser cache. It should be up now.
September 25th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
Yeah, I had a problem with them recently too summed up as:
Their helpdesk staff wasted my time quizzing me about my MySQL problem, and directing me to the a IPowerweb Help Center (their knowledge database), while there was a known-outage going on.
Why not try:
http://www.oha.nu/english/hosting.html
October 16th, 2006 at 8:48 pm
Hi Jon, I hope you have been able to get your site situated and found good hosting…I just switched to Rackspace from ipowerweb because of almost the same situation you had…last Thursday I lost 8 months worth of work because their servers crashed and they “lost all data” and it is not recoverable. I was about to launch my business website today, but couldn’t because everything has now gone down the toilet because of their incompetence.
I share your anguish about why the hell are we paying a company to host our websites if they are not running backups? It’s insane. And they advertise off-site nightly tape backups (a lie) and redundant mirrored content also offsite (also a lie). For this I would have just put a server in my garage and run my site from there.
I am now getting the runaround from them, that they had backups but they were done on the same server but on a different drive and both drives failed…one person tells me one thing, one tells me another…it’s exhausting…anyway I would RUN AWAY FAST, anyone who encounters ipower or ipowerweb…I can’t believe they are still in business.
I’m trying Rackspace based on some recommendations and after interrogating them enough to know they DO run backups (nightly) and full backups weekly, and their customer service so far has been “fanatical” as they advertise.
I can only hope for the best…best of luck to you…