Thursday, May 20, 2010

WebHost4Life? Not on your life! They suck


I originally thought they were just plain incompetent, but now I think they are slow, unreliable and incompetent. Which is a polite way of saying that WebHost4Life sucks. Badly.
The graph above shows that they have failed to provide a continuous service on the Fishwisepro.com site for the past month. Then check out the speed in the right hand column:
Now compare this with my new hosting company:
So WebHost4Life is slower. Much slower. When I measured this I also measured the "time to first byte" as 175 seconds, and a total load time of 298 seconds. (The numbers in are in the status bar on this screen shot):
Since 300 seconds is 5 minutes, we are talking about a very slow load time indeed. Most users would have cancelled the page after 10 to 15 seconds, so they would never have seen the page at all. I'm told this was caused by their "migration scripts". The ones that screw up your web site for you.
Maybe I should also add useless to the list. It certainly describes their help system, and their much-vaunted "migration" process. Incidentally, the "new platform" doesn't support multiple web sites. They proved it to me because they couldn't get it to work, although they wouldn't actually admit that it couldn't be done. They are under the false impression that it can be done, but when push comes to shove it doesn't work. How sad is that?
Update: We can add "losers" to the list. According to www.web-hosting-top.com, WebHost4Life's hosted domains grew for 2007-2009 from 62,076 to 70,669 domains. In 2010 the decline has set in, so that by May 17, 2010 they are down to 60,912 domains, a loss of 16% in just 5 months. It boggles the mind that they could throw away 10,000 customers so fast.

3 comments:

Guy said...

Man these guys... what clowns. I’ve been with them since early 2006. It was never great but it was ok and it was cheap (for IIS hosting).

But now, after this so-called migration, it’s all gone to hell.

Two websites both down for TEN DAYS! TEN FREAKIN DAYS!!! And STILL not fixed.

I used to recommend these bozos to others that wanted low cost IIS hosting. Every single one of them has been down anywhere from one to many days after this migration.

And the best part; they timed the migration on all of those accounts for just after the plans came up for renewal.

This is THE WORST experience I’ve had with a hosting company, ever.

Please, pretty pretty please:
– take your business elsewhere
– tell everybody to post everywhere about these idiots so they don’t fall prey

I sincerely hope they go bust. It would be a service to humanity.

Anonymous said...

I am having the same issue. I am being charged for a semi dedicated server whilst they have acknowledged my issues relate to a 'specialised server' which is used for the transition. The site is always down, my ftp is no longer working.

It is criminal that they are even charging for this service. So what do I have to do? How hard is it to transfer to another webhost if you are running dotnetnuke.

These guys are about the worst company I have ever dealt with in any industry.

Donn Edwards said...

I have not installed DNN myself, but I signed up with Arvixe.com for a month just to try them out.

My colleague installed DNN on my arvixe account without any problems, and got a test site up and running, so it can't be too difficult.

It will cost you around $8 for a month, so no major harm done if it doesn't work.

My biggest problem was transferring the domain, which took a week. But if you get the domain registrar to change the name servers to Arvixe's settings before you start the ownership transfer process, you should not have any downtime at all.

HTH!