Wimdows.NET

Wim's .NET blog

Webhost4Life...until things go horribly wrong...

A good colleague and friend of mine has been hosting a busy website with WebHost4Life for well over a year now. Support is good, quick and usually pretty painless.

A couple of weeks ago - he receives this e-mail:

Dear member,

I am sorry to inform you that your server had just suffered from a sever power supply failure. Because of that the Raid Harddrives was fried as well as the Daily Backup HardDrive that's in the same machine fried as well.

We normally have a Mass Storge server that'll store all the backups remotely. However, the system when down in the middle of such transfering, so we cannot retrieve any data from our Mass Storage system either.

We are now sending all the Harddrives of this machine to the Labortary and to see if we are able to recover the data in it.

This is the 1st time in 5 years that we have such problem. We'll look into why the power failure fried all the Harddrives and prevent this from happening again.

In the meantime, if you have any backup of your website we can help you load it up into a brand new server and get your site backup and running right away. Please let us know asap.

We'll futher design a special backup plan just for you to avoid any future problems. We can backup your site daily and send it to another server located in another state to maximize the backup reliablity. We can move you to a different webserver, please confirm.

Basically, the long and the short of it is that he paid for backup (it's part of the hosting package) and it will cost 40 bucks to restore, but WebHost4Life were unable to do this for him.

After a week of 'to-ing' and 'fro-ing' he's now been offered free webhosting for LIFE! Hmm..wonder if that's how they came up with the name in the first place...:-)

As a result of this, it looks like they're not too keen to help him get his site back up. After all, he's not paying for it anymore.

So, basically, make sure you're not stranded like he did and query your hosts backup policy, to make sure they're not using a "Daily Backup HardDrive that's in the same machine"!!! It's alright saying they offer backup, but when it comes to the crunch, you want to make sure they are able to do a proper restore!

Posted: Aug 19 2004, 10:14 AM by Wim | with 87 comment(s)
Filed under: ,

Comments

TrackBack said:

# August 19, 2004 2:15 AM

Phil Scott said:

Yeah, I've come to expect that with webhost4life you should thank yourself if you are pulling in a single 9 of uptime. For what you are paying, it's a great deal. But even for my personal site which might get 600 hits a day, I still notice downtime almost daily.

And then there was the time when the culture suddenly changed on their servers to german. That was a bit...odd.
# August 19, 2004 8:52 AM

patag said:

I would run away as quickly as possible from Webhost4Life. I ran a very big fan site for Lineage II and completely saturated my full T1 at my office. So I needed a cheap place with unlimited bandwidth. I chose the $20 per month plan with Webhost4life and in 3 days time they just stopped my web site claiming that my site was causing problems.

Let me state that the site was fine nor was it causing undo server strain. When I was running it from my office network, it was on a Dual P3 900 Mhz box (nothing special) and the box was able to handle the hits, just not the bandwidth.

So one evening, I get a email from Webhost4life saying, "We turned off your web site." That's all they told me!

You get what you pay for and unlimited really isn't unlimited. 15Gb daily transfer is what caused them to turn off my site.

Run away...

I'm now using www.servermatrix.com for hosting. Good prices and full access to the server with RDC.
# August 19, 2004 12:21 PM

Shannon J Hager said:

at least you guys were told of the problem. A couple weeks ago, a client of mine had thier site go down for a day, then back up but with old versions of some pages and a new (and unknown) IP address. The IP was needed to FTP into the site, so we contacted them to see what was wrong. Eventually they said that there was a new IP address because the machine had went down and the site was now hosted on a different box.

The reason the client wasn't notified? The host (SetUpSite) doesn't send bulk emails... ?!?!?
# August 19, 2004 1:32 PM

TrackBack said:

# December 31, 2004 7:24 AM

TrackBack said:

^_^,Pretty Good!
# April 10, 2005 2:26 AM

sydneyos said:

Likewise - in addition to the frequent down time and episodic email unavailability, I just found out these people told my client they were going to shut down his site if he didn't upgrade to their semi-dedicated plan over a year ago.  I called to find out why and they couldn't tell me.  This is a very minor site and not one that needs a semi-dedicated service by any means.  I am wondering if this is a tactic they've used with other non-technical clients to force them to buy services they don't need or risk losing their site.  Also, there was one episode (after upgrading) where they just shut down the site because they claimed it was affecting the other sites.  And yet, after restarting IIS, this has never happened again.  Still, they didn't even try that until I called to complain.  And their cusotmer service people are really snotty.  Avoid at all costs.  And if anyone else has been forced into services they don't need, I'd be interested to hear - feels like class action territory to me.
# June 26, 2006 9:29 PM

JJ said:

Webhost4life are horrible.

My other site was down 2wice today. Don't they understand the damage they inflict on me with their unprofessional behavior?

Had I only read these thread earlier!!!

JEEEEEEZZZZZZZ this is frustrating!

# July 23, 2006 5:15 PM

Amy said:

Their customer service is one of the worst in the industry. If they owe you money on commissions, good luck collecting.

Real bad problems are ignored and all the decision makers are always travelling abroad.

Everyone with problems should submit complaints to the California Attorney General's office.

# August 25, 2006 2:32 PM

John said:

They are doing a great job so far, I am very happy with them.  No downtime and speed is fast.  They support is very fast too.  I am using them for 3 years now.

# October 22, 2006 6:03 PM

patrick handley said:

anyone have any info on whats going on with webhost?

No sign of them on the web and no phone contact. Anyone have another telephone number for them?

# October 22, 2006 8:55 PM

CHARLES PEDLEY said:

Same problem. My site is down and I found out there's is too!

cpedley@cogeco.ca

# October 22, 2006 10:59 PM

John said:

Their phone # works for me, so does their helpdesk and live chat. I usually use helpdesk or Live chat.  They are very quick at resolving problems.

# October 23, 2006 11:09 PM

Incognito said:

I guess John here works for webhost4life..

# February 9, 2007 9:23 AM

Mark said:

I have two sites hosted with them (for almost a year now).  It's gone reasonably well.  SQL Server has ALWAYS been very slow, but for the money, I never really complained.  Of course, today when I opened up the site I get a SQL error (can't connect to the database at all).  Went to open up the Hosting Control Panel -- no go with that either.  I put in a ticket (for whatever good that will do).

I'm now talking to someone using their "Live Chat" feature.  He says it's a routing problem that the admins are working on.  He says "Use the IP address instead of the name for now".  And HOW, exactly, am I supposed to get the IP address?  He says "Ping it."  Yeah, buddy, if it would RESPOND then I'd be able to get it...but if it would respond I wouldn't be having these problems to being with.

Then he has the gall to say, "The admins have fixed the problem.  Please try it now."

Tried everything, not a damn thing has changed.  Seriously, what kind of support is this?

# February 23, 2007 11:31 AM

Jill said:

Why would anyone (over the age of 6) think that

you back up 1 harddrive... in the same machine as

the other harddrive????

Huh?

And why aren't the running multiple RAID drives

that are simply hot-swappable?????

# March 4, 2007 6:07 PM

... said:

i'am really impressed!!

# March 16, 2007 7:54 PM

Fairu said:

I've been using webhost4life.com service for years. It's going well for me. And the live chat setvice is good, they always try their best to solve the problem I encounter.

# March 27, 2007 11:09 PM

Charlie said:

Webhost4life is one of the worst hostings I met. I used it for two weeks. That was enough for me. The Sql Server database went down very often, probably because of the thousands of users who share the same machine, giving my users a "pretty" 500 error several times a day.

The initial response of the web was sometimes at day up to 15 seconds (that's simply unacceptable) and when I commented it to tech support, they said that nothing was wrong because ASP.net is slow the first time one a page is compiled (that was not true in my case, the page was compiled several days ago).

I think that many of who recommends this awful hosting are doing this because of their affiliate program.

# May 12, 2007 2:28 AM

Stether said:

cigarettes.blogbugs.org - cigarettes blog

# May 24, 2007 2:55 AM

Stephan said:

Hey guys, finally, I know what happeneed! I thought they had suspended my account for beeing late to pay the hosting bills.

Actually, I've been hosting several websites with them since 2002, and they were reliable, specially for hosting DNN portals. The Control Panel was really full of features.

On March 13th, without further notice or explanation, all my websites hosted at WEBHOST4LIFE just went down. I guess they were all in the same server that suffered a major failure. My main frustation, however was of a lack of responses to my questions at the support center.

At least now I know what went wrong.

I am hosting know at Godaddy's but the control panel is really, really bad.

Stephan

# June 1, 2007 3:04 PM

Kel said:

I've been with WH4L for about 6 yrs now and they are decent hosting company.. Support COULD be better, but otherwise things are fine. Before I chose WH4L I researched a ton of hosts and they all had disadvantages as well as advantages. You can bet on having problems with any host, so prepare in advance.

# June 6, 2007 10:22 AM

safari said:

reliable webhost4life=my happy clients. I have been host with webhost4life for 3 years and will host for another n*3years.

# August 3, 2007 5:19 AM

Dave G said:

I was few seconds from ordering a windows hosting from WebHost4Life and also from hostdepartment.com but reading all the reviews really scars me...

I'm now with GoDaddy and I'm looking to replace the funny web-admin SQL (+ more SQL space..).

So is there any decent, valuable windows hosting that supports ASP and have MS SQL in it?

The most important: SQL space should be > 250MB

Thanks

# August 8, 2007 6:18 AM

Ben said:

I have tried hosting the Joomla content management system on windows box with WH4L, and have run in to constant problems. Due to the site being a low traffic site the web application unloads from the systems memory. Normally this would be fine, except on WH4L servers it takes over 30 seconds to start up and causes the application to fail.

Trying to get support to do anything about this has been like trying to get water to run up hill.

# September 3, 2007 11:02 PM

Mike Reynolds said:

I'm a very satisfied 2yr customer of WebHost4Life.  Their service is exceptional and I've never noticed any downtime at all.  BTW, as far as I know, GoDaddy does not offer PHP, but WebHost4Life has PHP5.  GoDaddy is about 5 years behind the times, people stopped using ASP 5 years ago - and I just stopped using it a year ago (so I'm 4 years behind the times).  PHP rules and so does WebHost4Life.

One more thing on WebHost4Life, for what I'm paying per month, I'd gladly pay that just for the customer service they provide.  Thus, I think they are worth 2X what I pay.

# September 30, 2007 11:40 AM

chad said:

I've been using wh4l for about a year now and I haven't had any major problems. 99% uptime (which is the best you're going to get). Their admin panel is fantastic. Customer service can be a little irritating at times, but come on...who doesn't get irritated with customer service ANYWHERE.

I'd recommend WH4L.

# October 4, 2007 9:57 AM

Pissed said:

Fuck you webhost4life.

# October 24, 2007 9:56 PM

mmm... said:

By far the worst hosting company I've seen. Try talking to them on the phone... good luck!

I see that they are knows for their backups issues. I had major problems with them. Once you're site is more then 25 pages with a database you better get ready for some fun downtime.

# November 3, 2007 12:31 AM

red soxs fan said:

webhost4life

been hosted about 3 years now - good sized site - they have quick response - I have it checked with an outside service very reliable - we have the semi-dedicated service

# November 8, 2007 10:23 PM

Kevin said:

Avoid webhost4life.com like the plague.

# November 15, 2007 10:40 AM

Adrian said:

my site hosted with webhost4life for 3 years now, down almost once per week. Today site is down, e-mail servers are down, and webhost4life.com website is also down. What now?

# November 15, 2007 11:33 AM

Javiero said:

I work since two years with WH4L, very happy but sometimes the support is slowwww .

i recommend it

# November 16, 2007 6:36 PM

just read said:

I cannot imagine service being worse than the one webhost4life provides: they don't monitor the websites - they don't know whether your website is up or down, as they have no software to monitor it; they don't know whether their server is up to the capacity or not - they have no way to monitor it. So you can imagine how "smoothly" you website run on their server....

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# January 10, 2008 9:04 PM

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# February 25, 2008 2:09 PM

Tom said:

I'm a customer for 5 years now and was always happy with their services. But that changed last week!

All my sites are shut down. I actually experience the same problem sydneyos has with them. Webhost4life is telling me to upgrade to use their semi-dedicated service which costs 79$ a month! They tell me one of my sites, more specific a blog site, is causing serious CPU problems and affecting other users on the same server. They tell me to upgrade or find another host. I think that this is a kind of tactic to let their customers pay for something they don't need!

Right now, I filled a complaint but in the mean time all my sites are down. Very VERY frustrating!

# March 23, 2008 6:08 AM

sydneyos said:

Tom,

I finally ended up moving my client's main site to another host (really good host - hostmysite.com).  I did leave one of their mostly unused sites behind and webhost4life did allow us to downgrade back to the basic package, but basically after I harassed them and nobody could find any documented reason in their records for the forced upgrade.

# March 23, 2008 1:25 PM

nikho said:

Good prices but Support Sucks and servers are unreliable.

All these negative comments support my own experiences with webhost4life.

For a while, I hosted a small site which ran fine. I was able to get in touch with support fairly easily.

A year later I hosted another similar site, and things started going downhill.

PROBLEM 1:

Support sucks! I can never get through to them over the phone. Never!!!!

Everytime I call, I get "all our operators are busy at the moment....please try the live chat."

They don't even want us to call.

With live chat, it take me a damn 20 minutes to discuss an issue that would take 2 minutes over the phone.

PROBLEM 2:

Server reliability:

1. My site is down too often. Recently(within past 6 months ).

They don't fix it themselves. I feel like I have to contact them to tell them the issue, and then they fix it in about 5 minutes.

2. Sql server seems slow.

All around, they offer a lot of packages, good pricing, but their support and reliablity is just a killer. I'm in the process of moving my site off of there.

# April 10, 2008 1:34 PM

TaosBill said:

webhost4 a month continues to spiral into the depths of unbelievably. 25-minute support wait time at 8AM. Knowing these people, it is most likely a delay to make you give up and go away, but if you do decide to hang around, you will get disconnected after 20 minutes & after hearing over and over how fast the CHAT line is. Don't be fooled, you will think the entire internet has died and gone away before you get a chat response. Support ticket is an exercise in stupidity, yours for thinking they will admit to breaking your working site and waiting for hour upon  hour for a response. Do NOT under any circumstance check the elevate to manger box. You might as well expect snow in July in the desert. The biggest joke on you the customer, email the CEO!!!

# April 18, 2008 11:15 PM

Al-Shagra said:

Thanx everyone, except the obviously idiotic comments from the pro wh4l.

I was about to get an account and purchase a plan, but thought I would check out the first five reviews from respectable blogs.

People like you make it hard for scams like wh4l to take advantage of developers and our clients alike.

# May 9, 2008 6:47 AM

mdapner said:

We had the same type of slow SQL issues with wh4l as many others here have already posted. 5 months of this was all we could take. We moved over to Server Intellect and never had SQL issues again.

# June 9, 2008 2:41 PM

Ellie said:

We've just been told that they have no backups from before May 7 (It's Aug 5 today). They corrupted the database with all our client wiki communications and we're now suffering financial penalties for not being able to meet client commitments. They just dump the problem in our lap -- recreate the wikis and move on. Un-...-believable.

# August 5, 2008 6:53 AM

karl jacobs said:

Ive been with them for 2 days and im already pissed off, my site is based on SMF (quite a stable widley used php script) I have installed this probably 50 times and it is eeeeeeeeaaaaaassssssssyyyyyyy. However on my lovely new host it wont install, problem seems to be it wont connect to the database. I contacted tech support who confirmed that all the details were correct and that it should connect which I knew which is why i contacted f**king support! It still wont install although it did yesterday!!! and as i say ive built a few sites and it dont bode well when the 24hr chat support people ask you to log a ticket for a site thats using a script that isnt even installed yet!!!!!!

As I say i installed yesterday but immediatly ran into non consistant problems so i deleted the lot so i could go to them with a clean install knowing full well that any fault would be with them and now i have no site nor explaination or solution AVOID

PS i will be looking for a new host any recommends? for installing PHP scripts, i need multiple domains and sites.

# September 24, 2008 1:28 PM

karl jacobs said:

A quick update, I cancelled my account (I think) no response from accounts in the for of a mail confirming cancelation and details of refund or anything at all actually. Now I cant contact them now I dont have an account because and have no login! So no confirmation and no account but they still have my money this is worrying me as going on their track record I wouldnt be supprised if this gets messy with the credit card company later on but i will post back after the 10 days the refund is supposed to take. WEBHOST4LIFE should be avoided

# September 26, 2008 1:56 PM

Bill said:

I've been with webhost4life for several years, those guys make me impressive and life easily. I always

introduce my friends and my colleagues to host with them;

This is my blogs "2trees.cn"; if you want to host your website with them, you may refer to the

url:www.webhost4life.com/default.asp?refid=memberid

to review their website.

you can get a live chat with the guys.Hehe

I'm not sure that's the true things of i meet

Jordan L.

# October 18, 2008 7:51 PM

James said:

I'm still hosting my website with Webhost4life

In all i'm feeling

it has a good client service

the server is stable

when encounter issues and can resolve quickly

i know they've a special linux package very cheap

[url=webhost4life.com/linux199.asp?refid=memberid]SPECIAL LINUX PACKAGE[/url]

James

# October 25, 2008 12:03 AM

Luis said:

I found

Webhost4life is a great company, wahtever!

I do suggest it to all of my friends

Please refer to the page:

webhost4life.com/linux199.asp?refid=memberid

o have a check with their special package

Thanks

Luis W.

# October 30, 2008 3:44 AM

Bestlinux said:

[url=webhost4life.com/linux199.asp]SPECIAL LINUX PACKAGE[/url]—— one of the Best linux plan from WH4L

# November 1, 2008 8:46 PM

YESKY said:

yes,

Webhost4life.org

has a great client service and you would like it

Yesky

# November 27, 2008 12:58 PM

kasis said:

I've been to

[url=http://www.2trees.cn]2Trees.cn[/url] and it's a nice blog;

with my personal opinions,

[url=http://www.webhost4life.org]Webhost4life.org[/url] is a good hosting company and the price is reasonable

Quick response and fast service!

I do have a feeling to those guys

Rgs,

Kasis

# November 29, 2008 12:13 AM

Hotblog said:

hot blog? webhost4life.org?

# February 3, 2009 4:52 PM

Khalifa said:

DO NOT USE Webhost4life for any of your hosting needs !

I had a semi dedicated account with them hosting more than 25 domains and then all of a sudden all the domains are down ! They said its a routing issue and they are working on it. The domains are down now for more than 2 days ! and the only response I get is that they are working on it !!

I asked them to give me back my files and databases but they said sorry we currently have no access to the server !! What kind of hosting company is that !!

It seems that they co-locate their servers at another ISP and all what they do is just take orders.

Do not use this company by all means.

# February 6, 2009 6:51 PM

Howell said:

Hi

I've referred to

Http://www.webhost4life.org

to review and then coming here.

There're too many "black mouth" (properbly from other hosting competitors)

With my personal opinion, webhost4life is a good and reliable company worth me to introduce to my friends and my colleague.

Howell

# February 11, 2009 1:06 AM

Travis said:

Absolutely horrible! Run away as fast as you can

# February 16, 2009 5:01 PM

hell said:

SO WHAT DO YOU PROPOSE INSTEAD

# February 17, 2009 6:11 AM

derrick said:

DO NOT EVER... AND I MEAN EVER... Sign up with webhost4life.  i switched to them because they were cheap, but my site kept going down every day... it was getting to be ridiculous.  "temporary routing issue" was a frequent "cause", but it continued to happen.  Database would go down as well, so not only was i dealing with the webserver going down, the database would go down from time to time... ugh!  never again!

webhost4life = webhost4death.

# February 18, 2009 3:29 PM

Black Mouth Away said:

WebHost4Life is valuable

Too many black mouth must be from the competitors!

Like the page Http://www.webhost4life.org

# February 28, 2009 10:47 PM

Ray said:

I have done a fair amount of research on hosting providers since I run about a dozen sites for my family and numerous small businesses that I provide consulting services for.  Currently the host that I use across the board is Webhost4Life.com and I have found them to provide the best value for the money with excellent technical support.

I use and recommend their intermediate plan which is only $10 per month and it includes full email hosting for up to 100 accounts, web-based email, advanced anti-spam services, and lots of control panel features for the admin to determine how the email will be used.  You probably won't use their other services based on your question but they also include a ton of other features for free with this account including 2 GB of web hosting space, Microsoft SharePoint tool for creating dynamic professional websites, FTP, database support, etc.

For technical support they have several options which I have used frequently and they all work great.  The primary method is an online help desk where you can read KB articles, post questions in a forum, and log tickets for the technical support staff.  I have logged close to a hundred tickets over the past 2 years and their average response time is about 6 hours to first response with most tickets being fully resolved and closed within 24-48 hours.  In cases where you need immediate support you can flag your ticket as Priority 1, or you can use a special "Live Sales Support" link on their home page which opens a live chat window with their tech support reps.

I am not sure if they provide live technical support via phone since I never needed to use anything other than their help desk system.  They do count on you to understand the basic technical issues so they may not be the best choice for someone that only has an end user perspective with no knowledge of how to setup new email accounts and set the initial account options.

If you want more detail just let me know.  If you do decide to signup with them then I would appreciate you using this referral link:

www.webhost4life.com/default.asp

Once you have an account with them they give you a small credit for each referral you make and since I recommend them often this eventually adds up.  You can do the same once you are setup with their service.

Also, if spam has been an irritation for your users then I would highly recommend using the service below in conjunction with Webhost4life.com.  I am pasting in the content of an email that I just sent to my family, friends, and business contacts about it.  Hope this helps.

# March 9, 2009 9:48 PM

Kim Patrick said:

In the past month we have had 3 major outages on our websites. We are a 24/7 operation that requires customers to go to our website to look up information. We have lost untold thousands of dollars on lost sales. Webhost4life has refused to uphold their "guarantee" of 24/7 operation, and now will not communicate with us. Fortunately we keep a complete backup of our two sites and are in the process of switching hosts due to the continued issues and lack of cooperation and communication from Webhost4life.

# March 11, 2009 9:50 AM

hostingpreview said:

<a href="www.webhost4life.com

Professional Support!

Cheap Price!

Reliable Hosting Server!

Keep on the Good working!

Hayes

# March 18, 2009 8:24 AM

Mr vinylsearcher said:

Customer service is good. Hardware and uptime is terrible. My site suffers every day.

# March 24, 2009 4:06 PM

Lisa said:

With my personal experience!

Webhost4life is valuable webhosting company with lower price!

And super excellent client service!

Fast (Reliable

I like their Live Chat

But I want to remind

Their phone line should be better than present!

# March 30, 2009 11:01 AM

rbfigueira said:

Bem, como alguns sabem o PontoNetPT ( site e weblogs ) está hospedado na Webhost4Life. Nunca tivemos

# June 12, 2009 9:12 PM

rbfigueira said:

Bem, como alguns sabem o PontoNetPT ( site e weblogs ) está hospedado na Webhost4Life. Nunca tivemos

# June 13, 2009 4:02 PM

rbfigueira said:

Bem, como alguns sabem o PontoNetPT ( site e weblogs ) está hospedado na Webhost4Life. Nunca tivemos

# June 28, 2009 3:42 PM

www.Webhost4life.com said:

www.webhost4lifereview.com/web-hosting-review-web-host-for-life

check Webhost4life Review

# August 8, 2009 10:20 PM

angry customer said:

They say you get 100GB of storage, but then limit your FTP to 2GB (without telling you, you get to find out when you hit it).  If you want to FTP more you have to beg for it and wait 4 days while arguing and being treated like a criminal/spammer for wanting to use more than 2% of what they offered you and accuse you of violating terms of service that you didn't break.

My account agreement ends in a month, after 3 years with them I'm moving on.

Will miss that cheap price for .net hosting...oh no I won't since there are several out there that are cheaper now...bye bye sinking ship.

# September 9, 2009 1:31 PM

Mark said:

Got sick of it moved to hyve.com

# January 23, 2010 9:34 AM

Dingo said:

We are hosting with them for more than 18 months now. When we joined, we found them better than many others but since last 2 months, there were too many unannounced downtimes. Many times sql server was down, some times too many times in a day. Off late, they are migrating all sites to new set of servers & the support team is also different. Looks like the company management is in the process of changing hands. We run a busy website & migrating a pilot database has taken more than 6 days. There was absolutely no support response to tickets during the weekend. We work on Indian timings. There support response only happens on the US (EST) timings. When we are working here, we have to wait for their daytime to get a proper response.

We are surely checking other options. I would have recommended anyone 6 months back, but not now.

# February 19, 2010 10:11 AM

Raul said:

Webhost4life used to be a fair company but for the last few years is getting abusive with its reseller an the service is getting bad. Last week I had all my sites down because of server failure and for the last 2 month they are implementing changes moving accounts from one server to another causing a nightmare for clients like me and resellers like me. I did paid around 1200 to be an advance reseller and have a customize site but they unilaterelly close all reseller package now I have nothing. Would some one recomend what to do in this situations? am planing to open a claim on court but don't know what is the procedure.

# February 27, 2010 8:20 PM

Jayce Renner said:

I too have recently had many issues with WebHost4Life. They migrated two of my accounts and they went down. The sites are up at the moment, since I got them to reverse the DNS changes. But in the end, they are looking like they want to get on the new platform.

I am starting a Ning community to possibly centralize the WebHost4Life discussion. All viewpoints are welcome. webhost4lifecustomers.ning.com

# March 14, 2010 11:44 PM

Rick said:

I have been with Webhost4life for the past 5 years with minor issues UNTIL NOW. I have been going back and forth to the support teams on the old and new platforms for over 10 days now. My hobby small business web site is down so with the migrtaion from the old to the new platforms decided to create a new web site. Bad mistake aparently.

I created a new db 2 days ago and still cannot get access to them. So now I have the original web site (off the air) and cannot move forward with the new one. Irony.

Now I am somewhat experienced in SQL server (I am a software Architect that designs enterprise systems for the medical industry) and I know it is a simple job to enable security on an account in MS SQL server. It is also a simple job to add an IP address to a router.

Something smells wrong with this company. I cannot help but think that a takeover has happened with webhost4life which leaves existing customers in the cold.

Bad, Bad, Bad.

I would now only strongly recommend Webhost4life for brochure sites i.e. site that can be off the air for weeks at a time without impact.

Sad for a company that used to very good with service.

# March 19, 2010 5:38 PM

shyli said:

Webhost4life is horrible...keep away

Today all of a sudden my website went down and customer service is saying it would take 48 hours to fix something which they could not explain...CSR was very rude too...

This is the 4th time since past 1 yr I've been experiencing this trouble...

My sincere advice - DO NOT GO FOR WEBHOST4LIFE if you are looking for a reliable hosting provider

# April 17, 2010 12:21 AM

Tigran said:

Webhost4life is the worst hostig provider I have ever seen. They changed platform and become worse than the worst. Instead of my site I see error page and support feeds me with promises more than 10 DAYS.

# May 1, 2010 8:21 AM

Jay said:

A bit of information that doesn't seem to have been mentioned here yet.  

1) It appears that webhost4life might have changed hands.  I needed a receipt for tax purposes and tried to get a copy from them since I had lost it.  I was told that they could not get the receipt for me since it was on the old servers of the prior owners.

2) They are in the process of migrating everyone over to new systems, I have had tremendous problems with my site since March 15th, 2010 and am still not able to access my DB (hence my site is not functional).  They did not even do basic testing after my switch to the new server or they would have seen something was wrong immediately.  

Wait times for my issues have been 4-5 days (with my current issue sitting at 7 days and counting...).  

When I first signed up I thought customer service was pretty decent and have only noticed a dramatic difference the last couple of months.  After pushing a manager she said they have been swamped due to the migration and I am not the only one who has been affected in this manner.  Apparently the migration is scheduled to be done on May 31st and things should start to improve then...

While this may be true that doesn't excuse the service they have been providing during the transition period.  

I would like to switch providers but would be interested to know if anyone has any experience with a FULL TRUST provider that they would recommend (ASP .NET)?

# May 15, 2010 12:32 PM

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.

# May 21, 2010 10:22 PM

Stella said:

I have been with them for over a year maybe 17 months now and have had major trouble recently as when they moved platforms, my website went away, well my links and theme did as I used frontpage and they cant seem to fix it and now have totally given up even answering me for the past 2 to 3 weeks so I am moving but they will not not give me a refund yet the way they host my website is no good to me. I would never recommend them to anyone ever they just dont care

# May 27, 2010 1:02 PM

Liam said:

They are migrating clients between 2 platforms now and have taken my site down for over 2 weeks. They agreed not to do anything without speaking with me and I find out today via email that they have moved me again and yet again have taken me down. they are a mess. Their support team has tier 1, 2 and supervisors where tier 3 and the noc team are uncontactable. IE: when you have an issue, you can speak to donkeys (who have manners) but not the expert. Avoid!

# June 6, 2010 6:45 AM

Joe said:

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 me 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".

# June 26, 2010 12:20 AM

Anita said:

They are an absolute nightmare to work with. We had our site down after they moved platforms. They lost all our data and finally restored a website that was a backup from 3 years ago. Needless to say, they are no longer our host. Their concierge service is of no use and it was just to get you to pay even more for lousy service. They dont know what they are doing and you just end up playing a waiting game. I would never recommend. We lost so much information.

# July 27, 2010 8:07 PM

Greg said:

I can also report a sudden slide in service. Everything had been fine for a few years. Then suddenly a few months ago it started to go pear shaped. Did they get bought out or something? We were informed about being moved to a new platform. The new beta control panel was useless. Then the site goes down. Support hopeless. Then down again and and old backup restored. Time to ditch this bunch of wasters!

# August 26, 2010 8:59 AM

kelly said:

Just let you know wh4l already acquired by another company. details reported here:

www.webhostpark.com/.../126-webhost4life-review

# November 25, 2010 2:03 AM

rtyecript said:

I really liked the article, and the very cool blog

# August 24, 2011 9:49 PM

Estapeethentyy185566 said:

What happens to files when my wordpress space upgrade expires?

# November 11, 2011 3:15 AM
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