Wimdows.NET

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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 45 comment(s)
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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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# 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
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