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

59 Comments

• 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.
  

• 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... ?!?!?
  

• 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.
  

• 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.
  

• 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.
  

• 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?
  

• Same problem. My site is down and I found out there's is too!
  
  cpedley@cogeco.ca
  

• 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.
  

• I guess John here works for webhost4life..
  

• 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?
  

• 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?????
  
  

• i'am really impressed!!
  

• 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.
  

• 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.
  

• 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
  

• 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.
  

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

• 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
  

• 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.
  

• 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.
  

• 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.
  

• 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
  

• Avoid webhost4life.com like the plague.
  

• 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?
  

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

• 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....
  

• 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!
  
  

• 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.
  
  
  

• 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.
  

• 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.
  

• 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.
  

• 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
  

• 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.
  

• I have been on webhost4life for about a year. Quite happy with their service. For a quick overview of hosting services visit http://www.windowsunixwebsitehosting.com
  

• hot blog? webhost4life.org?
  

• 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.
  

• Absolutely horrible! Run away as fast as you can
  

• SO WHAT DO YOU PROPOSE INSTEAD
  

• 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.
  

• 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.
  

• WebHost4Life
  Professional Support!
  Cheap Price!
  Reliable Hosting Server!
  Keep on the Good working!
  Hayes
  

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

• 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!
  

• 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.
  

• Got sick of it moved to hyve.com
  

• 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.
  

• 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.
  

• 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.
  

• 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
  
  

• 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.
  

• 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)?
  

• 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.
  

• 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
  

• 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!
  

• 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".
  

• 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.
  

• 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!
  

• I really liked the article, and the very cool blog
  

• What happens to files when my wordpress space upgrade expires?