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Date Submitted :
June 16th, 2010
Length of time hosted by this company :
More than 3 years
Overall Rating :
4 out of 5
Reliability :
5 out of 5
Support :
5 out of 5
Pricing :
4 out of 5
Verdict :
I have been with Hostway since their first year. While I am not some massive money generating monster of a company Hostway has always treated just as important to them as their larger clients. Always getting back to me and resolving any issue or question I had within moments. Two years ago I upgraded to a gold service and could not be more pleased with everything from easy to find and use tech support to pricing to site uptime as well as stellar email and wonderful easy to use spam and blacklist software. And I can not praise the user interface more! Having had to use a lot of them in my time this is one of the easiest to understand and navigate. . I truly love this company and would recommend to any one who is looking for a reliable host company. It may not be the cheapest but easily worth the extra couple of dollars a month.
We have been with Hostway since they bought out Afinity. Since then getting support has been impossible. I have been trying to get them to fix my access to their control panel for over a year. Our site is working, but I can't make any changes to it other than FTP new pages. It is impossible to talk to a real person and explain the problem. Emails just come back with a statement of "we are working on the problem", but the problem is never fixed. We will be changing our host when the contract expires.
What a terrible, terrible company. Apart from the fact that their servers and support suck they are also hopelessly disorganized and incapable. Months ago I ordered some services with them. They said they couldn't charge my credit card - which is used for 20-30 online transactons each month elsewhere without a single problem - and advised me to pay via Paypal which I did. I sent them all of Paypal's transaction details - not only once but about 10 times since they kept sending reminders about "non-payment". Now, after 4 months they have suddenly charged my credit card for the same amount, saying that they never received my Paypal pament which is of course nonsense - I have all proof that it was paid. And their billing support doesn't even bother to reply anymore.
STAY AWAY - under all circumstances. Hostway means trouble on all levels!
I was a Costco ValueWeb customer. With Hostway's acquisition of ValueWeb I have experienced major problems. Hostway accidently cancelled my domains. When I called to address this Hostway problem, tech support told me to talk to customer support. When I talk to customer support, they transfer me back to tech support. Hostway is a nightmare. I have over three hours on hold and the Hostway problem is still not resolved. Beware of Hostway!
Twice they have disconnected my website without letting me know. They say they have sent an email notificatiion asking for domain registration payment, $35, but did not get payment. This is completely bogus because on two occasions they cut me off without sending notification.
Would I allow my site to go down for days just for $35?? Now they tell me it will be 24-48 hours to get it back up?? Meanwhile the benefit to them is that they use your website for advertising, whilst you are unable to earn a living from your own website.
This is shocking and unforgivable behaviour!
Like a few other reviews here, I have been with Hostway for many years and was entirely happy with their service, until just a few weeks ago. They shut down my E-commerce store without warning, accused me of using up too much of their server resource even though I had done nothing new to the site for years. Eventually it turned out that the technical problems were due to their trying to move my site to a new server, but they tried to make out it was me that abused their service. Tried and pleaded as I might I could not get them to resolve problems, all I got were emails about how they were passing the buck between their tech staff.
Nigh on 10 years as a loyal customer and they treated me like dirt for some problems that they themselves induced. Be warned!
It is truly a terrible experience. I should have read the postings here before signing the service with Hostway. At first, the email was not working for the domain. A ticket was opened, but I was told that it was an "coding" issue that has to be resolved by developers. The worst part was that they could not tell when it would be fixed. The helpdesk said, "it may take hours, days, or months...you should consider alternative such as moving email function to other hosting company." Finally the issue was resolved after 20+ days!
Now I have another serious issue. After I spent weeks to set up the site and load the product, and ready to make sales, I found out that both PayPal Standard and PayPal Pro fail to work. I was told again that it is a coding issue and developers will work on it! The ticket has been open for 14 days.
First off, we've been with Hostway for 8-9 years. The first 4-5 years were excellent. However the past 4-5 years have gone down hill! Here's the problems:
1. They are constantly up and down. I would estimate 50% downtime!
2. Webmail and email is so intermittent, you almot cannot use it.
3. We pay for an eCommerce site (way over priced) and the Shopping cart does not work! We have called and submitted Support numerous times and not fix yet. It's been down for 3-4 weeks. How can anyone do business with this company when they cannot fix something they broke? It's worked in the past for many years.
4. They are the worst company for techinal support. It takes them days and weeks to correct a problem. If you have phone support, which we do, it's worthless. Start in India and finally endup who knows where. The last call about the shopping cart the Lead Tech stated they didn't care if they lost any business.
I higly recommend anyone else, besides these people. I will be moving all 15 of my accounts as soon as possible.
I have only been a hostway customer since they merged with valueweb. Once the change was made, my Business website quit working. My website is developed in Perl.
There are various issues, but the bottom line is my website is still down. I received NO notification that this would be a potential problem. Their support is in Europe and not very good. The person on the phone just kept telling me there was nothing she could do. Even after talking to a supervisor, I got the same answer. I am in the process of finding a new hosting company and hope to be moved before the day is out.
Reached email quota, but no alert email. for 2 days, all emails sent to me went to nowhere (and not recoverable). also, not knowing whether emails i sent out actually were sent out. ridiculous!!!
Customer support gave me mixed answers as to whether they can provide me an email log, so that I can at least see who emailed me during this period. but it's been 5 days, and I ahve not heard back from them
I started using Hostway in 2002. Since that time I have designed dozens of websites and set up as-many accounts with varying services on hostway -- and recommended them to others countless times. From 2002 until about a year ago they were excellent with their feature-price performance and customer service was above average. HOWEVER, recently they merged with domainpeople.com and, coincidentally, their reliability has dropped noticeably and customer service is horrendous (slow to respond and not knowledgeable). I suspect there is a brain drain problem here (not sure, just a guess). I am moving all of my accounts to a competitor. I DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS HOSTING COMPANY.
Hostway was my main host for about two years, but I moved all my sites to another host after some very bad experiences with technical support and even worse, billing support. Poor response time, inflexibility, and difficulty resolving or understanding basic technical and billing requests were the issues.
To be fair, the uptime was never a problem and load times were well within the acceptable range. Price was not bad, but ended up being double what I am now paying for much better service.
I've managed multiple accounts with Hostway for over 6yrs and I'm and very sad to say that they have officially "jumped the shark" today.
I had a client trying to register a domain name (yeah, REAL technical stuff), and almost a month later AFTER she got the confirmation emails for her Control Panel account, I log in to set up redirects... only to find there is NO domain in there.
After two more attempts at creating new accounts, the registration still would not show up in her site control. The tech support-which I might add was awesome for years-was now absolutely impotent.
What really pisses me off is just how much work I will have to do now to migrate all my-and my clients' shit off their weak ass system. Oh wait, no, what REALLY pisses me off is how much of a jackass I looked like in front of my client who couldn't even get her domain registered, after years of me going on and on to her and all of my clients (some of which are F500 corps) about how Hostway was "Totally worth the expense"
Their service since purchasing Valueweb has taken a nose-dive.
Hostway, your are officially fuxored. I'm canceling as soon as I am able. What a goddamned shame.
I was with Hostway from 2004 until today, about 4 years later. Prior to switching to Hostway, I was with WebCom (who has since been assimilated by Verio). At the time that I was still with WebCom in 2004, they were having very severe problems with email outages, losing emails, and delays in email forwarding that would last for 6-8+ hours of delay time before emails were properly forwarded by their systems. So I switched from WebCom to Hostway in 2004 after getting tired of the major email problems that WebCom was having. The first three years with Hostway went quite smoothly. But, as with WebCom, Hostway has been too busy acquiring other companies, getting too big and unmanageable, and ignoring their existing customers.
Two days ago, I actually renewed my Hostway hosting plan and upgraded it to better one-year hosting offer. In the process of doing this, their sys admins had to cancel my previous account that I had since 2004 and move my account over to a new server and a new "ServicePlex" platform that they seem quite proud of. Well, in doing this, they totally f*ed up my domain name set-up, resulting in my DNS zone files either being screwed up, deleted, or missing. I called their Technical Support number 8 times during the past two days while my Web site and all emails were totally offline and broken, and they just replied that their sys admins will eventually get to my issue.
2+ days of having a total Web hosting and email outage is pathetic.
A one-time leader now resting on their past laurels. Hostway's SiteControl interface is virtually unchanged since about 2000. No support for Wordpress intstallation, and unadvertised additional charges for other things like SQL databases and Urchin stats. Performance used to be stellar, now barely average. Hostway is no longer competitive. We have had more than 7 sites hosted with them and will be looking elsewhere.
I was going to use Hostway but my business took a different road and in the end I never used the service at all. Despite several attempts to close the account the company would only direct me to a link to officially close the account but that link did not work. They continued to debit my credit card on a monthly basis despite being told on over 40 accassions to close the account. Their response was always the same - we cannot close the account you must do it via this "link" that would not work for me! I cancelled the credit card to stop the payments and now they are sending me letters from a debt collection agency for monthly charges for a service I have nver used and, as far as I am concerned, notified them months ago that I did not want! Very, very sad, very unhelpful, very negative experiance and I would not recommend anyone use them. Not the way to treat people!
I was with Hostway since 2001 but I left recently after their reliability and service began to deteriorate. Until last year, they were the perfect hosting company. They were a bit more expensive than others but their customer support and reliability more than made up for it. Last year I began noticing that my site would be down regularly on Sundays but without any warning. When questioned, the answer was inevitably that they were doing "maintenance" but they could not offer a better explanation. They finally told me they needed to move my site to a server with Windows 2003 but could not migrate my SharePoint data. That was pretty much the last straw. Too bad!
