There are 126 hosting user reviews for
IXWebHosting
Average Jury Ratings & Reviews of
IXWebHosting
3.9/5
2.5/5
2.1/5
2.1/5
Reliability
Support
Pricing
Overall
Below are some verdicts that users of our site have
given to
IXWebHosting . If you would like to submit your verdict about
IXWebHosting please use our submit page to review
IXWebHosting.
Are
you an administrator or staff member of
IXWebHosting ?
If so click here
I hope Google ranks this website in their top search results for anyone wanting to know more about IXWebhosting. I had been with that webhost for more than 4 years and changed all my sites to a different host just last week. IXWebhosting is the most poorly managed, technically incompetent and frustrating company I have ever had the misfortune to deal with.
Why have I been with them for 4 years?
Their webhosting plans were at the time and still are pretty cheap when compared to other competitors. But its true, if you throw peanuts, you'll get monkeys. You are ok till the time you have a website with only static (html pages). That's what I had for 2 years. The moment you have a dynamic site, have anything to do with databases, use pages in asp or php... God save you. I've had nothing but trouble for the remaining 2 years pulling my hair out with every trouble ticket raised.
Customer Service
Its the most slowest, incompetent buffoons I've ever interacted with. Every ticket raised takes a minimum of 14 hours to be verified. Their typical replies are "everything's ok at their end". They do not understand your query, nor can they understand any technical issues.
Spam-
I lived with spam in each of our mailboxes for all the time I've ben with IXWebhosting. Spam is like its brother. Besides having issues with our mail disappearing from our mailboxes (their backup could only restore some of it as it was infrequently taken), I had to put up with tons of spam. At the time of writing this, I believe they have made the web access to the email accounts over https, but still, my experience with them was ghastly.
Server Security-
My websites were hacked many a times. Their servers are easily vulnerable to anybody. I will rate my expertise with networks and security at advanced. To test the security I have hacked into my own hosting webserver and seen the list of domains, their entire contents by simply installing a ridiculous script. I raised this issue in a trouble ticket and the response was.. you guessed it.."everything's ok at their end"
Their famed easy to use preloaded scripts (Easy Apps collection)-
It is user friendly to install, I'll agree. But every one of them is completely outdated, buggy to customize and of course vulnerable to hacks. Their excuse- Its the entire collection of scripts that they install when they update the server software (maybe years before). The scripts in them cannot be changed or upgraded.
Final Comments-
If you have a simple website with a couple of html pages and you don't mind spam, if your wesite is hacked or defaced, its good value for cheap hosting.
Otherwise, Avoid Them Like The Plague... as someone else wrote in here.
I am not affiliated with anyone or anything from anywhere and all the experiences above are my own.
Archie H
We have been using IX for a long time. First thing that happended was that they allowed my EX-Wife access to my account after we were divorced because she has paid by her credit card at one point for one domain name. They changed the admin panel and allowed her full access to everything because she did not pay for her domain and called them! MORORNS! We have a pro business account and they allowed her access to customers account info, OMG what a night mare! Finally after getting the police involved they fixed it. Now 3 out of 7 of our accounts have been hacked... We have not done or changed anything, in fact the accounts that have been hacked are just place holders for domanins... I have asked it to be fixed from backup 4 times so far and as of yet nothing... I am just in the process of moveing everything to a new local box and say GOOD BYE loosers!
I personally recommened IX Web Hosting which I am using at present. IX doesn't pay me a dime, I'd like to share with you an honest review on IX. After using countless web hosting services, I found there was no big differnce between the top hosing providers of US. Maybe the top three got proud to overvalue themselves. What they do is just raise the fee year by year. You have to pay many extra fees for this and that. While for me, a not rich guy, I want the hosting service with fair price & nice bonus feature to add up to the total value of the price. I wrote an honest review with 6 advantages of IX over other providers based on my own experience at 10-d.com/webhosting.html
Visit my site to see it yourself.
I have 13 years with experience with many hosting providers later of it, finally i find redundance of resources, really low price, best windows hosting, so friendly support in IXWEBHOSTING.
Many times, some bad reviews come from total un - expert web developers.
Server vulnerable to hacking, infected our site, IX Web Hosting refused to acknowledge or address, arbitrarily shut us down. Luckily, we had just completed set up with an alternative server and this didn't cost us the significant downtime, money and trouble it could have. AVOID them like the plague!
In the beginning (up to a year ago) everything was fine. Now I have had so many problems that today I have changed my hosting company and left ix-webhosting and went to BlueHost.
My problems:
1. extremely slow server response (average response to a simple html page over 5 seconds). Regularly browser says: no server response. My customers are complaining. Maintaining my blog is almost impossible
2. ftp regularly does not work (complaint by server: too many clients, but I have just one ftp connection open)
3. average response time of trouble ticket about 24 hrs
4. tremendous problems in upgrading from php4 to php5 (I had to change ix-webhosting servers), without any help from them. They offered me help but that would cost me over 200$
5. their mysql server is slow
When I complain to them they tell me these problems are temporary and that they are about to improve it all.
Once again I have had a horrible experience with IX WebHosting. Here is a list of issues that I exprienced over the last year of being with them:
1. The password to the control panel keeps getting reset and I know for a fact that only a select few have access. Any changes made by those few are logged and disseminated to the rest. When I ask I am made to look like “what’s the big deal?”
2. They NEVER return calls and almost never update tickets except to close it and say that it was your fault. They refer you to the “system admin” who is a ghost as far as I am concerned then are quick to tell you that they can’t do anything else to help you.
3. Press as you might the cannot suggest when the problem can be fixed. It is like they think that your business and clients that are affected by problems don’t matter.
4. Their first level support are unskillful googlers who waste no time in presenting irrelevant rubbish explanations that clearly shows that they have missed the basics of training.
Most Recent Exerience:
Unfortunately they host my mail (haven’t gotten around to hosting my own as yet). One of my customers suddenly cannot send me any mail from their domain, at least I no longer receive it on my domain hosted with IX Webhosting.
My customer had a recent SPAM issue that was resolved however they were not blacklisted. All this time I was receiving mail fine. However a while after the issues is resolved I cannot receive any mail from them.
I try chat support who quickly tells me that I need to call in to report the problem.
ok I call and some guy is trying desparately to convince me that there is a problem with the MX records of my client. And even though I tell him that mxtoolbox gives me a clean report and also that my hosted mail is the only domain that is not receiving mail from my client along with other information he refuses listen. Eventually he gets tired and tells me that he has to get a system admin to call me back.
24 hrs later no call from any admin and I decide to log a ticket myself and describe the problem - no response.
I call back again and a young lady informs me that the issue was left untouched, whatever that means and puts me on hold after every question I answer. She then routes it to the “correct” queue and pomises me that I will receive a call.
24 hrs later no call and no update other than hers that says the call is on hold.
I update the ticket to ask what is going on?
12 hrs later no response so I call and was informed that since I updated the ticket to ask a question it was reverted to the end of the queue. Apparently I was punished for quering the status on my issue….
Another young lady can give me no indication as to an estimated resoution time or at least response time.
I ask for her supervisor who refused to give me his name but was quick to tell me that I would have to wait until the admins got around to looking at the problem.
He didn’t think it was reasonable for them to at least update the ticket and was quick to tell me that “we are just the phones” and that they couldn’t escalate beyond redirecting my problem to the admin queue. They would get to it whenever they can and I would have to wait…"there are other customers ya know?" so I have absolutely no idea how long I will be in that queue. His entire tone suggested that he had worked a tripple shift and was tired and grumpy or he simply couldn't be bothered. Meanwhile I embarasingly have to tell my customer that I am in the process of moving my mail services which after this I definitely will.
It really upsets me when companies like this get away with such horrible service.
The least you owe your customer as a service provider is a timely and honest update(s) especially when there is a problem. Lack of communications leaves people to assume the worst and suggests that the customer is not important. It does not matter where the fault lies - you are providing a service and it should be your obligation to protect the reputaion of that service by open communications to the client at all times. As an IT consultant I can personally attribute the retension of my business not to my knowledge as much as to ensuring that my customers are always informed and have open access to me. Many times it has been my saving grace during the few hiccups I have made over the years.
Ordered web hosting form them on Thurs. pm, finally setup on Fri. However, could not upload web since FP extensions were not installed; I installed them from the panel. Long story, several calls to tech support, they can not get the FT issues resolved; moved up to admin. Called over the weekend and told it would be 24 hours...I had to wait in the queue. On Monday afternoon I was told give them another 4 -5 hours. I cancelled later that night about 10 pm...issue not resolved. Tech support was useless. They did offer 2 months extra time if I stayed. After 30 days I would have los the $$; they did refund my $$. I had used them for a couple years in the past without too many issues, site did go down several times. Not recommended.
I totally agree with recent posts. I have been an IXWebHosting customer for over 3 years and they have always been great until this year. Websites are often down for days at a time with very poor technical support. I have been extremely frustrated recently and i am currently looking for another hosting provider.
Bottom line, saving a few dollars with this host is not worth the aggravation.
I have had nothing but problems lately. For a long time they were great but this last year everything has gone wrong. They move website around a lot and everytime they do they break it. They had a meltdown of the MySql server I was on and I lost 10 days. The most recent horror show is the php upgrade that virtually broke everything.
Their support is worthless. It take days before they even respond.
I'm busy looking for another provider.
I am totally and completely disgusted with IX Webhosting. It used to be a great host and I recommended it to everyone I could. But something has changed. I believe they got sold. Since then, we have had nothing but endless trouble with this host...
Last year, they proudly moved to a new Data Center. Of course this caused us problems for several months. They kept apologizing, but the problems persisted. After a very long period, things calmed down and remained that way until November...
Without prior warning, IX moved our site to a new server in November. After 60+ hours of calling, using Live Chat, and using the ticket support system, they finally worked out most problems. I felt like I had to beg to get IX to help resolve the problems that they created. I lost an entire weekend fighting them. The IX response times average between 12-24 hours...
Then again this January, IX updated all of our cgi-bin files in our domain and all of our sub-domains recreating the problems that were caused in November's unnecessary server move. Again, it took over 60+ hours to get our site up and running. I had to find workarounds to get our site up and running, and amazingly, IX tried to take credit for getting our site up and running again even though they had nothing to do with it...
Even though our site is up and running now, we still have many problems. After 176 hours of fighting IX for help, they have yet to correct the Cron job errors that still plague our site...
The last two days, the server has crashed in the evening requiring another call to IX to get the server restarted/reset and our site back online. This was the same pattern that plagued us after the Data Center move last year. And early every morning, the page load response times drag down to a crawl. This seems to start between midnight and 4 AM every single night. The other day, the slowness continued well into the following day. We get an apology from IX each time this happens, but they don't seem to be doing anything to permanently correct it...
IX has tried very hard to blame these problems on our code, which worked fine before the server move in November and again up until January. IX does not want to take responsibility for their actions and it is frustrating and disgusting dealing with them. I cannot in good conscience recommend IX Webhosting to anyone until they improve the skills of their own Technical Support staff. It wouldn't hurt if they hired a few more knowledgeable people to improve their response times too. Waiting 12-24 hours for each new response to a ticket is totally unacceptable. With IX's lack of effort, a resolution to a problem can drag on for days and weeks. IX does the bare minimum to assist its clients and they do it as slow as they possibly can...
Dealing with IX technical support gets real old real fast. I wouldn't wish this on anyone...
I have tried many hosting companies and ixwebhosting is amongst the worst. Their server will go down frequently. We received so many complaints from our own customers that the website is not working. We get this just about everyday. And two days ago ixwebhosting.com servers were down for 4 hours. Yesterday it was down 3 hours. Today it is down now for over 2 hours and we are still waiting for the servers to work. We are hosted on NS13, NS14. This has got to be the most frustrating experience in our 9 years in ecommerce. We made the fatal error trusting to host our site with ixwebhosting.com. The first two months were okay but then after it went downhill. I think maybe they work really hard during the trial period so you cannot refund the month. I'm stuck now with a long period of webhosting plan. They won't refund either and they will not provide you a good working server.
I have tried many hosting companies and ixwebhosting is amongst the worst. Their server will go down frequently. We received so many complaints from our own customers that the website is not working. We get this just about everyday. And two days ago ixwebhosting.com servers were down for 4 hours. Yesterday it was down 3 hours. Today it is down now for over 2 hours and we are still waiting for the servers to work. We are hosted on NS13, NS14. This has got to be the most frustrating experience in our 9 years in ecommerce. We made the fatal error trusting to host our site with ixwebhosting.com. The first two months were okay but then after it went downhill. I think maybe they work really hard during the trial period so you cannot refund the month. I'm stuck now with a long period of webhosting plan. They won't refund either and they will not provide you a good working server.
IX has been hosting my original domain for several years with no major problems. At the moment I have 3 domains on their servers running PHP/MySQL blogs and they run just fine, thank you. On the rare occasion that I've had to contact support, I've had good results and fairly rapid responses to my issues. Yes, I too believe the servers and staff are somewhere in Russia - my filename timestamps bear this out - but that doesn't bother me - the more capitalism over there the better, I say.
Is this a low-end, do-it yourself service? Duh. Coupla bucks a month? Come on folks. What did you expect at the lowest end of the pricing scale? I back everything up at my end, hoping for the best but planning for the worst. But so far I really can't complain. Would I run sites on IX if they were mission-critical to someone? No, I'd find another more expensive hosting service with a real Quality of Service contract. But that's why we have choices, isn't it?
I went to ixwebhosting because I was looking for a great mail server. Anyone can provide good web hosting sites for a basic price, but can you get large (100 GB) mailboxes, and large (10GB) attachments? They claim, yes, they can. Unfortunately, their mail servers are still in the dark ages for features, as they cannot support port 587 which has been a standard for years now. Needless to say, with all the ISP's blocking port 25 for spam control, I had no way to take advantage of their services.
Reliability: only marginal. Their sites go down a little too often for me. But overall are ok.
Ease of use: I had a lot of problem getting my domain transferred and then setup, and using DNS, etc. I had to get a lot of help from Tech Support. I was told this was a special case.
There is still one domain i cannot transfer to them. They say it cannot be done. Oh well. I left it at the old location ,and use Domain fwd, and email fwd from the other host.
So overall, very marginal features and service. When my contract is up, i will move on.
Alright, my domain (wheelsbd.com) was hosted with ixwebhosting for the last 1 year. Before that I had 4 more domains hosted with Ixwebhosting. I will write up a review of me being a customer with them for the last 2 years and 2 months. Unlike most people, I was not entirely unhappy with their service, however the jotdown with points in different categories in this review will help you from deciding wither you want to go with them or not.
My Hosting Plan: Unlimited Pro
* Unlimited Domains
* Unlimited Transfer
* Unlimited Web Space
* 2 Free Domain Regs
* 8 Dedicated IPs
* Ecommerce Ready!
Why I joined them?
Because, I saw some reviews back in 2006 and I found out nothing but good reviews and in fact that year, they won the Webhosting Company of the Year Award from a very reliable hosting review company. I was excited to see the words "Unlimited", but little did I know what I was getting into.
Support:
Their chat support is indeed a handy thing but its full of people who dont know what they are doing. Everytime you open up a ticket in the control panel, always give the chat support client, the ticket ID and tell them to fix it right away. They will reply back within 1 day which is just lame but if you dont bother chatting with them, then expect a reply in 3-5 days time.
Server:
Their Unlimited Pro was based on the same servers shared with everyone else in their clients list. It was good enough for my forum when I had around 30-40 users online at once, but when it became 100 users online a day, you would get MYSQL errors and server downtime every now and then.
Loading Speed:
Loading was considerably very slow, I never found it even comparable to 1and1.
Money Back Guarantee:
Believe it or not, I got my money back when I asked for it after renewing my contract for another 2 years. I could not decide whether to go with them or not, but I just signed up for the heck of it. Later, I realized I needed to move right away, I did not care about the refund but they were nice enough to keep the promise for the Anytime Money Back guarantee. I did not get all the money back because they would charge you for the domains you have with them.
Worst Experience with them:
Novemeber 20, 2008 was my renewal date with them. I signed up in 2006 November for a 2 year agreement. In november, 19th, a guy with a funny Ukrainaian name "Tiberiu" from system administration sent me an e-mail saying I am violating their terms of service by having a big disk space. remember they said unlimited disk space and I stored only 5 gigs worth of data. But still, they threatened me the day before my renewal date. I was shocked and mad, they threatened to suspend my account if I dont take any action within 5 business days. I deleted most of the contents and kept nothing important, making all recommended backups. I signed up with them for another two years as I was a fool lost and not knowing what to do. If I wanted to move to another host, I would have my site on downtime. I could not take anymore downtime, as a result, I earned some more money and decided to move to a VPS.
Why I moved to VPS?
As they say, you get what your pay for and I got it. I understood my lesson. My site is more valuable than the 310 dollars they charge me for a 2 year agreement. My website is right now very successful with an alexa rank of 60,000+. With all this traffic and so much addictive members in my website, I had to move to a reliable place where you would pay more and get more as well.
Notes to other webmasters:
You can definitely sign up with IXwebhosting if you are new in the web development zone. But, always research and read reviews, understand the promises they make and never take anything for granted. And most of all, make regular backups (database and file contents). I know my vps guys monitor my server and keep regular backups, but I schedule my sites backup every week or less and believe me its a relief! I made my sites myself, edited all the commercial scripts (vbulletin, photopost, joomla etc.). I did it because, I have a passion. Always explore all the possibilities and go with a reliable hosting company. Don't depend on any of them and pay more for a better host plan if you love your site as much as I do.
The only reason i still have an account with IX Web Hosting is because they gave me a 2 year extension of my hosting contract after they lost their entire MYSQL array, for which they had ZERO backups on record. Ever. I had my own periodic database backups, but the ecommerce store on their servers was down for at least 15 hours before i regained functionality to restore my own backup. It was horrible, to say the least.
They have a really nice sales page layout, but ultimately it comes down to service and they completely blew it. Aside from this catastrophe, there were ALWAYS problems with their hosting - routinely prolonged outages, incredibly overcrowded servers, technical support that was very clearly outsourced to another country (I'm pretty sure they have a call center in Russia), email ALWAYS disappeared or bounced... I'm getting mad again thinking about it..
So that was that - i packed my bags and went to another host which i am very happy with. Now, IX just has control of one lingering domain name, but the nameservers are directed to my new host. Never, ever, EVER will i look in their direction again.
I am totally and completely disgusted with IX Webhosting. It used to be a great host and I recommended it to everyone I could. But something has changed. I believe they got sold. Since then, we have had nothing but endless trouble with this host...
Last year, they proudly moved to a new Data Center. Of course this caused us problems for several months. They kept apologizing, but the problems persisted. After a very long period, things calmed down and remained that way until November...
Without prior warning, IX moved our site to a new server in November. After 60+ hours of calling, using Live Chat, and using the ticket support system, they finally worked out most problems. I felt like I had to beg to get IX to help resolve the problems that they created. I lost an entire weekend fighting them. The IX response times average between 12-24 hours...
Then again this January, IX updated all of our cgi-bin files in our domain and all of our sub-domains recreating the problems that were caused in November. Again, it took over 60+ hours to get our site up and running. I had to find workarounds to get our site up and running, and amazingly, IX tried to take credit for getting our site up and running again even though they had nothing to do with it...
Even though our site is up and running now, we still have many problems. After 176 hours of fighting IX for help, they have yet to correct the Cron job errors that still plague our site...
IX has tried very hard to blame these problems on our code, which worked fine before the server move in November and again up until January. IX does not want to take responsibility for their actions and it is frustrating and disgusting dealing with them. I cannot in good conscience recommend IX Webhosting to anyone until they improve the skills of their own Technical Support staff. It wouldn't hurt if they hired a few more knowledgeable people to improve their response times too. Waiting 12-24 hours for each new response to a ticket is totally unacceptable. With IX's lack of effort, a resolution to a problem can drag on for days and weeks. IX does the bare minimum to assist its clients and they do it as slow as they possibly can...
I had been with them for four years and thing have gotten worse or my understanding had gotten better. If there is an issue no matter what it is it is your fault/problem.
There is nothing about this service that is good. Tech support is, waiting in a queue forever and then talking with someone somewhere that know less than you. You have to do the troubleshooting to help them help you. Only to find out it's your fault no matter what the problem was.
Billing/Customer service is a joke. They make up some policy that explains away why you will not get what you are entitled to. When you ask for a written copy of the policy it does not exist. You end up being the insane one trying over and over again to get them to do what is in you contract and actually think something will change.
For the first 2-3 years my experience on ixwebhosting had been good. But I'm afraid they've become too big for their britches. Their technical support is extremely subpar and the security on their servers is absolutely bar-none non-existent. Lately, my website is repeatedly and consistently hacked. I have spent 4-5 hours on the phone and chat with technical support with the same result "your problem not ours". Despite the fact that I have been able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the attack did not originate from my files.
In the end the decision to use a webhosting company is your own, but I would seriously re-consider using ixwebhosting. There are plenty of people on ixwebhosting who have not been hacked yet. I was one of them until 3 months ago and since then I have been hacked 6 times. I've gone so far as to remove everything except the most basic html (no non-ixwebhosting software) and have had set and reset my permissions so that non of my files are prone to attack. The latest attack occurred from a different user on the same server getting hacked allowing the attacker access to my others files and others.
It was a nightmare dealing with these horrendous people at IX Webhosting.
- For the seven months my site was hosted there, there were a lot of slow downs, database cut-offs and data lost, and they never provide any compensation or explanation of why that happened
- IX reserves the right to cut off your website at anytime whenever they feel like to. At first they would not tell you they are going to cut you off, they just asked you to accept their TOS terms of service. Once you did that they cut you off immediately.
- Worst of all, they do not allow user to download their own website or database once they suspended your account. If you are not prepared you will be totally screwed. I have never seen hosting company not providing user their database when they move out of the host.
- Technical support is horrendous, either the person there just try to play dumb or are complete idiots. They do not listen to your words, they just repeat themselves over and over again as if they are merely answering machines.
- Make sure you read every single word in their terms of service, there are a lot of unfair terms to the user, make sure you are alright with every single term in there before you sign up. These guys sure know how to make a fool of you by playing with the terms.
I have been with IXWebhosting for about 3 years.
I would like to say that I am happy with the company.
I gave a 4 out of 5 stars for these reasons:
1. Sometimes customer service is unreliable. If I call at night, or try their online chat I'm always transferred out of the country. It's normally a 10 - 15 minuet wait and it's a hit or miss with their knowledge. I have had quiet a few international reps not know a fix, or tell me one thing and come to find out it wasn't true. ( Like they couldn't tell me what the package I signed up for 3 years ago included and if it were better compared to what they offer now. They bluntly told me, " No, sorry, I can't look that information up. " So I called the domestic number the rep bent over backwards to help me. He was awesome, and he compared both and told me what I had was better. sheesh, why can't they all do that. CALL THE DOMESTIC NUMBER.
2. I hate their online chat, It takes them forever to respond and fix something and it's always over seas.
3. Their email server has a lot of down time, even during the day. Clients call me all upset and I have to tell them to HOLD ON that it will come back up. I feel I have to cover for them on this subject.
4. When they say unlimited space, it's not unlimited. They have a counter bar in the Webshell that shows how much 'space' you are using. I was told it was to monitor users so they aren't uploading their entire computer and using the server as a storage unit. That they HAD to do it because it was a SHARED server and everyone uses it. I have a lot of photographer clients that post weddings in their galleries so I use a ton of space. They told me when the counter got into the 90's to call them and they would try to switch me to a server that has more space. If I wanted a dedicated server, I would have to pay for it and it wasn't cheap, :(
5.They use to go offline every night around 1 a.m. EST and not come back up until around 3a.m. - 4 a.m. I'm a mom, so late hours is when I do most of my work. I will say that since they have moved from Kentucky to their new location (I think Ohio) that this problem has almost vanished.
These are my gripes, so they do not get 5 stars.
Pros:
1. Domestic Customer Service is great. I love it. I would much rather call them, I get better responses and MOST of the time they're very helpful. I would call back for another guy if I don't get the help needed, LOL. I will never to a trouble ticket as it takes a decade for them to fix a problem.
2. I have the unlimited domain name plan. Actually, unlimited everything practically for about 59.00 a quarter.
3. 5 free domain registrations. Oh yeah, and my clients pay me regardless.
4. Easy interface, OSCommerce, Wordpress installed, free scripts.
Site Builder
5. Gets better every year.
In my case, the only thing that really bugs me the most is the email accounts going offline. It drives me crazy. Hopefully with their new facility, they can work on perfection. There has been a big improvement in downtime in the past 3 years. I think they are growing into a better company, they just needed some time.
STAY AWAY... STAY AWAY.... they mean trouble for your business....Extremely slow response with countless interruptions on a daily basis. I really curse the day I signed with them!!! I call them on a daily basis to bring the site up and running and I receive the same answer all the time....\"There was a temporary issue and it has been completely resolved by now. I am very sorry for this recent inconvenience, please accept my sincere apologies.
Our admin team is doing its best to provide you with the service that you deserve and keep the server\'s performance stable.\"
BUT this NEVER HAPPENS.
Never Ever Purchase from IX Web Hosting. They will screw you up. In the Start they were ok and offered a good customer service. I recommended to atleast 30 ppl and i have my own 15 accounts in ix of different customers. Their support and system admins are really stupid, they dont know what is the difference between an asp or php code. In an asp file they told me saw php code and therefore stopped my website for 5 days and after 5 days they applogised that it was mistake from their side. A totally un reliable company. If you are hosting a 5 page website or 15 page html website it is ok but never ever go for asp or php website. They will screw it up ||
Ever since this year IXwebhosting has become a bad host. Recently we\'ve got a couple of our sites that got hacked and it seems to be another case of server wide hacking. They have been good for the past couple of years but the situations has become really bad.
This hosting company, although claiming to have 150k customers are a joke, unreliable servers, unreliable staff. If you are hosting anything other than a static page dont choose these guys. On several occasions I have had my site changed, dealt with CORRUPT disks on their system and never have them admit to their errors. Bunch of arrogant wannabes.
We were with IX Web Hosting for 70 days. In those 70 days we probably contacted their support department 100+ times. We had non stop problems from day one. They do answer the phones but were rarely able to resolve the problems. Forget their trouble ticket system, they took an average of 3 days for a Russian to respond that they are looking into the problem. It got so bad that we attempted to contact the Owner Fathi on 3 different occasions, and on all three occasions he turned it over to a technical support mgr. that did nothing to help us. On the last instance we were having continuous problems with their MySQL server timing out. The technical support mgr called me and said there was a problem with their MySQL server and they were going to move us to a new MySQL server. After waiting 2 weeks we found out that never happened. With the MySQL problems still present they then came back and said our problem was our scheduler scripts (which now work fine on our new host) and there was nothing they could do. This was completely untrue and our scripts are now working perfectly on our new host. The last 3 weeks all of our websites were dirt slow to pull up, up and down several times, and their control panel was so slow it was almost unusable. Horrible Web Host and experience. Stay away from this company!!!
Well, coming from a newbie into the website business, I got HAD! I didn't think of reading reviews on host companies before signing up for IXWEBHOSTING. Boy! Did I learn!
We made it about 7 months, hoping things would get better (after their big Move...), but it didn't. I, too, got lied to over and over when my site kept disappearing over and over. I'd be working on it, and like magic >POOF< it was gone... for Hours! Sometimes even Days! When it returned, it would be an older version that set me back about a month of updated info.
Their answer to everything, "It's working fine here. It must be YOUR side." ahem.... Finally after many months of dismay thinking we were just new and dumb, we got it out of them that we were on a bad server and it finally crashed...for 5 days! When it came back, it was supposed to be better and new! NOT! We went down just as much. But whenever we contacted them, it was the same thing... "Must be on your side."
Enough! We may be new, but we're not that naive! My best advice is always do your homework and read reviews. This was an awful experience for us. We didn't even get a refund on any of the time that we were down or unused service. (even though their terms of use allowed us a refund). Interesting, huh?
Seems as though I am in the same boat with many others. I was very satisfied with the service until the end of 2007. Then things started to go down hill. I elected to move to a new server in February 2008 because I wanted to have access to PHP 5. This was a big mistake. I've been experiencing much unexplained downtime and they just tell me that I have to expect the unexpected since I am on a shared server. Their support seems to be completely incompetent and their admins evidently do not know how to run a large scale hosting infrastructure. I almost changed hosts at renewal time but I figured that I would never know if someone else would really be any better. I'm familiar with their system and I didn't have time to research a new host and move things over.
I'm very disappointed with ixhosting and I would not recommend them to anyone. If I were running a for-profit business on the web, I would definitely move ASAP.
Placed a ticket (recommended by support) for non-functional cgi to enable the backend of the store to work. Counting 6 days and tech support has yet to respond to this issue. Do they have systems admin only available Mon. - Fri from 830 am to 5:00 pm? I called the tech support on the phone which took 15 minutes on hold. This isn't a way to run a webhost company and expect satisfied customers. I cannot work on the store front end without the backend being accessible.
24 hours from now, I will be seeing about moving my website if a response is not received.
IXwebhosting was good for the first 3 years. For the past year they have been a webhost from hell. I call tech support and after an hour on hold, they tell me its my computer that cannot pull up my site. Funny, I can visit any site on the internet but yet "my computer" fails to pull up my site hosted by IXwebosting. The bad news... their service is getting worse! Don't be drawn in by the price, if nobody can see your site whats the use. One thing you can count on is its never a problem with their servers... it will always be your computer thats at fault. Don't waste your time with IXwebhosting!
As with the other IX Hosting reviews, they started out great, no problems, servers hardly ever down and good reliable tech support.
I'd say since around March 2008 or so their servers and service have really sucked! No other way to put it. They moved from Kentucky to Columbus, OH with a promise of better servers and service. That didn't help at all.
Linux Servers are down OFTEN! E-mail to tech support used to get answered in a fews hours, now it over 24 hours or more. If you call tech support you usually end up 15 - 25th in line on hold.
Take your business elswhere! They have had plenty of time to get their act together and have not improved at all!
i have two accounts with ixwebhosting, one in new data center (ip: 98.130.*.*), the other in old data center (76.163.*.*, now moved to the new data center), and i decide to leave ixwebhosting, reasons:
1. it refuses to restore or backup db, saying "we do not make such procedures on a regular basis", and keep asking me to use DTS. my db is 5GB, i can not make it through DTS. i ask several times and explain my db size is big, it still refuse to do it.
2. it refuses to backup files. one of my site has over 20,000 files, i encounter CGI timeout when i try to zip and download them. i go to ixwebhosting and explain the situation, it still refuse to do it. the reason is "we provide backups services only in special situations"
3. no backups. a live person told me that they backup my db twice a week. one of my site was cracked, and i ask them to provide a bakup, it told me they don't have any backup for my db at all.
4. Unauthorized site changes. we found the db of one of our site roll back to last month backup after the server down, and some new orders lost. i asked the livechat person and also placed a ticket for it, the ixwebhosting ducked my question and did not tell me the truth.
5. slow speed. we access our web sites in the states, europe and china, found it is very slow for visitors in europe and china (ping response: time=340ms~600ms)
now we will place a ticket asking for bakup the site. as the live person said "we provide backups services only in special situations, such as moving sites", the ixwebhosting has no reason to refuse me this time.
I've been using this hosting for more than a year and at the beginning I thought I found the perfect hosting. But as everyone said this was about 6 month ago. Now I totally changed my mind. I needed to wait more than three weeks to solve a problem in my database that caused my website to become offline. If I had access to the server I would have done it in 10min at most. So my advice to anyone looking for a review on this hosting, don't come near it
Many others said you get what you pay for, in this case is even less.
Service is intermittent, site goes down every once in a while. Also runs pretty slow, but, hey, what do you want for $13/month UNLIMITED sites? Its an obvious trap. Be cheap, just NOT THIS CHEAP.
Customer service just makes you waist your time explaining a problem, and never ever solve it, not even when they say they will, THE WORST.
I tried to set up a newsletter system using phplist, first they told me I had a 200 messages/hour, then they supposedly upgraded it to 300/hour, my email got suspended for a whole day after sending 150 messages. They advertise they can whitelist an email address, so you can send more email in special situations(newsletters). But in the end and after waiting for your ticket to get answered, you'll get a negative response, some nonsense like this "We can't whitelist your address because your intended 100 messages an hour rate is too high, it will overload our servers". Seriously, any decent server has a limit of 300-500 messages /hour, on their cheapest shared plans, and you don't need to take this absurd excuses.
Also, their email system has some retarded "pop-before-smtp" security feature, which makes smtp only available for MS Outlook use.
If I could set font size to XXL I would, just to make sure you read:
STAY AWAY FROM THEM!
As with what others have said, this web host has gone downhill. I actually hold two separate accounts with this host and they are set up on two separate servers. One of them is down just about every day, the other actually stays up mostly. Whenever I contact the support desk about the poorly performing server, I get the standard "We apologise for the inconvenience, our technical team are resolving the issue and it will be fixed shortly" (I'm sure this is a copy and paste from a file of standard answers they use). I got so furious finally that I insisted on my databases being moved to a more reliable server. They obliged and I haven't had any more problems since. And again as with what other's have experienced, it now takes forever for someone to respond at the help desk - it used to be almost instantaneous.
If you are with them, put your foot down and ask for a better server (and service). If you're not, you'd probably be better off looking elsewhere. There's something that just doesn't quite sit right with this company.
When we first started using this service we were ecstatic. Our company develops websites and we started using IX heavily. Their customer support was amazing, and they bent over backwards to help us in any way possible
We especially liked that we could add dedicated IPs. We got an account just for "Staging" and testing. We can create up to 16 IPs (for free) for each one of our accounts so we could use the service to show work to clients and to do testing. Excellent.
HOWEVER, in the last 6-12 months the service has gone steadily downhill. The server response and uptime has gone down the toilet on all our accounts. Customer support has gotten much less helpful (chatting with technical support now is painfully slow and invariably ends with us being told that we should just open a ticket - I don't know why they even have tech support). We monitor their uptime using IPCheck so we can see what's been happening to the servers over the last while and we can say, certainly, that their service has steadily gotten worse and worse.
We are now looking for other hosting options and have begun move our customer sites off of IX. I used to recommend IX to everyone.... not any more!
The first 3 years on IX webhosting were very good although I have had more problems recently. The MYSQL databases only went down once for about 8 hours in that time. If you have a highly visited complicated site make sure you configure the 404 error pages because ixwebhosting have teamed up with the spammers at searchportal.information.com and if you don't use your own 404 pages they show a page which looks like a legitimate page which has sponsored links on it. At first I though it was dns poisoning. I never even thought that my own web provider would be doing it, when I asked them they said it was true and it is actually written in the contract. If my site was't so complex I would have gone to another hosting service by now.
Up until about 3 months ago, my review would have been much different. I have hosted multiple sites there for over 4 years. However, recently all hell has broken loose and they are unwilling or unable to correct some issue. It all started when they were moving data centers. In which my sites and email were down for 2 whole days. After that, I could not connect via FTP to update my sites, when I did I either got kicked off or connected at incredibly low speeds, bps not even Kbps. Tried to contact tech support via live chat and was told there was no issue. They told me to try another ftp client software. I did try another client software and still couldn't connect. Contacted support and the same thing, there's not a problem. Finally after 18 tries FTP client software was able to connect, only to kick me out within 3 minutes.
Email!!!!! Don't be in a hurry to get emails. For the last 3 months it can take over 4 hours to receive an email.
Now I have another issue with the DNS servers. Called this time and got to speak with a gentleman who had no clue and had no ability to help me. All he could do was to enter a support ticket. This issue makes it impossible for an order to be entered, therefore shutting me down until somebody get around to looking at it. Not acceptable.
This is the kicker. They recently added a feature to leave comments of support help after you call. Recording states "wait 90 seconds after your call to answer a few question on the support you received." So I waited about 3 minutes when I got "An error has occurred, Goodbye" and the phone went dead.
Just like the rest of the company, IT ISN'T WORKING!!!!!! Stay away.
Difficult to rate this host -- their customer support is friendly, prompt, reliable ... their service is up all the time as far as I'm concerned ... but their marketing info does not agree with their "fair use policy" -- even though I signed up for the "expert plan" which at the time allowed 300gb of online storage, in fact they are capping me at 50gb because I'm using more space than the "average" user.
Some of their marketing material says "unlimited" web space, some says "1500gb" -- depending on version and date, but 50gb is a far cry from this.
I'm not a huge bandwidth user because I'm only using the website to store and display family pictures (yes, lots of them) and was only expecting to upload a little over 100gb -- so 300 gb seemed like lots of headroom ! I'm now at 60gb and was working with live chat support to fix the space problem that I was running into and now I find that 300gb does not equal 300gb -- it equals 50gb -- or whatever, in their sole discretion (from their fair use policy) they want to cap me at based on the average users use.
So is the price good ? not anywhere near as good if 50gb is the cap. Is their service good -- they said that they'll help me find another provider !! Great. Not.
I've finally moved my websites off IX and wonder why I suffered for so long. Their service in the past year has been so bad.
Having just re-hosted my sites, my spam volume is 1% of what it was. Now maybe I will stop getting blacklisted and spoofed, too. Every time I would complain they would say that is the way it is, spam assasin tags it. Well, it doesn't. I was getting 500 spam emails in Russian a day plus 200+ obscene ones and bingo it just stopped overnight when I rehosted.
They suggest you organize your email to go out smtp via comcast but if there are problems with that, i.e. blacklist by comcast, then they would tell me to call comcast, I'd call comcast and they would say to call the hosting company; they don't support any email going out over their network that isn't @comcast.net. It is a fun little tech support joke. Passing off the customer and making her suffer horrible email problems with no resolution. The phone support people are obviously in a tough situation and have become cynical and snotty.
They used to give me a credit when I would find the servers down, but lately they would say that I would have to document how long the servers were down to get the credit. They don't know? Of course they do, they just want to put the burden of proof on me so they don't have to pay.
After my latest round of problems with IX I've decided to post my experiences. Well it looks like most people have/had the same issues and feelings about IX web hosting. There are so many issues that others have touched on regarding support. Live chat is a joke - Russian operators who tell you to submit a ticket. Submitting tickets is even funnier. I currently have one open that's been open for 2 weeks now, and they don't even respond for 2-3 days. Calling in is an experience that makes you want to strangle someone. I think they have 2-3 people answering all calls because you always get thrown into a queue and hear "you are currently number 34 in line". I've found that I usually wait at least an hour for phone support.
Here are the four biggest issues I've had over the last few years:
1. Restoring to server backups without telling me - there have been several occasions where new code on our server was rolled back to an older version. Normally we find this out because a customer will ask why their issue wasn't fixed when it was in fact fixed. They seem to roll everything back every couple of weeks and don't let you know, so be sure to keep current backups locally and be prepared to upload them again whenever IX does a rollback without telling you.
2. High amounts of spam through their servers - there have been email accounts set up, and literally within minutes there will be spam messages. They say spamassassin is enabled on all accounts but if it is, it is not configured the way it should be. I've never seen as much spam as what comes through email accounts on IX web servers.
3. Unauthorized site changes - IX web hosting told us last year that our database was being moved to a new server. Most of our sites are db driven and pull from a central database, so this meant we would have to go through each site and make appropriate changes. We asked them not to move our database until we were finished making the changes on our end and they said "don't worry about it, we have a script that will handle it". We again told them not to do anything until we were done on our end, and 24 hours later, BAM, all our sites were down. We had a LOT of angry customers thanks to IX on that one.
4. Trouble tickets going unanswered forever - our most recent ticket still hasn't been attended to. We're forced to move our db to another hosting company and IX is not cooperating with us. We requested a backup because their settings cause it to time out when exporting through php MyAdmin so we were at their mercy. It's been two weeks now and the backup still has not been created.
In summary, if you're considering IX webhosting for anything other than a personal brochure type website, I strongly advise against using IX. If you're reading these IX web hosting reviews for sound advice, stay away from them! I've never experienced anything as bad as what they're putting me through right now.
Their control panel may be the slowest in the industry. It takes anywhere between to 5 to 15 minutes to create a domain or email account. I just now clicked on a button to create an email accounts, then searched web to write a review and I am finishing it now. As I am typing this review. It still did not complete!
Ugh...where to start. I have to say I was very pleased with this web host a year ago. They offer a great deal of services for a low price, and when it is working well, there are, of course, no complaints. Recently, my sites have been down more often than not. I am on the Windows hosting plan and my ASP pages will not function.
Of course, if you submit a trouble ticket and wait - in a day or so they'll reset the server and blame you for the problem. I have told them over and over that my site was running fine for a year (all DBs closed and all asp written correctly) yet they continue to tell me that this is my problem. One of my sites isn't even running a DB - I just have ASP set up for future programming. The reality is the servers are shared and they don't seem to be able to control them very well.
The best solution has been to submit a trouble ticket and call tech support immediately. I've waited for over 2 hours to talk to a human but they are usually able to get the problem solved (temporarily). If you experience a problem, this is what you have to do to get it fixed. If you try the CHAT feature you wind up talking to someone in Eastern Europe with very poor English skills that cannot help. If you submit a trouble ticket alone, without calling, they tell you to try chat next time. Ofter the problem will be remedied before the tech people get to the trouble ticket and you'll get a mesaage like "Your site is running fine for us - it MUST BE YOU!"
Ugh...so frustrating. I have researched tons of services and I'm not sure what to do. I definitely would not recommend IX Web Hosting at this time, at least if you are planning to use a Windows Hosting Service. Maybe if they are able to clean up their act...who knows.
I decided to go with IX Web Hosting since they had fairly good prices and seemed reliable according to some reviews and their offerings.
Everything worked fine, until I decided to start using the service a bit more. The moment I set up my blog, I noticed I was having technical issues every night.
The database usually failed, rendering the site unusable until I got in touch with tech support.
This continues to happen.
Great host if you have something that's not critical there (or something that doesn't need to be up 100% of the time). Otherwise avoid it.
The forum on my site also got hacked, even though the software I was using came with the web host, no modifications or additions from myself.
We just joined the affiliate program for ix webhosting. I transfered our first client today 9/21/07. They immediately saw a huge increase in SPAM email. I tested some of the webmail accounts over the weekend and one account had received more than 200 SPAM emails over the weekend.
3 different people from Technical Support said that I need to download configure my Outlook to filter an emails that contained the header X-Spam-Status. Out of all the SPAM emails our clients has received as of 9/24, 0 have contained the header X-Spam-Status.
Finally after chatting with 4 technical help people, they asked me to open a ticket.
We will see how long it takes for this ticket to get picked up. I will not sign up another client with ixwebhosting.
Nice people, but there are so very many outaes. It is soooooooo frustrating to not be able to send email, especially when it is urgent.
the fact that you have to divide large recipient lists into 2 or 3 is also very frustrating.
Now I know why they push the one year prepay. No way to get your money back!! I really hope for them they get their act together and work on reliability. At this rate, word will get out and the company will surely die.
They offer good speed and good support if you call. Support tickets are I'd say slightly above average but still slow. It's nice that database servers are seperate from you main server. But that's only good if you backup your data daily. They have poor procedures when it comes to backups. Even just talking to this girl on the phone (who was really cool). She didn't at all seem surprised by what I was experiencing and pissed that they were overwriting the backups with the previous ones. That's ok in some cases but if you happen to have a problem within 24 hours of them doing another backup. And it takes them 25 hours to respond. the backup is all ready overwritten and useless. Also HDD failed more than once causing major slowdown. Site outages were very common. Very common. I would not run anything important on their servers. too risky
This company's security is a joke. I recently hired Control Scan to monitor and check for security issues after I was hacked. They originally found 35 vulnerabilities so I have been searching for a new host.
I asked Ixwebhosting if they are PCI compliant and they did not know if they were or not. This is a requirement coming very soon for companies accepting credit cards.
I will not list the security gaps for obvious reasons, so I suggest you hire a security scanner company for your site. Check out the companies to make sure they are endorsed by Master Card.
Before i could find a new host i was hacked again. Now control scan finds 41 vulnerabilities of which 6 are critical. The big claim of theirs is they are not responsible for what they call 3rd party software. They choose what software they use but are not responsible for it. What a joke that is. Things are always somebody else's fault.
The trouble is I knew I was going to be hacked and had told them that on numerous occasions for a couple of weeks before it happened.
The trouble ticket is a joke as I have had to wait over 24 hours for answers to problems including slow load times, email down, server down and others. I have been moved to different servers and things usually run good for a couple of months and then degenerate down hill again.
The telephone support is actually very good from all of the experiences I have had and there have been too many phone calls lately, usually 1 every other day for about the last 3 weeks.
Why have i not moved earlier if I knew things where this bad. I have talked to over 100 companies and they do not seem to be very knowledgeable of their own product. I am not that savy to all the ins and outs of the hosting game so when I know what problems occur and the hosting companies do not know the answers I dismiss them as prospects.
In summary here it is in a nut shell. Stay away from this host!!!
NOT SECURE!!! Many vulnerabilities.
Outdated Apache used
Overloaded servers
email unreliable
trouble ticket very slow no information supplied as to what the problem was. Usually get lame excuses as to the problems.
Telephone support reliable and problems solved relatively quickly.
I had signed up for IXWebhosting after doing some extensive research online. I decided to go with them since a lot of the reviews I've read were positive and they seem to be on those reliable best lists in recent years.
Less than a month later, I cancelled my membership. Was the money 100% back guaranteed? Supposedly. A few months later, after reading my bill, they have deducted $20. It's not exactly 100%, is it? A year later, they said that if I was interested, I should reregister my domain for another $65. Is this a joke? Did I read the fine print wrong?
I used IXWebhosting to host my site and domain for a professional art portfolio. I had basic quicktimes set up. It wasn't taking a lot of space (5mbs). But every time I'd visit my site to check how it was doing, there was always a technical issue. It was always down. Almost everyday the server was down. (Mind you, I didn't have a fancy Flash website like others. Just basic HTML and Quicktimes showing my work.)
When I had checked in with customer service (They have a long procedure. They assign you tickets and after you've received your ticket, then you can personally call them.) they said everything was working perfectly fine from where their office is. (That's interesting. After reading another person's complaint about the same problem, I wonder if the company representative was not lying to me.)
How do I know if it was really working well from the customer service representative's point? Could I fly all the way to Kentucky, sit next to his computer monitor and say, "You're right! It IS working!"?
So, I cancelled it within the 30-day grace period and after that, I began to receive many bills. You'd think after one week of cancelling the service, I would begin to receive bills, but NO, I still received reminders a year later.
Somehow, I also began to receive junk mail from other companies congratulating me on starting my own business and would I like to sign up with them?
Not worth it and from the viewpoint of a student, the experience shocked the pants off of me.
Just because it has a BBB Reliability sticker doesn't mean it's reliable. My website was always down. (It was not due to bandwidth issues or space issues. It was a problem directly from their webhosting service.) When I had finished setting up some Quicktime movies, it would play once then the site would be down again.
The control panel was also not easily maneuvarable. The graphics were pretty bad and cheap.
I personally wished I had not been so cheap to go with IXWebhosting because it ended up costing me a lot of money.
Although the people in their customer service were nice, the technical service was very poor.
IXWebhosting customer service people = good.
IXWebhosting technical quality = very very bad.
Think of it this way, they had to be personally nice because the quality of their webhosting service is so bad.
They used to be one of the better companies out there. As of the past 6 months they have been overloading their mysql servers, causing constant down time on a daily basis. And when a ticket is put in, they will send a reply on the average in 24 hrs saying nothing was wrong when they checked. More times then not, I think the problems fix themselves, since their servers are in KY, and their support staff is in India. Go elsewhere for hosting.
THEY LOST ALL MY DATA!
According to their tech support, a power surge at their datacenter wiped out the SQL database running our on-line store. The power surge took out both the production and backup servers. Huh? Only a single backup? What happened to UPS protection, multiple/redundant backups, off-line storage and off-site storage? Seems like basic data protection to me... They tout reliability on their web site to no end -- but at this point it seems like advertising hype, not reality. Hundreds and hundreds of man-hours down the tubes... Arrrgh! A little beside the point, but their website also said they have a "self-built and self-managed Data Center and Call Facility in the Midwest (Hopkinsville, KY)", but none of the contacts I've had over the past year have been with native English speakers. For your amusement, here's the exact text of the tech support response:
------------------
Dear (yes, they forgot to paste in my name)
We are extremely apologize for this unacceptable situation which took place recently.
There was a major powersurge in the datacenter and we lost many backup servers and some production servers. We have already restored all production servers and have set up new backups servers, but mysql15 is among one that lost both production and backup machine. We basically recreated it from scratch, and recovered server structure, which means that empty databases and mysql usernames exist on your hosting account control panel.
Unfortunately, experts that were hired have not found way to recover lost data.
We can assure you that this will never happen again as we have taken certain measures already to prevent this kind of accidents from happening in future, e.g starting from Monday we will set brand new backup system which will allow to have backups on remote site. I am extremely sorry, that this let you and your business down so much.
In case you have a backup copy of your database at your disposal you may restore it to the target database or upload it through ftp to your account and let us know what database to restore. We will gladly process your request.
Please accept my personal apologies about this issue, and we are very grateful to you for your patience and understanding in advance.
I left this company in disgust recently after being with them for 18 months. The first 12 months presented few problems. But over the last 6 months, judging from both by own experiences and various comments on PC and IT forums, the company's server infrastructure may be seriously creaking under the load of too many websites and too few resources to host them.
Firstly, they oversell, a problem now widespread in the industry. Ultra cheap rates with promises of ridiculously excessive bandwidth and storage allowances certainly wins over customers in the extremely competitive bottom-end of the hosting market. But this highly questionable sales model is based on the assumption that nearly all users will only consume a fraction of the data they pay for and generally not put any stress on bandwidth, CPU and memory resources.
But wait...there's a very big catch. By IX crowding each server machine with too many customer accounts all it takes to cause a problem is for a handful of those customers to start getting some serious web traffic on their sites (they are only using the generous bandwidth they are legally entitled to, mind you). Once that happens the rest of the sites hosted on that machine can be affected with any number of different technical glitches and problems. And that might include you.
Secondly, you may come to know what a brain seizure is really like after you've experienced the comical and incredibly maddening world of IX Web Hosting Customer Support. You see with IX being the ultra cheapskates that they are, the live chat operators and email helpdesk staff are actually based in Eastern Europe and the Indian subcontinent. The staff's command of English is adequate at best, indecipherable at worst. Couple this language barrier with technical incompetence and flat out lying on occasions and you can only imagine what it's like for the poor schmuck who just wants his website and email to run good. I witnessed deceit, half-truths, and a constant contradicting of their own statements. Not to mention frequent blaming of the customer, such as blaming your ISP when its technically impossible that your ISP could in any way be involved with a particular problem.
IX Web Hosting? Beware all ye who enter here.
So how to do you spot a reputable web host? I would suggest you look for a slightly higher price and far smaller (and realistic) data allowances. Chances are you will be dealing with a company that does take its customers seriously and does not operate a seriously overloaded data centre that's the consequence of all this ultra cheap hosting madness.
IX Webhosting uses mail servers from openserver.com, which is also the server used by a majority of spammers throughout the world. As a result, within days of our site being hosted with IX, we found SMTP/POP outages occurring throughout the day (presumably during peak spam activity periods) and by the third day our own mail had been flagged as spam by AOL, Yahoo and other major mail servers, as well as large corporate IT departments. Our domain name was being blacklisted, purely for signing on with IX. This was a commercial account, so would have put us out of business quickly. When canceling, IX requires they confirm with a phone call from them, which can take days -- tying up more email in the process. Finally, the Customer Service rep denied any problem, saying that all hosting companies are subject to spam on their mail servers; the IX/openserver.com problem is heavily documented, so there is no excuse that IX claims ignorance. DO NOT HOST WITH THIS COMPANY--- unless, of course, you are a spammer, since they are spammer-friendly.
The host is slow, especially MySQL database. I'm a web master for commercial site and we hosted it with them for over a year. I would have kept it there but in the end they pulled one over us. One day I attempted to check our emails and all of them were down. I went to the front page of the web site and instead of our page there was a suspension message. It turns out the company's credit card on file has expired so instead of sending us a warning they simply suspended our account. THAT IS UNACCEPTABLE!
Now I'm trying to download our files to switch to another host and it's been two days of conversations with their customer service reps and still no result. (The ftp access is also suspended for me to download everything myself.)
Another thing, they claim that they are hosted in USA -- THAT IS A LIE!!! From what I went through with them, they are mostly SOVIET/RUSSIAN and are not in US!
My experience with IXWebHosting seems similar to many other people - great for the first month (funny enough the 100% money back period) but things go down hill from there.
I am having daily problems with my sites at IXWebHosting. Either the site doesn't load at all or it is painfully slow. The Webshell utility is regularly unusable.
The Live Chat service should be an excellent way of providing support, but although IXWebHosting claim they are based in Kentucy, the Live Chat staff are somewhere in Eastern Europe. The stock answer to any problem is that everything is ok at their end, so it must be me. But then if you raise a ticket a reply eventually comes that the problem has been fixed. However they never divulge what the problem actually was. Twice though they have offered a move to a "more reliable" server - seems they have a few unreliable servers.
IXWebHosting are very poor at responding to tickets - up to 24 hours in some cases. Even an email to the CEO through his "Our Promise To You" commitment raises a ticket that someone else eventually responds to.
Trading Standards here in the UK have a saying that "if something is too good too be true it probably is". Well that certainly applies to IXWebHosting. The packages are low cost but they come with low service.
I signed for two years and very much regret doing so. I will be cutting my losses and moving to another host. If you are thinking of signing up with IXWebHosting I strongly recommend that you go elsewhere.
I think these guy(s) look very good on paper, their web site, that is. But when it comes to actual customer service, I will rank them, on the scale of 1 to 5, a 1.
Specifically:
1. Tech support Knowledge is ZERO
2. General Customer Support/Care: Zero
3. Documentation for User Self-Support: 1/5
4. Product (Software Suites, Utilities, etc): 4/5
Essentially, this company is like a car rental company: They don't have to tell you anything about the car, nor know how to drive themselves. When you rent the car, you're on your own! This is how I would describe these guys' service. It maybe a little harsh, but I'm just honest.
Well, this company advertise the hosting space of 300 GB, but there is a fine print to it. You can store 300 GB only under the domain folder, not under the root folder. I had 50 GB under root folder, thus it created an issue.
OK fair, as per TOS, I can not store 50GB under root folder, and ixwebhosting sent me an email with 72 hr deadline to remove the contacts. Guess what happened?? With-in 36 hrs, wihtout waiting for me to remove the files, ixwebhosting deleted the filest themselves and did not bother to restore them on my request. Why did they give me a 72 hr notice when then did not have to honour it. It is scam. I lost all my important data. I will never recommend these croock to anyone.
The hosting database usually down, if you want to running some E-commerce websites on it, avoid it.
I have order two hosts at this company, they are MYSQL database usually will down two times in one months, sometimes will happen each day. The longer date they are resolve it take me three days.
In very short words - if you are looking for a cheap provide that gives you 1% of what they promise then go for them. Otherwise run away.
I hosted a site with over 4000 visit per day with most of the traffic on phpbb based forums. I payed for their 'business' plan and got many gb of bandwith, disk space and so on. However as soon as they discovered that may site is consuming this bandwith (actually I consumed less then 5% of what they offered) they shut down my site for a week (with no prior warning!) and told that I should optimize my scripts (phpbb scripts...). I had a few (fours to be precise) such adventures before I left them. In the end they told me that:
1. I overload their apache server serving static content (I use less than 5% of bandwith, with 4000 visits per day)
2. I am not allowed to store this amount of data (I had 4GB of site files)
3. I am not allowed to store files for the domain which they themselves locked (quite stupid...)
4. I am not allowed to host sited for which they do not host dns
In general I have a feeling that I'm allowed to pay them money and get as few things for it as possible.
As for their support - they have a good 1st level support online 24x7 which is nice. However this 1st level support cannot do anything. Sometimes I wonder whether they are real people actually.
Their system administrators are quite good and helpful however extremely slow.
And for the end a small funny thing - they store all passwords in plain text somewhere - as their system administrator pasted me my own ix account password into a support bug... i wish a professional hosting company is more serious about security.
IXWEBHOSTING is unreliable. They always down it seems. I'd says at least once every 2-3 weeks you go off line. They say its DOS Security issues of power supply/breaker issues. The online support is brain dead I know more than they do at times. And I know little or nothing. It is obvious they care nothing about the customer because these reaccurring problems never seem to change its either slow or down. I am looking to move my 4 websites to my web design guy hosting company. Also IXWEBHOSTING does not offer dedicated servers everything is shared and must be allot on each server unit. It makes you think they operate out of a basement or garage.
I moved 100 plus sites to IX about 2 years ago. At the time, I had only a few problems getting that many sites set up and running after having them all take a dive from other hosting.
At first, support was very helpful, and quick, now its very slow and all but useless. Even when you do get a ticket bumped up to manager status, the results are less then encouraging. They seem to have canned answers for everything, and its never there problem, its always, a route problem or a scripting error, or what ever.
Live web support is a joke, because unless its something so simple like how do you spell IXwebhosting, there response is to either give a canned (you made a mistake) response, or to tell you to post a trouble ticket.
I have posted trouble tickets that have taken days to get a worthless response. My latest round of trouble ticket woes came with a ticket I started on Feb 1 about two different accounts, not sites, but entire business class accounts, that the sites on were having loading problems from the servers.
They kept telling me it was my problem that it took 45 seconds to load a page, even when maintained a 72ms ping to the opentranfer server system (which is as far as you can ping in)
Even after getting this ticket bumped to manager status, and getting several phone calls from IX about the issues, that were supposedly on the mind, the sites on one server were so pathetically slow, that I could not stand it any more. My revenues on all my sites had fallen by 80% over about two months, because of all this.
I finally requested that they physically move the bad account to a new server. Which they agreed to do, but it took days. And to top it all off, they moved the wrong account, which took my revenues even lower.
To date this issue is still unresolved and the ticket sports over 35+ posts to it, not to mention the numerous calls to support and from support about the issues, that sill remain unresolved. They always end the ticket with:
Please accept my sincerest of apologies for this mix up. I am forwarding this issue back to the system administrators so that it can be resolved in a timely fashion.
If you have any questions or concerns please let us know.
Thank you,
Ya right!!! Think twice, and then think again 4 times more.
I only have about 20 sites left at IX, and soon as I can afford to make the move,(after loosing all my revenue) I intend to have none.
For the first few years everything was OK with IX. The space was small, but I wasn't paying for a lot. It was annoying to find, however, that new accounts paying the same amount as me would have more space. The only way to upgrade your account would be to repay for the year, with a refund. I felt it should have been automatic.
But the real problems started for me in about December. Seeing that they changed the plan, again, I upgraded to about 300 gigs of space. After a month I started to get errors when uploading saying that my disk space was full. I checked and was only using about 25 gigs. Not even close to 300.
After getting this error, I contacted them. They then suspended my account for violating their terms of service. They said I was using the space as storage, which goes against their terms of service.
I cleared off the files that were being stored, and then they suspended me again. Again, for the same problem. I told them that the files were being linked to from a closed community, and they asked for proof. Not once did they check the log files to see that indeed, these files were being accessed. After talking with a number of people for over a week, they finally called me. The person who called me had not even read all of the information in my trouble ticket before calling!
Once that mess was sorted, I thought it would be OK. But yet again I have been getting the server full error, and yet again, I am not even at 25 gigs out of the 300 I paid for.
If you want to deal with not even being able to use the space you pay for, then this is the host for you. I am sorry to be leaving them in a way because for three years they were a great company. But I can't convince myself to stay and not even be able to use 25% of what I am paying for.
Cheap. That's it about this host. MySQL server was incredibly slow, definitely they have put too much users on them. Sometimes it took 20 sec to open a page on PHPBB based forum. Customer support usually replies promptly...often, but not always; answers are useful in 60% of the cases. Finally they brought my site down saying that my DB causes server overload (db was around 300megs, used for PHPBB)...and proposed to optimize PHPBB code not to cause overload on their servers.... but they did not inform me about this. I got a reply from support team more than 24 hrs after site was brought down and only after I wrote a message to CEO.
I have been with many web hosting companies and I am totally impressed with IX. The tech support is very good, phone support is just OK, but the online help ticket system they have in place is AWESOME. All of my online ticket requests have been responded to in under 30 minutes. I put in an email suggestion to the president of the company, and within 5 minutes I received a phone call from the president's representative to discuss my suggestion. Only down side right now is they are not a full registar of domain names so you can't perform a complete transfer to IX,(that was my suggestion). The representative stated that they are in the process of becoming a full domain registar. I will be staying with IX and enjoying the customer service, great prices, and loads of storage and bandwidth. Great control panel software. Well worth the wait for the full domain registar service in the future. AWESOME hosting company, best in class right now.
We are an internet retail service with several sites. We have been a customer of IX for over 2 years and are NOT on one of their cheap packages. Their service like their support staff's English is getting worse and worse. The IX servers are down for maintenance at least a few times every week normally for 3 to 6 hours. Their servers will also be down at least one time per week or two due to technical problems or non scheduled updates.
A power supply upgrade took down our sites recently for over 12 hours.
E-mail fails almost every day.
If an AOL customer marks ANY of your e-mails as spam (in our case confirmation of the customers order) then IX will immediately disable all of your e-mails without informing you or consulting with you. It will take you several days to get this re-enabled after you have spent hours trying to work out why your e-mails suddenly stopped working in the first place. Obviously if you really are sending spam then you will probably not get re-enabled at all as you would expect.
Support will always tell you that a problem with the servers will be resolved within 20-30 minutes. This will not be the case and normally your site will be offline for hours.
This hosting service has got worse and worse over the past year. They really don't care at all about their customers. Support will drive you mad running you around and round in circles. Your e-mail WILL stop working on a regular basis and your websites will be offline on a regular basis.
Save yourself a lot of stress even if it means spening a little more money and look for a reliable provider.
Awesome Host. Quick, helpful support (sometimes took multiple replies to solve the problem, but during what I assume was business hours, they responded in less than 20 minutes). Lots of storage. Lots of SQL databases. Lots of bandwidth. What more could you ask for?? Webmail client works... I don't like how the interface is on a different server, but if i really wanted to, I could install an open-source webmail package. Using the open-souce FileZilla FTP client for FTP tranfers, and works great with this host (someone below was complaining about the site recommending you buy a FTP client, but if you want a good, free FTP client, then just search freshmeat.net for "ftp client", or use FileZilla). I've yet to witness any downtime at all, except for the scheduled ones at midnight periodically, but I don't mind, since they notify you in advance.
I've had to use support several times, and once was when I was trying to install AWSTATS... I just submitted a support ticket, and within a few hours, I had a detailed set of host-specific instructions on how to install it. Saved me DAYS!!!
I would (and do all the time) recommend this host to anyone. Don't go for something cheaper like Netrillium, because believe me, it's bad. (I have to use it for a school band site, and they picked it because of its price - but it is bad, and not worth the price cut)
In a nutshell I started with IX in December 2004 when I moved several domains there after becoming completely disgusted with iPower.
I have to say that the service was great as was the hosting until around Jan 2006. From there it's been steadily downhill. MySQL server response is so bad that I scraped the three forums I had spent many hours creating as it was pointless given the extremely erratic and generally slow load times. Blogs, even small ones, aren't much better as I have several using WordPress.
I have two accounts with one expiring on 2/27/07 and wanted to transfer several domains that are database driven to the two year account I purchased last summer that has largely remained unused. One would assume this would be a simple accounting / clerical change, yes? Not a chance, baby. I have to back up each domain and three blogs. DL all. Upload all (a real pain with a DSL that is only 15K on the UL side), create new databases, restore the DBs from the backup, set the new parms in the config files and undoubtedly debug numerous small items. In short probably 10 hours of wasted time. Which is a nice way of saying this is complete bull s**t.
Many of these hosting companies seem to be managed by myopic, one trick ponies who can only think in terms of being the low cost provider who so compromise the services that they render the whole proposition worthless. What am I saving with a hosting service that provides marginal to poor hosting for $60USD/year when I could have good solid hosting for 25-30% more. Price and value have NEVER been equivalent.
Being a cynical old turkey and having seen this pattern repeat I suspect it's actually a business model of giving good to great service for several years to build a good rep and then screwing the service and staff into ground while milking the good will for the final few years till the fall out puts the customer base into a death spiral.
Can't say if that's the case with IX but either way I'm completely ticked with the progressive downhill slide in service, the minimum wage, untrained support staff that seems to be the norm in "off hours" who quite frequently either don't answer the question asked or answer it incorrectly and similar items.
I had to follow the link just to make sure the critics were talking about the same host I use. The only two problems that I have ever had requiring technical support were caused by me. In both instances tech response was immediate and effective.
I have two websites hosted on IXWebHosting which from time to time are unavailable. Correct me if I am wrong folks, but, every site on the internet is unavailable from time to time.
I believe everything about IXWebHosting is totally awesome - price, value, service. I would recommend it to anyone without reservation.
I am disappointed in some of the features touted by this service:
1. WebMail client is TERRIBLE. I have to use it when I am away from my office. It is hard to log in, has a brief time-out that the user cannot set, so if you are composing a long message, it times out, wiping out the message. Then, once it has timed out, you have to wait about half an hour to log back in. If I am trying to use it on the sly while I am working at a client's the black screen is really obvious, doesn't look like a business application.
2. Spam Filter. It claims spam filter capability; instead it has the capability for you to set up rules on your email. It does not even have the built in capability to filter non-latin alphabets. They think that I am going to program an entire set of spam filter rules for each of my email accounts. This is not a feature; it's a joke.
3. FTP. I tried to use the FTP service they offer and support suggested that I purchase FTP software.
4. The control panel is designed for engineers, not non-technical people. It names the items by some name that doesn't say what the feature does in lay terms.
5. Power problems, until recently uptime has been good, but recently there have been power outages and brown outs. In order to get a refund on the lost service, they ask that I document the outage as if they didn't know. They seem to expect me to spend my day trying to get to my website so I can tell when it is up and down. That's crazy.
A positive, their new online support service is very responsive and polite.
HORRIBLE!! That's the one word to describes this host. Opened several accounts 9 months ago because pricing and features seemed justified. Everything ran fine for about 2 months and then the problems started.
Extremely slow (30+ second) page loads and lots of downtime. All of our sites would fail at once for up to several hours. And this was happening across 4 different servers. There are also logical resets the cause counters and other components to restart at zero several times a day.
The MySQL servers are overloaded and will refuse connection requests at peak hours. Also, the MySQL server will intermittently slow down to a crawl due to excess traffic.
We have experienced over 9 hours of downtime just in the past 6 days. They keep saying it’s a power supply problem. Sorry, but that’s a bunch of BS. What kind of datacenter has to go down 4 hours at a time because of power supply issues?
Tech support via Trouble Ticket takes up to 24 hours to respond and they always say that nothing is wrong. And good luck getting support by phone. It takes from 15 minutes to an hour to get through and then they say that nobody else is reporting any problems. If that’s true, then why the long wait for someone to answer? Online chat usually responds quickly, but their command of the English language is poor at best and it can be difficult to get your point across.
We have since moved to another host and dropped this turkey. It’s your money, so take time to research this sorry bunch before giving any of it to them.
Their response time is generally within an hour or two but answers can sometimes be vague or totally off topic. Their MySql servers will often become over used causing major lag or the server will just deny requests totally. They have been getting better customer service wise lately, they have started sending out email notices when they perform maintenance or upgrades so that we can expect to possibly be down in a certain time frame. When your site does go down for a period of time they will reimburse your account with credits for purchasing more hosting.
cheap. and that's just about it. my email is always down. they never let you know either. the support is bad (if you can get through) they sound like they're just kids who don't know or care. don't use these people, they have got worse over the last year. time to change. if anyone can recommend a mac friendly reliable hosting company please let me know.
I switched from BlueHost to IX because of value, well you get what you pay for, which is nothing. Since i have made the switch i have not gone one day without having to send in a ticket for the site being down.
This time i can not even send them a ticket because their site is down, LMFAO, once they are up again i will be closing this account....
I joined IX Web Hosting two weeks ago and the problems started at the first second of pressing the "Sign Up" button. I was moved onto a "new server" that had "less than 100 people on it". I uploaded a 6KB (no typo there) file and it loaded in 15 seconds moving at SSLLOOWW speeds. I did this every day for a week and then I called, I called in the early morning hours and then again in the after noon hours and was number 15 in the call system, after about 40 minutes on hold the only answer I got to these problems was: Open up a ticket, we can't help you by the phone. Then I called for a uptime compensation because my server had 98.6% uptime and they guarantee 99.9% uptime and they said they only give credits if THEY SAY SO, I phyically verified my server downtime and also used a monitoring service and they said that it was never down so I don't get credit. I called and was told that "every thing was fine". I HATE IX WEBHOSTING! They respond to tickets in 20 hour times (not the guaranteed 1hr time).
As a new customer I reccomend elsewere for web hosting.
ALSO: I asked to be moved servers and they said that my server was a newer one and that I would be moved to an older, more crowded server, I declined then changed my mind and a rep. said that quote: "sorry, it's not possible".
Lately we constanly have email problems. Sometimes it lasts for more than one day. The tech support responds fairly quickly but always gives you the boiler plate type of answer wihtout addressing the real problem. The frequency and the duration of downtime is becoming unacceptable.
I've been using IXwebhosting for the last two months basically because of its low prices and features included in its business plan. Then I found it was a terrible mistake mainly because of its poor reliability. My web is constantly slow and down several times each day. Each down may last several minutes to several hours. Technical support is basically useless, there were always unscheduled maintainents. Because I am using the Google checkout payment feature, the slow speed will provide wrong and confusing shipping costs to our customers. Pass this company if you have other choices.
I started with IX in December of 2004 as I was fed up with bad service, wide variations in tech support knowledge and similar. All of 2005 the basic sites I was hosting there seemed to work fine and e-mail was likewise good.
Starting around Jan 2006 quality, along with pricing, dropped significantly. I started using more database driven items such as WordPress blogs and PHPBB forums and found response times to often be unacceptably slow. By that I mean a 3-5 window that a user would likely tolerate for a page to load. Blog and forum load times often went to 10+ seconds which to me translates as the user bails on your site.
Also tech support quality has dropped significantly. Support calls during 2005 were often answered immediately and wait times generally were under 3-4 minutes. Since around mid-2006 any calls during any prime time windows such as early evening in the US will often put you at number 10-15 in line which means 20-40 minute wait. Completely unacceptable for me as an IT pro.
Mail problems have also arisen in the past 4-5 months where I get a bounced email giving "553 sorry, that domain isn't allowed to be relayed thru this MTA (#5.7.1)". Fascinating. How can I be relaying when I'm connecting directly to my mail server for my domain as I have for the past 25 months.I called tech support when this started and the tech said it was because my ISP wasn't allowing relaying. Really. I explained that I wasn't in the smallest way using the ISPs mail server and that they are one of the very old original ISPs that believe their job is an Internet connection and everything else is the user's to deal with. Thank goodness some of the good old ones still exist! Regardless he was sure it something my ISP was doing. Me not think so.
Moreover I run my own internal mail server for several other domains that I have and have zero problems with mail service.
What was even more an insult I tried to forward one of the bounced e-mails to the support email address at IX and guess what. It bounced back. Hey why take my word for it. Here's POC:
"Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mail.opentransfer.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.
:
user is over quota"
Damn! :)
Lastly I wanted to install Mediawiki and another package with the latter requiring PHP 5 and the former needing it for the latest versions. IX only offer PHP 4 something currently. Tech supports answer. "Oh they're considering adding that sometime next summer (2007). OK cool but how many of us will gone elsewhere?
I have to assume that IX has decided to go with a really low end, milk the market, business model for hosting of generic, low requirement sites and simply don't want the business of those of use using database driven tech. and need the performance.
'nuf said. I would have rather had the higher prices and much better service and performance. No reason they could offer tiered pricing and service.
I'm shopping to go elsewhere and given the pain of moving the several blogs and a database driven site will be evaluating carefully my potential new home. Contract expires mid Feb 07 so I have five weeks to bail.
In sum I would recommend serious site builders look elsewhere.
Almost just the marketing term. All of there service are bad. the speed is quite ok but they limit all type of content. The response time of support is slow. Down time freequently
I switched from another hosting company which I thought had problems with down time. The reviews I read appeared glowing so I had high expectations. But within less than a week of signing up, I was having email problems ... and I've already encountered 5 instances of both database and mail servers going down (in less than one month!!!!). I've also had other odd problems which really shouldn't have occurred. The latest problem now is that my mail forms on my web sites won't send mail.
The live chat staff are generally nice and can help to a certain point, but then you need to open a ticket ... and hope that your problem can be solved.
I don't think I'll last the distance with this mob ...
Ongoing server problems. Slow speeds. Email problems Tech staff who respod quickly but dont know what they are talking about half of the time. I had to ask 6 times for the paths for zip tax and mysqldump. Each time I was told they did not support these. I knew they did and eventually got a person who gave me the paths.
I have a number of sites with host excellence and I will be moving all of them.
They are the same company as host excellence which is just a s bad.
Great host! 24-7 Telephone support, but will wait on hold for 20-30 mins during peak hours. Otherwise, I have called and gotten an answer (real person) on the 1st ring during late night and early morning hours.
Recently switched from honstonce.com (I posted for them as well...worthwhile to read). This company is a little more expensive, but when you factor in the 3 free domain registrations, it comes out to less money overall.
Nice paqckage but mail server goes down literally every other day and they dont seem to know what they are doing with it - they are aware of the problem but it is still not fixed. our company is suffering from their terrible availability for the past two months. going to drop them as a vendor. too bad, all the rest is nice, we just cant rely on them for business purposes.
I have ixwebhosting for about 3 years or just more than 3 years.
My website has about 2000 members, 250 person log on daily, about 40 members log on max at any moment. We have a phpbb forum and a photopost gallery in one database. The gallery has about 20,000 photos. My database is about 200 MB. I stored video files about 40-99 MB each for members to download. My bandwidth usage per month is about 100 gig.
The Server speed is inconsistence, sometime slow, sometime fast, sometime I can't even access my forum. In the past, I'v used the chat service many time when I cannot access my forum and they treat customer alright but the problem persist. Lately, (last couple months) the Server speed improve and I do not have problem accessing my forum although sometime it still slow and I'm using cable internet connection.
I would recommend them depend on what kind of website you have. If you have a business site and unreliable service is not acceptable to you then I would not recommend them. But if your site is only an entertainment site or hobbie site and you can live with a slow connection or downtime here and there then they are good because of the disk space and bandwidth. To be honest, my downtime at ix were plenty but not long, it would be down for about 1 to 5 minutes max but then I only visit my site after 3 pm so I don't know how reliable they are before 3pm on a daily basis.
Ixwebhosting will shut you down without notifying you if they find copyright material on your site. A Moderators of mine uploaded some music that has copyright and they suspend all my domain.
About a week ago, my database was shut down because ixwebhosting said the slow queries in my galleries jam their Server. They gave me a list of example of queries that were slow. I took those queries to staff at photopost.com and the engineer there tested those same queries on a site that has similar database size like mine and found no problem. The engineer at photopost told me the problem is with ix, not mine.
My opinion of ix is mixed. They have been nice to me most of the time. I can live with their slow server but they do thing that I consider unacceptable like shutting down clients site without trying to contact the client to notify them of the problem so that both side can work it out.
This is my sincere review and I hope that my review can be of help to you. I'm still hosted by them but I'm checking around to find another host to experiment with.
If you want basic hosting, then ixWebhosting is acceptable. Otherwise, look elsewhere. Their organisation seems geared towards a one size fits all mode, and if you want anything done that is outside the norm, you will hit a brick wall.
Their tech support provides quick responses, but the responses are, in general useless, and it would seem that they do not read the trouble ticket before responding. For example, I complained that emails were intermittently not working for an account but works for another, and both were accessed from one client computer. Their reply was to check the client! Then they gave some CRAP about a temporary outage lasting for 10 mins ... kake up guys the emal account is still not working! To date, this issue is still not resolved.
To add insult to injury, if you ask them to do something on the web site, you can expect the exact opposite. For example, when I complained about the limited sub domain support and a number of bugs, they reset my web server settings without asking me first, then tells me "the problem is fixed". Now, I think twice before raising a trouble ticket for the fear that it may cause by web sites to go down completely!
Other limitations: no support for custom error pages using ASP, very limited sub domain support, eg., cannot specify a redirect on a subdomain to a page with query parameters. SQL mail is not supported, and neither is SQL backups (their tech support says you have to raise a trouble ticket every time you want to backup the database). Perhaps I should send them a trouble ticket every day to backup the database!
Furthermore, they only support POP before SMTP (which is not supported by Outlook, and your users will get numerous errors). POP before SMTP is also a security risk for users with dynamic IP addresses.
Really Bad All Around -- people say the price is good but is it really if your sites are always down? Really folks, saving 5 or 10 or even 25 dollars a month is not worth spending hours on tech support -- especially if you're hosting for clients...
After waiting on hold for over 1 hour (yes, ONE HOUR) the kid who answered couldn't answer the simplest sales question OR technical support question.
While waiting for him, I tried the "Live Chat" support. They gave me an answer which I was happy with, but still not sure if they knew what they were talking about. Finally, the kid on the phone told me the complete opposite answer to what the "Live Chat" person did.
I must quote the review below which I read earlier as this is exactly the same problem I experienced lately. Been very satisfied with IXWebhosting for nearly 2 years now. For me, it was then the top choice and my top recommended host. I even moved nearly all my web sites over to them because of very good service hosting flexibility and support.
And then ... strange things started to happen ... first, visit counters get reset to zero value (which they say was impossible to happen unless I was the one myself who changed the values), then permissions on some folders get reset and locks out changes (they give me the same reason "it can not just happen"). then email fails totally on one of my domains (which tech support sweepingly answers me with "I do not think so ... I checked our our servers and they are working fine"!
Okay... it is not so much the problems that arise that irritated me. Such problems do arise and such problems can be solved. It is the way their technical support team or call center NOW handles my plea for help ... As the review below states, they now give you scripted answers and make you feel it is your ineptness that caused the problems. And they immediately assume you overlooked many things close to saying "RTFM". Then they leave you hanging clueless on the status of the problem. They say they will forward the issue to the concerned department but they do not get back to you. When you follow up a day later ... you get to chat with yet another tech support and have to repeat explaining the problem again ... then you get the same responses over again. I think they are using call centers now not directly involved in their operations.
If I was the end customer, this may not matter so much. But, as a webmaster I have customers and clients at my neck when failures happen and I get stressed out because I can't give them any explanation! Poor tech support from hosts such as this one now is bad for business for webmasters. I won't recommend this host anymore.
====
"Great service for first few months then they were bought out by another company and everything wen tdown hill. Monthly email problems that take major escallation to get resolved. Chat based phone support is worthless as they read from scripts and think everyone they talk to are stupid and computer novices. I am CCIE an have these guys tell me stuff thats just nonsense scripted babble. Have had 36 documeted outages in over two years. More numereous slow down sand PHP issues. They have changed my sites setting more then once and have had several config file corruptions. Mail, well read the other comments, its a very simplistic by todays standard email systems and not one to have your business rely on. It's cheap, in terms of cost and in what you get but then you get what you pay for.
If you want your site up 24X7 this is NOT the site for you."
My experience using IXWEBHOSTING has been like dream come true. Too many hosting companies these days are quick to take your money without producing the goods. The quality of the hosting and services provided are just top notch and their support is just outstanding, even for someone located in Australia. I have had a dozen or more support calls iwith them, some with complex issues and they were all resolved within 15mins of logging the ticket. I have been so blown away with the level of service and support that I just had to right this review.
I found ixwebhosing after leaving hostonce.com. I've submitted a review for hostonce, it's a worthwhile read if you get the time.
Anyway, ixwebhosting cost a little more but they're worth every extra penny.
The customer service is the best I've seen. I mean, they have live chat with an instant admin online within 5 seconds. Who else does that? No-one that I've come across yet.
I have only ever had 1 issue and it was resolved in minutes.
They offer a good service, reasonably priced and most importantly cause less stress than my previous supplier. It's great knowing that my site is up and I'm receiving the emails I should be getting.
If you're looking for reliability, go with ixwebhosting.
I see that most of the reviews here are old. Well, who knows what the difference is, but listen up. This company is nothing short of AMAZING! I just posted the folowing on my web forum for all to see:
Let me give you a heads up again about my hosting company. NO, I get nothing for recommending them! I've just gotten out of hosting hell with someone who wouldn't even answer my emails or return my calls!!!
1] They allow you to call anytime and request a specific tech! If he is there, you get him. I know of NO company that does that. Because of that, I can call the same person; he knows my site now like it's his own. He and I have developed a partnership and I NEVER SPEND TIME TELLING A NEW PERSON SOME LONG HISTORY! I have a list of 4 of the best guys there!
2] The guys that work during the day are understandably busy, but they never seem rushed. Because the nights are slower, they go after the reallly tough problems, and they are relentless. They just will NOT give up. The only thing they won't help with is actual web design issues.
3] With the toll-free tech number, I sometimes call in and will be maybe the 3rd one on hold, but the wait is never long.
4] They do whatever they need to do to fix your problem or escalate it up to the next level. And that is NOT stall tactic like in some companies. They are back with me within 24 hours with a solution!!! But to be honest, it's been within just a few HOURS everytime. The longest I've waited is just until the evening when the night guys come on. They do the more time-consuming work.
5] I have NEVER heard, "Oh, that's a Windows/Microsoft/software, etc. problem... not ours."
6] The technical department is open via phone AND online 24/7. You can use the online access, but you get MUCH better service if you get the guys on the phone. Use the online method only if you don't have time to stay the course with them on the phone.
THE HOSTING COMPANY IS: www.ixwebhosting.com Okay, off my soapbox, and on with my Edwin McCain Band Promo hat. Remember, we are the HEART of the future of EMB. Let's spread the Ed and share the best music on the planet!!! Thanks for supporting EdwinMcCainMusic.com. You guys are the best!
*Laughing*
_________________
Have an Edwin Day!
Administrator
That sums up the service. The price is great... all of it is top-notch. I KNOW that when a few people have problems, THEY are the ones who seek out the forums to complain. The HAPPY ones don't often do that. So, I tend to realllly listen to them. The only complaints I have had are that I wish they offered more goodies like I had on Fantastico. For someone like me that knows "just enough to be dangerous," I need those "canned" features. The other one is this: No, honestly, I am not impressed with the online help. It is outsourced to India and some of the calls go there. Those are not helpful. I just pick up the phone and get the help instantly.
Thanks for letting me share my experience. The ones I've had in the past with an UNNAMED host and Bravenet .... well, I'm a VERY happy camper!
I had a really bad experience with ixwebhosting. They suspended my account because they said there were 15,000 emails plugging up the web server. I told them that I wasn't spamming anyone and that I thought someone may have tried a DOS attack, but that I needed to see one of the emails to find out what the problem was. Rather than help me, they treated me like a spammer and demanded that I disable all email scripts in order to have my account reactivated. The techies wouldn't help at all, in fact they were very short and rude. My site has been live for three years and I've never had a problem like this before. I switched to these guys about a month ago because I needed more bandwidth to accommodate the traffic I was getting, but now I've gone back to my old web host for the time being.
And as far as their control panel goes, the disk space graph is incorrect by about 400% and they don't give you the ability to set permissions on folders directly. You have to ask them to set the permissions, which takes about three days.
If you are thinking about using ixwebhosting, I would seriously think twice about it. There are plenty of other web hosting companies who offer the same thing for the same price and who know what customer service is.
The only killer with them is poor reliability - I have hosted with them for two years and it is a disaster every other month. Databases keep going down - SSL certificates expire without warning - disks crash with poor backups - temp directory is always full - always moving you to a "better" server and hence the two day downtime - and on and on. Sites go down for days and then they say this is routine maintenance. Great price and good features but all for naught since your site is always down. THey have a great warranty on their site which of course they don't honor or they will go bankrupt. My advice - stay away. I am slowly moving my sites off to other hosts - just got fed up.
I hate to say that this host is not as it seems to be. My website is either not responding at all or too slow to open many times a day.
I have been complaining them about this issue though I get timely response but none of them are satisfying. They say they are working on it. But I am experiencing this kind of problem from a long time. For some time the problem disappeared but then its the same story of website being too slow or not responding.
This happens for about 180-600 seconds but happens too often in a day. When I write to them they say everything is ok. As it may be possible that when they view my mail my site might be working fine.
I have another website hosted somewhere else & I have never faced such problem there. My other website is www.freegamey.com & it's hosted at www.powweb.com Powweb is surely a good host.
Very quickly, I've been very impressed with IXWebHosting however I have one may gripe. They use a very old version of SpamAssassin dating back to 2004. Most spammers now know how to get around the things older version of spam checking software look for, so ALL spam gets through.
IX have been unwilling to take customer feedback in regards to upgrading to a newer version of SpamAssassin. I hope I don't get this sort of pushback if there's anything else that needs upgrading.
Apart from that everything else has been first-rate.
I have had a account here at IX for over 7 mos now and would have to say DON"T USE THEM for anything more that html pages. I host 5 site there right now (only till my account is up for renew) all my site are Mysql and PhP based and that’s were the trouble lays.
There MySql server are over sold to the point at times it will take 10 to 20 sec to show, trying to run a forum there well good luck as people trying to post will only see page time out 35% of the time.I don't think in the 5 mos I have been there I have not seen downtime everyday if only for 5 min but none the less downtime.
Web mail is out of date and slow to load all the time, php send mail is down more than it's up.
Trouble tickets take 24 hours to get a auto reply with this info same thing every time.
I apologize for the recent problems with the SQL server.
Such issues are related to the fact that you are hosted on the shared server, where besides you, the accounts of other customers are hosted as well.
As you might understand, we are literally unable to control every customers's actions on the server. There is no technical way to track if there is anything getting prepared to spam, is there any trend for the traffic on somebody's web site to increase rapidly or if somebody's forum will be overcrowded in a few minutes.
We can not foresee such failures. However, I totally understand that this is a lame excuse for you.
Let me inform you that we are now in the process of moving the part of the accounts from this server to a new one. We believe that it will unload the server a bit and you will see the first results in a few days.
Your accounts won't be toucned in any way, do not worry, this is also won't influence the work of the SQL server in general.
We thank you for your prolonged patience and staying with us though.
Please don't use this host for anything more that Html ONLY
I have been with two other website over the past 6+ years and been very unhappy with them. Both of those sites are listed here with ratings above IX Webhosting which doesn't make any sense in my experience. IX Webhosting beats them hands down. Their prices are great, their services offered far, far exceed the services on the other two websites I used. I can't believe some of the services offered for the Linux Business Plus plan I have. And if you don't end up liking them, you can cancel their service without paying for the full time. I am hosting 5 full domains there - each with their own different settings/services at no extra cost. The control panel is comprehensive and easy to use. I can't say enough good about them. I am recommending them to everyone I can. The best there is!
I have hosted with IX Webhosting for about two years, and have nothing but good things to say about this host. Very occasional server problems (3 or 4 in two years) have been remedied promptly with their 24/7 live support. Trouble tickets (essentially e-mail support) are responded to within 24 hours, often much faster than that. I have had no real problems with reliability, and downtime is minimal, average for the industry it seems to me. This company is an excellent value and your rates are guaranteed to stay the same as long as you host with them!
The worst experience I have ever had with a host. First my email was down for 3 days. Tech support telling me it will be backup in 2 hours.
Now Jan 8, 2005. All of my sites have been down for 2 days. Now they are backup with the message "web server OK" but I guess that means they lost all of my data. We are on day number 3. I personally would detect my site down on a regular basis for 5-60 minutes each week, who knows how often it went down. Currently I have about 4 accounts hosted with them. All 4 are down nvahomes.com, virginiamls.com, and homebuildersmls.com. My email is down for virginiamls.com and has been for 24 hours.
I have never had problems with IXwebhosting. Their support is top notch and my websites experienced only minor problems - due to bad scripting from my side.
I have read a lot of negative reviews about IX. I also know some people who experienced down times etc. and found that most of the time it is due to badly written PHP or MySQL scripts.
Their support operators are friendly and always gave me a direct and correct answer.
I would definitely recommend IX for people that know their way around the different scripting languages and are looking for a top web host at an affordable price.
My verdict of the bad reviews of IX is as follow: If you cannot play golf, it is not the golf course that is bad. If you cannot write proper scripts, it is not IX, or any other host for that matter, that is bad.
Thanks IX for a great and the best hosting experience!
Great service for first few months then they were bought out by another company and everything wen tdown hill. Monthly email problems that take major escallation to get resolved. Chat based phone support is worthless as they read from scripts and think everyone they talk to are stupid and computer novices. I am CCIE an have these guys tell me stuff thats just nonsense scripted babble. Have had 36 documeted outages in over two years. More numereous slow down sand PHP issues. They have changed my sites setting more then once and have had several config file corruptions. Mail, well read the other comments, its a very simplistic by todays standard email systems and not one to have your business rely on. It's cheap, in terms of cost and in what you get but then you get what you pay for.
If you want your site up 24X7 this is NOT the site for you.
I've been hosting my site in ixwebhosting for 2 years. I must addmit I was very happy with the amount of storage space and bandwidth they offer at the begining. I was also pleased by their 24/hr chat support, which was virtually none existance in Australia hosting companies at that time. Until recently, as the number of visitors to my site increases, i realise how sluggish ixwebhosting is, sometimes the sites didn't even load. imagine how the customers think of the business when the site staffs up like that. I have lost alot of customers and protential sale because of this. So don't be fooled by their deals and cheap prices, if you are serious about your website, host it somewhere else.
As with all web hosting companies, it seems that their intensions always start off so good, but after a two year period seem to dwindle. For the past two years we have been hosted with IX, we have experienced, major email problems, php formmail problems, and backups and just recently they've changed our mysql database name without notifying us. This normally won't be a problem, but when you have 24 databases it poses a problem with things, such as our time involved in fixing everything and who's going to cover the cost. I contacted and talked with a so called supervisor, and still after four days have had luck with this issue, they say they can't put us back. Apparently the server admins are gods and cannot be talked to. I've worked for four hosting companies in the past, and I can tell you that everything they've told me from the emails to the mysql issues have all been BS. I'm looking forward moving all our websites to someplace safe.
In the year I have been with them the email has been down many times. The Web site was down a couple of times. But I have problems with the email every month. Support just comes up with execuses. The latest it has now been not working for 3 DAYS. And support just keeps saying they are working on it and it will be up in a few hours. For THREE days they told me this.
I figured out how to fix my email I am now moving to another hosting site.
Generally, web site hosting has been satisfactory. I cannot comment on load times, etc--seems OK.
My Problem is e-mail. At this point it has been mostly down for three days, I think. I have received an occasional message, but most, including my "test" messages go into who knows where. I know I have people out there wondering why I am not responding.
Live Chat--they do talk to you, but no help. Obviously not native English speakers. See the following exchange:
Chat InformationPlease wait for a site operator to respond.
Chat InformationYou are now chatting with 'Marina Glamazda'
Marina Glamazda: Hello, how can i help you?
you: Hello Marina. My site is xxxxxxx. WHEN will e-mail be back up--I was told a "few hours" yesterday by Brett--as far as I can tell it has been mostly down since the weekend.
you: hello?
Marina Glamazda: hold on please, let me check
Marina Glamazda: unfortunately that's the server side problem, we are still working on that, it takes more time than we expected, please, accept my apologize regarding this issue
you: This is a business site; this is a real problem. Have I lost any incoming or outgoing e-mail; or is it just delayed?
Marina Glamazda: mail should not be lost regarding updates that i have now.
you: OK, thanks. PLEASE get it going Goodbye
I've noticed a tremendous drop in traffic and email and customer sales and started investigating the problem. After receiving phone calls from my customer base, I came to realize that a lot of my email was apparently not arriving at all. I also noticed that my site was often unavailable, pages wouldn't load, etc.
Many phone calls to their tech support line revealed that quite a few others were having the same problems. Usually, you'd be caller #8 or #9 on hold... which pretty much revealed that their customer base was unhappy as hell. I sure am.
Their live chat will connect you to Russia or some obscure location, where they don't understand english well or computer terminology. I was always given the same excuse regarding the technical problems I was experiencing, yet the problems persisted over and over again. Now I know why my business is in the toilet. I've worked too damn hard to be let down like this.
Downtimes, site unavailable, missing emails, lost data, etc., I've experienced it all. In some cases, I KNOW I had transferred files to my site, but two days later, they went missing. What happens often is your website is simply unavailable. Repeated attemtps at connecting will sometimes make it show up, or not. What the hell is happening then when my customers try this? Of course, they'll give up in frustration and go shop elsewhere.
This kind of service sucks and I'm shopping for a real hosting provider. I am sick to death of crappy service and will be quite happy to pay for real quality. I have better things to do then manage my hosting ISP.
Save yourself some grief, go someplace else. I wish I could recommend someone, but can't.
This company is quite possibly the very worst hosting experience I have ever had. They were down constantly , made changes without informing you, customer support could not deal with the fact they did not control the DNS, and the final straw was when I decided to cancel they would not let me back in to my own website to retrieve my data without renewing for 3 months. I can can not over emphasis, GO ELSEWHERE !
Just to follow up on my previous posting dated 11/8/2005, I tested my website again at 3:29pm CST and 3:33pm CST. At 3:29pm it was taking 121 seconds to load my homepage and at 3:33pm it DID NOT load at all.
The response I received from technical support is, and I quote, "I honestly apologize for the temporary inconvinience caused to you.
I can assure you that the problem is only a temporary one and system administarors have taken necessary measures to fix it."
Again, this is typical of the response one gets to response time problems. These "temporary" problems have been going on for weeks and not once have I been told what the administrators are actually doing to remedy the situation.
Within the last 6 months IXWebhosting has lost touch with its clients. Several times during the day webpages won't load or load at a snails pace. Even their control panel is inaccessable at various times during the day. They tried to tell me it was my DSL provider but I proved that wrong to them. Upon my last complaint of pages not loading I asked for a reason why and what was being done about it.
The answer I received was, and I quote, "First of all, please, accept my apology for this inconvenience. I can perfectly understand your claims, they are fair enough. Let me explain the current situation. The system is running ok, there are no reports of problems. We are monitoring it and make all possible to prevent such things from happening in future."
This is typical of the answer you receive from their support yet nothing seems to change. My last major outage was less than a week ago and it lasted for several hours.
When I started with IXWebhosting things were much better but not now. Until they get their act straightened out I would stay away from them unless you don't mind customers not having access to your website.
At the time of writing this, 3:00pm CST, 11/8/2005 I tested my website again. Usual load time is less than 2 seconds, it took 47 seconds.
I have had no problems with iX. My site has been up and running 24x7 since my service with them, 3yrs. They have answered all my touble tickets and helped me get started in the begining. When ever I had a question about something thur email my response was either same day or next day.
Poor quality host! This Host Jury site is hosted by LunarPages - that should tell you something about reliability. I liked ixwebhosting's 30-day money back guarantee, their BBB membership, the four domains, each with its own IP #, (that is rare) and they don't allow porn web sites. I thought I had arrived in hosting nirvana. WRONG!!! From the get go my sites loaded as if in slow motion. Several times throughout the day the sites would not load at all. I must admit that the web sites were very zippy at 3AM which is a sign that too many sites are running on each server, e.g. at peak demand times all sites slow down. Responses to my complaints usually came 24 or so hours after my complaint and would go something like… “site works fine now - can't find any problem”. They were apparently checking in the wee hours of the morning. Another time they blamed downed routers on the Internet for the outages I was experiencing as my sites were loading just fine their center. Well, Duh!
Website Pulse, a web site monitoring service, warned that my site was down several times during the first few days. When my sites were on ipowerweb that occurred several times per “year”.
