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Date Submitted :
March 21st, 2010
Length of time hosted by this company :
More than 3 years
Overall Rating :
2 out of 5
Reliability :
1 out of 5
Support :
2 out of 5
Pricing :
5 out of 5
Verdict :
I've been with Westhost for five until recently switching. Ignore the good reviews of Westhost that you find online, the company was recently sold to a larger outfit and things have gone down hill really fast.
Their prices are really low, but you'll pay for what you get. If you're running anything in the way of dynamic content, stay away. Their live help is quick to answer online, but all they'll give you is ambiguous responses that don't solve anything. We're on a VPS that has been very slow for about a week, and all they can say is that "the sever is under a load." When asked what they're doing to correct the problem, they just say "our technicians are working on it."
The only good feature about Westhost is the price. If you've got a hobby site, they're probably a good fit. If you depend on your websites for income, Westhost will cost you a lot of money in downtime and poor response to problems.
This company is junk now. Many peoples websites are down for a week now. Ours is on and off for a week, and we are better than most. Some companies are paying for backup, we pay 29.95 a month, but it TURNS OUT THE BACKUPS WERE NOT DONE. If you don't believe how horrible these people are, just read the }outage} forums on forums dot westhost dot com
We used to love Westhost, but they have gone way downhill. Their latest outage of over 10 hours today has cost us thousands of dollars. They used to be reliable, but I guess they grew too big and now can't keep up. Sporatic downtime. Not acceptable...we will be moving quickly!
BUYER BEWARE! I was impressed by their marketing of Wordpress hosting packages. I signed up for a hosting account for 6-10 small domains. My traffic was less than 1% of plan and disk space about the same. After their money-back period expired I began getting highload messages from the tech-geeks. Impossible considering how small these domains were and little traffic. It's really just a BAIT AND SWITCH plan where they want you to upgrade your account to one of their shared VPS plans which costs far more. I CAN NOT RECOMMEND this company. In all of my years of dealing with internet businesses, this is the worst. The refused to give me a refund when I gave up on their customer support and transfered my domains to other companies without any issue.
When I called inquiring about their service. I told them that I had a custom Miva script, and the rep said that it would all come set up with the necessary files to run miva. When I called their tech support they said that they don't provide support for custom scripting. They told me would have to upgrade to business pro plan. I can understand them not providing support for a custom script, but I wasn't asking for that was just asking for them to provide me with advertised tools be be able to run miva. Their tech phone support provides terrible support also. If you are researching hosting, be very warned about starting a hosting plan for this. They did not make any effort at all to keep me as a customer. All they would have had to have done is have one of their server admin put the necessary miva conf files in my cgi-bin and my script would have ran their. Now I am just running away, and you should also!!!
It will be coming up on 1 year that I have been with WestHost. I originally went with them for the price, and the guarantee that I could work on CPU intensive compiling within my server without having my account suspended.
I am using the Personal Value package, and today am upgrading to their Winter Special (for additional bandwidth and disk space).
I primarily use this service while at work, as such, it is important to have a CP that isn't setup with a port number by default. I tried two other providers recently, and neither of them had a CP that would work while at my job (port blocking *see last paragraph*).
Lately, I have been tinkering with PHP and SQL, and as such, have made some mistakes, and destroying some of my databases, as well as a few failed attempts at backing up and recovering the databases myself. In any case, these were issues that I caused because of my lack of knowledge, and the support team at WestHost was top notch in every case (more than 20 "oops" moments) to get me back up and running.
On a side note, I decided to look at, and briefly moved to MediaTemple, and GoDaddy for their VDS packages. This package is cheaper than WestHost, as far as what you get on the server, but as far as support is concerned, neither of those measured up to WestHost.
I would recommend this service for a novice through advanced users, who are looking for World Class Support, and the best all around server plans in the industry.
I've been with westhost for a couple of years now. I have had a good experience with them. The couple of times that I have contacted tech support, they were helpful and knowledgable. I have about 8 sites on their server. Mostly static html, soms PHP and Javascript. I've only seen my sites go down for a short period of time a while back. I was with registerfly before westhost and have had a much better experience with westhost and would recommend them.
I have a shared VPS Business Value package. The download speed of the sitr is v v slow on their servers. I contacted westhost about this and they started to blame the HTML of the site. However, their server performed differently at different times of the day. USA morning time there is no chance your site will download fast, many times my site timed out and wouldn't connnect at all. They are cheap with lots of storage space and transfer of data, however they must be ramming their servers with sites if it takes 2 mins to download a web page on a broadband connection.
They also suspended my site without even informing me of the shut down - very rude.
Here is our case after WestHost upgrade to 3.0 platform – read our ticket below. We have to replace our index page with a UNDERCONSTRUCTION page because if we don’t most of our PHP code will display. Hope our experience will help you!
My 1st ticket
Our site was down yesterday. We have chatted live with Keara and Clay to solve this problem but our site is still down. Please inform us what is going on and when our site will be back to normal. Our business has stopped since yesterday because the site was completely down.
My 2nd ticket
I have lived chat and created ticket ask for support to solve our problem but got no response with the ticket we created and our site is still down. We can not wait any more. We want to our money back!
Westhost reply
Thank you for contacting WestHost. I apologize for the delay in response. I'm sorry to hear your site is down. It looks like your account was upgraded to our 3.0 platform. There have been 3 email sent out to the email address on file prior to the upgrade to let you know what applications were going to be upgraded. You can still log into our Client Upgrade Information Tool at
https://v3upgrade.west-datacenter.net/whlogin.php to see what was upgraded. Even if the PHP version was not upgraded, there was a new installation of your existing version. That means any setting you had in the PHP.ini file would have been set back to the defaults.
We try to make sure that you have adequate information regarding any upgrades we might perform so that you or your developer might prepare for any changes. It looks like you will want to have a the developer who designed your site take a look at what settings they need changed to make the site function with the new installation of PHP. I know that PHP is working properly, because you can get to this page:
http://yoursite.com/phpinfo.php. If PHP wasn't working, that page would not display. The problem lies in the coding for your website and the necessary changes that may need to be made in the php.ini file.
Please let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.
Best regards,
Keara Balls
Technical Support Representative
WestHost Inc.
Phone: 1-800-222-2165
Fax: 435-755-3449
My 3rd ticket
we had paid one year in advance for our account for second bill. Our site has been down for 2 days. We have chatted live but the problem has not been resolved. We created 2 tickets to ask for support in getting our site back and get no response.
The site is completely down therefore our business has stopped because of inattentiveness from Westhost. We want our money back!
Westhost reply
I apologize for the inconvenience of your site being unreachable to you. When I go to the URL, the site seems to come up just fine for me. I see a white "under construction" page. That page was not put there by WestHost, so I would have to assume it was put there either by you or your developer. Are you still unable to reach your site?
As for you request for a refund, refunds are only available during the first 30 days of your initial order. At no other time is a refund available.
If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me again.
Best regards,
Reed Cardon
Technical Support Representative
WestHost Inc.
Phone: 1-800-222-2165
Fax: 435-755-3449
You will notice that the old reviews are positive. They used to be a great host, but in recent times have changed. My site speed has rapidly declined as they over sell their bandwidth. Every attempt to fix the issue was riddled with excuses and the worst thing is if you read their policies, NO REFUNDS. So even though their service has declined you don't get your money back! Stay clear of them and save yourself the time, money, and hassle!
I host and maintain a site there. I use MivaMerchant to sell CDs. I have been there 3 or 4 years now.
OK the price is not the best around. I stay there because it's all set up and I don't want to go through the hassle of moving it. That said, I had to call tech help to set up MivaMerchant and they really helped me. No complaints, up and running and selling. I don't really like MiveMerchant- there's not enough customization and what there is is hard to do; it looks "old" and sort of feels old, but it does the job.
The site is up and stays up. Just static HTML + javascript so there you go.
They host your pages. They answer emails and the phone. They are not *shady* in any sense of the word. That's about it; nothing to complain about.
Westhost used to be great, but then I decided to participate in their beta upgrade program. Now they erroneously show in their files that I am at 152% disk use capacity when I'm at around 50% (which one of their techs confirmed). However, instead of helping to fix the program, one of their sales rep tried to get me to sign up for a more expensive plan--and then he changed my ticket to "resolved"--yes, telling me that I should upgrade my plan helps resolve my problem. I am switching soon.
I have been with westhost since 06 so I assume since their 05 problems they definatelly did major uodates, as I read below how terrible they were. I ma dedicated server with them, no problems at all. If I need anyting they have live 24 hours chat so I can chat at any time I want.
Disadvantage: They have their own control panel so it was little difficult to adjust. But on the other hand, no hacker attacks. Also adding more domains on your curent hosting package is limited and of course their dedicated prices are high.
Advanatage: Great suport and so far I had no downtime in any way.
Never had any real problems with them, anytime I called tech support they where quick to fix the problem. Have only been down once, but they had good reason and gave refund. There OK in my Book.
Our site was down for 50 hours August 3-5, 2005. Again for 2 hours on the 8th and 3 hours on the evening of the 8th. Absolutely unacceptable performance. Cost us thousands of dollars.
