iPowerWeb resorts to posting fraudulent reviews on HostJury
iPowerWeb (iPower) has surprised us yet again this morning. Recently we have had several blog posts about them here on HostJury. With their company being purchased, 35% of their systems being hacked & their obvious decreasing support quality they have been fueling lawsuits against themselves on a daily basis.
However their latest attempt to attract new clients is an interesting, yet fraudulent one. Upon checking the reviews posted about iPowerWeb this morning we saw that both had been posted from an internal network at their company (gateway.phx.ipower.com) in Phoenix. This is one of the few times that a company has been so brazen that they've posted multiple reviews at the same time giving flawless ratings to themselves.
In this case they've been caught red-handed but on a number of other websites we have found their reviews have remained online. Luckily we have a very thorough auditing process & removed them immediately. It is sad to see a company as large & once renowned for it's great service to suddenly have to resort to posting fake reviews about their own services to gain traffic.
It's a new low.
I know I'm a little late in piping in here re: affiliate relationships on this site, however: David, you deserve high praise for your response to Sam's concerns (and I admire Sam's diligence).
I want everyone reading this to know that this website is the 'real deal', and you can count on the reviews here- they are impartial, completely community driven and after having visited what seems like a million such sites in the past ten years; when I discovered the launch of this website in an e107 forum 2 years or so ago, I loved what they were doing from the start. It was fresh, honest and a BIG step in the right direction. Clean, uncluttered very Zen... not a thousand flashing clicky things trying to lure you in and banner ads all going crazy for your cash.
I fully expect and WANT these guys to succeed and make money (like the craigslist and google guys) from the traffic I bring here- I think this is the RIGHT way to rate hosts. Do you?
Aren't we all trying to make a living doing what we love and providing a valuable service in the process? Here, it's done elegantly and completely without regard to the hosts financial standing in the community.
It doesn't matter how much iPowerWeb is paying to HostJury (or has in the past); when they screw customers, it costs them the business of every single person who finds this website and the reviews filed under them. They can't alter that and as we've seen in recent events, neither can sneaky employees or desperate managers there.
I love HostJury and I pray that you guys make buckets of money on every visit I make here.
I'm off to find out if Fused is as awesome as they seem. A little more $, but worth it for anyone looking to MAKE A LIVING on the web!
Sorry my contact email did not publish. It is jdrconsultant@hotmail.com any lawyers representing a client would be preferred. I need to get my business back and recoup some losses
Does anyone know the names of the plaintiffs or preferably their lawyers? I rented a faulty server, lost very important domains, websites, and have spent endless hours waiting or speaking to people who do not help me. I lost most of my internet presence not to mention an extreme amount of money............Their support acts kind but then once they get off the phone or place you on hold-that is the end of that!
I had them too, but my site kept getting hacked. When I contacted tech support, they told me to contact abuse@ipowerweb.com. How am I suppose to send them an email if my website got hacked?
I just stumbled on this. I too have been having problems with iPower/Startlogic recently. I started hosting my website with them in 2005 and was quite happy with their excellent customer service. Since the transition to this Vdeck 3.0 it has been all downhill.
I accidently deleted my image file the other night and searched in vain for the recycling bin. Not there. I called Customer Service and was told there was no longer a recycling bin and didn't i have my original images on my computer anyway? Huh? I do, but that's a lot of extra work to upload them all again.
And...when I go to upload I almost always get a 500 error stating that the page is temporarily unavailable. It's ridiculous. This used to be such good service. Figures. I'm no expert on this website stuff and it annoys me to think I have to start over with another company. Go Daddy? I guess....
We have been suffering for website and mail service malfuncition from ipower a couple of times since 2006. Recently, they are driving me really crazy. Our website and email have been down since March 16th, 2008. I called everyday and waited for half an hour even one hour, asked them to get our website and email work. I was gaven ticket number, repeat our security answer. it turned out to be nothing moved forward. This webhost is really not to be recommanded! Stay away from ipower.
I manage 9 websites - 2 are mine - all w/ipower which was ipowerweb.com. All was fine until Jan 2008 & the new vdeck. 2 of my clients sites which were transitioned failed to let me publish - that was finally resolved. I sold a new site in Jan 2008 which I published 1/14 - by 2/14 it had absolutely dissappeared - gone. I too did the phone dance, submitted tickets, resubmitted tickets, resubmitted tickets over & over & over. Their page public_html under Filemanager failed to open w/error 500 for 2 1/2 weeks, finaly was repaired 3/3 & I was able to publish. By 3/6 all was lost again & still is at this date. I am so sorry I asked my client to transfer - that was a DNS nightmare also - since I cannot in good conscience bill her for a site that has been up only 1 of 3 months & it is a business site. I have talked to ipower - found out they hired over 100 new employees - most do not know anything about any of the webdesign programs at all including ones that have been around a very long time like Frontpage. I am always asked to backup my files - luckily they are all on my computer as they surely were not on their servers anymore. At this point, cross my fingers, 8 of the sites are working. I found no way to complain to corporate headquarters about this so here I am - thinking of ditching ipower & transferring this client back to her old domain & hosting - not to mention the appology I had to make & also making me look like an idiot for suggesting ipower - where is the company I used to love?
Sam,
The url isn't obfuscated or obscured for any purpose other than organization, primarily. It makes it easier on us to manage (and even track) outgoing clicks so we can assist in seeing which aspects of our own sites are popular.
Now on the other hand it definitely does have it's added benefits as we can setup outgoing links to go to affiliate programs where possible. We've got companies who pay out the largest affiliate payouts down on the bottom, in fact there's very few up top!
We certainly don't organize our list based on affiliate payouts. Instead, 100% of our list is based on end-user reviews - if a company with an affiliate payout just happens to get near the top, bravo!
If we can pay for lunch & help users find QUALITY providers, we've killed two birds with one stone. It allows us the ability to concentrate on Hostjury as a dayjob rather than a side project, we can only expel more effort and make the site better for you, the visitor.
We have never stated that we don't use affiliate links, quite the contrary - we've had long and frank discussions about it, on WHT and on this site.
What we've said is that we will never (and we haven't, nor do we plan on) decide what hosts go where in the rankings based on affiliate payouts or whatever. Most of the hosts in the top 10 don't have affiliate systems at all, and the ones that do go there on their own merits.
As long as we're open & honest about it, which we are, have been, and plan to be for the foreseeable future there's no conflict of interest.
Chek this one too:
http://hostjury.com/host/redirect/110
And here is a tool to check the header of this redirecting page:
http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp
Well,
can anyone explain this to me?
http://hostjury.com/ads/clickthrough/12
Hostjury, which claims itself to be not involved in any affiliate linking, is redirecting to HostGator using the link above. Infact all the websites that are reviewed can be reached using some or the other redirect. Look, I do not have anything for or against any webhost. But I am really pissed off because of dishonest webhost reviews. All ..almost all the top ranking webhost blogs/sites/ sell affilate links.
I don't know whether this comment is going to appear on this site or not. You seam to be a more cleaver than the rest of the review websites. They put direct affiliate links. One can easily find them by looking at the source code of their pages. But you use redirects to do the same. Or am I mistaken? Please clarify.
To Yeah:
Well, the quickest way to help us get these posts to the top of the search engines is by users like yourself linking to them.
Tell your friends, post about it on your own websites & sure enough -- we'll get to the top.
We're certainly not out to blast them ourselves but sometimes it's hard not to -- things have gone so far downhill it's depressing!
I wasn't saying that you guys are posting good reviews earlier at the bottom of my post as "HELLO" that whole thing was from a post I put on another website that was a review site. I said that at the top but I should have clarified again at the bottom, sorry.
Yeah, I hear that. I'm just saying that when you search for reviews for Ipower on google or yahoo or whatever, you get all old reviews. Either that or the reviews are completey dishonest. This blog has all the honesty in it and there are good and bad reviews here but basically all are honest. This is ridiculous, I've been switched over to the new system Ipower is using, vdeck 3.0, and ever since for about a month now I've literally had to call them every single day with a new issue. Today the actual filemanger is down and now I'm on the phone with a customer support lady who is saying that her station is down so she can't help me right now and is putting me on hold again after waiting 45 min to speak with her, and I've been on hold again for about another 30 min and then I just got the dial tone disconnection. Most of the time when I talk to one of their support people either they can't understand anything I try to tell them or they are completely rude. For instance two days ago the guy was eating food while he was talking to me, yesterday I got a girl who was basically lying to me the whole time and trying to treat me like an idiot, and today I got this girl who's system is down and none of them have helped me. Hopefully the girl I'm talking to today can help, she's the first polite person from support that I've talked to yet. She actually took my number down so she could call me back when her system is back up. I do feal bad for the people working there who have to deal with this completely failing system and are probably getting lamblasted with calls from snotty people. That's probably why it takes so long to get through to someone there, because most of them have probably quit. Honestly though, I feal way worse for the people who are getting sucked into this nightmare of a webhost by old or false reviews they're finding on google or whatever.
"HELLO"/"ALSO" -
We don't review hosts, their score is based on reviews from their users - it's partly higher than you may expect because of older reviews before the changes at the company, when they were regarded a pretty good host.
If you disagree with their score please feel free to add one of your own.
As for the comment about the iPower-related blog posts - it's simply the fact that those posts are popular makes it appear as if we're only posting about them - we post about many things and only a very very small fraction of them are related to iPower.
Thanks for your comments.
If anyone knows how to make web pages that will show up at the top of a search on google, yahoo, etc. when someone types in ipower, or ipowerweb, or ipower review, etc. then they should make this blog on of them. Or this blog should just be reuploaded as ipower hosting review blog!
I went on a review site and posted this message just because I used to use their reviews before chosing my web hosts...
You should really look into re-reviewing your take on Ipowerweb hosting service. For one thing, the new Vdeck 3.0 has php disabled which is causing problems for alot of businesses. Secondly there is a scam they are using where they make it extremely easy in the new platform to accidently delete an entire directory, which may or may not contain your entire website, and they have removed the recycling bin so that you cannot undo your mistake. Then you have to sign up for a backup system for an additional $12 a year, not much but that's not the point, the point is that they are willing to let your entire website go down just so that they can trick you into spending 12 more dollars a year instead of advertising the benefits of their backup system and being up front about it. I was also on the phone yesterday with one of their so called "customer support" people and let me tell you, this is one area which that absolutely DO NOT outperform others. I was on the phone for over 45 minutes before speaking with anyone and once someone finaly did speak with me I gave him a simple question about php, (btw I should note that I am very patient and give a postive and polite attitude when I speak with them) he then put me on hold to search for an answer, supposedly, so I then waited another 25 minutes before the on hold song stopped playing and I got the "please hang up and try again" message! This has happened more than once. Their customer support is so bad that most of the time when I speak with someone there I know more about the system than they do. As far as reliability, they automatically switched everyone over to the new platform while the old one is still working before they even fixed the bugs in the new 3.0 system. I admit back in the day, 2006, besides the mediocre support, they weren't all that bad actually but that was then. Now, there a sinking ship with bad support and a bad system and until or unless that changes no one should be suckered in to this broken mechine by out of date reviews. This is how people lose business, by investing their time into cardboard cutout companies. I hope you take the time to consider how it makes this site look giving good reviews to bad business.
Let me tell you a little something about ipowerweb. I power web is based out of phoenix Arizona. They have 3 companies before the merger with endurance corp. The 3 are ipowerweb, startlogic and dot 5 hosting. All three companies have better business bureau complaints up the Wahoo! Just recently 3 on your side which is a new station in phoenix Arizona went over to the ipower and startlogic head quarters because there was a huge complaint against startlogic web design. You can view the article here http://www.azfamily.com/news/3oys/stories/KTVK3OYS20071210_web-site-Startlogic.2b9cd5d.html. Ipower, startlogic and dot 5 hosting don’t design websites. They out source to a company called design var in California. So if you buy a website lets say at 600 dollars. Ipower, startlogic and dot 5 keep 300 and design var keeps 300.00. So basically your web design is only $300.00 and you paid $600.00 (and it takes 2 years to get your site finished)
They recently started doing website optimization and search engine optimization. They do very basic stuff. All they do is meta tags that’s it. I don’t think you want to spend 2 to 4 thousand just on keywords. Im sure you can Google all kinds of complaints about their seo.
Getting back to endurance international. Endurance international is a company that buys hosting companies that are basically going out of business. They have biz land, powweb, a bunch others and now the lucky 3, ipower, startlogic and dot 5. Im sure endurance didn’t do enough research on the 3 companies. Good luck with that endurance.
Be careful who you choose for internet services because it could result in a loss of money and a pain on your butt. Always look at review sites and research.
The Host Review Guy
I keep my site on their server for 7 or more years. They are not perfect, but not so bad as many people say here. They need to improve phone service and develop more clear and logical management over the control panel(this is probably why they moved me to the new server recently with V3 deck), but looking back I can not say I had a lot of down time with them. I do not switch because I am not sure if I can get anything better for about $10/month for my small business. Where could you see good responsive phone customer service novadays?
I have been on hold over 1 hour as I write this
December 30, 2007
I have been with ipowerweb for over 7 years and had 6 sites with them.
They don\'t like to answer the phone and they never have.
The guy who said they won\'t help you with a list of accounts is so right. I had about 25 domain names and they could not give me a list! I went with my own hosting at hostgator and was amazed at fast and helpful they were. I must of called them 20 times the first month, ( I was installing lots of new tools, I never used since before.) Right now I am migrating my last 2 site and I can\'t ftp, they changed platforms and the login for the ftp isn\'t working! I guess I will hang up now. I hate these guys so much. They charged me for a bunch of domains I transfered and I gave them 90 days notice and it took me and the credit card company 6 months to get it resolved! Well it has been over 1 hour now and I think no one is there.
TYPICAL of ipowerweb.
Hey if you never need anything from them, then go ahead and use them. Good luck!
Writer and website-designer
Bay Area, Ca