Yesterday, I woke up feeling like life was too easy and I needed some abuse so I contacted IPower. I actually had been putting off a bit of house keeping with them for a couple years. I have about 100 accounts with them and manage another 50 or so for my clients.
Since IPower upgraded their system, it is now possible to manage those accounts from one login.
That sounds like a nice thing and truly is if you are adding more domains, hosting plans or servers.
But if you have a historical plan with IPower, then its the same SADSOL (song and dance shit out ‘of’ Luck) story.
Here’s the summary, of what I learned.
- You can consolidate accounts
- It is not easy.
- You will need tons of information including the email address and original credit card you registered with (or the credit card used for the latest charge)
- You may be asked to send sensitive credit information via email to IPower (a request I refused)
- You may have to repeat all of these steps many many times
- I have no idea if it will actually work after you do any or all of that
- Its probably easier to transfer your accounts to a different web hosting provider than it is to consolidate existing IPower accounts with IPower
- No one but the Billing department can help you, and they can only be reached by phone.
- No fix will happen while you wait (If it happens or if it works it will happen later)
- If you are expecting a baby soon at the time you start this process, you will not only receive baby gifts from the shower before its done, but your child will probably have made it through college first.
Ok, that last one may be an exaggeration but, I would not bet against it in Vegas.
Here are the transcripts of the beginning of my journey to discover this thing
info: You are now chatting with ‘Will G. ‘
Some D. Guy. : How can I help you?
YoursTruly: HI Will, I manage about 100 domains with Ipower. I need to consolidate them under one account and my account manager hasn’t returned my calls in over a year. How can I do this online?
YoursTruly: 
Brett: I have a client that also needs to consolidate too, so after I learn how I need to walk them through it (they have 20-40 accounts with you)
Some D. Guy : Wow ok
Some D. Guy. : Have you taken a look at the VPS premium (100 domain storage) ??
YoursTruly: No, I already have a server (actually 3). I just need to consolidate my accounts with ipower (mostly domain ownership, maybe a few hosting plans)
Some D. Guy : i think that billing would be able to do this
Some D. Guy : have you spoken w them
YoursTruly: no its not terribly easy to get people on the phone with iPower, was hoping I could do it myself so that it will get done. No offense or anything but service at Ipower is not an easy thing to work with.
YoursTruly: if you hadn’t upgraded your system I would have transitioned somewhere else a long time ago. Had some really bad experiences, but things seem to be improving in a few areas. working with people on the phone is not one of them.
Some D. Guy : Yeah i understand
Some D. Guy : You will need to wait for billing to get this done though
Some D. Guy : unfortunately I can’t do it 
YoursTruly: ok, well, I’ll try and contact them sometime when I have the time to wait on hold.
Some D. Guy : thanks
That sent me to the phone number for IPower.
I phoned the billing department and was actually put through within about 15 minutes which is extremely fast IPower.
It took me several different attempts to try and explain the situation to the representative at ipower.
One of the problems with this process at ipower is the fact that they need you to tell them everything about how you registered a given type of account with them before they can then attempt to match all those accounts up, put them into a batch, and convert them over to your future holding account. So for example I’ve registered accountants using two or three different e-mail addresses over the years. Sometimes I use a default address for websites that I will loan myself, and sometimes I’ll use a webmaster address for a customer account.
If you submit a batch for conversion you have to submit only those that are under the same e-mail address and and create a separate request for any others under different e-mail addresses.
That’s the long and short of what I learned about that.
I also learned that you have to know the credit card that you use when you registered it. Now that’s not a problem typically when you’ve just registered an account but two or three or four years later, after your credit card number is possibly change the date changed or who knows what, you may not remember the exact credit card that you use or know the number that was in force at the time you registered it because you’re credit card may have a new number this year.
Then there was the very scary aspect of the DNS settings.
Most of my ipower accounts are run through my own server. I do not use ipower for most of my server needs. That means I’ve gone in and I have set up the DNS pointing settings to direct traffic away from ipower servers and directly over to my servers. I’ve done this directly through the registrar which ipower gave me access to. By the way that happens to be Tucows.
I learned that if you change your account and consolidated in ipower they will change the DNS settings back to the default within their own system. They claim that this will not have an impact on the Tucows settings, but I don’t necessarily trust that is certain password resetting options can reset Tucows.
The bottom line is, the last thing that I want to do is test my websites and their ability to stay on line through a high-power reset based on the information I receive from a representative at ipower even one in the esteemed billing department. I’d couldn’t afford to have what my customers websites come off line because it has been reappointed to ipower away from the server that the normally reside on. Sure I can reset it, but it would be just my luck that the propagation would take two to three days instead of the typical 15 minutes. Two days or even 15 minutes could be enough for me to lose my client.
So before I will attempt to complete any of these transitions I need to test this out and see how it really works as opposed to how it hypothetically works. I’m initially going to test this with a few domains that I have that are basically parked with ipower right now. I’m going to point them at my own server and set up a dummy webpage and then attempt to consolidate them and see what happens to the DNS settings.
I wish there was an easier way, but after all we are talking about ipower.
