here’s a gem of a broken situation from Ipower in regards to registering a new domain.

I recently tried to register a domain from Ipower under an existing account.

Why you might ask?  Because I’m an idiot that likes punishment.

Instead of getting a message stating that my domain had been registered, I get a message stating that I do not have enough credits to process a registration.

I did NOT try to pay for the registration with ‘credits’.  I did try and pay for it with a working credit card, which prompted the follow up question, “WTF IPower?”

Then, I tried to buy the domain a second time and got the same message, but notice at the top of the message it shows that I have 2 Outstanding Domain Credits.

Then I checked my email and I had 2 transaction confirmations for registration but they did not list the domain name I had ordered.

Ergo IPOWER took my money and didn’t register the domain!

So it looks like I have a IPower hold situation in my future. 

Tip to the wise, don’t do business with IPower.

If you are into masochism then I highly recommend IPower Hosting.  They run one of the best hosting companies around designed to ruin your day and provide less than adequate service while trying to overcharge you at every turn. 

Today, their surprise attack came in the form of an automated email informing me that they would charge me $8.99 for domain privacy on an account that was renewed a month ago for domain registration and that had domain privacy specifically turned off!

To top things off, when I asked a help representative why I was being threatened with the new charge, she indicated that I had already been charged for it!

There are times, when I just think its impossible to win with these guys.  They just seem to make stuff completely up in their billing system.

The Help Representative from IPower Hosting: Hi Brett. My name is Melanie, how are you today?

Yours Truly: Hi, I just received an email from iPower indicating that I would be charged for something I am not enrolled in.

Yours Truly: I received this message

Yours Truly: Your “someplace.net” domain name has an August renewal date and is enrolled in our domain privacy service, which protects your identity by keeping your contact information from being published online. To ensure that someplace.net remains protected, we will automatically initiate a one-year renewal of the domain privacy service on August 29. We will charge $8.99 to the credit card we have on file for your account to renew this annual subscription. To review or update your credit card information, log in at: http://www.ipower.com/secureControl/EditCCInfo.bml ****************** INSTRUCTIONS FOR OPTING OUT ****************** If you do not want us to renew your domain privacy service on August 29, please log into your Support Console and submit a new request, indicating the domain from which you wish to remove domain privacy. BE SURE TO SUBMIT THIS REQUEST BY WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 27, 5:00pm EDT, so we can process your opt-out request in time: http://www.ipower.com/member/sconsole/index.bml

Yours Truly: My domain someplace.net is not enrolled in domain privacy. I specifically opted out of it over a month ago.

The Help Representative from IPower Hosting: May I place you on hold while I review your question? It should take about 3-4 minutes. I’ll be back as quickly as I can.

The Help Representative from IPower Hosting:

Yours Truly: sure

The Help Representative from IPower Hosting: Thank you for holding.

The Help Representative from IPower Hosting: To protect your account from unauthorized changes, can you please verify for me the answer to the Security Question:

The Help Representative from IPower Hosting: What is your mother’s maiden name?

Yours Truly: ‘some name’

The Help Representative from IPower Hosting: Thank you for the authentication.

The Help Representative from IPower Hosting: I have checked your account and the Domain Privacy is already renewed for your domain.

Yours Truly: OK, well that raises 2 or 3 problems.

Yours Truly: 1. Why does my domain central show that it is turned off?

Yours Truly: 2. why am I receiving an email to charge me for it in 3 days?

Yours Truly: 3. if already renewed, why is my account showing an expiration date of 8/1

Yours Truly: correction 8/1/2008

The Help Representative from IPower Hosting: I have checked in the payment history and it is already paid.

The Help Representative from IPower Hosting: It is due on August 1, 2009.

Yours Truly: Yeah, I remember renewing it, but why am I being threatened with renewal again, along with turning on a service I don’t want and have turned off?

Yours Truly: you can see the email yourself above ^

The Help Representative from IPower Hosting: We have to ask our specialist to turn it off.

Yours Truly: can you clarify more? Does that mean, even after I turn off domain privacy on domain central, I then have to ask a specialist to do it?

Yours Truly: I have close to 100 accounts with you and that would be a major pain in the rear.

The Help Representative from IPower Hosting: Yes.

Yours Truly: Your serious! Then why do you even set the option up in domain central if the button doesn’t work?

The Help Representative from IPower Hosting: We have to tun off from backend.

The Help Representative from IPower Hosting: I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.

Yours Truly: So is that why I was charged for domain privacy when I renewed, even though I specifically turned it off? How do I get a refund?

The Help Representative from IPower Hosting: It is already enabled and we cannot refund it.

Yours Truly: Well, I specifically disabled it before renewing.

Yours Truly: I want a refund. Its not my fault that you enabled it when someone forgot to do some work on the backend a month ago.

The Help Representative from IPower Hosting: Yes, I understand.

Yours Truly: So please process my refund.

The Help Representative from IPower Hosting: It is already enabled and we cannot refund it.

Yours Truly: You charged me for something that I did not order, specifically removed. You owe me the money, its your problem that you enabled it not mine.

Yours Truly: So get me a refund or I will file a complaint with the Attorney General.

Yours Truly: Its illegal to charge someone for something they did not order.

At that point, the help desk representative almost started to become helpful.  But ultimately, she punted telling me that a ticket would be created in the system to solve the problem, but would not tell me whether that involved giving me a refund or not.

Plus, it has now been 48 hours since that ticket was created and I have heard absolutely nothing from IPower on this issue.  I might as well be playing golf under Orlando golf rules, where by you automatically add 20 strokes to your game if you are under the age of 62 or have not spent more than $5,000 at an approved Orlando theme park.

So first IPower raised their domain renewals from $6.50 to $6.85.  No big deal.

Then they doubled their rates, by charging people $7-8 for WhoIs privacy protection when it used to be included with domain purchases and renewals.  Ouch, Who-is going to pay for that after getting it free (and still getting it free at many other hosts!)

They separately upped the rates on .US domains also from $6.50 – $6.85 to $15.95.  Ouch that smarts!

Well, this week when I went to renew a few domains, I noticed that without any apparent notice or warning, they had upped the rates on their regular domains (.com, .net and others) to $7.5.

Now, I’m pretty sure the price of gas has nothing to do with the delivery of my domain renewal notices, so I can’t see any reason why they would raise, re-raise and raise again their rates in about a 6 month period, unless there was some bigger problem in the company. 

That’s my best guess!  If you have a better guess, let’s hear it. 

In the meantime, domain rates are still not terribly expensive, but if you own a large number of them, you might have to consider moving your domains elsewhere or taking out a free mortgage loan or something to pay up on the renewal rates.

So you may have followed my recent problems with IPower.  Their site has a bug that prevents existing account holders from registering a new domain.

See

On Hold with IPower for 2 hours

and

Complaint – IPower Still Can’t Process New Orders Correctly

and tangent

Consolidating Accounts at IPower Very Hard

Well they seem to have a more serious issue that compounds this problem.

My Domain Availability Search was compromised.  When I attempted to register a new domain and register it through IPower, that domain was subsequently purchased by a domainer that owns over 1.5 million other web domain addresses.

I was not trying to purchase anything special, just a spelling variation to redirect to my site.  In fact, when I ran into a problem with the order, I did not do any additional searches on their system fearing the worst. 

So this domainer guy picked up the domain just a day or two after I attempted to register it through IPower before being thwarted by their broken buggy system.

It is a big problem, when they are unable to process an order.  Its not like they are some mom and pop hosting company using used cisco equipment that needs a reboot, we are talking about simple website functionality.

On the internet, it is a MASSIVE problem when the security of your transactions are jeopardized.

I had my suspicions about IPower in the past, but had not been able to confirm the problem.  I always took the precaution of ordering immediately, anything that I searched for.

The search was a required step in the ordering process.

When their buggy system didn’t allow me to place my order someone else found a way to view my search and make the purchase themselves, probably hoping to take my traffic or resell the domain to me at a $1000 plus markup.

Here’s my recent email to IPower

. . . . .

That said this evening I learned of an even bigger problem with your domain registration process. It would appear that it is not secure.
The domain that I attempted to register multiple times while your system was not working was registered by a domainer (someone who owns over 1.5 million domains).
It is not a typical domain that I attempted to register and not something a domainer would care about unless they knew that someone wanted to register that specific domain.
There have been rumors floating on the internet that your domain ordering process may be compromised either hacked on the website itself or compromised by someone within your company. This is the first direct confirming evidence that I have seen regarding this problem.
Now, in the past, I would not search a domain on your site to check availability unless I was prepared to buy it as soon as availability was confirmed.
However, since your site is compromised AND I am unable to purchase domains on the first try (as of this evening 12:12 am 5/14). I can no longer use your service for this initial phase in building websites (that is acquiring domains).
I do hope you get it fixed, but I have to go somewhere safer for business where my privacy is not in jeopardy.

My Advice to people considering the registration of a domain. 

DO NOT USE IPOWER AT ANY COST

Fortunately, in this IPower did make things easier as they have raised their prices.  First from $6.50 to $6.85 (no big deal) and then more importantly, by adding the cost of $8.99 for Privacy Protection, a service they used to provide for free.

This is a quick update to the previous article titled – IPower Still Can’t Process New Orders Correctly .

Since that chat session, I had to call IPower back again this evening.  This time for a clients account.  I called in and was on hold for 45 minutes.  I got through to someone and they hung up on me after 2 minutes.  They couldn’t seem to spell my domain name (in their system) to pull up my account in the system even after I gave them my username, password, security word and last four of my credit card.

So then I had to call back in.  This time I was on hold for 75 minutes (actually went in, pushed 3 for billing) but the phone was picked up by someone else at 25 minutes who was not billing.  They did me the nice favor of putting me back in the hold que at the beginning!

Fifty minutes later a person in billing actually picks up the phone.  They slug through trying to get my domain name right.  Finally get it after a few minutes and then they are able to confirm that my request to consolidate my customers accounts had failed.

Four days ago, I had requested that twenty some parked domains should be consolidated to our primary domain and hosting plan with Ipower.  We had these twenty domains as mis-spelled versions of the domain, redirected to the primary domain.  Having twenty some individual accounts, 1 for each domain is a real pain to renew each year, hence the consolidation request.

The rep was trying to be helpful and put me on hold again.

Fortunately, it was just for about 2 minutes.  He came back and tells me that he will work to manually consolidate all the accounts now, as I  . . ..

you guessed it!

Wait on hold some more!

Now don’t get me wrong.  At this point, I’ll suffer through another 5-10 minutes of IPower’s hold music on loop (the same techno song on repeat, not even the full song, just a 60 second loop or something) as long as I can get my customer’s accounts consolidated.

So in the meantime, I write this and a few other articles and shop around for a cell phone with a GPS system and a great video recording capability.  (looking at the Nokia N95)

Description Of Problem

When logged into my account with Ipower, I try to order a brand new domain to add to my existing account.  The ordering process system tries to force me to create a brand new account (while logged in) instead of adding the domain to my existing account.  This error pops up regardless of the path that I tried to process the registration.  It occurred in both IE7 and Firefox although the video only shows firefox.

Below is the chat transcript from my session with IPower. 

Welcome to IPOWER! You are number 1 in the queue. Please be prepared to answer your Security Question when we begin chatting. To enhance our security protocols, we’ll need you to provide the answer to your Security Question at the beginning of our conversation. If you have not yet set your Security Question and Answer, please log into your account now to set it up. Thank you. Please hold for the next available operator to respond.

You are now chatting with ‘Ipower Sales Rep’

Ipower Sales Rep: How can I help you?

IPower Customer with Complaint: Hi name edited out to protect Sales Guy,

IPower Customer with Complaint: I’m trying to register some new domains to add to one of my accounts.

IPower Customer with Complaint: Your ordering system has been broken for a couple months (I’ve even been interviewed by the Press in Phoenix about it) and I’m trying to figure out when it will be fixed so that I can place a new order.

Ipower Sales Rep: I apologize for the inconveniene.

Ipower Sales Rep: I can order them for you.

IPower Customer with Complaint: I manage about 100 domains through iPower, and I’m trying to keep all my new domains under my existing account.

IPower Customer with Complaint: I’d prefer for your system to be fixed.

IPower Customer with Complaint: Do you know when that might happen? Its been broken since February.

IPower Customer with Complaint: I was interviewed in March.

Ipower Sales Rep: I was unaware of that problem.

Ipower Sales Rep: I have ordered myself and have customers that have done it.

IPower Customer with Complaint: That’s partly why I’m chatting. I assumed that since the problem had been reported in the papers that IPower was aware.

Ipower Sales Rep: Today in fact.

IPower Customer with Complaint: Usually I can get an order through on the 4th or 5th attempt.

IPower Customer with Complaint: Today, I’ve tried about 10 times and it just seems to get worse.

IPower Customer with Complaint: I can take a video of it and send it to you if you like, but I’d like to see it fixed or I’ll have to take my business somewhere else.

Ipower Sales Rep: I am unable to fix it from here in sales.

IPower Customer with Complaint: Who is responsible for the sales portion of the website?

Ipower Sales Rep: I will connect you with the support department and try to get a supervisor on the line to assist you with htis.

IPower Customer with Complaint: I tried billing but had no luck there. I can’t get through to support

IPower Customer with Complaint: thanks

Ipower Sales Rep: I will connect you.

Please wait while I transfer the chat to the best suited site operator.

You are now chatting with ‘IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint’

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: Hi Customer with Complaint. My name is IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint, how are you today?

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: How can I help you today?

IPower Customer with Complaint: Hi Ipower Support Rep,

IPower Customer with Complaint: I was just transfered from sales

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: Okay.

IPower Customer with Complaint: Since February your new web site setup continually errors out when I attempt to place new orders.

IPower Customer with Complaint: In March a reporter from your local Phoenix newspaper even interviewed me about the problem.

IPower Customer with Complaint: It seems to be getting worse, and I’m trying to figure out if you are even aware of the problem.

IPower Customer with Complaint: I’d like to see it fixed, because I can’t place orders for new domains.

IPower Customer with Complaint: (note on that last) I usually can get an order to go through after 4-5 repeated attempts, tonight I tried over 10 times and it just gets stuck.

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: Your domain name ‘domain-mentioned-in-chat-form-session.com’ is associated with the account ‘username’ and the hosting plan for the account is Domain parking account which is of free of cost.

IPower Customer with Complaint: I have about 100 domains with you.

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: In this plan you will not be able to use any hosting account features.

IPower Customer with Complaint: They are not under the same account

IPower Customer with Complaint: hold on, you do not understand

IPower Customer with Complaint: I’m trying to add a domain to the account with the home address of different-domain-with-multiple-domains-already-on-it.com

IPower Customer with Complaint: when I signed into chat, I mentioned the ‘domain-mentioned-in-chat-form-session.com.com account thinking it was the primary. the chat session info is incorrect.

IPower Customer with Complaint: I have 6 other domains under the different-domain-with-multiple-domains-already-on-it.com account

IPower Customer with Complaint: I’d like to have about 100 there, but consolidation under your system is extremely problematic for legacy accounts with or without hosting plans with you.

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: Domain ”domain-mentioned-in-chat-form-session.com.com’ is associated with the account ‘mavenmap’.

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: Could you please let me know where exactly yo wish to add your domain name ‘ different-domain-with-multiple-domains-already-on-it.com’?

IPower Customer with Complaint: forget about that domain, that is not the problem

IPower Customer with Complaint: ok, let me try again.

IPower Customer with Complaint: different-domain-with-multiple-domains-already-on-it.com is the account that has the home symbol on it in your system. I’m assuming that this means its the primary account under the login name of brettbum

IPower Customer with Complaint: I am trying to purchase a new domain (actually several) to add to this account.

IPower Customer with Complaint: I already have 6 additional domains on this same account, that I have ordered over the last 60 days.

IPower Customer with Complaint: They were difficult to order and it took me about 5 times per domain before your system would process the order. (the errors that I’m referring to and the same errors that I was interviewed about when the Press wrote up a nice article about the problems that IPower has with its customers).

IPower Customer with Complaint: Are you telling me that I can no longer add domains to this account? If yes, that’s all I need to know. I can go do business else where. If not, then lets talk about getting your system fixed.

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: You can add multiple number of domains under your current account.

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: I have checked your account ‘username2′ and noticed that the account is set as Domain parking account, where you can only park the domain names.

IPower Customer with Complaint: no, that’s the problem the system is not processing orders. I’d love to but its not working

IPower Customer with Complaint: What does this “I have checked your account ‘username2′ and noticed that the account is set as Domain parking account, where you can only park the domain names.” have to do with buying more domains for parking?

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: In order to add the domain name from the account, please follow the steps given below:

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: 1. Log into the vDeck at http://www.ipower.com/controlpanel/index.bml with your vDeck username and password.

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: 2. Click on  ‘Add Registered Domain to Account’ under Domain.

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: 3. Enter the domain name you wish to add and click on ‘Add Domain’ button.

IPower Customer with Complaint: you are telling me things I already know.

IPower Customer with Complaint: I’m telling you that your system does not work when I do that.

IPower Customer with Complaint: Should I send you the video?

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: Okay sure.

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: Are you trying to register the domain name or trying to add the registered domain name?

IPower Customer with Complaint: give me your email address or I can post it online and send you a link

IPower Customer with Complaint: here’s the news article btw http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/business/articles/0306biz-ipower0306.html

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: Okay.

IPower Customer with Complaint: trying to register a new domain name

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: You can e-mail us at support@ipower-inc.com .

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: Okay.

IPower Customer with Complaint: attention who?

IPower Customer with Complaint: I’ve sent emails there before. they get lost.

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: You can register the domain name by going to the URL:

IPower Support Rep responding to Complaint: http://www.ipower.com/product/domainRegistration.bml

IPower Customer with Complaint: yeah, that doesn’t work either

IPower Customer with Complaint: tried that about 6 times, tried hitting the Domains button and then going through the New Registration link.

IPower Customer with Complaint: Let me know when you want to hear about how this doesn’t work?

IPower Customer with Complaint: btw, just tried it again while doing the video and it did not work

IPower Customer with Complaint: OK, look I feel like you are waisting my time, when I’m trying to help you.

IPower Customer with Complaint: I will render the video and send it to ipower’s support email. In the meantime, I place my order with someone else because you do not seem very helpful.

IPower Customer with Complaint: I wish you and Ipower luck with this and hopefully won’t have to read about you in the paper again nor give another negative interview.

Your chat transcript will be sent to my-email-address@yahoo.com at the end of your chat.

Note: I tried to call in initially.  After waiting on hold for 20 minutes I tried chat.  I might as well have pulled my optical mouse through my nose and out my ears and returned it with a computer rental absorbing the equipment damage on my credit card for all the good the chat help did me. 

This is a question that is central to anyone that wants to make a smart decision in choosing a hosting company.  If you are going to have a hosting company, eventually you will need to deal with them on the phone.  I don’t care what their up time is or how good they are technically, you will have to talk to them some day.

When you call the experience you receive and the time you spend can quickly change your perspective on who is good and who is affordable. 

If you get a hosting deal that costs you $50 a year for hosting expenses, but requires that you spend 8 hours a quarter on the phone waiting on hold or getting transferred around, and your time is worth $10 an hour (just a low example) then this hosting company would actually cost you $50 a year + $80 per quarter or $380 per year!

For that money, you could lease your own dedicated server!

So here is an excerpt from a discussion forum thread where a number of people are trying to share their experiences and assessments of hosting companies based entirely on the subjective view of how good their phone support is.

Obviously, this should not be your only criteria for choosing, but it definitely should not be neglected when you make your choice. 

I have used several hosters. Currently on Aplus.net and Godad, which have phone ssupport, and mediocre service.
My LIST So Far:
- Liquidweb: a very impressive company with good, 24 hour support. But to get dedicated IP, you need to go with their $25/month plan. Yikes!
- NewIdeaHosting.com. A very small company. My call was returned, and the owner chatted with me for an hour on the phone! Plans have small bandwidth, but promises No overselling, and personalized attention. Extra $5 for dedi IP. He specializes in Small business sites, and small eCommerce sites. He has only 250 accounts, on 3 servers. He rents servers from the Equinox data center of Chicago. Seems exceptionaly honest.
- MegaHosters. Excellent phone support and WHT reviews. But company was taken over by another company, and so may well go downhill in future. Another problem: uses Hsphere.
- Steadfast. Has a good rep on WHT, and seems impressive. Tech answered the phone immediately, but they say they prefer emails. Sales phone has limited hours. Good price on $20 SSL. But, uses Hshhere.
- JodoHost 24 hour phone. But, uses Hsphere. An Indian company with office in Florida, and good rep. I like the idea of outsourcing phone support, if it makes it more available and affordable. But, the accent on the phone was very hard for me to understand, so maybe this might not work…..
- Hostgator. Yes, it’s a big overseller, but seems to get good reviews/results anyway, and good phone support.
- ? ThePrimeHost ?? Mostly good WHT reviews; some dissenters. Site says 24hour phone, but when I called on several nights, no one ever answered… 

OnGoing List of Good Hosters with Good TELEPHONE tech support – Web Hosting Talk – The largest, most influential web hosting community on the Internet

Hope that helps get you started on your path to choosing the best host.  If you have a hosting company experience that you would like to share drop us a comment.  We’d be happy to cite your example and give your site credit in the form of a plug with a mention and a link. 

In the mean time, try and keep yourself sane as you work to deal with your hosting company.  At the end of the day its just business, not personal, don’t let a hosting company representative push you over the edge or before you know it you’ll find yourself drinking away your web profits and end up in drug rehab or something.  Keep yourself happy, sane and balanced no matter how bad your host is!

I do not utilize GoDaddy hosting services on a regular basis, but they are very popular due to their advertising with sexy women that are scantily clad and cheap prices.  What internet nerd doesn’t like cheap sexy women?

Well, as anyone might guess there is more to life than cheap sexy women, and that is pretty much the rule proved out by GoDaddy.

if you work with their site, you will rapidly learn that the interface is extremely cluttered and it is very difficult to navigate to any systems or actions once you are logged into what they call a ‘control panel’. 

BTW – GoDaddy’s control panel is not at all like CPanel, one of the most popular hosting management software programs that comes as a standard service with hosting pacakages.

The more you try and do anything on GoDaddy the more irksome all of the GoDaddy ads for additional services and upsales become. 

I will give them credit in that they seem to only advertise their own services as opposed to say mixing in Vista Print coupons or something else on their site with their own products and services.  (Exception to this rule being all forms of advertising with Adwords and Yahoo!)

Why on earth would a person want to buy even more hosting with GoDaddy when managing an existing hosting plan with them is so cumbersome in the first place?

I do not know the answer to that unless some people just happen to like High Maintenance Hosts like they like cheap sexy high maintenance women.

This week I have had a very strange experience with InMotion Hosting.  The strange experience with InMotion Hosting is that I have a complaint about their service.

I’ve been with them for several years and never had a complaint before (if you don’t count the time they turned off my hosting account without telling me when I had a memory hog wordpress plugin installed for a couple days).

This is a legitimate complaint.  Since last Friday my virtual server with Inmotion Hosting has been down, crashing or partially crashed about every other day.  From Friday until about Sunday, my email was not working.  I was taking the weekend off and only noticed that I was getting terribly much spam on my treo forwarded from one of my webmaster accounts.

When I checked in on things Sunday, I confirmed that the email server was definitely down and it was not a problem I could fix myself by restarting the email server and POP3 server.

Then a couple days later the email was down again and this time the database server which runs MySQL (and all of my blogs) was down plus, I could not access CPANEL on any of my accounts nor my server.

Today, one of my domains on the server (but not all) has the same problem.  No email, no database, no ftp, and no site up on the web.

The Complaint about InMotion Hosting

Here’s where I have a complaint.  I called to get the issue fixed.  Hold time this week has been in the 30 minute range, which is atypical as holdtime is normally in the 30 second range.  I waited to get someone for about 30 minutes.  When I finally got them, they could see that there was a problem, but they could not get tier 2 support to work on it.  That’s atypical as well. Normally Tier 1 can figure out a problem and if they do not have permission to do the fix, someone in tier 2 is ready and gets it done in minutes.

Today was different.  I was told that they were short staffed due to illness and my ticket would not be assigned for 30 minutes.  I could understand that as I get sick like anyone.

However 2 hours later my websites were still down and 3 hours later the whole thing went down including email and my primary domain.

When I called in at the 3 hour mark (when my site went nuclear), I was on hold for about 10 minutes again before I spoke with anyone.  By the time they got on the line, and researched my ticket, another 5 minutes, the site had come back up.

That was great, glad to have the site back up, but at this point I wanted some answers.  I had no information as to why my site had been down today or any other day and at this point my confidence in InMotion is severely shaken.  Things were looking ugly, (not IPower ugly) but too ugly to ignore.

So at this point, I’m now waiting for a written response from tier 2 as to what is causing the repeated down time on my server.  I need written because that is what the tier 1 rep recommended and apparently there were no Tier 2 reps handy to respond verbally and save everyone some time.

So now I sit back and wait and hope that my server stays up and wonder when I might respect a response as to what happened, and more importantly how the problem can be prevented in the future.  Its a weird thing having problems with InMotion.  I hope that this is isolated as I do not even want to think about having to make a move and find a hosting company that has been as good as Inmotion has been over the last few years.  Hopefully this is not the signal of a downturn.  I have looked on Orovo and several other areas for info on similar complaints, but come up short so far.

There are an endless number of sites, articles and reports about IPower’s short comings (many of which are located here.)  When you are a customer of IPower, they are essentially one of your partners in business.

This weekend I experienced a new problem with IPower.  One of my client websites has a blog component to the site, used for updating news releases.  The blog is powered by WordPress and I needed to upgrade WordPress and add some new functionality.

This is normally a very simple process and relatively quick.  You upload some files and possibly run the upgrade.php file in WordPress if the database needs an update too.

Well IPower runs MySQL (database program) on a separate server from the actual web server on their new systems.  For whatever reason, IPower apparently ran an upgrade on the MySQL server this weekend. 

They have previously indicated to some users that poorly performing MySQL performance was related to systems like Joomla and WordPress and not their own servers.  These systems are not perfect but 99 out of 100 other web hosts do not seem to have the slow loading page problem with MySQL powered systems that IPower has.

Maybe its possible the reason for this upgrade actually hinged on the need to solve the slow page loading problem for its customers or maybe not.  I suspect there’s more of an issue with the configuration as opposed to their actual physical server.

The Problem

Anyway, I uploaded the files (took 4 tries as something kept timing out.  Couldn’t tell if this was Dreamweaver or their ftp server connection.  I normally have no issue with Dreamweaver and couldn’t tell what was causing the problem.

When I got to the upgrade.php step, I hit the link to run the upgrade and there was a distinct lack of action.  In fact the process timed out.  I tried it again an hour later and an hour after that.  Timed out all three times.

Then the entire blog portion of the site stopped working and I started receiving error 500 notices and then Database Connection errors. 

My Client’s Site was Down!

I tried contacting support through chat and never got through after waiting for 50 minutes ( I was 8th in the que when it started).

I then logged into vdeck and created a support ticket, which is a new beta system that they have.

After more than 24 hours, I never received any updates or acknowledgement and definitely no action from IPower based on the ticket.

So I tried chat again.  This time I was 2nd in the que and got an actual person after about 20 minutes.  The person was nice, but obviously managing multiple chat sessions.  Responses during chat were extremely slow and it was obvious the chat representative was not paying attention to what I was saying let alone understanding my comments.

I did my best to keep my patience knowing that if I lost the person, I’d only have to get back in the que all over again some other day.

TIP – Once you have an IPower support person talking to you, do not let them go until the problem is actually fixed.  No Matter what!

Anyway to make a long story less long, my problems were apparently related to IPower’s upgrade of their MySQL server.  Initially as I was chatting IPower led me to believe that my problems (site down) could last for several days until the upgrade was done.   That seemed nuts, so I persisted with them and was ultimately able to get things resolved.

The following is a transcript of your chat session.

General Info

Chat start time

Mar 24, 2008 4:46:07 AM EST

Chat end time

Mar 24, 2008 5:35:38 AM EST

Duration (actual chatting time)

00:49:30

Operator

Ipower Chat Representative

Chat Transcript

info: Welcome to IPOWER! You are number 2 in the queue.
Please be prepared to answer your Security Question when we begin chatting. To enhance our security protocols, we’ll need you to provide the answer to your Security Question at the beginning of our conversation. If you have not yet set your Security Question and Answer, please log into your account now to set it up. Thank you.
Please hold for the next available operator to respond.
info: We appreciate your patience. All operators are currently assisting other customers. Please continue to hold and we’ll be with you as quickly as possible.
In the meantime, please be prepared to answer your Security Question when we begin chatting. To enhance our security protocols, we’ll need you to provide the answer to your Security Question at the beginning of our conversation. If you have not yet set your Security Question and Answer, please log into your account now to set it up. Thank you for waiting.
info: We appreciate your patience. All operators are currently assisting other customers. Please continue to hold and we’ll be with you as quickly as possible.
In the meantime, please be prepared to answer your Security Question when we begin chatting. To enhance our security protocols, we’ll need you to provide the answer to your Security Question at the beginning of our conversation. If you have not yet set your Security Question and Answer, please log into your account now to set it up. Thank you for waiting.
info: You are now chatting with ‘Ipower Chat Representative’
Ipower Chat Representative: Hi Me. I apologize for the wait time. My name is Hannah, how are you today?
Me: Good how about you?
Me: I have a ticket that has been open for over 24 hours relating to MySQL issues on Ipower servers, that is causing my site to crash regularly.
Me: So far no one has responded to the ticket at all Support Ticket #4809381
Me: domain is advancedenvironmentalmanagement.com (on an ipower hosting plan)
Ipower Chat Representative: I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you.
Me: no problem as long as we get it fixed
Ipower Chat Representative: To protect your account from unauthorized changes, can you please verify for me the answer to the Security Question:
Ipower Chat Representative: What is **** ***** **** ****?
Me: *********************************
Ipower Chat Representative: Thank you for the authentication.
Ipower Chat Representative: Can you please hold while I check this for you?
Me: sure (btw I can login to MySQL admin, but the service doesn’t run appropriately)
Ipower Chat Representative: Can you please hold while I check this for you?
Me: sure
Ipower Chat Representative: Thank you for holding.
Ipower Chat Representative: We are in the process of upgrading MySQL version, hence you may experience slowness. However, once the upgrade is completed you will not experience any issue.
Me: How many days is this going to take?
Ipower Chat Representative: The upgrade will be completed in few days.
Me: We aren’t talking slowness, we are talking failure
Me: How can you take websites offline for a few days?
Ipower Chat Representative: Me, we have not taken the Web site offline. However, you will only experience slowness.
Me: I’m telling you that the MySQL problems have taken my site offline.
Me: (for the last 24 hours)
Ipower Chat Representative: Me, you have told above that it is loading slow. However, if the Web site is not working, please let me know.
Me: No I stated that the MySQL issues were causing the site to crash regularly.
Ipower Chat Representative: Can you please provide me the URL of the page?
Me: I never mentioned anything about slowness.
Me: This is the directory that has the wordpress installation
Me: http://www.mysite.com/news/
Me: The problem is in the admin section of the site, it crashes due to the db after login
Me: and often comes up with a 500 error code for the publicly viewable portion as well or a screen that says there is a Database error
Ipower Chat Representative: Okay.
Ipower Chat Representative: Can you please provide me the admin username and password?
Me: username – ***************
Me: pword *****************
Ipower Chat Representative: Okay.
Ipower Chat Representative: Can you please hold while I check this for you?
Me: sure
Ipower Chat Representative: Thank you for holding.
Ipower Chat Representative: I was able to log into the admin page of the WordPress without any issue. I have not received any error.
Me: Did it say Upgrade ? and did you click it?
Me: that’s where it errors out
Me: and crashes
Me: I can’t proceed with any other work on the site until I get past the upgrade
Ipower Chat Representative: Can you please provide me the steps to replicate the issue?
Me: I just did
Me: alternatively go to http://www.mysite.com/news/wp-admin/upgrade.php
Me:
Ipower Chat Representative: I have accessed the above URl and I receive the following output ‘No Upgrade Required
Ipower Chat Representative: Your WordPress database is already up-to-date!’.
Me: I can get in now as well. It must have finally processed through or something.
Me: Thanks for the help.
Ipower Chat Representative: It’s my pleasure!
Ipower Chat Representative: I only have your first name. Can I have your complete name for our records?
Me: sure Me
Ipower Chat Representative: Thank you!
Ipower Chat Representative: Have you sent any e-mail to us regarding your issue? If so, please provide me the e-mail address through which you have sent the e-mail.
Me: no emails, I provided them through your support ticket process (number above)
Me: and entered at the start of the chat
Ipower Chat Representative: Okay.
Ipower Chat Representative: Is there anything else I can assist you with today?
Me: Nope that should do it. Thanks again
Ipower Chat Representative: Thank you for chatting with us. Please feel free to contact us at any time. We are available 24×7.
info: Chat session has been terminated by the site operator.

So my issue is now fixed.  My site is running.  The slow loading problem is now there, just like the representative promised (thanks for that).

There are times when I feel like my hosting experience with this business partner is more like the experience that a person receives when they go on a royal caribbean cruise ship and get sick from the service or the ships food or something.  You spend all that money and time and end up getting sick from it.

So just when I thought I was done dealing with IPower for the month, my client (and my wife) decides that she wants a different domain name after all.

So I go back into the system to pick up the new alternate domain name. 

Step 1 – “I LOG IN”

That’s and important step!

I make my selection for a domain name, its available, and the process dumps me on a section to fill out the same stupid account information.

HELLO, I’m Logged IN!

So I play along.  I enter the information, including my correct username and password and my phone number into the field that I know doesn’t work.

I submit it and get the following error.

HELLO, THAT’s MY USERNAME AND I AM LOGGED IN!

So really, what does it take for IPower to realize this process is broken.  This is nothing new,  I saw the same problem months ago, even mentioned it to their tech support.  Does no one pay attention there?

Seriously, I think there is something wrong with their login logout or session tracking process.  To overcome this problem, I had to log out and log back in, that kicked me into Vdeck 3.0 (which I dislike) and then I hop back out to the top level menus for IPower purchasing. 

This time around, I’m prompted twice to add the domain to an existing account and option that I did not get the last time I logged in and went through the process.  Then of course I got to experience the phone number issue all over again.  What a joy.

One other thing, I’m just registering single domains, but this would be a major major hassle if I were doing a batch of domains.  DO NOT put yourself through that misery with IPOWER. 

OK, this is a nit picky thing about IPower and in my defense for nit picking, I’ll say that I am getting this off my chest as some of the bigger problems with IPower are too severe and too big to cover in a blog.

Today, I was trying to simply register a couple domains.  I have an account already.  In fact they gave me several hundred accounts.

Well, when I ordered the first domain, it made me enter all of my account information all over again.  Including a phone number broken out with three text boxes, one for the area code then another for the next three digits and the last four digits.

But then the whole process errors out because apparently they can not read the input from their own form.

Here’s the down side of my last phone chat with them.  They never picked up after they transferred me to billing.  In fairness, I only waited about 10-20 minutes.

D P.: hello, how can i help you
Brett: Hi Dianna, I’d like to register a couple domains to add to my account, but your system is just about impossible for me today.
Brett: I have about 100 domains or more with Ipower and a few hosting plans
Brett: But these were mostly done before your conversion, and so I am spread all over the place (my customer rep hasn’t called me in over a year, so there’s no help there).
Brett: Today, I simply want to pick up a couple domains, but I’d like to bring them in under one of my many existing accounts.
D P.: are you having issues doing that?
Brett: PS I tried to register 2 domains, but when ever I had the second, the system deletes the first. I’m glad I’m not trying to place a large order today!
Brett: correction ‘when I ad the second,’
Brett: add
Brett: lol
D P.: sorry about the issue
D P.: i need to get you to online biling
D P.: online billing
D P.: they will have the tools to help you
D P.: plase hold as i transfer you
Brett: ok
info: Please wait while I transfer the chat to the best suited site operator.

Now that I am done dealing with IPower for the day, I can take off my disposable gloves and get back to work with actual people.