iPower
reviews and complaints

I've been trying to get a refund of $176.23 from IPower.com since June 14,2007, for charging me for renewal of domain names that I did not want and did not request. Recently they put another 95.40 charge on my c. card for domain hosting of glamakazes.com that I had cancelled in June and that they "confirmed" at that time that I had cancelled! That domain name no longer exists on the web (or as my property) and hasn't since June 07 - so why would I pay 95.40 for web hosting it? I've written them a dozen or more emails so far and all I get is double talk and nonsense from them.I sincerely believe they're just trying to Screw Me out of my money! They're obviously incredibly incompetent also at IPower so I'm wondering if this has this happened to anyone else?

Ipower.com web site hosting co sold me a web site for 3 years about $200.00 and then another for 1 year about $100.00, and ipower.com - web hosting Co. did Search engine omptmizing on 1. Sits That cost me money, they said I did not have to know any html and it was user friendly, in which they were right at the time, but then they switch it over to where if you did not know html then you could not run your site. So at 73 years old it to late for me to learn html. so I am out a bunch for a false promise through ipower.com-Site hosting Co. So if you thinking about a web site host, think twice or maybe 3 times. ipower.com gave me no choice in the matter it was either their way or the hy way. Now ipower.com web hosting trying to say that I only bought the domain name for 3 year 200.00 a lot of money for a domain name. H.L. Adams.

I have been with Ipower Web for a year and was very satisfied until now. There service is horrible. I dont call tech support very often. Five days ago I emailed Ipowers tech support with a question about why the web server returns an incorrect time. It actually returns a time that is about four minutes too fast. OK I can fix it by subtracting the minutes but I paid for a server that works. Actually setting the time on a server is automatic unless it was configured that way or someone is just plain dumb.

After waiting 30 hours I emailed them again and waited another day. On day tree I called their tech support and after 30 minutes on hold I got someone. They told me they did not know why the time was incorrect and they agreed to have someone else look at it. I got an email response two days later telling me that:

We are sorry for the inconvenience but they dont offer scripting help and that I should contact (a) script debugging company. (LOL)

First of all I did not need any debugging of script. System.DateTime.Now is a C# function that will return the current Date and Time from the server. I have used this hundreds of times.

OK so after waiting five days I'm told we cant help and its my fault...I decided to call again... OMG what a mistake.

Here goes day five:

About 9 am I call their 888 line. Number 2 gets tech support and 1 hour and 4 minutes later my battery goes dead on the phone. So I get another phone and call again...52 minutes later my cell phone battery dies also. So I call back again and decide to just cancel the account and get a refund. I just renewed the account 6 days ago before all this happened. Any the billing office also would not answer and after holding for another 42 minutes I decided to call the sales dept... Would you believe it; they answered within ten seconds! Remember two hours on hold for tech support... 40 minutes for billing... and 10 seconds for sales!
Ok so I got somebody after 5 days waiting and 3 hours on hold!

A ladies voice quickly told me, however, she could not help and hung up! Yes She HUNG UP ON ME!

So I called back..again got someone at sales within seconds. Again Im told they cant help before they even know why Im calling. The second guy puts me on hold for another 20 minutes. So I call again and get James, who tries to find a supervisor named Eric. When he transfers me to Eric, I get Eric answer machine. So I call back again. I get the same lady who hung up and she again hangs up on me. So I call again. This time I get a man with an accent. He is very rude and asks me If I would like him just to make something up to talk about and then hags up on me. So I call again. This time I get Matthew. Matthew tries to find Eric and puts me on hold for another 15 minutes. So I call back again. I get James again and he finally get Eric the supervisor. Eric listens to my complaint and is only interested in the fact that this is a tech support issue and just wants to put me back on hold. I explained that I had been trying to reach the tech support and had already waited 2 hours on hold. Eric offered no resolution other than to put me on hold for billing so I could cancel my account. After waiting on hold for another 15 minutes I hung up.

I'm not sure what to say other than this is the worst customer service I have ever seen. These people really dont care. They should not be in this business if they cannot give you what you paid for.

I recommend that you do not do business with IPOWER WEB

Thanks

Unsure of their location - but do not waste your time and energy with Ipowerweb. They are a very incompetent and unreliable company.

There is no one that takes any responsibility there nor can you get an extension or a name of anyone in a higher capacity. It takes months to get anything fixed. They are down all the time which resorts in your website being down as well as any emails. They'll just switch you to another server platform without your consent or knowledge, which results in loss of emails and data too. They are a waste of money and in over their heads.

If you're looking for a headache, looking to be on hold for 30 minutes at a time before speaking with someone who really doesn't have any answers for you and must put you in touch with a "level three tech" and have nothing else to do 7 to 10 times a month but call in because you have yet another issue with your website or email - Ipowerweb would be a great, great place for you.

But if you rely on your website and emails for business, I highly recommend you looking elsewhere!

Beware of ipower.com and ipowerweb.com! I purchased a VPS (virtual private server) back in March 2006 to host my up and coming website business, www.listasaurus.com. After getting the wrong advice on what kind of server I needed TWICE (and finding there was NO support for their dedicated servers, which no one told me), Sean Green in Account Development and Sales advised the best solution was a virtual private server. Sean was actually a very good support person in that he helped me with many problems I encountered with bad technical support people (I have transcripts of chats with rude support reps and getting the runaround).

The website advertised numerous features with the Ipower Pro Plus Package that I purchased, including Daily Tape Backups and 24/7 network monitoring. I did not have any problems with server downtime until last Thursday, October 12, 2006. I found the server was down and when I inquired with technical support, they told me they were aware of a problem and working on it. The server was down for about 9 hours and then I contacted Sean who told me there was a multi-drive failure and a problem with the RAID drive.

He said he would let me know what the status was as soon as he found out. I inquired about backups and he said he hoped they had done one, and asked if I had done a backup. I told him no, because it was my understanding ipowerweb did backups.

Next thing I know I received an email from tech support that evening, advising that "all data had been lost" but the server was being rebuilt and as soon as it was available we could upload our data.

Well that would be FINE if I had known I needed to make a backup of my database, but I had never done that because I understood based on ipower's advertising in my package, and the fact that no one had ever told me otherwise, that they were doing nightly backups.

When I called tech support that night, they told me there were no backups and they do not EVER do backsup for VPS and dedicated servers. Again, this had never been disclosed to me.

I called Sean Friday morning and he confirmed that he never told me there were no backups, that he also understood standard backups were made and he was surprised to learn about this.

So basically I just lost 8 months worth of work on my website, which stores all the information in a CMS system/MYSQL database. My website was finally due to go live today, but of course I lost everything and I will have to start over.

Friday Oct 13, 2006 I spoke with David Sipes in the technical support and he told me an image of the server was going to be retrieved and they would try to get my data back. He did not call me back that day.

October 16, 2006 - After sending many emails and leaving voicemails to Sean, since David would not give me any contact information, I finally got a call back from David who informed me that they had "done everything they could" but there was no data on the restored server image. I find this outrageous, considering what if there were a disaster on site at ipower/ipowerweb? How would they resume business? (David said it is not possible they could ever have a fire. Amazing.)

Because of this company, I have lost countless hours worth of hard work on my website. It will take me countless more hours to rebuild this from scratch, which is what I will need to do. I have also found numerous similar complaints online about ipowerweb, where people have lost data and they were also told there were no backups.

Their site advertises this, this is FALSE ADVERTISING and misrepresentation. I want everyone possible to know about this so they don't go throught the nightmare that I am living.

On October 17th I was contacted by a James Murphy, a manager I believe in Sales, who advised me that backups WERE indeed done on the server where my website was hosted--only they lost the backups too. Because the backups were being done on a different drive on the SAME server...not to offsite backup tapes as the ipower.com website advertises.

So this a) contradicts what I was told by tech support that NO backups are ever done, and b) contradicts their clearly false advertisement online about daily backups being done to offsite tapes. In fact, Mr. David Sipes advised the company is in the process of creating an offsite backup process at a new data center, but it's not currently in place.

Mr. Murphy called me back late Oct 17, 2006 to advise that my suggestion of having a company like Drive Savers work on the corrupted drive to possibly recover the data would not be possible, as "an executive decision was made not to pursue the option of a third-party data recovery company". When I reported this to a Quality Assurance rep, Warren, who responded to one of my emails, Warren told me this was complete misinformation from Mr. Murphy, that TWO third party companies had already analyzed the disks, and nothing could be recovered.

Pretty amazing that this was done not by one, but TWO companies between Friday and Monday. Wish I could get that kind of service from ipower.

Lastly, Mr. Murphy's offer to me, when I asked what the company was going to do for me now, was 6 months of free hosting with them (worth around $300). then he said the most they could offer was one year of hosting (worth around $600). Wow, what a great offer. Yes, that'll surely make up for all of my lost time and rework that I now get to do. That will help my business get back up and running! Oh, and I'm SURE this type of thing will NEVER happen again...yeah, right, take a look at some of the other postings out there if you search on "lost data and ipowerweb". I am not the first person this has happened to (though according to David Sipes, I am the ONLY person upset about this, apparently all other clients were a-ok with it).

I will never do business with this company again. I can only be thankful my site wasn't live yet, only because I would have lost who knows how much customer data and it would have been even more disastrous.

I have had other issues with ipowerweb, I get different answers from their tech support people (when you can get them on the line, usually it takes 20-30 minutes of hold time), and no one seems to really know what is going on there. Sean Green is the only person there who has ever taken a personal interest and done everything he could to help me. But surely someone needs to inform their sales staff of critical issues like backups not being performed. Had I been told this initially I would not have chosen this company.

I honestly don't know how this company stays in business. A bunch of monkeys could run a better business than this.