Web Hosting Lab

Page 2 - IPowerWeb benchmark results

IPowerWeb is one of the biggest web hosting companies in the USA. According to their site, they host hundreds of thousands of sites. Since I have heard various contradictory opinions about them, I’ve decided that they will be the first company I will run a test on. This company is famous for its very good hosting plans and quite poor customer support. IPowerWeb owns 4 data centers in California, USA. Obviously they are a very big company.

I decided to try them and a quite serious problem showed up. One of my older accounts was registered together with a domain name. Upon the domain’s expiry I received an email informing me that this domain would be renewed upon renewal of the account itself. I said to myself "how thoughtful, very good" – I went and renewed the hosting account for one more year. After almost 2 months I tried to open the domain and found out to my horror that it could not be opened. I checked if I was the one who confused something. I looked at the control panel, but didn’t find anything there. I checked the WHOIS and found out that the domain had expired. How come?! I thought they renewed it?! What could be done... the site is too small and apparently I was not paying enough attention to it, which didn’t prevent it from accumulating 2 months of downtime because I didn’t know that it had not been renewed. I opened a trouble ticket and waited in expectation. Unfortunately, you should know that if you are in a real hurry, then IPowerWeb may not be the best choice for you. I received a reply to such an urgent ticket from their support team after 30 hours and 24 minutes! This is a very big delay since they are offering 24/7 support. This speed suggests that the support is available once in 1-2 days rather than 24/7. Although I was disappointed with the speed of their reply, their tech support replied to me very politely and without asking further questions told me that the domain would be online in 24 hours. An hour and a half after I received the answer from the support team I received also a renewal notification about the domain. Since it was my first renewal with IPowerWeb, I didn’t know I was about to receive a notification after the domain’s renewal. If I did, I would have had the opportunity to lower the downtime from 2 months to 1-2 days. The next time we will know.

Their trouble ticket system made a particularly unpleasant impression on me. It turned out that in order to open a ticket you have to visit 4 different pages (4 clicks) on the whole, which involves also a big portion of reading and careful selection on your part, since the "open ticket" link on some pages is actually a part of the text. A link for opening a ticket is missing in the menu in their Help Center and so, you have to read the introductory text on the first page in order to find the link, which takes you to a page, which contains nothing but the following sentence: “Please direct all support queries here”, with a link to a new Support Center, where you also have to read to find the link via which you finally arrive at the form for opening tickets.
This whole procedure definitely made me angry.

The absurdly complicated ticket opening procedure creates the impression that IPowerWeb aims at reducing the number of the support requests in a disloyal way to the client. The client support has to always be up to a certain standard and you shouldn’t have to be a fan of reading in order to open a ticket. Not to mention the fact that the people from Europe and the other continents that don’t use English actively may not find a way to open a ticket at all.

As far as their control panel, called vDeck, is concerned – it is pretty unusual. Some will like it, others won’t. I am accustomed to control panels of the cPanel type and if you are such a consumer like me – then definitely you won’t like the arrangement in vDeck. IPowerWeb’s Control Panel doesn’t boast many features, but they do have some very good things - the file manager is well organized; they have an easy-to-use web site builder and some interesting scripts and features in their "Power Plugins" section such as form mail, guestbook, some Java applets, PayPal cart, and something really useful – "Content Feeds" – through which you can generate RSS feeds for your own site on the following topics: headline news, sport or Horoscope of all the signs of the Zodiac. I personally think that the number of the scripts that can be installed through the control panel is small – they are only 7. Compared to Fantastico, which is being offered by the majority of the cPanel hosting providers and has more than 20 scripts, it is insufficient. Moreover, many popular scripts, such as Joomla and Mambo, are simply missing.

Perhaps akin to the complicated ticket opening procedure, there is a complete lack of explanations and tips in the control panel itself. Instead, each section contains a link to the FAQ, which explains the functions thoroughly, but opens in a new window each time, which is not very convenient. Maybe one or two sentences in the control panel would have been just fine, but, unfortunately, they are missing.

A friend of mine saw the above-written before I published it on the site, and said to me “You try to present IPowerWeb as a very bad company”. Probably you’d say the same, but the truth is I am not even trying to. Something, which can be proven easily by the following 2 tests that I conducted:
1. One of the tests – a combined PHP test + a MySQL test – failed.  After I went deeper into the matter I found out that IPowerWeb did not allow the creation of temporary tables in the MySQL. I had to change the way the test operates.
2. I added an email info@domain.com to my account and tried to set up my new email in Mozilla Thunderbird. I had the mail server, a username and a pass. Everything went great until I clicked on the "Get Mail" button and I waited and I waited and I waited… Finally, an error message appeared, which said that the email client could not connect to the mail server. Hmm... I performed a ping and found out that the mail server was being successfully pinged. I opened telnet and tried to connect manually to the mail server and found out that the mail server did not support the IMAP protocol (?!?!?!??!). After all, the year is 2007 and this company has hundreds of thousands of clients. How come it doesn’t support IMAP? Luckily, I didn’t have to use their email service… Despite the obstacles, I tried the POP3 service to determine the speed at which the emails were being delivered. Luckily, the mail came fast – in less than 20 seconds. Otherwise, I would have been most disappointed.

Pros:
+ always very good plans on offer
+ if you decide to refer friends to their service, they pay very well, which is maybe the reason why they are so successful
+ friendly support
+ stable company – it’s obvious that this company will not go bankrupt tomorrow and that your site won’t go down because of this

Cons:
- slow hosting – the scripts are often running slow, which causes server overload and an overloaded server means problems
- slow support - 30 hours for a reply is way too slow
- in order to open a ticket you have to be patient and do much reading – a good way to avoid opening of the tickets and make the user irritable
- a strange CP. Some may like it, but I definitely didn’t
- the CP is not suitable for people who don’t speak English very well
- insufficient number of preinstalled scripts; one of the most popular Content Management Systems such as Mambo and Joomla are simply missing
- no support for the IMAP protocol

Page 2 - IPowerWeb benchmark results