My experience with ipower

I bought a few websites through them several years ago, when they were good. Sometime in the last 2 years they crashed.

I used to run a few phpnuke websites. About 2 years ago they started going down for no reason. It turns out while ipower offers high bandwidth and a large amount of storage very cheaply, they limit the amount of "queries".

In layman's terms, when a web page loads the code sends queries so that it can pick up files it needs to display on the page. On a plain html page this usually means image files. On pages that run on databases, like phpnuke, postnuke, forums, chatrooms and stores, this means everything on the page.

So you are allowed to store as much information you want on the space you rent from ipower, but you are not allowed to display them on a page as much as you want, even if you are well below your bandwidth limit.

This limit on queries is not listed in the advertising they use to reel you in. You will just find your site down from time to time depending on how many visitors you get. More popular = more visitors = more queries = more downtime.

You are also limited to 1 cron job. A cron job is something you want to schedule to happen on a regular basis. You would be wise to use this to do site backups.

I got fed up and stopped using databases altogether, thinking that would solve the problem. It didn't. Things got worse in the fall of last year. Since about September my site has been shut down for things ranging from migrating servers, deciding to shut down FTP access for blogs, and accidentally unplugging a server.

This doesn't include the times my site or email were down or inaccessible for reasons never explained.

Main reasons not to use ipower:

1. They will never tell you ahead of time when they are going to do an upgrade or move something. They never have. EVER.

2. There is no way for customers to contact each other.

3. If they finally admit to a problem, the developers are working on it and they expect it to be solved within 24 hours. They will tell you this for several days in a row if you can manage to get a response.

I'm normally a very even-tempered person, but my experience in the last few weeks was the last straw for me. I'm putting it here in the hope that no one else will have to go through this. I only wish I had saved the other emails I have exchanged in the last year with Ipower so you could see the scope of the problem. Instead I have linked to the User reviews at Cnet So you can see for yourself.