Let me start by stressing that IPOWER, also known as IPOWERWEB and what more, is complete and utter garbage. They don't even deserve a link, go and Google perform a search in Google for them if you would like to know more...

I use DreamHost, for those who'd like some good, reliable and affordable hosting - if you enter the coupon SHADOW1980  when signing up, you'll get up to $90.00 discount. A level 1 package with 200 Gigabytes webspace and 2 Terabytes bandwith will come to $29.40 for the first year.

Anyways, back to IPOWER, I manage a small website for a relative of my girlfriend and unfortunatly she is hosted with them at the moment as dealing with their support was an absolute nightmare.

Due to the unfortunate passing away of the person who managed the website before me, the credit card details were not up-to-date on the account. Not the biggest deal in the world, but at IPOWER there are no notifications or warnings. So when I checked the website's rankings in Google, I noticed the server was down with a nice suspension message. Great...

I proceeded with the most logical course of action - I jumped on their so called live support - and tried to sort things directly. To cut a long story about this online support crap short, six support chaps later I knew the automated greeting by heart and timed the average response time in these ONE TO ONE conversations at about 6 minutes. Per question/line. Let's just suffice to say that conversations take a long time this way. More time then I have in one evening... I got a bit pissed off being sent from Billing to Technical to Billing, etc as well.

Either way, they promised to call me back - which they didn't. They rang my girlfriends relative instead and convinced her that re-activation and paying $50 on top of the normal fee because of this re-activation would be a good idea. Bah. I could have hosted it for a mere fraction of that and we would actually have been able to DO something with it. But never mind, I was happy enough the website would be back up - which it was after about 10 minutes.

I can hear you thinking now - that aint too bad Shadow! Well, yeah. But this wouldn't be a rant if that would be the end of it now would it?

The next day while I was at work I thought I would check up on the website, I was a bit afraid that Google would crawl the website while it was down. Well it was worse then that. First, Google DID crawl the website and removed it from it's index. Great - nice to recrawl it to check if it isn't just down as well guys - check your crawlers! Second and worst though, the bloody website was down again! What the hell?

This is when the rant really starts, as this is where the e-mail support team comes in... (Who'm I hope are the first target of North Korea's new Nuclear Arsenal)

So I sent them this message:

Please note that their support form asks you for all kinds of information, domain, name, email, last numbers of credit card, etc. It takes a fortnight to complete the form..

Anyway, their reply came a day later:

I did not get a reply for another 2 days, so sent them a reminder:

It took a full day before a reply arrived. (Another freaking day - the bloody website and mail is still down, great for business.)

All this time the website is down, and business is coming in....  Not that they care.

Anyways...

 Well I made myself clear. Not very productive but sometimes you just need to get things off your chest.

The reply:

 Honestly, at this point I am just trying to cooperate and go along with the flow. I just want it to work!

Let above be a lesson for anybody who considers IPOWER/IPOWERWEB as a host. A complete and utter rip-off and the support is terrible. At least with DreamHost you don't need support for these things - you can do everything yourself within the control panel. And I do mean, everything. *throws a large brick in the direction of the IPOWER support team*.