Problems:
FTP Servers do not work,and they do not know how to fix them.
Support operators have been dramatically worse, in th e past year.
Unauthorized charges to the credit card on account.
Support wait times routinely over 1 hour on hold.


I am stuck with these peopel as they billed one year in advance, without authorization. I would have moved already. Make sure you want to deal with the headaches mentioned above, before you pay them a cent.

I'm a web designer and have been using Hostway for myself and some of my clients for 5+ years. Starting in about Jan 2006 Hostway service has gotten SO BAD it has driven me to start moving my clients and myself to another provider.
*Service outages at least once a month
*20+ minute hold times for support are typical
*under-trained or just plain dumb support staff
*frequently phone support lines get overloaded to the piont that no calls can even go through
*more often than not support Q's sent via email go unanswered

To sum it up: Stay AWAY from Hostway. Hostway sucks! Hostway is incompitent. Hostway not worth the trouble!

After three years of up and down service with Hostway, it as gone all down. When I notified them I wanted to change the nameservers of my website(to move to another host), they locked my account for more than a month. They told me I had to renew my domain registration for a year to unlock my account. They did not unlock my account, which was paid in full until I threatened to sue them.
Hostway stinks, don't ever give them your credit card number or register a domain name with them, you'll be sorry.
I'm with Lunarpages now, they are 1000% better than Hostway.

what more needs to be said.. unbelievably poor response time to server problems. besthostrating.com shows that there were no down times this past weekend, but my site was totally out along with 100 others (so I was told).

I have been with Hostway for almost 4 years now and it has been a pretty good run. If they were competitive on pricing, I probably would stay.

Pros: Good infrastructure, good server speed, great functionality, great uptime, decent to good tech support, adequate billing support. They have a nice control panel, simple and intuitive that allows you to access all your domains and hosting accounts from a drop down menu. Even the basic hosting plan has some nice free add-ons like a blog, and a site builder for the do-it-yourselfer. The e-commerce cart is pretty good for a canned solution.

Cons: Pricing is not competitive. Also note that prices listed on this site are only if you pay a year in advance, and if you cancel, you do not get a refund for unused time. Prices are higher if you choose to pay on a monthly or quarterly basis. They also nickel and dime you for things that (I feel) should be included. It is extra for a referrer log, extra to add Urchin web stats, extra for sub domains, extra for clean mail plus... you get the idea. And the real dealbreaker for me is that they charge me $75 a year to be an "agent" and refer business to them! This fee cuts steeply into commissions earned and gives little incentive to stay. Talk about killing the goose that laid the golden egg. After looking at my last years Hostway statement, I realized I am probably better off moving myself and my clients to a better priced host.

So I'm shopping around.

After going through 2 previous hosts and having less than stellar support and up-time I'm extremely please with HostWay. My dedicated server is truly up 99.9% of the time and the last 6 months have been nothing but success for my sites. I simply have no complaints at all about HostWay and they've allowed me to forget about my hosting and focus on making money.

A disturbing pattern of poor business practices, poor customer service, poor credit or billing practices and general customer dissatisfaction has emerged at Hostway.

A Google search reveals a number of disgruntled Hostway customers.
According to former Hostway customer mongrelly, "HOSTWAY NOT ALL IT SEEMS", drickman says, "MISLEADING ADVERTISING", fourofour states, "I AM VERY DISPLEASED BY THE SERVICE (OR LACK THEREOF), almcc2 declares, "AGGRESSIVELY UNHELPFUL TECHNICAL SUPPORT", mzarozinski writes "CUSTOMER SERVICE IN THE TOILET", from tman269, "HOSTWAY IS KILLING MY BUSINESS", m0213 states, "HOSTWAY.COM CHEATED ME", tom b says, "A REAL PAIN, I WILL NEVER DO BUSINESS WITH HOSTWAY AGAIN", sharks13, declares, "U WILL FAIL WHEN U TREAT PEOPLE LIKE CRAP" and playerline.com warns, "STAY AWAY". According to the Better Business Bureau of Chicago, they processed a total of 43 complaints about this company in their last standard reporting period.

These 43 complaints do not include the much greater number of complaints unreported to the BBB like the 10 illustrated above.