I've used Ipowerweb since 2002, and they have been a great value until last year. Reasonable plans, the site would load quickly, easy setup, and great service.

In the past year, however, the service has become terrible. They have servers running at close to 100% capacity now, and all of the sites on that server are sharing limited SQL resources. What that means is that your site will hang, load very slowly, or give users errors almost daily. Additionally, I have had weeks of downtime waiting for them to fix a server problem.

The technical support has gone from very helpful to downright rude. During the last phone call I made to them (and the last one I'll ever make to them,) I was told point blank that the service I had was only meant to be for grandmothers who wanted a website that hosted pictures of their flower garden for a few friends to view. I sure didn't see THAT particular fact on their site. I can do that at photobucket for free.

Each time I call for help now, they try to sell me an expensive virtual server account that costs roughly 8 times what I'm paying now. They say that's the only way I can expect my site to function.

I'm not running a huge site. I have maybe 30 users on a message board, and I'm not even using 2% of my monthly bandwidth limit. The message board is the entire site. And Ipowerweb can't even provide the power to keep one message board running for 30 people.

I'd think it over before I gave them any business. I'm not the type who goes around trashing companies on the internet for no reason. But I'm sitting here waiting for my site to come back up so I can explain to my users why it was down all day again, and I figured I'd try to prevent this from happening to someone else.

I can honestly say the only reason I'm still with Ipowerweb is that I don't have the time to move my site to another host. I will definitely be doing it as soon as possible, however.

Avoid these guys unless you want a website that makes your customers angry.