Awful

WestHost's servers have gone down several times in the past couple of years forcing our company to be without a web presence for several days at a time.

If your website is crucial to your business, I would do some serious research before you use WestHost. It's too bad. They used to be a very solid company, but in the last two years, their servers and their customer service have gone downhill in a big way. Buyer beware.

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Servers go down for extended periods of time

Reliability of their servers is absolutely terrible. The server that hosts my websites is a 50/50 proposition. When it goes down, it will be "worked on" for days and weeks before they fix the problem. The Technical Support people "shrug their shoulders" and say its the TA's number one priority. They never give you an ETA. Worse of all, during the busiest time of the year (Christmas season)for online sales, the server is inoperable. I can't log into email, both my website's shopping carts are not accessible to shoppers and it is less than 2 weeks before Christmas. On-line chat wait times are between 20-40 minutes. When you finally chat with a support person they provide this explanation "current server maintenance". I asked what does that mean? Answer: its being worked on. I'm losing sales and they don't have a clue as to when the problem will be fixed. Previously, I asked to be moved to another server that hopefully was more reliable and of course they said "no". If you do a lot of business online avoid this company.

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Coupon code

This isn't a review since I work at WestHost, but here is a 20% off coupon code for any plan at WestHost: EC5KDD11. E-mail me with questions. Kdonakey@westhost.com

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Get me outta here!

We have two current clients and our development site all on the same server. The service has been spotty but in the past week the servers have had issues at least 5 times. We suggested going with WestHost because the service has been OK in the past. Now it is embarrassing that we constantly have to tell our clients "the site is down again".

Technical support does little besides shrug their shoulders and saying "Our admins are working on it". Rarely do they give an ETA. We are also stuck in a 3yr contact and unlike iPage or Host Gator they will not let you out of it if you are not happy.

I have no choice but to move on. When the servers are up I have no problems with speed but I just can't take it anymore. Productivity is down and clients are unhappy.

Do not go with these guys.

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44+ contiguous hours of down time

Starting on Saturday February 21st WH went down. It is now 44+ hours later. My home page is serving but nothing worse. MySQL... busted. SSH... busted, SMTP.... busted, so basically my website is useless. They claim the fire suppression was triggered during a test and site this as the cause for the downtime. Well... they use Inergen. Inergen contains nitrogen, argon and carbon dioxide. You're breathing those gasses right now. They can not take down an ENTIRE data center. Even if we were talking about a corrosive fire suppression system that still doesn't explain what happened. The backups should have shifted over to the backup data center at another site but that is NOT what happened (or maybe it did and it failed). Either way I would suggest that you steer clear of WestHost. I have already canceled one of my sites and will be terminating the other two shortly.

Now... to be fair, I have always found their customer service to be excellent. Their support staff in my experience have been very well trained and they speak English (whenever I've had to call, I've always been connected to someone in the US... it's a damn shame their network is so severely flawed).

I've been with them since 2004. Reliability seemed to start going downhill around the same time that UK2 bought them but the February 2010 downtime was the straw that broke this camel's back.

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They claim to support Miva

When I called inquiring about their service. I told them that I had a custom Miva script, and the rep said that it would all come set up with the necessary files to run miva. When I called their tech support they said that they don't provide support for custom scripting. They told me would have to upgrade to business pro plan. I can understand them not providing support for a custom script, but I wasn't asking for that was just asking for them to provide me with advertised tools be be able to run miva. Their tech phone support provides terrible support also. If you are researching hosting, be very warned about starting a hosting plan for this. They did not make any effort at all to keep me as a customer. All they would have had to have done is have one of their server admin put the necessary miva conf files in my cgi-bin and my script would have ran their. Now I am just running away, and you should also!!!

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get a big trouble with their upgrade

Here is our case after WestHost upgrade to 3.0 platform – read our ticket below. We have to replace our index page with a UNDERCONSTRUCTION page because if we don’t most of our PHP code will display. Hope it helps U when looking for host.

My 1st ticket
Our site was down yesterday. We have chatted live with Keara and Clay to solve this problem but our site is still down. Please inform us what is going on and when our site will be back to normal. Our business has stopped since yesterday because the site was completely down.

My 2nd ticket
I have lived chat and created ticket ask for support to solve our problem but got no response with the ticket we created and our site is still down. We can not wait any more. We want to our money back!

Westhost reply

Thank you for contacting WestHost. I apologize for the delay in response. I'm sorry to hear your site is down. It looks like your account was upgraded to our 3.0 platform. There have been 3 email sent out to the email address on file prior to the upgrade to let you know what applications were going to be upgraded. You can still log into our Client Upgrade Information Tool at
https://v3upgrade.west-datacenter.net/whlogin.php to see what was upgraded. Even if the PHP version was not upgraded, there was a new installation of your existing version. That means any setting you had in the PHP.ini file would have been set back to the defaults.

We try to make sure that you have adequate information regarding any upgrades we might perform so that you or your developer might prepare for any changes. It looks like you will want to have a the developer who designed your site take a look at what settings they need changed to make the site function with the new installation of PHP. I know that PHP is working properly, because you can get to this page:
http://yoursite.com/phpinfo.php. If PHP wasn't working, that page would not display. The problem lies in the coding for your website and the necessary changes that may need to be made in the php.ini file.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can do for you.

Best regards,

Keara Balls
Technical Support Representative
WestHost Inc.
Phone: 1-800-222-2165
Fax: 435-755-3449

My 3rd ticket

we had paid one year in advance for our account for second bill. Our site has been down for 2 days. We have chatted live but the problem has not been resolved. We created 2 tickets to ask for support in getting our site back and get no response.
The site is completely down therefore our business has stopped because of inattentiveness from Westhost. We want our money back!

Westhost reply

I apologize for the inconvenience of your site being unreachable to you. When I go to the URL, the site seems to come up just fine for me. I see a white "under construction" page. That page was not put there by WestHost, so I would have to assume it was put there either by you or your developer. Are you still unable to reach your site?

As for you request for a refund, refunds are only available during the first 30 days of your initial order. At no other time is a refund available.

If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me again.

Best regards,

Reed Cardon
Technical Support Representative
WestHost Inc.
Phone: 1-800-222-2165
Fax: 435-755-3449

User Comments(0)

Used to be good, now bad!

You will notice that the old reviews are positive. They used to be a great host, but in recent times have changed. My site speed has rapidly declined as they over sell their bandwidth. Every attempt to fix the issue was riddled with excuses and the worst thing is if you read their policies, NO REFUNDS. So even though their service has declined you don't get your money back! Stay clear of them and save yourself the time, money, and hassle!

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Westhost is a great choice

I have never minded paying a little more for reliable business services. My hosting company is a vital partner and Westhost has proven it takes care of my needs. I don't know what else to say - but they rock. Network speed and reliability of the servers. Daily backups. Live chat, online manuals, newletters, all the apps I need. Great choice for any serious business.

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WestHost web hosting provider response:

All time favorite

I'm a web designer/developer who has been using Westhost to host my and my clients' sites for years. They offer great features in their Virtual Private Server packages that make my job easier. Uptime is very good, and when problems do arise they offer strong support. While supporting more than 30 sites with them, I have to deal with tech support on a monthly basis, and it is normally quick and always helpful.

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