Stay away from web host Ipower..

DogSoldier

They are expert in extorting customers with limited technical expertise.. Which is about 95% of the people who use the web.

In short, I wish I had found this web page 2 years ago: http://hostjury.com/blog/view/90/escape-from-ipowerweb-how-to-leave-ipowerweb/comments-page-1

It would have saved us a ton of problems and downtime.

micker

I had over 120 domains registered with them in 2006-2007. They were absolutely terrible, the worst. At least Registerfly had the common decency to go out of business after screwing its customers, Ipower is still out there doing it.

They locked down domains to prevent me from transferring them, even on domains I had sold. They continued to renew and bill me for domains I had set to drop and they would routinely fail to send out login info for their BS tucows DNS system. In short these are shady people that I havent used since 2007.

I have one domain registered with them still because they refused to give a refund for unauthorized rebills they made and gave me credit instead. I had them apply it to the domain used for my fiance's blog and had them reg it until 2021.

DogSoldier

120?! I feel your pain, well.. not really. It's like my problem x 120. But what you described is very familiar. We moved web hosts but neglected to cancel the service with them (Our first mistake), so when we moved and re-registered the domain til 2012, they changed our DNS servers, we changed them back through opensrs. So they deleted our opensrs account name and password, and disabled the domain. The client, who is technically illiterate (To put it politely) called Ipower and asked them whats up. They said that in order to restore the domain, he had to prove who he was as the domain owner. So he claims to have filled out this form and sent it electronically. 3 weeks later, Ipower sells our domain to a company in China. They claim they never received this form from him. So I call them and they claim that there is no such form, that any form that seeks to verify domain ownership MUST be mailed. So I told the client this and hopefully, this will work out. The Ipower tech support I talked to seemed sympathetic, and he claims Ipower will fight for us to retrieve our domain name, but I'm not hopeful.

In that link above was this tasty little bit, "One of our readers found the corporate phone number for Endurance International, the company that owns iPowerWeb. If you want quick, prompt service in getting your cancellation, domain name details or anything else give them a quick call: 1-866-897-5421"

I actually tried this. In comparison to the stonewall of Ipower, the people at Endurance were actually very open and helpful. But we still haven't gotten our domain back.

I agree, there's a pattern of abuse and shady dealing that cannot be unintentional. I would hope that more people get a warning before using this company.. With that said, below is a partial list of web hosts owned by Endurance that everyone should stay away from.

AccountSupport
BizLand
BlueDomino
Dot5 (Dot5 Hosting)
DomainHost
eHost
EntryHost
FatCow
FreeYellow
HostCentric
HostYourSite
HyperMart
ImOutDoors
iPowerWeb (iPower)
NetWorksHosting
PowWeb
PureHost
ReadyHosting
Startlogic
USAnetHosting
VirtualAve
Xeran

micker

I thought Fatcow was an independent? Did they get bought out?

Ipower was just the start of that mess. My next stop after leaving them was RegisterFly. Now that was a mess. You can read about what happened here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RegisterFly

Long story short it ended in a class action lawsuit and hundreds of my domains going up in smoke. Someone should make a movie about the downfall of Registerfly... The IT staff tried to keep management from dropping all of the clients domains. They barricaded themselves in the server room for days... It's an interesting story.

Now I no longer trade in domain names, but the ones I do own are all at a regular price registrar. No more discounters for me. It's just not worth the headaches.