This is the absolute worst host I’ve ever used. They changed ownership in 2010 and their prices have gone up and the quality WAY DOWN. Don’t use this host if you have a business that can’t go offline for days at a time. They have a 99.99% uptime guarantee. Use pingdom.com to see if my website server is up or down. It would go down several times a month and sometimes for hours. Even with that, I would check my server after seeing the site has gone back “UP”, only to find that due to a configuration error,the server was up but the site was still unavailable.

I canceled my account December 22, 2011 and currently working with Consumer Protection Agencies and the BBB to get my refund as they’ve stated they deleted all my account info upon terminating my account.

Here is a copy of the message they sent me:

support@webhost4life-inc.com via yourhostingaccount.com

Dec 23 (7 days ago)

to me
Hello Brandon,

I am writing this email in response to your inquiry on Support ticket #9097102. Per your request, I have canceled your account ‘bt*****’ on December 23, 2011. As you are aware of that we have upgraded your account ‘bt*****’ to the new servers on December 29, 2009. Also, we have not charged your credit card in our platform towards this account. Hence, there is no refund due on this account.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We are available 24×7.

Sincerely,

Sabina Perry
Billing Specialist
======
I guess they were just giving me a free account.. lol

http://bit.ly/rLWEIR

On the “new” platform the SQL admin tools have worked only once to create a database backup and save it locally. It was broken again today so I tried using SQL Server Management Studio and successfully created a backup, but I can’t get to it to save a local copy. The ftp tools don’t work to establish a connection to the directory where the backup is located and the SQL admin tools time out making a connection. Prior to this problem, a fiasco ensued when the website went dark and it took more than 4 days of ridiculous messaging to put it back in service. Along the way I learned that the host expects customers to use Internet Explorer 6 or earlier and Windows XP or earlier to interact their web-based hosting control panel. I learned that because it was impossible to connect to the control panel using IE 8 and Windows 7. Firefox works fine. Maybe they don’t want to host Windows users. They are just an awful host since moving to the “new” platform. Now, I change my host to Asphostportal.com. Everyhing looks fine until now.

Thanks for the comments! The new platform is sucks..

> From: support@webhost4life-inc.com
> Subject: [P07579604000000000] Sharepoint site not working
> Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 18:58:02 -0400

Hello, Unfortunately, we did not consolidate your legacy server. All legacy data

has been deleted and you will need to either locate a new hosting company for

your share-point services or use our new platform with it’s current restrictions.

Your domain has been pointed back to 66.96.146.85 (the default IP for your

windows pool). If you have any further problems or questions, or would like me to

contact you by phone to explain this further please provide me your details.

Thank you,Troy R

————————-

Attention Webhost4Life,

On October 20, 2010, I was notified that all my Sharepoint data has been lost.

This is all important business data since I started my technology company in

2006. I hold you company liable for this data loss and am outraged that no

warning was given before you deleted my website off of the Sharepoint servers. I

have submitted numerous tickets over the last few months to get back my data.

All these tickets were quietly closed but not resolved.

I am forced to take legal action against your company to recoup the damages

caused by your company’s negligence.

Please contact me if you are able to recover my business data. In the mean

time, please refund my hosting fees paid since 2006. The total refund is $709.12.

This is 4 years of service that was billed and paid at $177.28.
—————————————–

My name is Ryan and I represent the Legal Team at Webhost4life, I am writing to

you in regards to the loss of data for your sharepoint server due to the

migration. First I would like to take this opportunity and apologize for any

inconvenience this issue may be causing. Secondly, I wanted to confirm with you

that we no longer have access to the Legacy servers, and therefore are unable

to provide any backup of any data for you. Lastly, we are unable to provide any

compensation due to loss of data. I did notice we have canceled out your

account. If you decide to open a new account with us, we would be glad to

provide you with 6 months of free hosting due to this inconvenience. Please let

me know if I can be of any additional assistance regarding this matter. Ryan

S.Legal Team

Send email
Find email Add to contactsTo @hotmail.com
From: legal@webhost4life-inc.com
Sent: Mon 10/25/10 6:24 PM
To: @hotmail.com

Hello Miles, Due to the privacy policy in place, I am not required, nor obligated

to provide my full last name within the signature of my emails. At this time you

may simply refer to me as “Ryan”, “Ryan S”, “Mr. Ryan”, “Mr. Ryan S”, or Mr. S.

Thank you

I have been with them for several years, and slowly they have been deteriorating, in terms of features offered (less), price increases, slower and less competent support, and increased downtime and website slowness. However things have gotten really bad since January, and affected me directly since June when they started to run all the websites they host (including those expensive dedicated servers) of their new, apparently improved, platform. It looks like as of August 2010 they have completely moved all their clients to this new platform. And all new clients will be on their new platform automatically. And I can only feel sorry for them, because that new platform is new indeed, in that it totally ruins your website. Please read my review to find out why…

WEBSITE MORE DOWN THAN UP and “EXPERIENCED” SUPPORT TEAM:
For a start, expect your website to constantly go down, and expect the support team not to be able to do anything about it for weeks! Yes, weeks! While the support is available 24×7 as they say, they are practically useless. The way their support works is quite entertaining, if only it wasn’t so sad… First they turn you into a parrot (a little bird that can repeat phrases after you… you know) by making you restate the problem to them like 5 times over (because they will either answer a question you did not ask, or ignore half of what you asked), to which they give you one of their two favorite responses: “we are sorry for this inconvenience…” or “we are investigating the issue…” or both, if you are particularly insistent. The way they decide which response to pick is by throwing a dice btw. After about a week, once you have received 5 or 6 as you have probably guessed terribly informative messages; you request that the issue be looked by a supervisor or a higher technician. This turns them into a different mode of operation with you… Now they tend to reply in a “things are working fine now, please check on your end…” fashion and closing the ticket. And after that, Oh Miracle! Indeed, the website works for 30 minutes, or even an hour… unbelievable! (Though if you can call 5s-10s response times working is a matter of a debate). But that “miracle” time does not usually last more than an hour… the website goes down for some time, and then spontaneously up again for 10 minutes, and then down for oh maybe several hours, and then… you get the pattern! So, then you realize that, after all, they are just humans, not some deities that could work a true miracle, you so hoped for! After all, it must be insanely difficult to have a website you host run for several days uninterrupted… isn’t it? Thus, you submit another ticket, and you are back to the beginning of your entertaining, but sad, time-consuming, counter-productive, and costly endeavor of communicating with their so-called experienced 24×7 support!

WEBSITE ACCESS PROBLEMS:
But if the roller coaster-like responsiveness and availability of your website didn’t disappoint you enough, I have another lovely surprise: guess what: you may not even be able to access your website for weeks to upload or download files via FTP, or to back up your database! I have been cut off from my website FTP-wise for 10 days! They could care less! Just imagine what it’s like to urgently need to update your website and not have any means to do it! Their support this time was beyond just incompetent, they were totally clueless! I was asking like what is 5×5, and they were telling me that 2+2 = 4 (bad analogy but you get the point – they were totally unaware of the problem or did not want to fix it). I tried retrieving a backup for one of my databases for 1 month! They could care less! It was fortunate that I was able to migrate my database nevertheless by first using an older backup and then importing data from their database server (which thank God was accessible at that time) over to my new database server. So, even after you realize how terrible they are, unless you do regular backups that you have access to, you might have a very hard time trying to migrate to a different host, like I did.

DIRTY PRACTICES with BILLING:
And a few words about the billing. BEWARE they do not stand by their guarantees! First of all they do not refund any add-on features you purchased in addition to your plan – at all! So, even if you spend more than what the plan cost you on those extra features (like extra domain) – they will not you refund a buck! Second: regardless of what your issue is they will impose a hefty cancellation fee! Third: when issuing partial refunds for the hosting plans they calculate the amount by looking into complete months of hosting left, and rounding the amount in their favor! So if you have left 117 days with them, they will refund for 90 days only, not 117! Fourth: if you have prepaid for the hosting (like I did – I paid 40 days before my hosting would expire), they will turn it on its head and state that your real payment date was the begging of the new billing period, and the beginning of the new billing period was the date when you paid! That’s what they told me on the phone: literally they accused me of late payment, when in fact it was the other way around! So, not only is their support incompetent, but their accounting department is incompetent as well! Fifth: I have asked them several times not to put my account on auto-renew; and over the phone they assured me it was off, but when I logged in to the control panel, the auto-renew was on – they disrespect you completely! Finally: when it comes to arguing that you want to cancel the account and get a refund, stating unacceptable downtime as the reason, they tell you literally: “Yes we do provide and guarantee 99% uptime, but that is cumulative, not during any particular time period”. In other words, if you host your website for 5 years with them (that’s 60 months), it’s ok by their terms for your website to be down for 2-3 weeks in a row, because the uptime guarantee is cumulative! Ridiculous! So, basically, you would be very lucky if you get anything back from them! Do not trust them, and stay away!

PROOF of THEIR POOR PERFORMANCE and CONCLUSION:
I am glad that I have finally ended my relationship with them and moved to a great asp.net alternative – ARVIXE. I am btw not their affiliate or anything, but thought its important I mention a good place where you can go if you want to host a moderate asp.net websites with SQL Server databases.

And here’s a response time chart generated by Pingdom for my website when it was hosted by WebHost4Life.com and later when it was on ARVIXE’s servers! It’s real data, and to me the difference is astonishing:
http://i52.tinypic.com/2dc5o20.png

The bottom line is that if you want your website to be constantly inaccessible, offline, slow, and unresponsive, and if you like repeating your questions and explaining your issues 10 times over to the support team only to hear that they “are sorry” or that “it works fine now”, then WebHost4Life.com is for you. Otherwise – don’t even consider this terrible web host!

PS:
Sorry for the lengthy and at times sarcastic review, but I really wanted to give a thorough and comprehensive review with specific examples and facts, and to warn people to stay away from WebHost4Life.com!

Since then, they have gone from OK to absolutely terrible (and I’m being polite here). We were given 4 hours notice of the migration of some 8 global sites (that included two for a major global beer brand and two for a major global mobile phone company – so not trivial players) and despite desperate and repeated pleas by our CTO not to proceed until we had domains sorted, etc, they ploughed ahead with the migration.

The result was all sites being taken off line. We then went through the process of creating support tickets (we also called them and tried to get through to ‘management’ but were repeatedly told that no one could help…) and working through our global client’s IT departments to get DNS changes, et al. WH4L was no help and we still – some 2 weeks later – still have some sites down because they cannot seem to get ASP.NET working on their servers.

My only advice is stay away from these guys – they are the worst of the worst. There are plenty of great global hosts out there and I’m just sorry we stayed as long as we did. And the biggest insult – they have increased their prices… wow!!