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HostWinds - "Premium" service
LowEndTalking
Member
I just wanted to share this experience with you.
I'm one of the customers who had an account with WeLoveServers and was then migrated to HostWinds.
This was already the worst experience, I ever had with a provider. While they failed to send me any notification via E-Mail, they even didn't notify me when they actually migrated the server to a new IP address.
Well, okay, they did, but 3 weeks after it actually happened. In the meanwhile, I had to find out everything myself.
Well, that was a nice one. Then the next surprise came. A slight price increase from $38 to $96.25. I don't want to discuss this here, but I then asked the customer service to cancel the server when the next payment is required. This would be somewhere in October 2016.
So far, so good. I can understand the high price for a company that speaks of itself as a premium provider with 24/7 experienced and US based service.
And I was so glad to experience this great service. Let's fast forward to yesterday (April 16th). I wanted to log on my server and got a connection time out.
Well, happens. Let's check the customer service interface, just to make sure. Man, that was a great surprise. My service was simply cancelled b/c someone shifted the due date some months front (Mid April). That's premium service!
Anyway, I opened a ticket with High priority asking for my service to return, it was paid until October. The initial response was "Sorry, we're looking into it."
After some more hours, I got this:
Currently at this time, we are seeing that there wasn't much data on the server with We Love Servers, if you want we can migrate the data from there or we can create a new server for you
So right after saying "We're looking into this", there isn't even an explanation what happened, not a real Sorry. For me it reads more like "Yeah, well, we fu**ed up. Anyway, you didn't really had that much data, right?".
Ah, and to make even more of this situation, they have this great signature:
Please take backups often, practice writing secure code, and run malware scans regularly,
Yeah, well. Thanks for that! Anyway, they restored my server with my old backup. Not even a sorry.
I really thought about taking back that cancellation but that's it on my side. This isn't even worth a dime.
After their arrogant message where they basically blamed WeLoveServer for being the worst provider on earth, they didn't really perform better, did they?
Or maybe I have the wrong ideas when it comes to Premium service. :-)
Anyway, just wanted to let you know. Take care of your data, it doesn't need an "rm -rf /", it simply needs a premium provider...
Comments
Hostwinds is by far a premium provider, they are the exact opposite but with premium prices. I've heard of multiple complains about them.
Not had to speak with them but the 'move' was handled rather badly. I went from having UK servers (for VPN) to "premium' US based at x4 the price.
What narked me was the implication of Hostwinds doing us a favour (to be fair they would argue they could have dumped WLS customers) but they didn't
I am sure many ex WLS clients feel the same, simply stating the service is premium (as it costs x4 more) does not a premium service make.
A small update, to keep everything correct.
HostWinds contacted me again and apologized for everything and offered me to restore newer backups. They also provided a detailed explanation. :-)
Although the whole process wasn't being handled how it should be, HostWinds at least noticed their mistake and fixed it.
That's great news, like I said it's not an ideal situation but it could be much worse.
That's good they issued an apology to you and newer backups
.
Resurrecting a somewhat older thread, but I think the following is worth some lolz
I too was a WeLoveServer client and yes, WLS had their issues but Hostwinds took those issues to another level
We all got this email when WLS was acquired by Hostwinds, stating that a transition to Hostwinds would take place. It was reassuring that this shouldn't be a problem because we could keep old VPS IPs, data and settings. Surprise!! IPs were changed all of the sudden. EU servers moved to US datacenter with high RTT.
Realizing this, I raised a ticket, letting them know about the issue and requesting back the old IP. Guess what? A technician thought that it was HIS server! He/she logged in as root, without any approval whatsoever and tried to change the setting he/she THOUGHT to be the problem. Result? Completely broken server! Lets call this "The first catastrophe"
I just love inaccessible, inoperable servers with customer's live data (sure I had backups, but restoring to other servers in different hosts and tinkering, takes time!)
In an attempt to prevent all hell from breaking loose, I raised another ticket for the other VPS I had with WLS, which hadn't been migrated yet. To cut the long story short... Yes! You guessed it! They did the same! So I met "The second catastrophe"
Seeing these insanely high prices, I decided to cancel the VPS of "The first catastrophe". This way I found out that cancellations were immediate. If you had paid for 12 months and decided to cancel on the 4th month, you could kiss the rest 8 months of paid service goodbye. That was why I decided to delay the cancellation of the second VPS.
For the second VPS, an invoice was generated 20 days or so before the due date. But at Hostwinds the thought that this wasn't something that I should know about, so they didn't send any notice (I can hear your thoughts... It wasn't even in spam/junk! :P ). One day BEFORE the due date, they decided that it was time for them to collect the money from the invoice they hadn't sent me. Ticket with high priority...! The response in chat was that a technician was already looking at the problem! lol !? Let's call this "The first great response"
The second (canned) answer looked more "official" but the highlight was: "All cancellations must be received via ticket through the Client area at least three (3) business days before the next billing cycle begins". Let's call this "The second Great response". Billing the customer without a notice and then blaming them for not sending the cancellation in time.
Well... Hopefully this is the end of this post. You see I only had 2 VPS with WLS which were migrated to Hostwinds. I can't imagine the length of this post if I had more services... ;-)
Having really important issues in two out of two total services with Hostiwinds... Well this can't be a coincidence!
What do you expect from a host who in its starting point mainly promoted BH & Spam/Scam activities ? They even promoted themselves as DMCA-Ignored host to only start slamming every client with the DMCAs once they gathered enough $ ...
site:blackhatworld.com "hostwinds"Once a spammer, always a spammer ...
I think hostwinds = burst.net ..
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1387621
Care to elaborate?
Think he's suggesting when you visit burst.net it takes you to Hostwinds haha
I am fairly certain that HostWinds brokered a deal for their cloud clients back when Burst was going under. I am sure you can find more diving into the WHT forums, but I am fairly certain this is the case.
Worth noting that Hostwinds also screwed ZPanel (leaving my opinions of ZPanel as a panel aside).
Really interesting info in there that I didn't know about...!
I have read
somewhere (I don;t remember the exact source now)that "Ballen", the creator of zpanel had been threatened by hostwinds after selling the panel to them, not to be involved with the fork (sentora). I really wanted to know what did they were thinking when they got zpanel and kicked all the community out of the project. And then, killed it.Maybe they thought that there were to many holes in zpanel and just wanted to do something good for the hosting community, who knows
EDIT: I just read @joepie91 's link, that describes the pressure from hostwinds to ballen (Bobby Allen)
May another ex-WeLoveServers client join in on this discussion?
Unfortunately I don't have the same complaints as the previous posters (I don't like to talk to technical support very often) but I do regret not taking advantage of their 60 day money back guarantee.
I signed up for a yearly OpenVZ WLS VPS around mid-September 2015 so my invoice wasn't due until October (HostWinds gave an extra month for the invoice if you were originally a WLS customer) of this year. The migration happened shortly after I purchased my VPS.
Since I had paid the WLS price and had a year, a year was more than enough to find another VPS provider because as others have mentioned, their prices were quite high.
I paid under $20 USD with WLS for a year on an OpenVZ container and HostWinds tried to match the same specs as the WLS VPS. Unfortunately, the specs were less than that of the WLS VPS and again, as others have mentioned, they used WLS as a scapegoat for their reasoning.
I was quite shocked when I saw the price for my VPS that I would have to pay: $40+ (this is with the 50% discount they gave to all of us WLS transfers).
I regret not taking advantage of HostWinds' 60 day money back guarantee because soon after the migration, GalaxyHostPlus (GHP) came into fruition and they had very good start-up deals to help them get on their feet. A friend of mine has purchased one of those startup VPS deals from GHP and has been happy with it since.