iPowerWeb (iPower) has surprised us yet again this morning. Recently we have had several blog posts about them here on HostJury. With their company being purchased, 35% of their systems being hacked & their obvious decreasing support quality they have been fueling lawsuits against themselves on a daily basis.
However their latest attempt to attract new clients is an interesting, yet fraudulent one. Upon checking the reviews posted about iPowerWeb this morning we saw that both had been posted from an internal network at their company (gateway.phx.ipower.com) in Phoenix. This is one of the few times that a company has been so brazen that they've posted multiple reviews at the same time giving flawless ratings to themselves.
In this case they've been caught red-handed but on a number of other websites we have found their reviews have remained online. Luckily we have a very thorough auditing process & removed them immediately. It is sad to see a company as large & once renowned for it's great service to suddenly have to resort to posting fake reviews about their own services to gain traffic.
It's a new low.
Thu, 25 February 2010, 15:12
Kudos to you for posting this. I have read quite a few negative reviews about this company, I'd be curious to hear if anyone has any recent findings - are they clearing up their act or are they beyond help?
Wed, 20 January 2010, 06:17
Look, iPowerWeb resorts always do the new things those are really attract the visitors so it is my suggestion that you should at least visit once here.
Mon, 19 October 2009, 22:51
Nice catch on this. i've spent over an hour on this site reading reviews and I think I've spotted the same thing once or twice. It would be nice if you could check IPs posting against IPs of hosting companies.
Sat, 27 June 2009, 02:08
I-Power sucks as a comany they ripped me off and I wouldnt reccommend them to anyone, the auto payment is unfair and will not refund if they see a mistake..
Ripped Off
dont go with them for anything
Thu, 25 June 2009, 20:22
All in all HostJury is a pretty lax review venue. This just adds weight to the fact. Actually I have a feeling that HostJury is just another HostGator company - self serving?
Tue, 12 May 2009, 22:14
This does not surprise me at all. Ipower treated me horrible as an account. Generally there are many other great hosts out there and this move by Ipower to post fake reviews just shows how desperate they have become as a company. I am still also surprised they are in business. Thought they would have been gone with the end of 2008 by now.
Sat, 4 April 2009, 19:38
. I have three websites hosted by Ipower web and ever since they arbitrarily changed my password I have been unable to access my site riteworks.com.
After demanding credit card numbers for credit cards I no have they insisted I fax a copy of my drivers license. This proved not to be enough. Instead of sending a password to the address I included on the fax they now said I would have to wait 5-7 business days for a response. The reps were like brick walls using the word "policy" to avoid discussion.
Sat, 12 July 2008, 06:46
I know I'm a little late in piping in here re: affiliate relationships on this site, however: David, you deserve high praise for your response to Sam's concerns (and I admire Sam's diligence).
I want everyone reading this to know that this website is the 'real deal', and you can count on the reviews here- they are impartial, completely community driven and after having visited what seems like a million such sites in the past ten years; when I discovered the launch of this website in an e107 forum 2 years or so ago, I loved what they were doing from the start. It was fresh, honest and a BIG step in the right direction. Clean, uncluttered very Zen... not a thousand flashing clicky things trying to lure you in and banner ads all going crazy for your cash.
I fully expect and WANT these guys to succeed and make money (like the craigslist and google guys) from the traffic I bring here- I think this is the RIGHT way to rate hosts. Do you?
Aren't we all trying to make a living doing what we love and providing a valuable service in the process? Here, it's done elegantly and completely without regard to the hosts financial standing in the community.
It doesn't matter how much iPowerWeb is paying to HostJury (or has in the past); when they screw customers, it costs them the business of every single person who finds this website and the reviews filed under them. They can't alter that and as we've seen in recent events, neither can sneaky employees or desperate managers there.
I love HostJury and I pray that you guys make buckets of money on every visit I make here.
I'm off to find out if Fused is as awesome as they seem. A little more $, but worth it for anyone looking to MAKE A LIVING on the web!
Fri, 11 July 2008, 11:25
Sorry my contact email did not publish. It is jdrconsultant@hotmail.com any lawyers representing a client would be preferred. I need to get my business back and recoup some losses
Fri, 11 July 2008, 10:10
Does anyone know the names of the plaintiffs or preferably their lawyers? I rented a faulty server, lost very important domains, websites, and have spent endless hours waiting or speaking to people who do not help me. I lost most of my internet presence not to mention an extreme amount of money............Their support acts kind but then once they get off the phone or place you on hold-that is the end of that!
Sat, 7 June 2008, 21:11
I had them too, but my site kept getting hacked. When I contacted tech support, they told me to contact abuse@ipowerweb.com. How am I suppose to send them an email if my website got hacked?
Wed, 14 May 2008, 01:52
I just stumbled on this. I too have been having problems with iPower/Startlogic recently. I started hosting my website with them in 2005 and was quite happy with their excellent customer service. Since the transition to this Vdeck 3.0 it has been all downhill.
I accidently deleted my image file the other night and searched in vain for the recycling bin. Not there. I called Customer Service and was told there was no longer a recycling bin and didn't i have my original images on my computer anyway? Huh? I do, but that's a lot of extra work to upload them all again.
And...when I go to upload I almost always get a 500 error stating that the page is temporarily unavailable. It's ridiculous. This used to be such good service. Figures. I'm no expert on this website stuff and it annoys me to think I have to start over with another company. Go Daddy? I guess....
Wed, 26 March 2008, 18:54
We have been suffering for website and mail service malfuncition from ipower a couple of times since 2006. Recently, they are driving me really crazy. Our website and email have been down since March 16th, 2008. I called everyday and waited for half an hour even one hour, asked them to get our website and email work. I was gaven ticket number, repeat our security answer. it turned out to be nothing moved forward. This webhost is really not to be recommanded! Stay away from ipower.
Thu, 13 March 2008, 21:41
I manage 9 websites - 2 are mine - all w/ipower which was ipowerweb.com. All was fine until Jan 2008 & the new vdeck. 2 of my clients sites which were transitioned failed to let me publish - that was finally resolved. I sold a new site in Jan 2008 which I published 1/14 - by 2/14 it had absolutely dissappeared - gone. I too did the phone dance, submitted tickets, resubmitted tickets, resubmitted tickets over & over & over. Their page public_html under Filemanager failed to open w/error 500 for 2 1/2 weeks, finaly was repaired 3/3 & I was able to publish. By 3/6 all was lost again & still is at this date. I am so sorry I asked my client to transfer - that was a DNS nightmare also - since I cannot in good conscience bill her for a site that has been up only 1 of 3 months & it is a business site. I have talked to ipower - found out they hired over 100 new employees - most do not know anything about any of the webdesign programs at all including ones that have been around a very long time like Frontpage. I am always asked to backup my files - luckily they are all on my computer as they surely were not on their servers anymore. At this point, cross my fingers, 8 of the sites are working. I found no way to complain to corporate headquarters about this so here I am - thinking of ditching ipower & transferring this client back to her old domain & hosting - not to mention the appology I had to make & also making me look like an idiot for suggesting ipower - where is the company I used to love?
Thu, 31 January 2008, 13:46
Sam,
The url isn't obfuscated or obscured for any purpose other than organization, primarily. It makes it easier on us to manage (and even track) outgoing clicks so we can assist in seeing which aspects of our own sites are popular.
Now on the other hand it definitely does have it's added benefits as we can setup outgoing links to go to affiliate programs where possible. We've got companies who pay out the largest affiliate payouts down on the bottom, in fact there's very few up top!
We certainly don't organize our list based on affiliate payouts. Instead, 100% of our list is based on end-user reviews - if a company with an affiliate payout just happens to get near the top, bravo!
If we can pay for lunch & help users find QUALITY providers, we've killed two birds with one stone. It allows us the ability to concentrate on Hostjury as a dayjob rather than a side project, we can only expel more effort and make the site better for you, the visitor.
Wed, 30 January 2008, 20:12
We have never stated that we don't use affiliate links, quite the contrary - we've had long and frank discussions about it, on WHT and on this site.
What we've said is that we will never (and we haven't, nor do we plan on) decide what hosts go where in the rankings based on affiliate payouts or whatever. Most of the hosts in the top 10 don't have affiliate systems at all, and the ones that do go there on their own merits.
As long as we're open & honest about it, which we are, have been, and plan to be for the foreseeable future there's no conflict of interest.
Wed, 30 January 2008, 19:45
Chek this one too:
http://hostjury.com/host/redirect/110
And here is a tool to check the header of this redirecting page:
http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers.asp
Wed, 30 January 2008, 17:44
Well,
can anyone explain this to me?
http://hostjury.com/ads/clickthrough/12
Hostjury, which claims itself to be not involved in any affiliate linking, is redirecting to HostGator using the link above. Infact all the websites that are reviewed can be reached using some or the other redirect. Look, I do not have anything for or against any webhost. But I am really pissed off because of dishonest webhost reviews. All ..almost all the top ranking webhost blogs/sites/ sell affilate links.
I don't know whether this comment is going to appear on this site or not. You seam to be a more cleaver than the rest of the review websites. They put direct affiliate links. One can easily find them by looking at the source code of their pages. But you use redirects to do the same. Or am I mistaken? Please clarify.
Mon, 14 January 2008, 23:31
To Yeah:
Well, the quickest way to help us get these posts to the top of the search engines is by users like yourself linking to them.
Tell your friends, post about it on your own websites & sure enough -- we'll get to the top.
We're certainly not out to blast them ourselves but sometimes it's hard not to -- things have gone so far downhill it's depressing!
Fri, 11 January 2008, 16:58
I wasn't saying that you guys are posting good reviews earlier at the bottom of my post as "HELLO" that whole thing was from a post I put on another website that was a review site. I said that at the top but I should have clarified again at the bottom, sorry.