iPowerWeb resorts to posting fraudulent reviews on HostJury
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.
I agree - they are worse than useless. So bad in fact, I have warned other people not to use them via my page at http://www.flairnetwebdesign.com/ipowerweb.html
I have been using ipowerweb for 5+ years for 2 different domains. I have had many problems - including have my X-Cart php script hacked (and no, this was not a file permission problem *I* caused), and having my photo gallery become corrupted when they "upgraded" my installed gallery script with ZERO warning or notification, and suddenly putting query restrictions (again with no warning) on mysql that caused my site to begin crashing, etc, etc.
Why haven't I moved? I have been planning to move for a long time, but I've been in analysis paralysis - switch to another shared host? Move to a VPS? And which one? Use a host that is "certified" for my shopping cart? I need to just pick one and pull the trigger - they would have a hard time being worse than the current ipowerweb!
I use iPower, their service is the absolute worst. Support is even worse than worse. The site(s) go down regularly, Tech Support is unreachable mostly. They claim they will reply in 24 hours, you would be lucky if they reply at all, if they do, it will probably be 9-10 days later. (I gues they're hoping you would go away).
Just as a side note, once I called support and their system said, "You are in the queue, your call will be answered in 2,709 minutes." I guess there were more than 1000 people holding and @ 2 minutes each...
All they need to do is put more people in tech support. If they did, I think they would take care of 90% of their problems. But they are so stupid, that they don't.
I welcome comments by someone at iPower. It will probably take them 6 months to respond to it :-)
J.A.
heh, word on the street is that it's the CEO's brother in law. Bet he doesn't get fired for this :)
No big surprise. This <i>is</i> Endurance International (EIG) and iPower we're talking about here.
Good job on catching them. :) It really is a new low.
You would, frightning really.
You would think that they would be smart enough to use an IP address other than one hosted on their network?
Lol, this is truly pathetic of them. kudos to HJ for catching this and letting everyone know what they are doing