24
Apr
Webhost4life started moving customers from old hosting platform to new platform in early Jan 2010. During the migration you may experience some problems and if you’re a customer of webhost4life, please reply this post and tell us what’s the problem you got with the migration.
And also you may tell us the migration status of your hosting account, if the problem was resolved then you may tell us how you fixed the problem so others can learn from you and try that method to fix the problems.
Click here to see what others say about the migration
I tried posting a comment, but it timed out. Welcome to the new platform, where nothing works proerly.
The chat line “technical support” desk is based in Mangalore, India, and is not staffed by technically qualified people. All they can do is log support tickets for you (it’s quicker and more accurate to do that yourself) but they can answer basic questions on how to use the new console.
That’s about as much “support” as you’ll get from them.
Tickets are usually responded to in a day or two, and resolved usually in a week. Don’t expect it to be done sooner, because it won’t. I have some tickets outstanding for several weeks.
If you can fix the problem yourself, do it. That’s what the new owners, EIG, expect you to do, because its cheaper for them. It’s what they call an “outstanding customer experience”.
My first issue was to solve the problem of a blank page. On the old platform I had set up a domain redirection so that http://fishwisepro.com was redirected to http://www.fishwisepro.com
This doesn’t work on the new system, so ask them to cancel it and just use the default settings.
My second issue was that on the old platform, my web site was housed in a folder called “/site1/” and when it was “migrated” the new platform can’t have a “home page” in anything other than the root folder. So you have to use the new file manager to move all your stuff from “/site1/” to “/”, and then fix the domain pointer to point to “/”
Ignore the “subdirectory” option in the “Domain Pointing Manager” because it doesn’t work properly. The only option that works is the “Home Directory” option.
Check the “httpd.ini” file in your “/” folder. If its size is anything other than 0 then change it to be a zero-byte file.
On the new plaftorm, every time you upload a file using FTP, the date of the file changes to the date uploaded. So to keep your file dates synchronised, download all the files you just uploaded, so both your local copy and your remote copy have the same date.
They are not using IIS7 for FTP, so the FTP MDTM command is not supported.
I was a happy customer of nearly 2 years with Webhost4Life. Recently I was even getting serious about upgrading to their VPS offering.
Until a week ago when my site was “migrated”. I am now a customer of KickAssVps.com and am in the process of terminating my Webhost4Life account.
At first glance, my website transferred ok. But upon further inspection I realized they had deleted all of my custom DNS records. When I went to the new platform to add them, the entire site went offline. I chatted online with several support “technicians” who kept telling me they were making my case high priority and an engineer was working on it. After nearly a day of being totally offline, it was finally resolved by a simple IIS restart. What was most frustrating during this process was there was no communication back to me using the ticket system. For all I knew absolutely nothing was going on – which I still suspect to be the truth since an IIS restart doesn’t take 18 hours.
Fast forward a couple days and I discover that one of my databases was moved to the new platform – but none of the data. Just the database schema was moved. After talks again with “support”, I was told a ticket was created for them to move the database (again). I have yet to see this ticket actually in the system.
Fast forward another day and I find that some IIS/ASP.NET permissions are prevening my software licensing system from generating software keys. 5 days later, this case is still open and every time I chat with “support” I am told not to worry because an engineer is working on it – and that it will be fixed within “30 minutes”. I’ll also add that I provided a detailed process (and urls to articles) on how to fix the issue. Once again, the ticket system was one-way with no information coming back from customer support on progress or status.
Just yesterday I completed my transition to my new provider and I have nothing but excellent things to say about them. Webhost4Life, on the other hand, is a company I will be discouraging people from using for the rest of their existence.
I welcome your comments.
They took down two of my sites, both on DNN, but I had them revert back to the old DNS, so they are up at the moment.
If it helps, you may find our unofficial wh4l community site interesting: http://webhost4lifecustomers.ning.com/
Many people have posted their migration issues there.
I have been with webhost4life since 2004 and have refered many friends to them. Everything was fine from 2004 until begining of mid 2006 and that’s when started noticing a complete change in their support and quality of deliverables.
1. Support team is not knowledgable enough to answer all technical question.
2. Technical support are not competitive and can not fix critical issues with their own hosting infrastructure.
3. Response time deteriorated by a long shot relative to previous years
4. Support does not read the tickets properly and sometimes reply to other tickets. This is a nightmare because they tell you to do things that are not applicable to your problem.
5. Quality of support is just terrible.
I moved to webhost4life and having really bad experience. They are switching to new platform and there are a lot of problems because of this. Also you cannot change file permissions by yourself from the file manager. You have to ask the support to do it for you for every change in file permissions.
I use FileZilla in FTPES mode to connect to my web host environment. Due to some changes in our local company network topology, I am connecting to the domain via VPN-1 SecurRemote NGX R60 HFA2 (Build 044). Once I installed the client, FileZilla could no longer connect to my web host using FTPES. I uninstalled the client and FileZilla started connecting again.
It’s official! FileZilla’s FTPES mode and SecuRemote don’t work well together. Good thing I have another machine I can use to download my web site.
Why is this important? I was using FileZilla to quickly back up my web applications to my local development workstation. I am leaving WebHost4Life.com after getting a good look at their new control panel and hosting support. I don’t know what happened to the company, but this change and migration is not for the better.
The host – webhost4life.com – have recently migrated me to their new system and it’s caused no end of problems. I lost two of my databases, couldn’t pay the bill for them to restore the database from my SQL injection problem and also lost control of two of the three domains on the account. As it turns out that they no longer support .edu.au domains. WTF, man? A day ago they did and now they don’t – all without telling me this was the case. The crazy thing is that this statement is provably untrue as the old settings for the edu.au domain still work and the site is still there. I just can’t ever modify any of them ever again.
It turns out that web hosting is even more troublesome than malicious hackers, and now I’m looking for a new host.
What I can say is the fucking webhost4life new support team screwed everything up. Read my article of the migration here: http://www.webhostthink.com/2010/05/12/fucking-webhost4life-migrationfucking-new-support-team
After months of having a migration status of QA and a message stating that my site has not yet passed their extensive QA process I suddenly find that my site was migrated to the new servers.
Now I have no site! There’s simply nothing there! No files or web services or blog or anything. The only thing so far surviving is the database and the mail accounts. Also, after having the site transferred I have been receiving hundreds if not 1,000′s of old email for all of my mail accounts.
I’ve contacted their live chat support team and all they can keep telling me is that I have to wait for one of their engineers to contact me. In the meantime, I have to tell my clients waiting to use their licenced software from my site that they will have to wait. This is starting to cost me a lot of time and money that I could well do without.
At least some of you were sent emails notifying you of the transfer…you should count yourselves lucky! Now I’m having to find another host provider hopefully not get stung like this again.
I could keep going but I think that their changes to the Terms of Service speaks volumes…I particulaly like the part where they state in section 21 part b. “WE CANNOT GUARANTEE CONTINUOUS SERVICE, SERVICE AT ANY PARTICULAR TIME, INTEGRITY OF DATA, INFORMATION OR CONTENT STORED OR TRANSMITTED VIA THE INTERNET. WE WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS TO, OR ANY CORRUPTION, ERASURE, THEFT, DESTRUCTION, ALTERATION OR INADVERTENT DISCLOSURE OF, DATA, INFORMATION OR CONTENT TRANSMITTED, RECEIVED OR STORED ON ITS SYSTEM.”
At least they’re holding up that part of the agreement.
Webhost4life are a bunch of f**king jokers. They screwed up both my ‘transfers’ – in the one they revealed my database connection string to the world for 6 days! They migrated the schema but not the data for 2 of my databases and for the third they changed the username and password without telling me (they don’t understand version control systems so don’t bother trying to explain why this is a particularly egregious thing to do). They killed my ASP.NET MVC site completely too by misconfiguring IIS. Also, they dropped all folder permissions and, get this… you CANNOT assign these yourself through the control panel! If you want to do this you must contact first line support who then raise a ticket and 2nd line support may get it done for you within 3-4 days. This makes regularly deploying your application *impossible*… big bang deployments anyone?
In my 15 years as a web developer I have never experienced such incompetence.
I despise these f**kers.
After migration I just lost an email account on a domain that was there since 2004. After contacting support they simply said there was never email on that domain.
Further two sites went broken, one just redirected to another folder (not made by me ) with a blank page, another was redireinting to a wrong path.
Great work (NOT )
I think I am going to look for antoher webhoster.
I had a horrible migration experience as well which included poor customer support. I was happy with the company until the two month automated migration which in the end I had to complete my self anyways. The email system has changed drastically as it is buggy and you can no longer set the sizes of your mailboxes. They are now limited to 250 MB even though I only have two mail boxes. Judging from the “works when I try it” and “that’s not how we do things now” responses it appears they don’t care.
I currently searching for an alternative web host.
In the last week, I have had two similar issues at listed above, and have become sooooo disappointed in lack of half decent support from WH4L. It’s aweful!! I am certaily looking for a new host.
They changed the script they use for FormMail. First I knew my clients complained their forms weren’t working. They didn’t think to let customers know they were doing this. I had to quickly change the forms on ALL of my sites which took a while.
This was just the start. They “lost” one of my databases and ALL the data contained in it. This was a real estate site so you can imagine the damage this caused.Then they added something called PEAR (my colleague understands all this, I do not) one file of which had the same name as one of my colleague’s database files and that particular site went offline at the weekend which was the site’s busiest time normally. The help desk was useless, my colleague eventually changed the name of his file and the site came back online, no thanks to WH4L.
I have had enough. Looking for a new hosting company. Pity as I have been with them for several years with absolutely no complaints at all.
one problem after another. my website has not worked 100% properly since may 25. here’s some of what i’m going through. i hope it helps others.
*confirm your ftp settings with wh4l. my control panel was showing wrong ftp connections. make sure the files on ftp server are the same as your website – upload a test page and see if it appears on your website.
*confirm your pop3 settings for email.
*my ssl certificate was not able to be migrated. wh4l should purchase and install a new one for you. note to self – make sure i wasn’t charged on my credit card.
*confirm that your databases have been migrated. my wordpress blog was down because of this. i also have a database for form data which has yet to be migrated. also, database connections have all been changed so you will need to update this in your code.
in my experience, support tickets are better than live chat. i have not had one problem solved by live chat. however, they respond very slowly to support tickets so you just have to wait.
for various reasons, i’m not able to switch hosts right now but if i could, i definitely would. wh4l is really bad!
You’ll love this one…
I have 5 semi-dedicated servers with WebHost4Life hosting more than 80 domains.
I just received a call from their ‘Support Team’ and some *SSHole named ‘Ken’ saying that they are “having trouble with the migration of my accounts” so they “will no longer be supporting DotNetNuke or SSL”.
Really????
He then states rather glibbly in his phone message that I should address this right away because my servers will be turned off in 2 to 4 weeks.
Bear in mind that I have been with WebHost4Life for more than 5 years. I spend more than $700.00 every month with this company and I have never missed a payment.
I never received an email notice that this was happening, no posting on the Web site nothing, just *SSHole Ken and his phone message.
I tried to call WebHost4Life, but those of you who host with them, already know that was pointless and wasted time and effort.
I started a live chat where I asked if it was true is WebHost4Life not supporting DotNetNuke anymore or even SSL? I was assured that was not the case. Just then I got through to someone on the phone at the new company who stated clearly that “WebHost4life will no longer be supporting DotNetNuke or SSL”. She then confirmed that my servers would be turned off in 2-4 weeks.
WebHost4Life.com = CrappyWebHosting4AFewMonthsUntilYouWiseUpAndGoElsewhere.com
PowerDNN.com is my new host. More expensive, but they speak and write english without translators and they are very responsive.
Stay away from WebHost4Life.com, forget about them being a lousy hosting company, they are just a lousy company period.
Sincerely,
18yr Online Vet and most recent WebHost4Life Victim
Nice work buddy! Some of these are classics!
All hell broke loose on my sites when they moved me to the new platform.
I am having problems everywhere. MyLittleSQL is just a joke, when it connects. All my subdomains stopped working. My directory permissions were not transferred and my users could no longer upload item photos. Support takes a long time to respond. I am running around looking for another hosting company.
STAY AWAY from these guys.
All I can say is, Webhost4Life sure f’d up with the change to the new platform. I was a 7 year long member, and thought the 4Life would really work for me. Seems not. They decided to remove remote administration of MySQL, and make it only web based. My scripts went from 30 seconds of automated, up to 30 minutes of even trying to find the dang interface to reload database. Pretty much effictively shut down my site on updates. I called the tech as other guy above did, got mostly same response. What it came down to was FU buddy, we know what is best for our users, and as you are one, we will tell you how you can, or cannot access your OWN data. By the way I am a DB Admin, and well that just does not go over well. I’m posting to as many sites as I can, to stay away from WebHost4Now, if you want to keep your own data up to date. Looking for a better solution myself.
Mike
I’ve had 3 WH4L accounts since 2001. They were great. Great support qualified technology people. Responsive and just great to work with. Now I can only echo what’s been said here.
I’ve referred numerous people to them and hosted many clients sites on them. All I can say is don’t use them. They suck royally. They caused me to lose an account that had a very valuable web site i=on it due to their incompetence.
I predict they will be out of business in 24 months. They have gone from one of the best to the one of the worst hoster.
Sad really.
I have been customer for eight years with webhost4life and was happy until 5 weeks ago. After reading all the comments I assume most of us are facing the same or a similar problem. Customer service and support sucks big time!! Just for your information guys our webpage is not working since 5 weeks!!! Everyday promises but nothing gets done!! All I can say is thank you Webhost4life we lost a lot of money and sales because of your f.uped service!!! I RECOMMEND TO EVERYBODY DONT USE WEBHOST4LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!
Awesome work. I always find very unique posts here on your Blog.
Thanks for the great desings.It will help me to redesign my jobs site
I had two account with WH4L and they informed me of the migration. I’ve had hosting with multiple companies through the years and I’ve seen a few migrations, so I wasn’t all that worried.
Then the first account was migrated. It was a simple one and seemed to go smoothly. But somewhere along the way one of my custom applications broke. I did not build it, had no way of fixing it, and subsequently lost an entire site (which I had to rebuild in another CMS on the fly…fun). I cancelled that account because I had already intended on using a cheaper host for my less demanding sites.
My second account is an Advanced VPS account. Yesterday morning all of my sites hosted on this account went down. I can’t even login to download a backup because the IP address isn’t resolving. My first call was to check on billing (which was out of date because the card we had on file with them was expired…I had tried to update this in the past, bu the old control panel refused to allow me to do so). I thought that was the end of it.
But the site was still down an hour later. I called, emailed, and submitted a trouble ticket. They told me that the site was “migrated” and since they have NO COMMUNICATION with the new team they can’t even check to verify. I had to call the new team and they said it was “Pending” and suggested that I call the old team.
30 hours later, the site is still down and the best I’ve received from them is that they’re going to fast-track the migration. It’ll be finished in 24-48 hours. In the meantime, my site is still down.
Worst experience ever. We’re already switching to another CMS and web host, but I can’t help feeling that the change can’t happen soon enough.
DON’T GO WITH WEBHOST4LIFE. Their support used to respond to tickets within an hour. Now expect NO RESPONSE to any inquiries.
I agree with singlelatte. Used to be one of the best and it’s sad.
Couple of years ago I joined WH4L. It was great, I remember the techies at that time were very knowledgeable. Tickets were answered in a timely and professional manner.
Last monday (August 2, 2010) I received an email saying that my site has been migrated to their new platform. That was the beginning of the nightmares. I went to check the site again, nothing was up. I started getting Bad Request Error 400. Opened tickets, no answer/replies.
Talk to the techies, they have weird accent could not understand one another.
I am moving to JodoHost and would never recommend WH4L to anyone. They suck. Shame on them. That’s what you get when you outsource your services.
Unhappy Customer
Mannn, if you wanna get crazy and loose a lot of time and money with webhosting then you should subscribe to Webhost4life.com, they are the most miserable web hosting company i ever meet… Support is just a useless script guided humans saying nothing… I had 3 websites working fine in the “old platform” but since they migrated the nightmare has begun… endless tickets and support chat sessions that less or nothing solve.. wrongfull information is given.. forget it… used to be good, now its the worst you can get… Never host your websites with those guys at webhost4life
What the new owners of webhost4life is akin to terrorism. I have lost all of my websites all of my email and their support refuse to even give an estimate on when it will be resolved.
If this is what we can expect from indian outsourcing then gold help us. I am so sick in my stomach from what this has done to me it is unbelievable. 1 week and I can still not get my website… the support team doesn’t even exist. This is like an organised crime gang.
Webhost4life use to be fantastic. I would happily pay double for that same type of service being through this nightmare.
To reiterate… EIG (Endurance International Group) are not a company they are terrorist thieves who are now actively destroying my life.
40 web sites down on 2 VPS accounts for 5 days, without even an email notice first telling me about the migration. No email, no Web site, no FTP, no control panel access.
Just 40 domains taken down. I get an email an hour later saying “Congratulations! Your account has been migrated.”
I had already logged into the “Transition Kiosk” and switched it to ‘Manual’. Appearently, that’s about as useless as the WH4L tech support with their ticket updates of “work in progress”. How informative! That sure sheds some light on the work you’re doing. These little gems by the way are automated. How else could it magically appear literally 2 seconds after I hit the submit button on my ticket.
And to cap it all off, a full 2 days after I have had 40 Web sites down and without any email service, but somebody repsonding to my tickets with “work in progress”, I finally reach a lead tech in the support department who informs me that nobody has even looked at my ticket yet! And, that he “didn’t plan to look at it soon” either because, get this “we respond to tickets in the order that we receive them”.
So, I am going out of business while “Jimmy the Tech” teaches somebody how to write an image tag.
I couldn’t even login to download files or point the domain temporarily to another site. Just locked out and held hostage by this lousy hosting company WebHostLife.
I believe their plan is to shed all of these DotNetNuke type of accounts, take the hit and then just change the name of the company. Beware of anything associated with these robber barons: http://www.enduranceinternational.com
Run from WebHost4Life. If you are there now and have not yet felt the sting of the “migration”, get out now while you still can, it’s coming.
Thanks for this nice collection of comment forms. There are some nice ideas for the next redesign.
failed to check on my account after a year, and lost SSH access (for linux hosting plan).
will not renew the acc unless the issue is resolved