Webhost4life Transition, Old platform Vs. New platform Comparison
If you’re a current webhost4life customer and I guess you’ll encounter the largest changes with Webhost4life. I think you should have received emails about this changes, how is the new platform and is it better than the old one? As you see, Webhost4lifereview.com is a web hosting reviews website focused on the updates about webhost4life, here I’d like to talk about the new changes.
1. The Changes of Control Panel
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Okay! The old control panel is designed by webhost4life programmers and the new one is using cPanel control panel. I admit there’re much more features in the new cPanel control panel, but I’m already familiar with using the old one, so if it’s possible, I wish they can offer one more choice for the members who’d like to use the old one – Like me.
2. The Support Team is already Changed
Webhost4life has been recognized as one of the best customer supports in the industry, the original webhost4life support team makes me impressed and then I determined to open a website to review their web hostings. The original support team are so good that you cannot scold any bad words about them, how is the new support team? I need to say they’re also responsible but they’re further not good enough than the original support team. I can guess if you’re encountering issues, you’d rather choosing to contact with the original support team, but not the new one. The new support team still have many things to learn:-)
3. Affiliate Program Changes
Uh.. This is a bad news for the old reseller partners. As you see, the old webhost4life offers a generous annual commissions and the new affiliate program only offers one time commission payment. If you’re an old reseller partner, I think you cannot accept with the policy changed. Whatever, the program is good for the new partners, since you can get higher payments in a short time.
4. Home Page Changes
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The new webhost4life home page seems to be more beautiful than the old one, but indeed, I found the new website homepage’s loading speed is not so good than the old one, maybe the old one is better in the codes optimized. And another, you can find the old webhost4life can offer more web hosting packages than the new one. The new webhost4life don’t provide ecommerce hosting and dedicated servers any more, I just think how they deal with those dedicated users at present, forced them move to another hostings?
Conclusions:
From these changes, I cannot make a conclusion the new webhost4life will be better than the old one, but I do wish webhost4life can grow better in the future.
Are you a current webhost4life user and how’s your experience? Welcome to share your opinions with others. Thank you!
I’d have to say that the new WH4L support is appalling.
Tier 1 support (chat and voice) are often just reading/replying off scripted responses to only a certain number of “common” problems. They are slow and sometimes a simple chat session can take up to 30 minutes to complete. More often that not you suddenly get the feeling that Tier 1 support can’t really think outside the box so you MUST insist they refer a ticket to Tier 2 support … But even then the Tier 2 ticket they create usually does not have any meaningful data you conveyed to the Tier 1 person, indicating their poor knowledge of what’s going on.
Don’t even think of asking for help from a Tier 1 support person is you are trying to manually migrate your websites from the old WH4L to the new WH4L.
Tier 2 support is a bit hit and miss. I’ve had some great and prompt solutions but at the same time been equally disappointed. For example a simple question on how to use a Verisign identity certificate with the Online Microsoft Exchange interface they support should be simple to answer … WRONG! No answer or feedback from these guys for over a week now, even with me constantly prompting them …
If you are a reasonably technical user, then stay away from these guys … You’ll be banging your head against the wall when you realise you know more than they do.
If you are a newbie then you are in trouble too. WordPress has a great feature that allows users to automatically upgrade their versions. Big problems on the new [possibly crowded] WH4L servers as the upgrade function times out …
Tier 1 & 2 support say it must be a WordPress fault, but it works fine on the old WH4L servers. It’s obvious the upgrade process is timing out and it’s very obvious that WordPress on the new servers is SLLLOOOOWWWW. The new WH4L support don’t care, simply because they couldn’t be bothered [or know how to] investigate the issue … claiming “It’s the application’s fault!”.
Not impressed with all the time I’ve waisted. I’m going to shop around and find another hoster, even if it costs a little more.
The new WH4L may still be cheap, but their support service and server performance really stink.
Hi there,
Yes, I did find the new webhost4life support team is not so good as the original support team.
If you’re looking for reliable windows web hosting, I recommend “Arvixe”
If you’re looking for reliable linux web hosting, I recommend “Hostgator”
Good luck！
Billy
New support Team is absolute disaster, after many years with WH4L I am moving all my domains out ASAP, the new Team is a bunch of incompetent ignorants that as most idiots think they know everything.
Frank
Had an account for 4 years. The new support team should all be fired. They are ignorant, rude, lie to you and provide a substandard service. This web host is now a classic example of a company that should be avoided at all costs. They brought my site down almost daily for 4 weeks solid. At the end of this month they hit the pinnacle of genius when they took an unrelated companies transactional database and replaced my product catalog with it. This essentially made over 4000 customers private data, publicly posted on the website, including CC information. All they offered was 6 months hosting credit. You have got to be joking, actually their team must be a bunch of jokers with the way that they act. STAY AWAY !!!
The old support is 100 times better than the new one! I agree with this point!
Site has been down nearly 36 hours since they transitioned me. Still is not up with no contact from technical support.
Sorry to hear this! You can try to contact with the old support team to check for you, too!
The old technical team is always helpful than the new one!
The new WebHost4life became a disaster
I thought that is only me but is not… I am customer with wH4L for more than 5 years and I have been very very pleased with their services and tech support. I contacted their tech team very rear, but when I did it they got back to me in minutes, mostly hours. I recommended all of my customers to their host.
Three weeks ago I created an account for a new customer of mine, and it was done on the new platform. The account that I have is still on the old platform. I built his website and test it on my old platform where everything was working fine. Two days ago I moved the codes over to his account. Surprise: some DLL from the bin folder were not loaded by the server. This caused that all the static URLs that I had were not converted in dynamic one so none of the links were working. Every link was returning a 404 error. Using Intelligencia.UrlRewriter.dll you can create static URLs for SEO purpose but convert them on the server in dynamic one.
So, I tried to get in touch with the new support team to help me resolving this issue ASAP, since my customer was loosing business for every minute that his website was not running properly. This is when, for the first time in more than 5 years, I was TOTALLY SHOCKED by their lack of professionalism.
They passed me over from one to another, sent to live chat which is just a robot, and when I called them and I complained that I didn’t get a response from them in hours the tech team told me that their response time in 24 to 48 hours. I couldn’t believe my years. Are these people out of their mind?
Anyhow, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and I waited 24 hours. After 24 hours I saw a status in the ticket stating “work in progress”. That’s it. No details, no nothing. Just work in progress. I waited 12 hours and I called them again. They told me that the request is in process. I told them that I can not wait any longer because my customer is loosing business, and if they don’t solve the problem in 2 hours I will have to close the account and move to another provider. They told me that they will solve it and will get back to me.
I waited 5 more hours and nobody got back to me, the problem was not solved, so I closed that account. As a transition, I will host my customer’s website on my own account which is on the old platform, but I will have look around for another hosting company. I don’t want the same thing to happen with me when my account will be transferred to the new platform.
It is sad that such a great company made such a bad move.
Can you guys recommend any good ASP.NET web hosting company?
You can click here to visit “Arvixe” web hosting and they can support Monthly payments! And you can use coupon code “MVCHosting” to save 20% cost and my email account is “Webhost4lifereview@gmail.com”, please feel free to let me know if you need any assistance!
Good Luck!
Initially I had been very pleased with this hosting company. However, they changed ownsership and migrated my sites and not only reduced features, but totally crashed the sites. This happened about a month ago and I’m still having major problems. I was totally blind-sided by how my hosting went from good to a disaster in the blink of an eye. My problems are too painful to mention, and would cause me nausea to list them here…It would be like reliving my worst nightmare.
I just want to say that it was a shame that we existing customers apparently were sold out to a bean counting organization that has little technical ability and no customer support. I’m exiting this new ownership asap. DO NOT BE FOOLED BY THE PREVIOUS GOOD RATINGS FOR WebHost4Life, they are no longer a viable hosting organization.
The current disaster, because of ownership change, at WebHost4Life is the third time ownership change for a hosting company has caused me a tremendous loss. THIS TYPE OF BUSINESS PLAN MUST BE STOPPED. So I have started a blog to determine if others have losses where proper compensation can be achieved. titled: Class Action Lawsuit against WebHost4Life Blog
See:
http://fhemsher.blogspot.com/
Sorry for hearing this! If you need any further assistance for searching for a new web hosting, please feel free to contact with me at Webhost4lifereview@Gmail.com“!
Best Regards,
Billy
Can anyone tell me how to backup and restore large database files using the new control panel.
From what I can see there is no way to create a zipped version of the backup file and upload it, as per the old system. Any suggestions?
I have 5 accounts with WH4L each with multiple domains on it, I also referred a bunch of people to them.
A friend recently told me they made him loose several customers after the migration. So I heald my breath and waited hoping it would not happen to me but it inevitably hit me as well….today I am about to loose one big account because of their lousy platform and even lousier support.
This is simply not acceptable and I have to move out of there after 10 years almost of being a very happy customer. I cannot even begin to describe the impact this will have on my and my customers
How good are the arvixe people? also has anyone heard of the 35$ cancellation fee they added at WH4L ?
Hi Patrcick,
The webhost4life management team was changed and since then their service started to drop down, my experience with Arvixe web hosting could be trusted and they support monthly payment. Anything you need can be satisfied with Arvixe LLC. The Arvixe phone support team response time is faster than their live chat..
Regards,
Billy
The ne wplatform sucks. They have broken every on eof my clients web apps. The new tech support staff are a complete joke. They are all working from automated scripts. They SUCK.
They have cost me over 2K in buisness this week alone!
RUN!
Man these guys… what clowns. I’ve been with them since early 2006. It was never great but it was ok and it was cheap (for IIS hosting).
But now, after this so-called migration, it’s all gone to hell.
Two websites both down for TEN DAYS! TEN FREAKIN DAYS!!! And STILL not fixed.
I used to recommend these bozos to others that wanted low cost IIS hosting. Every single one of them has been down anywhere from one to many days after this migration.
And the best part; they timed the migration on all of those accounts for just after the plans came up for renewal.
This is THE WORST experience I’ve had with a hosting company, ever.
Please, pretty pretty please:
– take your business elsewhere
– tell everybody to post everywhere about these idiots so they don’t fall prey
I sincerely hope they go bust. It would be a service to humanity.
WH4L just migrated my sites to the new platform in the past couple of days. They totally hosed all of the mail accounts. All of the mail accounts had messages and folders duplicated 2-3 times, some as many as 4 times. The support person I got on the phone was professional and I must say answered the phone more quickly than ever before, but who ever wrote their migration process should consider other career options. Hopefully they will get it together, but PO’d they didn’t perform better during the migration.
now, here is one more unhappy user about this disaster new platform migration. They just migrated mine and the result is that I am leaving them for other hosting place after 7 years with them.
So if you are looking for a place to host your website, here are my words, DO NOT GO WITH Webhost4life. if you are a current use whose contract is about to expire, DO NOT RENEW the service. If you are a current user whose account hasn’t been migrated, GO FIND Another place quick.
The new platform is a disaster junk full of craps. The support staff usually have no clue what your problems are. The support service is completely a joke.
Run away while you still can…
What a disaster. I am a 5year customer, blindsided by migration. Terrible support, multiple migration issues, lost my ssl certificate, no .net 4, no extensionless mvc, many many outages and even when the sites are up they are dog slow. I moved to Arvixe, cheaper, faster and even the sales people are technical.
Same issues everyone else has had and I thought it was me. What has happened is WH4L was sold and the old owners are drinking and dancing with the cash as we are stuck with clowns. I called Comcast and asked for a static IP and now I have 4mb up 20mb down. I went to Sam’s Club and bought the biggest UPS Battery they had and I ordered a DELL quad server 4gb ram. I loaded IIS, SQL, and hooked it all up. Cost, roughly $1,800, and now a monthly bill from comcast for $150 a month (have my phone there too as part of the package). I canceled Version land line and DSL which I was paying roughly $80 a month for. Now I have my own host, it kicks ass, and guess what? I am never down and it screams!!! If I out grow the damn cable I can scale (according to comcast) up to 10gb up (YES 10gb with fiber). So, not that I wanted to host my own servers but they cost me many times this each month since they sold the company. Goodbye and if anyone sues these bastards count me in!
Hi, you’re a rich man!~
My site went down when they migrated it and there was no sense of urgency! Old support team passed me to new support team who passed me back. I lost a lot of business and my site was down for 5 weeks. My site is only online now because I LEFT WH4L . Can they get away with it? They think they can!!!
I used them for nearly six years and I thought that I may have been one of the lucky ones who avoided their “migration” issues, unfortunately I was wrong.
I cannot recommend this company in the slightest any more
The new owners and operators are liars and cheats and have destroyed what used to be a decent low cost service. Everything about the “new” WebHost4Life is FUBAR.