Well the bell has sounded. I’m done with ixwebhosting.com as my webhost. Frankly, their customer support is awful. It puzzles me that they are marketing themselves as the “business choice” for web hosting and yet their service is definitely not of business caliber. I guess if you’re a business that is just looking for a simple html page to give basic info on your business you’ll be okay but if you’ve got dynamic content running on your website - ixwebhosting is definitely not a good choice.

Over the past year and a half I put up with slowdowns, outages, and email problems as the normal “costs” of a cheap shared hosting plan. But the last straw for me was my experience in the past week. Here’s the breakdown.

1. Over the weekend (March 27-30, 2008), ixwebhosting.com moved all their servers (and customers) to a new data farm. I was warned well in advance of this move via email and also warned that this would mean downtime of about 48hours. There was nothing wrong with that - and they did their customers right by communicating what was about to happen. The move was done to put us on new servers and make things run faster and better - or so we were told.

I first reported about my webhost (ixwebhosting.com) doing a major server move last week that affected the uptime of unfoldingneurons.com and some of my other websites over the weekend.  At first it seemed like all things went well with the move (albeit not much improvement in speed as they said there would be), however since the move the php mail() function has been borked on my server and all the services dependent on that function don’t work.  That means that new people can’t register for my plugin support forums and people requesting a password change won’t get anywhere either.

I’ve been trying to get my host to speed up a fix but unfortunately there communication has been pretty much nil and aside from the “we’re working on it” that I obtained from a fellow named Artem in the chat support I have no clue as to when it’ll get fixed or what the problem is to begin with.

This is just one more thing to add to the list of things I’ve been dissatisfied with this host and if I haven’t heard anything from them by tomorrow I’m going to start looking at other webhosts for all my domains and websites.  I’ve got a list of webhosts I’ve been keeping an eye on for a while but maybe my readers will have some suggestions?