Westhost

I have been a WestHost client for the last 8 years and their reliability and customer service has gone downhill in a big way. My site has been down for more than 24 hours on more than 3 occasions in the last 6 months. Their customer service is the worst! Very rude and condescending. I don’t know if they have changed management or ownership in the last year but something bad is going on there and they have taken a nose dive! If I could give them a negative rating I would. I wouldn’t recommend WestHost if they were the last hosting company on earth.

Dealt with an extremely dismissive, disrespectful and rude tech this morning. If this is the level of their customer service then I would suggest looking elsewhere for Web Hosting.

There have been many unplanned outages which means lots of lost revenue and advertising revenue for my site. Even when the site it up, the system is sluggish and trying to get to my control panel can take literally minutes between screens. This is extremely inefficient because my site is updated frequently and I have tons of pages. What should take minutes can take over an hour. I am looking to make a change.

WOW!!! I had no idea a web host could be this bad and still be in business!
When I joined Westhost, I saw right away that their admin interface was weird. But hey, they were cheap. However, a few months later I got locked out of Cpanel. It was requiring that I change my password, and didn’t give me any reason as to why. Naturally I thought something bad might have happened, so I contacted support. Nope… they just make everybody change their Cpanel password every six months. Weird, wish they had just told me that, but fine.
The next time I had to change my password, I got locked out of Cpanel. For MONTHS. Tech support was no help. I had to tell them repeatedly that the password change protocol wasn’t working, until finally somebody overrode it for me.
Now my bill is due. It’s past due, actually, but no matter how many times I click the «pay bill» button, nothing happens. My site will be shut down in five days. By then I will have moved to a new host. Anybody is better than these idiots.

Do yourself a favor, DO NOT consider hosting content with Westhost! Check Unilocal first, they were ok a decade ago, are a nightmare now.
I started using Westhost many years ago, and initially they were great, very helpful, great service. About 5 years ago I moved my content because I kept getting hacked on their servers and they were horrible, no help at all.
For the past 3 months I have been trying to transfer my domains away from Westhost and have had more than 30 interactions attempting to get them to send me the EPP code so I can transfer and they have just now made that happen. Today they sent me a bill saying they were auto-​renewing (nothing is hosted there) and were going to retain my domain.
Avoid these clowns at all cost. Many great hosting services to chose from, save yourself the headache.

I moved both my websites over to WestHost from GoDaddy and it was the worst experience ever.
I thought GoDaddy was bad, but WestHost is just as bad!
For over 6 weeks, both my websites (which were on different servers) were either down or they were experiencing extremely slow response times.
Every time I would contact WestHost’s tech support department during these 6 weeks, they would tell me the same thing… that they were seeing the sites fine and that it must be my internet provider’s issue, which was Time Warner. So, they would tell me to contact Time Warner every time.
When I finally started to realize it wasn’t a Time Warner issue and that it was a WestHost issue, I decided to move my sites off of WestHost.
When I contacted WestHost’s cancellation department, that’s when the rep told me that the reason why my sites were slow or were going down was because I was hitting my limits and needed to upgrade my hosting plan.
At no time was I EVER told that from the tech support team! Had I been told that in the first place, I would have upgraded my hosting plan immediately!
I can’t tell you how much traffic I lost and lost revenue because of WestHost inability to tell me what was really going on with my websites.
On their site they say «100% Satisfaction Promise»
I paid for a year up front for both websites and was completely dissatisfied with their service and asked for a refund for the unused portion of hosting plans.
They refused to give me a refund…

The negative:
Westhost convinced me to ‘upgrade’ from their VPS service to hosted cloud, promising more robust website, quicker response, and near 100% uptime.
My site has been down for four days, and was down for three out of the previous seven prior to that, and a total of fifteen full days down since my ‘upgrade’ in February.
When they answer their phones (which has taken up to TWO HOURS recently), they have very little to offer as far as what the problem is, when it will be fixed, or suggest a solution.
When asked for compensation for the outage, they offer silence
Save your money — go elsewhere for web hosting.
The positive: they are cheaper than their competition.

Edit — 5 days after the breach their phones are still not answering. I just realized that WestHost will email your password IN PLAIN TEXT!!! This is not a serious company.
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I’ve been with WestHost for about 2 years, and my previous employer was with them for about 3. The quality has steadily declined. Lots of downtime, etc.
Recently they suffered a breach and reset my password. Their email claimed it was very limited, but I doubt that since their support is so crushed the phone line won’t pick up. So it must have been a massive breach. 36 hours after learning about this I am totally unable to access my account. The chat function is dead. The phone line just gives dead air. My support ticket is 25 hours old.
Totally, completely, utterly unacceptable to delete your customers’ passwords en masse, claim it was very limited, then fail to have the staffing to deal with it.

run far away from them. they suck! i

This is the worst host company of all time. When I finally got around to switching host because this host was SUPER slow to load and constantly down for maintenance, they wouldn’t stop billing me. I contacted them 3 times over 3 months to cancel my account and they still billed me.

this company is one of the worst hosting companies i’ve ever had the unfortunate experience of dealing with.
stay away! there are plenty of reliable hosting companies that don’t give you the crappy customer-​service like westhost.
stoner idiots is right! seriously wtf?
stay away!!!

i’m sorry west host but you’re customer service reps are a-​holes. when did you become such an arrogant company?
you need to learn something about customer service and treating your customers better. i was going to switch all our domains to west host but then after one, you a-​sholes shut down our site for fraud? wtf? seriously???
from what i deduce, you’re customer service rep sounded seriously stoned. «good luck with that» was the sarcasm that came from his mouth. stoner idiot.
ZERO STARS! THIS COMPANY IS THE WORST!

This isn’t really a review for products but, rather a review of them as an employer. If you all thought that their services suck it’s probably because they don’t treat they’re employees the greatest. They are a cheap company (which is shocking since their services seem to be pretty spendy), thy don’t offer medical benefits and in fact will ask you to lower your hours just so they don’t have to offer them to you. They don’t give raises on the anniversary date of your day of hire but, they only give them t you once a year and that’s it. There are no 6 month reviews and in fact even when they praise you and offer to take you out to lunch they dog you on it, too. I would never work for them nor would I ever suggest this place of employment on my worst enemy.

(I am adding a little update at the top of this review to say it has now been three weeks and Westhost has been unwilling or unable to fix the issue. Apparently they just cannot handle a mailnig to 6,000 subscribers three times per week.)
I have been with Westhost for about ten years, with a few bad experiences, but never before as bad as the one I am in right now. I send regular requested updates to about 6,000 subscribers a few times a week. This week my mail queue got jammed up, so mail wasn’t going out, and I have been bounced around from person to person who has no idea what is causing the problem and how to solve it. Finally somebody today just suggested I delete the 12,000 emails in the queue, but had no idea as to what caused the blockage and how to stop it happening again. Meanwhile one of the mailings was to publicize a show that has already begun as we speak. Three days wasn’t enough lead time for Westhost to fix the issue for me to get my mailing out on time. I don’t think the lower level folks even took the issue seriously enough to send it up to the techies who might have been able to help.
Meanwhile phone support wait times have been upwards of fifteen minutes and chat has been so overloaded that its been down a few times this week so the only way to get in touch with them was a support ticket.
And this is not a cheap hosting service! OK, enough venting, I probably have to search for a new host. That is a total drag after all this time, but I have to be able to send bulk mailings.

I have a reseller account with Westhost. Have been with them for 10 years.
They are a great company with excellent customer service. Their prices be a bit more than others, but you can’t beat their reliability and support.

Ok — I have been a customer for over 3 years now and have had a VERY rocky relationship with West Host. BUT today takes the cake. After suffering and enduring performance issue on my website for sometime (much of it to do to West Hosts technical issues), I noticed through Google Analytics that my site was slowing and I was experiencing a heavy fall off in traffic and in fact my site was unreachable. When I called Westhost I got, in my opinion, the worse technical support person I have every had the misfortune to talk to in history. He basically told me that my web service had failed (Apache) and that it had to be restarted. I asked him «Is it not web hosting companies job to monitor my service and to make sure that uptime is maintained at least to an industry standard by restarting services that fail. He said no! It was my job.» And made some suggestions how I might create and run a crom script to restart my service in the event it failed (among other things). I could NOT believe what I was hearing so I asked to speak to a manager. He informed me that they had all gone home for the evening and there was no one that could give me more info or that I could talk to. In my opinion this is the worse internet hosting I have ever found. In my opinion go anywhere else you can. I plan to move my site as soon as possible.
UPDATE: I was able to move my entire website and blog (the new word press export and import works great) to Go Daddy in JUST 3 hours and DNS propagated in 12 minutes. I was easy. BYE BYE WEST HOST. I AM SO GLAD TO BE RID OF THIS ALBATROSS.