Chris Myers ( buildersent(at)yahoo(dot)com ) at: 2008-07-01
Time Hosted: over 3 years
General Rating note: | Features note:
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Control Panel note: | 92 out of 97 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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In the last 8 years I have had a total of 11 individual hosted accounts on LH. At one time their servers ran current verisions of PHP, SQL, etc. - those days are gone along with my business.
Their servers are very outdated with their backend software. This leads to all sorts of problems when needing to update for security reasons your website.
Their tech support is fast in responding and quite helpful however up until the problems in June (not their fault) Tech support and LH refused to speak with clients and would only communicate via email. This was the second reason i decided to flee from them.
Servers are often bogged down, non responsive and email has many problems.
Most of my sites are now migrated and the balance will soon be moved as well.
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John Paulsen ( johnpaulsen1017 at yahoo dot com ) at: 2008-06-03
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 58 out of 63 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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This will end up being like a run on a bank. if you don't get out soon, you may never get out. I'm no expert, but I suspect a string of transfers and the refunds that would accompany them would reduce cash flow sufficiently to require them to cut servers, support, etc.... I predict the end will be quick and painful if they don't step up their game quickly.
If they do go belly up, what happens to our domains and files? I am doubtful there would be an orderly and quick shutdown with a mechanism in place for rapid transfer of all domains to the new host of our choice.
If there is anybody from lowesthosting.com reading this, please take immediate action to reassure me and the rest of you subscribers.
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me ( down(at)lowesthosting dot com ) at: 2008-06-03
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 67 out of 68 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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I've already bought my other domain and am at the point of transfer, but lowesthosting.com is down AGAIN and I can't get the email to unlock the domain!
This is a serious situation and lowesthosting is the worst hosting company ever!
I get this message from billing, then lowesthosting goes out again!! No transfer code, all email down - no way to contact besides the answering machine - no call backs.
-----------
We have unlocked the domain and sent the transfer code to the domain's
admin email address listed in the whois. Please save all your website
files and we will then cancel your account and issue you a pro-rated
refund. Please confirm that you would like to go ahead and cancel and
we will refund your paypal account and delete the website from our
server upon your reply.
Request Authorization Code Results
Authorization codes are sent to the owner of the domain via email.
-----------------
Call 800-762-4913 and 503-579-7973 and complain!
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John Paulsen ( johnpaulsen1017 at yahoo dot com ) at: 2008-06-03
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 75 out of 76 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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Here is what they told me via email several hours ago:
"Dear John,
Your website and email are back up again. We are so sorry for the
inconvenience of the outage which was completely beyond our control.
The servers are back up and our support ticketing system is available
for
any further technical assistance. You can access it by going to
help.lowesthosting.com. We apologize for the delay in reply."
Unfortunately, they are mistaken as my sites are not yet available. I also suggested they pay for a domain to be hosted in another DC, possibly lowesthostinginfo.com, or something like that, since had they had that tool available, they could have posted information throughout this ordeal and, if they were savvy enough to copy the email database to the other site, they could have emailed all of us. But, what do I know.
Anyway, it is nor 10:23 PM in Michigan and mt sites are unavailable and they have not responded to numerous requests for genuine information about when repairs would "really" be completed.
They have missed the opportunity to shine in a very difficult situation.
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Tim Reid ( sales(at)aegcomputers(dot)com ) at: 2008-06-02
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 92 out of 99 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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I don't know about anybody else, but I am up and running again. I am still disappointed in the lack of communication, but man after reading the accounts of the damage, the fact that they are up and running again this soon is awesome.
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UNHAPPY CUSTOMER ( ) at: 2008-06-02
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 84 out of 89 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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I have been with LH for almost 5 years. Never had any major issues until now.
I understand that the fire is not their fault,
but lack of customer service and updates regarding the situation @ LH is unacceptable.
What the heck... Do they want to go out of business?? After this.. I am moving my biz!!
The email they sent about people calling!! What a joke!! If it were not for various message boards like this. I would not know what # to call.
Then the whois information for lowesting hosting give you a fax #.. You would think they would have the right contact information there for their customers..
Hmmm.. I think they did not want to get phone calls and put up a fax #..
Ok Rant over.. Going to look for a new hosting company so I can switch it over when ever LH gets us back up...
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Randy Massner ( wizzard8955(at)verizon dot net ) at: 2008-06-02
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 59 out of 63 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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I agree,, I am not jumping ship,, just PO'd at the communications. I have received email from at least 2 other sites explaining the problem since their servers were in the same building. Why do I have to find out about it from other sites? I have paid faithfully for over 5 years and the least I can do is get an explanation from them.
My opinion
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F.M. Thornal ( fm(dot)thornal(at)bldr(dot)com ) at: 2008-06-02
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 95 out of 100 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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I have been with Lowesthosting since '99 (they were in Atlanta then) and have had positive results using their service. Yes this is a setback. The disappointment now is the lack of communication. They could at least change the answering machine outgoing message with a statement or update of the repair efforts instead of having to find out what happened from another hosting service. And from reading their blog it is apparent that Lowesthosting servers must be on the first floor. At this time I think it is a little premature the "jump ship".
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Tim Reid ( aegcomputers at hotmail dot com ) at: 2008-06-02
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 68 out of 69 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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This is obviously something out of Lowesthostings control and we are not the only ones affected. What is needed now is patience while they get us back online.
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Tim Reid ( aegcomputers(at)hotmail(dot)com ) at: 2008-06-02
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 88 out of 95 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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There are several more accounts on the internet about services affected by this explosion and fire. This is obviously the real deal, and we all need to just be patient until they can bring us back online.
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Tim Reid ( aegcomputers(at)hotmail dot com ) at: 2008-06-02
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 93 out of 98 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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This is from "The Planet"
This evening at 4:55pm CDT in our H1 data center, electrical gear shorted, creating an explosion and fire that knocked down three walls surrounding our electrical equipment room. Thankfully, no one was injured. In addition, no customer servers were damaged or lost.
We have just been allowed into the building to physically inspect the damage. Early indications are that the short was in a high-volume wire conduit. We were not allowed to activate our backup generator plan based on instructions from the fire department.
This is a significant outage, impacting approximately 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers. All members of our support team are in, and all vendors who supply us with data center equipment are on site. Our initial assessment, although early, points to being able to have some service restored by mid-afternoon on Sunday. Rest assured we are working around the clock.
We are in the process of communicating with all affected customers. we are planning to post updates every hour via our forum and in our customer portal. Our interactive voice response system is updating customers as well.
There is no impact in any of our other five data centers.
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Tim Reid ( aegcomputers(at)hotmail dot com ) at: 2008-06-02
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 69 out of 75 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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I received this e-mail in response to my query this morning:
Dear Tim,
ETA for servers is between 5-9PM.
We apologize for the delay in reply. Most clients have been calling and this email is normally only used as an off network emergency access to our domain for updating dns.
There was a major power outage in one of the data centers where we maintain many of our servers in this case the H1 data center in houston. Although we own our servers and have our own datacenter staff we lease access in the datacenter to supply our access poin to the internet backbones (level 3, savis etc) and to provide us with power for our server racks.
The Datacenter has N+1 redundancy and does have UPS battery backup and Backup generator capability but a completely unusual occurance happened where the main Stepdown power transformer shorted resulting in an explostion and small fire in the electrical interface room. Normally when Power goes out the network swiching swiches over to the UPS which is a short term 2 hour battery system while the backup generators go online and are cut into the master power buss.
The problem was that the explosion destroyed the Power panels where the generators connect to the main power busses. This outage effected not only Lowesthostings servers but 40 other major hosts and over 9000 servers so it was a major unexpected outage.
The good news is the new Transformer has finally been aquired and is being installed and we are told it will be tested over the next few hours and various switches & routers brought back online and tested before power is sequenced to our server bank so it should not be more than this evening after that your server comes back online.
Once power is back, your server and all data will come online as before. Anyones mail server that has attempted to send you emails during the outage window will automatically attempt redelivery so you may get a few 36 hour old emails but none will be lost.
Our main Lowesthosting.com website does have an emergency backup server in our other Datacenter but it takes 24 hours for that to propagate so our main customer portal has been down which has frustrated our staff and many cleints for our inability to post news or reply to tickets during the propagation to our emergency server.
We apologize for this window where you were unable to reach us and although we have never had a catastrophic outage in 8 years and pride ourselves on average a 99.84% cleint server uptime we will be installing a new high availability cluster on our main website so should we ever have a major outage our website and news and ticketing system would not go down for even a minute.
We realize the problem is not that the server is down so much as people not being able to reach our website but that is purely due to the dns propgation delay for the cut over to our emergency backup server. To make matters worse many people did not write down our phone number and did not know how to reach us.
For future reference our main number is 800-762-4913 and our billing number is 503-579-7973
You should know that we not only backup all of your data in our data center but maintain an emergency archival copy off network so we really do maintain the integrity of your data.
Again we apologize for any inconvenience. Its been a long difficult weekend for our staff as well and we will be posting a full story and pictures on our website shortly. The servers will be back up in a few hours.
Regards,
Ray Alin
Assistant Manager
Lowesthosting.com
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Randy Massner ( wizzard8955(at)verizon(dot)net ) at: 2008-06-02
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 89 out of 94 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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I can understand that things happen. I have been with them for over 5 years and have never had problem one. Thing that bugs me is there is always a way to communicate. They should have sent out a mass email when this problem started 3 days ago. To leave every one hanging that long with no info at all is inexcusable. I will be watching very carefully how this whole thing is handled to make my decision if I renew with them or not. As of this writing,, nothing has happened,, we are down and no info from them at all. That sucks
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John Paulsen ( johnpaulsen1017(at)yahoo dot com ) at: 2008-06-02
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 61 out of 68 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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Well...
I have been with them for over 3 years and have several sites with them and have had no downtime issues. Their support has always exceeded my expectations ... Until now!
I have tried email, the telephone number answered by the FAX, and left a message in ther general voice mailbox.
As a longtime customer, I would sure like to know what has happened, why it happened, and what they will do to prevent future and similar problems. Although i have not given up on them at this point, I am concerned that an incident like this will cause enought customers to flee to other hosting companies, causing a significant reduction in cash flow, and making the problem even worse, up to and including bankruptcy.
if they are going to bounce back, the time to do it is now.
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Tim Reid ( aegcomputers(at)hotmail(dot)com ) at: 2008-06-02
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 50 out of 53 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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They need to be manning the phones 24/7 if they are having the problems they say they are. And how do we transfer anything to another host if they are truly down?
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Elizabeth ( trvlngeah at hotmail(dot)com ) at: 2008-06-02
Time Hosted: 2 to 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 64 out of 69 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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Yes this is bad. No e-mail or website access for 36 hours now.
Thinking it's time to change hosting companies - can anyone recommend another hosting company?
Thanks
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Tim Reid ( aegcomputers at hotmail(dot)com ) at: 2008-06-02
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 73 out of 76 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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I can honestly say this is the first major problem we have had wirh hosting in the over four years we have been with this company. It comes at an unfortunate time, (when is the right time for down time?) I am using a mixed bag, some just hosting, some domain plus hosting. I really hope we are back up and running soon.
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Pam Bateman ( Cpointpond at aol dot com ) at: 2008-06-02
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 68 out of 76 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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I have been a long time customer and this is the first major downtime of our website. In our fast paced action world, it is tough to be down. I believe the site went down yesterday 6/1 in the afternoon. Can't hang tight too long since I start advertising a major event begining tomorrow directing customers to our website, but in all in all, lowest hosting has been a great host site. Hope they are up and running soon!
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admin ( support at videocamerasecurity dot com ) at: 2008-06-02
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 96 out of 97 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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I got a response with a phone number for lowesthosting.com
The main line is 800-762-4913 and the office line is 503-579-7973
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admin ( support at videocamerasecurity(dot)com ) at: 2008-06-01
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 86 out of 93 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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Finally got an overly dramatic answer from lowesthosting@GMAIL.com
Note: The 'assistant manager' claims most clients have been CALLING? How can you call when there's only a fax number?? Who's got the number for lowesthosting.com ?
----------------------------
Hello admin,
We appologize for the delay in reply. Most cleints have been calling and this email is normally only used as an off network emergency access to our domain for updating dns.
There was a major power outage in one of the data centers where we maintain many of our servers. Although we own our servers and have our own datacenter staff we lease access in the datacenter to supply our access poin to the internet backbones (level 3, savis etc) and to provide us with power for our server racks.
The Datacenter has N+1 redundancy and does have UPS battery backup and Backup generator capability but a completely unusual occurance happened where the main Stepdown power transformer shorted resulting in an explostion and small fire in the electrical interface room. Normally when Power goes out the network swiching swiches over to the UPS which is a short term 2 hour battery system while the backup generators go online and are cut into the master power buss.
The problem was that the explosion destroyed the Power panels where the generators connect to the main power busses. This outage effected not only Lowesthostings servers but 40 other major hosts and over 9000 servers so it was a major unexpected outage.
The good news is the new Transformer has finally been aquired and is being installed and we are told it will be tested over the next 2-4 hours and various switches & routers brought back online and tested before power is sequenced to our server bank so it should not be more than another 1-2 hours after that before your server comes back online.
Once power is back, your server and all data will come online as before. Anyones mail server that has attempted to send you emails during the outage window will automatically attempt redelivery so you may get a few 18 hour old emails but none will be lost.
Our main Lowesthosting.com website does have an emergency backup server in our other Datacenter but it takes 24 hours for that to propagate so our main customer portal has been down which has frustrated our staff and many cleints for our inability to post news.
We appologize for this window where we were unable to reach you and although we have never had a catastrophic outage in 8 years and average a 99.84% cleint server uptime we will be installing a new high availability cluster on our main website so should we ever have a major outage our website and news would not go down for even a minute.
Again we appologize for any inconvineience. We will be posting a full story and pictures on our website shortly.
Regards,
Ray Alin
Assistant Manager
Lowesthosting.com
------------------------
--END OF BOLONEY--
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Paola Costantino ( paola at luxury-voyages(dot)com ) at: 2008-06-01
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 65 out of 70 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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This is my first time having problems. Please contact:
Paola at paola@luxury-voyages.com or call 650-610-8782 if you have any news...
1) Hosting and emails www.luxury-voyages.com
2) Hosting and emails www.luxury-voyages.net
2) Domain, hosting and emails www.italytravelspecialist.com
Sincerely,
Paola
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Admin ( support at videocamerasecurity dot com ) at: 2008-06-01
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 82 out of 86 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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By the looks of things, lowesthosting.com is out of business, 6/1/08
If you own a domain hosted by lowesthosting.com like I do, fax nonstop complaints to 503 210 0379
Their customer support needs more emails because they are not responding to requests to support@lowesthosting.com, billing@lowesthosting.com, admin@lowesthosting.com
If this company goes belly up, how do we change our registar to point at a new DNS server if we can't get to the control panel?
I just paid for a domain transfer at godaddy.com but I can't change DNS because lowesthosting.com control panel is down!!
What a terrible and pathetic company!
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Gerard Chaney ( montebello at comcast(dot)net ) at: 2008-06-01
Time Hosted: 2 to 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 74 out of 76 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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Since it is the starting of a new Month, I'm a little worry that they shut off the door !!!!
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Rajeev Bharol ( rajeev_bharol(at)yhaoo dot com ) at: 2008-06-01
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 61 out of 70 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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I am hosting my website with lowesthosting since 2004.
This the first time I am seeing problems with them and unfortunately there is
no other way than email to contact them and today 6/1 there site is down so can't
contact!
Only hope is that they find it out and fix it.
Since 5/31 afternoon their website is down my website www.astroquery.com which I
host on their servers is down as well.
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Tim Hancock ( hancocktim at earthlink dot net ) at: 2008-06-01
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 65 out of 68 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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Same here. All our functions are down. This is the worst outage they have had yet. If any of you have any info, please contact me at the earthlink address, because our email is down of course at the site hosted by them I mentioned in the previous review.
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Gerard Chaney ( montebello(at)comcast(dot)net ) at: 2008-06-01
Time Hosted: 2 to 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 91 out of 97 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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Same thing for me, today June 1st, no more e-mail, web site etc since yesterday May 31st. I have 2 Sites hosted there, one for about 3 years.
Impossible to contact any person, if somebody knows about it send me an e-mail at montebello@comcast.net
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Tim Hancock ( admin1(at)psychometricresearch(dot)com ) at: 2008-06-01
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 67 out of 75 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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Our firm has used this host for nearly 6 years, so I think I'm qualified to speak to their reliability. In short, their service is horrible!! They also have unacceptable amounts of down time. Our emails are delayed at times from hours to days and some emails disappear into oblivion altogether. Their customer serv ice is worthless--every time we take out a complaint ticket, they can't diagnose their problem and want to blame it on everyone else. In the beginning they were much more reliable, but in the last two years this company has fallen into criminal levels of false claims and unethical service and behavior. One time, acting as our registrar, they even tried to shut down the domain, even though we had paid them for the coming year---so their bookkeeping is even abhorrent. We threatened to sue them and report them to the reristrar authority and may still follow through with that lawsuit due to the damage it caused to our business. Stay away from this company if you have anything mission critical at all to conduct on the web. We are actively seeking a new host right now, and the only reason we haven't switched is due to time constraints and deadlines on even bigger business issues.
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Walter Helfrecht ( wh08501(at)optonline(dot)net ) at: 2008-06-01
Time Hosted: over 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 76 out of 86 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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As of yesterday (5/31/08), I have lost all connectivity to Lowesthosting.com.
The 3 sites that I had hosted with them are now totally down -- DEAD. No HTTP, no FTP, no E-MAIL. No Customer Support. Zilch. Nada. Zero.
The only phone number listed for them in Oregon is being answered by a fax machine. I have sent two faxes and have yet to hear back from anyone regarding the outage.
In the 4 years that I've had Lowesthosting as web host service provider, I have NEVER encountered this level of trouble. Their CSRs were always able to help me with problems and resolution was very fast. But, something like this will quickly turn all that sour.
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Danny ( dwheisner(at)yahoo dot com ) at: 2007-10-29
Time Hosted: 2 to 3 years
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Control Panel note: | 78 out of 83 Web-Hosting-Top users found this review to be helpful!
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These guys totally suck! Good luck on getting any resolution to any problems that you have. I had a client that had two sites hosted with them and we had the hardest time getting the domains transferred. In fact, at last count, we tried to transfer the domain 3 times to another provider and they have dropped the ball all three times. They have NO telephone number to be able to call someone and complain and respond to your requests for help when they get around to it.
Run far, far away!
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