First Impressions Of IWeb

I recently switched my dedicated server hosting from The Planet ($100/mo) to iWeb ($70/mo). I'd been with The Planet for quite a long time (originally Rackshack, then renamed to ev1, then bought by The Planet), and had been reasonably happy with them, but I'd been thinking about jumping ship for a while, for several reasons: (1) I was unhappy with EV1 for paying protection money to SCO; (2) my hardware was getting out of date; and (3) I thought I'd see if I could save some money on my monthly bill. I found iWeb because they were high up in the netcraft rankings, and netcraft showed them as running Linux. Searching the webhostingtalk forums for comments, I did find one long thread that involved one very unhappy user, but I wasn't convinced that his complaint was completely reasonable, so that didn't scare me off.

The dedicated server page at iWeb has a prominent offer of 1-hour activation on selected servers, but that wasn't an option I could use, because I wanted to use their cheapest configuration, which is a 2.4 GHz celeron, with 1 Gb ram, 160 Gb disk space, and 1500 Gb/mo. Since this was a step down from $100/mo at my old host to $70/mo at iweb, I was worried about quality of service and support, so I only signed a one-month contract. If you prepay for 24 months, you can get the same service at $52/mo. There was a setup charge of $49. Access to a web control panel would have cost extra, and they tried hard to sell me on that, but I didn't need it, since I'm comfortable managing everything via SSH. I got Debian installed on my machine rather than their default for Unix boxes, which is CentOS.

The first problem I ran into was that I made a mistake at one stage of the sign-up process, and although the interface did have buttons for backing up to earlier steps in the process, they didn't work for me. Starting over from scratch didn't work, and I finally had to put in a different email address in order to get a fresh start.

I placed my order by phone Wednesday morning, and got access to my server Thursday afternoon. Everything worked well as far as getting apache, mysql, and postfix set up.

IWeb is Canadian. Their pricing for US customers is in US dollars. They answer the phones in French, but everyone I spoke to was bilingual, and we never had any significant problems communicating. My credit card company's risk management thingie got triggered because of the non-US transaction, but that wasn't a big problem.

The big problem I had was that I was unable to log in to the iweb web site, which I needed to do in order to set their nameservers to point my domains to my box's ip. I put in the username and password, but the login page just refreshed. I started attempting to resolve the problem first thing on Friday, and ended up dealing with a total of six people before finding a solution at noon on Monday. In the interim, they offered to set the dns zones for me from their end, and that worked. Support was pretty bad. Sometimes I was able to get through to a technician on the phone in 5-10 minutes, but other times I spent ~1 hour on hold waiting to talk to someone. Email support generally received either no reply or a non-helpful reply. This was one of those typical, frustrating tech support situations where you keep on explaining the same things to different people, they promise to get back to you but don't, they send you canned email replies that don't address your actual question, etc. The long and the short of it seems to be that their login page had at least one known OS/browser incompatibility (with some versions of Windows+IE7), and one other, which was the one I had run into (with both Firefox 3+Linux and Konqueror+Linux). (I had javascript and cookies enabled on my Linux box, and in fact the cookies were being accepted, but the page just wasn't loading.) Tech #3 was unable to log in to my account on his own machine using my login info on Firefox+Win. The final resolution of the problem was that tech #6 suggested I try a different machine, and I found that it worked on my wife's machine with Firefox+MacOS. Go figger.

So in summary, their support is horrible, but basically I'm resigned to the fact that all webhosts' support is horrible. Maybe iWeb's is a little more horrible than The Planet's, but they also cost significantly less. The experience has been bad, but not bad enough to make me give up on the initial investment of the setup fee plus first month's service. I realize that at $70/mo they're working on a very thin profit margin, and I'm not under the illusion that they can afford to provide the level of support that would come with a $300/mo account. I'm going to stick with them for at least a while and just try really hard to avoid ever needing support.