WebHost4Life Review - The Right Hosting Company For You?

Name: WebHost4Life
Plans: Shared.
Website: www.webhost4life.com
Summary: WebHost4Life has way to many issues. I can’t recommend them to anyone looking for a web host. These WebHost4Life reviews might change your mind if you’re considering them for web hosting.

ReviewResearchInterviews

WebHost4Life Logo WebHost4Life has been providing web hosting services to businesses of all sizes since 1999. But, what is the feedback from webmasters that have used their service over the years? WebHost4Life thrives on offering the most stable web hosting service to compliment the effectiveness of the IT services of your business. At present, Webhost4Life is providing web hosting services to over 50,000 clients across the globe.

WebHost4Life is a host that is owned by EIG who owns a lot of hosting companies like ApolloHosting, Dotster, HostNine, PowWeb, Startlogic, and JustHost.

With their name, you would think customers would stay for life (pun intended). I like to rate each web hosting company on 5 areas; overall, uptime, performance, cost, and customer support. I have developed a rating system at the top of this review to show how I rate them. In this review, you will see why I don’t recommend WebHost4Life. Hopefully, this review should help you when deciding if you want to choose this web host or not.

WebHost4Life Features

WebHost4Life offers a number of webs hosting plans to those webmasters that are looking for shared plans. Each plan comes with either the Linux or Windows operating system. They mostly focus on using the Windows OS. They do offer a dedicated server for those that are expecting more traffic and will require a server that can support more bandwidth. Their prices are a tad bit higher, but if the value is there then I wouldn’t have any issues hosting with WebHost4Life. Now, let’s take a look at the features that they offer.

MS Hosting

For Windows MS Hosting you have the option to pick from 3 web hosting plans.

Basic Plan

The “Basic” plan comes with 10 GB of storage, unlimited transfer, and bandwidth, unlimited domain names, 20 MySQL databases, Windows 2008, 10 FTP/e-mail accounts. The price tag for this web hosting plan is $4.95/month.

Advanced Plan

The “Advanced” plan comes with unlimited storage, transfer and bandwidth, unlimited domain names, 50 MySQL databases, 5 MSSQL databases, Windows 2008, 300 FTP accounts, and 2,500 email accounts. The price tag for this plan is $9.95/month.

Premium Plan

The “Premium” plan is their highest shared Windows hosting plan. This plan comes with unlimited storage, unlimited transfer, and bandwidth, unlimited domain names, unlimited MySQL databases, 5 MSSQL databases, Windows 2008, unlimited FTP accounts, unlimited email accounts. The price tag for the “Premium” plan is $19.95/month.

WebHost4Life does use the whole unlimited bandwidth offer that a lot of other web hosting companies use. I am a not a fan of this because I like to know the actual numbers. One company that doesn’t use this marketing tactic is WireNine. I should mention that with the “Premium” you will receive a free domain name. Otherwise, if you purchase the “Basic” or “Advanced” plan you will have to pay 15.99/year.

Unix Plan

The “Unix” plan comes with unlimited disk space, bandwidth/transfer, unlimited domain names, 50 MySQL databases, ShopSite shopping cart (15 products), a site builder, and unlimited email accounts. The price tag for this plan is $6.95/month.

There are a number of optional upgrades you can purchase with this plan. SubmitNet (Search Engine Submission) $79.95/month, RatePoint for $19.95, and enhanced security for $100.

MS Power Server

The MS Power Server plan states that it’s a “high performance” dedicated server. The price tag for this plan is $59.99/month. This plan allows 8 sites, 1,000 email accounts, 8 MSSQL databases, 1 MySQL database, 10 GB of disk space, and 200 GB of transfer and bandwidth.

I feel really shortchanged with being limited to 8 databases on this server. I currently, have 2 VPS servers with InMotion and I can support hundreds of databases. It just doesn’t make any sense to me!

Security

In the technology world that we live in security is a big threat. Many companies are implementing paid services to help us strengthen the security of servers. WebHost4Life does offer a paid service call SiteLock to help protect our website against hackers. This service will prevent hackers from being able to attack your website and can even restore your site to an earlier state if it does get hacked. This service does cost $14.99/month extra.

So, now that we know all the features and plans that WebHost4Life offers let’s take a look at uptime, performance, and the customer support.

WebHost4Life Performance & Uptime

There are times when WebHost4Life has been down for hours and even days costing owners a fortune.

20% Downtime With WebHosting4Life.com — All I can say is wow. Their servers were up 80% of the time.

Uptime

Webhost4life guarantees an uptime of 99.9%. But do they really deliver on these bold claims? The answer is no. Downtime is one of the most frustrating things to deal with when you running or creating a website. In fact, out of all the web hosting companies out there, WebHost4Life has very poor uptime. The feedback from a lot of webmasters is very bad. In fact, I have trouble finding someone that has something nice to say about their experience with them. Don’t believe me on this check out these comments left by angry WebHost4Life customers:

WebHost4Live Downtime — Hacked and don’t know how to fix it!

WebHost4Life Downtime Again — Very poor uptime!

WebHost4Life Always Down — They don’t know what they are doing.

So, am I stating that if you decide to host with WebHost4Life that you are going to have a ton of downtime? Might you? This will be one hosting company I will be signing up with and monitoring in 2015, though. I will then be able to show you my uptime stats.

Performance

Well, if you’re still reading this WebHost4Life.com review I’m going to show you how their performance stacks up to another host. To do this I check their response times on isitdownrightnow.com. What this does is gives me an accurate readout of their response times. The response time is measured in milliseconds (ms). In order for a hosting company to have excellent performance, they should have response times under 20 ms. Average would be 21-49 ms. Over 50 ms is considered to be slow. It was no surprise that WebHost4Life had a response time of 72.19 ms. This is far too slow! Here is a screenshot of my findings:

WebHost4Life Response Times

WebHost4Life doesn’t use SSD hosting which could be one of the reasons why their performance numbers are not on par with other companies. Other EIG brands like Dot5Hosting and Easy CGI use SSD drives. Why can’t WebHost4Life?

WebHost4Life Customer Service

Their customer support is all in India; I think.

WebHost4Life has very lacking support! Customer service is the main reason clients opt to continue or stop a web hosting service. If you can’t get your issues resolved you’re just going to get frustrated and migrate to a new web hosting provider (which is what many people are doing). When you call them you’re just going to get someone in India to talk to. It would be nice to speak to someone locally. Since websites work 24 hours a day, web hosting companies’ customer service should work 24 hours a day, too. They do work 24 hours a day, but I don’t believe they actually know anything about running a web hosting company. At times you’ll feel like your on a hidden game show where someone is going to pop in and say “Surprise this is really a joke, but thanks for playing.”

I have however fallen to be a victim of an unresponsive customer service of WebHost4Life at critical times. WebHost4Life ‘s live chat gets disconnected after 15 seconds of no response. Even when you try it again you’re lucky if it stays connected. And if you haven’t already had enough you’re going to get exactly nowhere with them. It’s so frustrating!

WebHost4Life Review Summary

WebHost4Life is such a bad web hosting company words really can’t even describe how bad they actually are. Everything changed when towards the end of 2009 they sold their company to EIG. In late 2009, WebHost4Life was acquired by new owners and boy oh boy did they destroy it. A lot of clients lost valuable data during the transitional period. The new WebHost4Life circa 2010 has become slower and less reliable. Service quality has deteriorated and prices have increased. I would really like to hear from an employee of WebHost4Life and let us know what your doing to better your company.

There are so many issues I have with WebHost4Life. I can’t recommend them at this time. If someone at WebHost4Life could address these problems and resolve them I would be more than happy to reevaluate them.

If you are looking for a good web hosting service go with InMotion or GreenGeeks. Please leave your comments down below and please provide your experience working with Webhost4life. Please review and rate them up above in the user reviews section. If you have found this WebHost4Life review helpful please use the share buttons to share it on any social media sites you participate on. Thanks so much for reading my review on their company.

WebHost4Life research.

“Positive”

“Negative”

WebHostingReviews.com

WebHostingReviews.com is a web hosting review site just like tbwhs.com. They have collected over 70 reviews on WebHost4Life. Most of the reviews on their website don’t exactly praise their service. In fact, 9% of the people that have left a review on this site recommend their service. There are a number of reviews on WebHost4Life.com but I will highlight one that stuck out to me:

The following review for WebHost4Life was written by Doug McC. It is not at all a review which will motivate you to sign up for their service. He was a WebHost4Life client who suffered long and hard through site crashes and a variety of other ‘yapping rat dog’ problems which caused huge repercussions. Doug informs us that long after canceling service with WebHosting4Life, four years later in fact, he discovered his company had been being billed the entire time! He was forced to file a complaint he would have liked to completely avoid, and when his funds were replaced it was put on his credit card. It was nothing but trouble.

This is just one negative review on WebHostingReviews.com. There are a lot more. In fact, with uptime & reliability, they get 2/69/10, server & connection speed 3.93/10, price and value 2.06/10, support 1.89/10, and billing 2.43/10. Some other complaints that other webmasters complain about are:

Sites would go down.
Move your sites source code to a different folder.
Horrible support (in India).
Confusing price structure.
Lost emails.

Obviously, I am filing this under my negative section. They have a lot of problems and issues and webmasters complain about them frequently.

cnet.com

cnet.com has a forum on their website and I just happen to stumble across a forum post that was warning people about their experience with WebHost4Life.com. This thread was posted on February 26, 2009. This thread discusses the following:

You need to contact them 3-4 times before you get a response.
Sites are migrated without you instructing them to do so.
Support just tells you sorry about the inconvenience for everything.
They cut their email and wanted email verification that they were not spammy.
Shut down site because of resources usage.
Accounting issues mean your site is going to go down right away.
Tried to contact CEO as instructed multiple times, but their CEO doesn’t respond.
Migrated to a new server and was shut down again.
Shut down for high IO.
Got disconnected from phone support.
They shut down your site and just tell you to upgrade.
No urgent support. Took 7 days to get a site back up.

There are various webmasters that left responses on this thread. They basically, called WebHost4Life.com’s technical team useless. There are live chat scripts that go nowhere. People have even wanted to file a class action suit against them. The feedback is so insanely bad on this thread. You have been warned!

WebHostingJury.com

WebHostingJury reviews different sites that offer web hosting, much as tbwhs.com does. WHJ offers a summary score on each of the categories of web hosting, based on a five-point scale, with 5 being the highest score. In this case, we’re looking at WebHost4Life as a hosting company. WHJ gives them 1.7 out of five. The highest overall score is 3 for pricing with reliability and support each getting 1.7. Here is what customers have to say about WebHost4Life.

Reliability

Customers who had been with WebHost4Life for several years decided to switch hosts because of downtime. This host experienced downtime for entire days at a time. When individual websites go down, it takes WebHost4Life several hours to fix the problem. Some customers reported 50% downtime. Loading times were very slow, according to some people.

Service

Customers said that when they had problems with their website, it would take an inordinate amount of time to get the problem fixed. In addition, customer service couldn’t tell other customers which domain they were paying for, and would often disconnect chat sessions without answering questions.

Server

The server tends to go down, leaving customers with a lot of downtimes. Websites also get hacked because of lack of security and because the server was not updated. When WH4L switched panels, it took months to complete the switch, and it never did work properly.

Most customers seem to think that when WebHost4Life was bought out, the service and quality dropped significantly. It turns out they were bought out by EIG. This company has acquired over 90 hosting companies and most of the companies they bought have issues with customer support.

WebHost4Life gets a 1.7/5 for reliability, 1.7/5 for support, 3/5 for pricing, and an overall rating of 1.7/5. Over 100 people have left comments and rated WebHost4Life on WebHostingJury.com and most of the comments and ratings are very negative on this site. This means other webmasters are having some major issues with them. I am filing this in my negative section for WebHost4Life because there is a lot of dirt on their name on this website.

“Neutral”

HostSearch.com

HostSearch provides analysis and scoring of web hosting services the same way that tbwhs.com does. They state their overall rating of a host upfront, which is based on a five-star rating system. In this case, we’re looking at their review of WebHost4Life.

Overall Ranking

WebHost4Life gets a ranking of three and one-half out of 5 stars. Each of the categories is ranked at this level, including uptime and reliability, customer service, support, network speed, price, value for the money, and billing procedures.

Recent Developments

Several customers who placed their reviews with HostSearch said that they had been with WebHost4Life. Some of them said that they had been with the host for several years, but that over the last year, service and quality have declined. One person said that his site had memory problems two times a week, while another said that his site had been down for several days.

Satisfied with Service

However, other customers said that they are quite satisfied with the quality of service. While customer service is sometimes lacking, and the tech support is rather slow, they consider WebHost4Life to be a quality provider and a reliable host.

In general, it seems that WebHost4Life is a pretty good host if you are fairly independent with running your website. Don’t count on customer service to walk you through the process. There were 7 comments that were left for WebHost4Life and they are generally good. The worst score 2 to 3 stars. The editor review is positive, though. Therefore, there is some mixed feedback on WebHost4Life so I am adding this piece of my research to my neutral section.

WebHost4Life interviews.

All content on tbwhs.com are opinions and not facts. I have thoroughly reviewed each company and then provide my personal opinions on them. It’s up to you as the consumer to do your due diligence and do more research if you feel something might be inaccurate.

WebHost4Life Review – Lots of Features, But Fall Short