I have had hosting through ipowerweb for the last 4 or 5 years, and they were my first hosting company. I learned a lot through my experience with them, especially because they had “auto-installers” through the vdeck which allowed me to start playing with WordPress, phpBB, and other scripts. Lately, however, I had been getting more and more unhappy with what I could and could not do with my website. I have also noticed some pretty severe performance issues regarding database queries. The long and short of it added up to me finding a new hosting home with Site5.
What put the nail on the coffin with ipowerweb for me was its poor support for Drupal database requirements. I kept reading about errors that would occur even after the lengthy back and forth with tech support to get it configured correctly (and that is every time you need a new db for Drupal) and I decided I just didn’t want to deal with it as a Drupal newbie. I definitely didn’t know what I was missing, though, until I signed up with Site5.
So far, I am ecstatic with my new host, truly. They are less expensive (!), faster, have a great control panel, have Fantastico, and their servers and databases are set up to handle Open Source scripts. I have shell access!! They have good, active customer forums and my two minor support tickets were resolved in 5min and 10min respectively. For the first time I feel like I have control over “my” server space and databases. And because handling domains is so easy (with MultiAdmin) I feel very comfortable offering hosting to my design customers who may not want to mess with their own hosting.
The only downside to all this is that I have gobs of hosting from ipowerweb paid up until December 2007 that I don’t know what to do with. If you have any use for it, let me know.