By Danny Wirken

“Choose the IX way” they say—but firsthand experience will teach you that web hosting with IX will only lead to frustration, failure, and several thousand dollars down the drain.

Hidden Charges

They claim to be affordable, at the supposed rate of $1.99 per month per hosted domain name. But that’s without their hidden charges, the fees for extra services (which aren’t so much extras but features you really need to run a decent site). It’s kind of like a car salesman telling you that he’ll give you a really good deal on the tires, but then doubling the cost of the actual car.

Frequent Overcharging

And whatever rate you actually sign up for, get ready to be overcharged—then wait months for them to correct and reverse it. And it’s not just one error, which can be forgiven as a glitch in an otherwise perfect system. Overcharging is the norm, and can reach over several thousand dollars more than what you’re expecting. They’ll bill you for an upgrade (which you didn’t request), then charge you twice for a plan (or for a plan you don’t have). Sometimes they’ll even put in additional features without your approval or knowledge, until you get your bill and see the extra thousand dollars. Or they’ll make a really stupid mistake, like being billed for extra bandwidth when your plan is supposed to have unlimited bandwidth. With all these errors you can easily get a billing as high as $4,000—most of which you didn’t expect, and which will take them months to reverse.

This is annoying even for large businesses, but for an individual using a personal credit card, or a small and struggling start-up with limited funds, it can be very crippling.

Slow Service

But do they care about the inconvenience they cause? No. Because the fact is, they’re only efficient when you’re a new or a potential customer. They honor your calls, speak politely and charmingly, and give you that well-practiced sales talk on the features and benefits of IX webhosting services. But once you sign the contract, they promptly treat you like dirt. It doesn’t matter that you desperately need them to refund the overcharging—an error they already admit as theirs—they’ll still make you several months, and then parry your requests by saying that “The file is being processed by the Billing Department”. Well, the Billing Department must be populated by very stupid lab mice, because it takes more than two months for them to look at their computers, check the discrepancy between their bill and your contract, and issue a reversal.

Of course, that’s assuming you’re actually talking to a customer service representative. It’ll take you hours just to talk to a real person, and once you do, you’ll frequently be transferred from one person to another, put on hold, and generally given the run around. “Choose the IX Way” indeed–yeah, choose it if you’d like to spend the better part of your life with your ear glued to the phone, listening to bad canned music while you pray that somebody picks up soon.

Rude Personnel

And when they finally take your call, they’re rude to you. It’s enough to make you scream. First they make you wait, and then, when you tell them what’s wrong (a worried, harassed and disappointed customer), what’s sickening is that they’re not even remotely apologetic. In fact, they’re downright rude. When one customer complained about this service (or lack thereof) and how it was jeopardizing his business, the manager rudely said, “That’s your problem!” and hung up. When the customer phoned back, he said he was in a meeting and had “no time” to take the call. Frustrated (and infuriated!) he tried calling again, this time posing as a new customer who wanted to sign up with IX Webhosting. The manager took the call, and was all polite and friendly until he realized who he was really talking to. He hung up again.

Automatic Disconnection of Accounts

It can take years for a website to build its search engine rankings, and a lot of additional investment as well. You have to build consumer loyalty, improve the keywords, increase the hits. But despite all this hard work, you can lose your ranking in an instant—even by just being offline for a week. That’s why people pay for their webhosting. Something that important shouldn’t be left to chance.

But when you’re webhosting with an unreliable, uncooperative and uncaring company like IX, you might as well sign a death sentence on your site. That’s because they have the habit of automatically suspending all the websites in your account, without prior notice. They won’t even check in on you to see if they’ve made an error on their assessment, or give you a chance to check on the problem and perhaps offer a solution. You’ll just open the computer and discover the website is down—and if it turns out to be an error on their part, you still have to wait a long time for them to correct the problem. (Think about it: if it takes them four months to correct a billing, how long would it take them to reactivate a website?)

And if you have multiple accounts, they’ll suspend not just the site with the problem, but everything. Those websites you spent months, even years, optimizing for websites searches are now officially down, and their ranking slipping by the day. If by some miracle IX Webhosting actually fixes the problem before the end of the century, the damage has already been done. You’ve lost your position on the website search, and we all know how hard it will be to regain it. Without a good ranking, you won’t get hits, and if you don’t get hits, it’s very hard to get a good ranking. And again, IX Webhosting doesn’t care. Your business could go down the drain, all they know (or want to know) is that they’ve made money off you. Too bad they can’t keep their end of the bargain, and actually delivered on the promises they made to their customers.

So don’t choose IX Webhosting, unless you’re a sucker for punishment and a complete fool. Just don’t say we didn’t warn you.