Endurance International Group (EIG) Hosting
Last updated on Aug 1, 2022
Important Update: Endurance International Group is now Newfold Digital. Soon after Clearlake Capital Group completed it’s acquisition of EIG in early 2021 it announced the formation of Newfold Digital.
Seeking an alternative to EIG/Newfold Digital hosting? This post here lists non EIG/Newfold Digital web hosts.
I’ve been meaning to create this post for quite sometime because I knew it would be helpful to have a page dedicated to the subject of EIG hosting for visitors to reference: including their background, what hosting brands they own, noteworthy outages, and trends of reliability/support. I have included some of my own opinion, however I feel that if you read through this whole post, follow the sources that I have referenced, and think about the whole EIG story things do add up.
For those who aren’t aware, Endurance International Group (EIG) is a Burlington, Massachusetts-based company known for its silent takeovers of some of the largest web hosting companies in the industry. To date, EIG has control of over 60 web hosting brands – which include some of the major players in the hosting business, such as HostGator, BlueHost, HostMonster, iPage, FatCow, JustHost, Arvixe, A Small Orange, and HostNine. In the web hosting industry, there is this misconception that “larger, well established companies will always offer the best in quality and service.” While this may be true for some industries, it definitely cannot always be attributed to the web hosting industry. With a very large portion of the major hosting companies owned and operated by EIG, it is important for you to know exactly what happens behind the scenes.
EIG Web Hosting Circle
EIG focuses on buying web hosting companies which helps them increase their customer base. The acquired companies continue to operate under their established brand names and do not try to publicize that they are owned by EIG, which can result in the following scenario:
- A dissatisfied customer leaves EIG host number 1 and goes in search of a new host.
- The customer searches for the term best web host on Google and comes across top 10 lists consisting of mostly other EIG hosting brands (unbeknownst to the customer).
- The customer decides to go with EIG host number 2. The end result is EIG has not lost this customer!
- Rinse and repeat, until the customer does some more in depth research, and discovers a list of all EIG web hosting companies.
For your reference here’s a listing of all of the brands and hosting companies EIG owns.
2slick.com
AccountSupport
A Small Orange
ApolloHosting
AptHost
Arvixe
Berry Information Systems
BigRock
BizLand
BlueDomino
BlueFur
BlueHost
BuyDomains
Cirtex Hosting
Cloud by IX
Constant Contact
Directi
Dollar2Host
Domain.com
DomainHost
Dot5Hosting
Dotster
easyCGI
eHost
EntryHost
Escalate Internet
FastDomain
FatCow
FreeYellow
Glob@t
Homestead
HostCentric
HostClear
Host Excellence
HostGator
HostMonster
HostNine
HostYourSite.com
HostV
HyperMart
IdeaHost
IMOutdoors
Impress.ly
Intuit Websites
iPage
IPOWER/iPowerWeb
IX Web Hosting
JustCloud
JustHost
LogicBoxes
MojoMarketplace
MyDomain
MyResellerHome
NetFirms
Networks Web Hosting
Nexx
PowWeb
PureHost
ReadyHosting
ResellerClub
SEOGears
SEO Hosting
Site5
SiteBuilder.com
Sitelio
Sitey
Southeast Web
Spry
StartLogic
SuperGreen Hosting
TypePad
USANetHosting
vDeck
Verio
VirtualAvenue
VPSLink
Web.com
WebHost4Life
WebHosting.info
WebsiteBuilder.com
Webstrike Solutions
Webzai
World Wide Web Hosting
Xeran
YourWebHosting
That sure is a long list of EIG companies to remember (70+), and I’ll add to it as EIG acquires more web hosts. Make sure to bookmark this page, share it, like it, tweet it, or something so you can refer back to it in the future.
There’s much more to this story below, but if you only came to this page in search of reliable web hosts that are not owned by EIG, here’s a list of EIG hosting alternatives for you.
EIG Web Hosting Outages
EIG has had several large scale outages over the years. The most famous, and perhaps eye opening, for many customers occurred on August 2nd, 2013. Millions of HostGator, BlueHost, and HostMonster customers lost services as the EIG datacenter in Utah took a hit. It affected phone lines and servers in all their hosting facilities and was one of the biggest outages the web hosting industry has seen in recent years. As multiple large hosting companies were all under EIG, it made it apparent as to why they all went down at once.
Other Big EIG Outages
- December 31st, 2013 – Bluehost, HostGator Among EIG Brands Hit by Massive New Year’s Eve Outage
- April 16th, 2014 – More Downtime for HostGator and BlueHost Customers as Router Issues Plague Utah Data Center
- May 19th, 2014 – Yet Another BlueHost and HostGator Outage
The post above is from a HostGator customer who started a thread titled – FINALLY Abandoning Ship! - October 29, 2014 – HostGator Fail – All Reseller Servers Down
The comment above is from a HostGator customer on WHIR article – HostGator Struggles to Bring Reseller Servers Online After Intermittent Outages
The switch from SoftLayer to the EIG-owned datacenter in Provo, Utah is one of the biggest reasons HostGator customers saw a reduction in quality and service. Since EIG took over HostGator servers were a lot slower; support staff was not as helpful; live chat, tickets, and phone support response times increased; etc. A combination of these problems has shed some light for existing customers and many have made the switch to other hosting companies.
A very important factor that needs to be taken into account here is the fact that EIG will continue to acquire small, medium, and large sized web hosting businesses from around the world. When other web hosting companies flourish with their own customer base it is something Endurance International Group sees as an opportunity.
EIG’s Acquisition and Business Structure
The executives and decision makers behind EIG devote a great deal of their resources to finding up-and-coming web hosting businesses that have a strong customer base. Upon acquiring a new hosting business, EIG often makes several notable changes to the business. These changes can include the implementation of their own control panel, migrating accounts to different servers or datacenters, as well as a reduction or complete abolishment of the existing operational staff.
Endurance International Group has their own team of support staff that they use for many of their hosting companies. Despite the acquisition of a new hosting business, which in turn brings new customers, EIG eventually transitions to using their own short-staffed support personnel. The downside of their actions is that both their existing and new customers will potentially have to learn to deal with lower quality support service. There is simply not enough staff to deal with their ever growing customer base. This trend is likely to persist as EIG continues to buyout other web hosting companies, but could be reversed if the decision makers at EIG prioritize staffing their support/technical departments.
In most cases, both existing customers and potential new customers of EIG-owned companies will only see these brands from the outside. For example, HostGator still looks pretty much the same as it did – they continue to have the same brand name, logo, website, promotions, plans, etc. However, EIG has completely revamped and overturned the administration and technical side of the business.
Here are some examples of customer complaints from Twitter
@hostgator – What a way to screw up a good thing. You used to be good. I am tired of the outages and EIG SUCKS! Time to move on!
— Debt RoundUp (@DebtRoundUp) August 2, 2013
@drpareshsoni using Hostgator since 2010, but seems like their quality gng down with every passing day
— Harsh Agrawal (@denharsh) March 27, 2015
What has happened to @Hostgator’s once excellent support? My site has been down well over a day now and two tickets ignored. @HGSupport
— Paul Sutherland (@suthers) January 23, 2015
Bluehost down. Can’t access my site. Can’t access cPanel. Can’t get email. It’s time for a new webhost.
— Michael Erb (@merb) May 29, 2015
@bluehost Come on, Bluehost. It’s unprofessional not to respond to customers when the server has been down for 2+ hours. Not impressed.
— Ana Parfenova (@anaparfenova) May 29, 2015
@iPage What’s happened your support team?? Can’t believe our website is down over 2 weeks. Feeling ignored. Ipage not interested. Irritating
— Dave Reel (@Reeler70) January 30, 2015
@jainsudhir1 my ipage hosting is down for all day no support at all no reason it is down, if you work for this hosting they need better supp
— TESFA.com (@TESFAcom) June 19, 2014
Still down. Still nothing, nada, zip from ipage. How ridiculous! You’d think if they give a link to contact them, they’d answer it!
— a. puog (@ByondPolitics) March 25, 2014
I have also included a big collection of customer complaints about A Small Orange’s long support ticket response times in a recent post titled: Things You Don’t Want in a Web Hosting Company
Examples from webmaster forums
I am freelance web developer and I have been using HostGator since 2011. They used to be my top choice webhosting provider, but recently their servers and support has become unreliable. I have 2 VPS, 1 Reseller and 1. Dedicated server where I have hosted all of my clients domains. Even though all the plans are managed but recently they are taking up to 8 days to reply to support ticket that I had raised. Every time their excuse is “First, I would like to apologize for our delayed response. Our ticket queues are much higher at the moment than we would like. We are taking steps to reduce overall wait times, but reducing the current load will take some time.”. They have been telling this for last two months.
— HostGator Services has become unreliable recently
I have never had such terrible support from them as I am getting now. Just a few months ago, It took about 30-45 minutes to get them on the phone. The ticket system was faster. So I tried it. Now it takes 3 days or longer to get a reply. As for the phone, I hang up after an hour, so that isn’t working either. The chat countdown from 30 minutes never works. I have also noticed that the servers, which never before had more than 70% of drive space used, are now running 98%. Everything is so slow on my reseller server that I can’t stand to be on the website any longer. My standard hosting account is starting to bog down as well. The answers, which I have already found by the time they arrive, give a one-line answer and a 4-5 line apology for the support delays which they are working on to fix. They need to quit “fixing” them because the more they fix it the worse it gets. I am very loyal, but I gotta go!
— Hostgator Support Very Poor These Days
As I write this I am in Hostgator Hell. Exactly as Brad says, I waited 1 hour and 40 minutes for Live Chat to finally get around to chatting with me – and the timer was set at 30 minutes forever….And what’s more, when they did finally get to me they gave me mistaken information – so now I’m back on the treadmill – waiting for the Live Chat timer to move from 30 minutes again. Definitely not impressed. Not in the least. Happy to move if there is a better option out there… and there really must be. This is not even close to reasonable customer service.
— HOSTGATOR – WARNING – DO NOT USE
One theory I’ve heard throw around as to why some of their hosting brands have a high rate of complaints is just the sheer size of their customer base. As an example, if you take 1,000,000 customers and 1% of them are unhappy that’s 10,000. A smaller sized company with 10,000 customers with 1% dissatisfied would be 100. Regardless of the plausibility of this theory, what I see is a huge company that needs to maximize profits as a publicly traded company (EIGI), trying to manage too many hosting brands with millions of hosting accounts, and the result is the original brands are clearly worse.
The Unfortunate Truth in the Web Hosting Industry
The unfortunate and unavoidable truth in the web hosting industry is the following: EIG owns a massive portion of the medium to large sized hosting businesses in the industry. If you are dissatisfied with HostGator or any other EIG-owned company and decide to switch – there is a very high probability that you may still end up with another EIG-owned brand. That is if you don’t do your research and know about the full list of EIG hosting companies (see above). From a business standpoint, EIG has done its part in acquiring a significant market share, however, customers are the ones who are affected by their actions.
For current customers of EIG web hosts (or any web host for that matter) that are happy with their web hosting services, I have a few suggestions for you. Make sure you have uptime monitoring setup so you know when your websites go down (e.g. Uptime Doctor and Uptime Robot). Also run a speed test on your websites to see how fast they load (e.g. Pingdom). You might discover that you are not satisfied with the amount of downtime you are experiencing over time or that your loading speeds are sub-par. The reason why I’m bring this up is some webmasters have no idea that their websites are not performing as well as they could. Last but not least, make sure you create your own backups regularly, so if you ever face problems you are in control of your data and can move to another web hosting company.
Avoiding Disappointment: Non EIG Hosting (Choose a Web Host Not Owned by EIG)
The good news in all this is that there are still many reliable hosting companies not owned by EIG. Customer satisfaction oriented hosting companies who make it a priority to offer quality services are aware of EIG and their practices. Hopefully, they avoid potential buyout deals from EIG, despite the monetary gain.
For those who are looking for reputable hosting companies that are not owned by EIG and most likely never will be, please refer to my earlier post made after EIG acquired Arvixe, which lists non Endurance International Group hosting companies. You can also see all of the web hosting companies (good and bad) I’ve reviewed so far here.
Choosing the right web hosting company has always been a hard choice, especially because of the number of companies in operation. However, once we disregard those owned by EIG, there still is a great selection of trusted hosting companies out there. Consider asking other webmasters for hosting recommendations and see which one offers the best plan according to your needs. Then do your full research on that company, including searching on WebHostingTalk for feedback on them. If you are new to web hosting or need a brief refresher, read through my web hosting guide. Making the decision to choose the right web host for your needs is important – as it will prevent frustration, disappointment, and the need to switch to other web hosting providers.
The bottom-line here is: try your best to avoid EIG brands as the majority of them have been a consistent source of trouble for many customers.
EIG Hosting Story Updates
There are three EIG hosting brands that recently started being promoted at the top of some hosting review sites. eHost.com, HostClear, and a newer brand name IdeaHost (added to the list of EIG brands).
All three of these brands are not well known and have a very similar design/layout too.
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Endurance International Group Announces Definitive Agreement to Acquire Constant Contact
“We couldn’t be more pleased to welcome Constant Contact to our team and our family of brands. We have long admired Constant Contact and its strong management team, and all that it has accomplished in building a great product set, as well as building an influential culture and team. Their focus on the customer and product development complements our offerings for small business services, and expands our ability to address the needs of SMBs. We know that once small businesses have a web presence, they look for other products and services that will help them to grow their business. We see an opportunity to help our growing subscriber base meet their goals through an integrated suite of solutions, and we are excited to add this talented team to our roster,” said Hari Ravichandran, president and chief executive officer of Endurance.“Our team has always been passionate about helping small businesses do more business. Joining the Endurance family of brands will allow us to extend our reach and be a better partner to small businesses across the globe. We have long shared a parallel path—from our focus on SMBs, to technology, to talent—and we believe this transaction will build continued value for all constituents,” said Gail Goodman, chief executive officer of Constant Contact.
Choosing a web host not owned by EIG is just one side of the coin.
Another side is: choosing a web host that *will not* be owned by EIG in near future.
Case in point, Arvixe. I migrated some of my clients there, based on the reputation of Arvixe, and three months later, EIG bought Arvixe. Their acquisitions are so sudden and spring out of nowhere… -_-
The same thing happened to me! I bailed on HostGator after finding Arvixe, only to find out two weeks later that they were bought by EIG. I had even found statements by the owner of Arvixe stating he would never sell to EIG! Now i’m searching again. Arvixe was great, now they are no longer reliable. Oh well…
Endurance International Group ~They assumed the company from Intuit and Homestead Technologies and immediately did a system purge without telling account holders, destroying decades of files amassed by inactive accounts they considered unprofitable and accounts that were considered expendable. The web site builder they offer for home use had no way to back up files, keeping customers captive to use them as a web host, keep their sites active and to be a constant source of revenue. Inactive files were destroyed along with the account holders business, storage and livelihood. They lie! Profusely! They don’t care about clients or files, websites or web hosting. They care about the bottom line. What are the ledger figures at the end of the day. They put up a front to pretend to be community minded and small business oriented, wanting to help. In the end. They will destroy your life and not even blink. I have had intimate and personal experiences with them for over 13 years. They ruined my business, my memoirs, my book, my family tree, my life’s work! They just, destroyed everything I entrusted to them, claiming my contractual obligations. When there were none. These people are pure evil.
They bought up Arvixe a few months ago, and right now ten or so servers have completely collapsed with thousands of customers left wondering what the hell is going on. They’re not responding to anyone, not updating their customers, and some sites have been down for more than 12 hours. There are some customers who have been without service for weeks according to their own forums.
Arvixe was never the best for customer support (not since 2010) but this is truly atrocious. This is the kind of failure you might expect after a major disaster, but it’s all down to nothing more than their ineptitude, their arrogance, their greediness and their uselessness as a hosting company – probably all as a result of being bought by EIG.
If you’re with Arvixe, move as soon as you can to a company not owned by EIG, the service is only going to degrade further as they desperately squeeze every dime in profits out while putting nothing in, all knowing that you’ll likely end up moving to another of their companies to be giving them the money anyway. This is what happens when a corporation forms a monopoly.
Yep, everything has collapsed at Arvixe! I cannot believe the problems I’m having—both with service and with getting tech support. It’s worse than anything I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve been working with websites for 12 years. I’m switching to a non-EIG company ASAP.
I’m moving our environment off of Arvixe as I type this. Our server has completely gone haywire ever since it was migrated a few days back. Just some of the most absurd issues I’ve ever seen. The most random settings keep getting mucked up (often something out of the customer’s reach), and we’ve been opening tickets faster than they can fix them. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t causing so much trouble for my client.
Pretty sure this is the head of EIG IT:
http://i.imgur.com/1Zlz5Cf.jpg
LOL! Thanks for the laugh, because I’ve been pulling my hair out. Emails now seem to be randomly not reaching me (and clients get no error message saying the messages didn’t go through). This is insane. I wish a tech news outlet would do a story on it.
Read PC Mag’s review: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2462052,00.asp
It glows with praise, then the Editor says they’re going to re-evaluate Arvixe because of all the negative comments- but they haven’t. PC Mag has zero credibility now.
Interesting. I’m glad they posted something, but it’s too bad the marketing director’s comment is allowed to stand on its own like that. It makes the problem sound minor.
The re-evaluation has now happened and the score got knocked down. Ironically, the host to replace it as PC Mag’s recommendation is HostGator, so make of that what you will in terms of credibility.
I still wonder how they can give it a 2.5/5 score if their own article describes Arvixe uptime as “the worst” and “unacceptable”. And that’s based on a tested downtime of half an hour over two weeks – my Arvixe sites have had downtimes of *several days* since the EIG acquisition.
Arvixe used to reply promptly on requests. Not anymore. Malware on their Caiman server, No working email on our website for 10 days and payments made by Bitpay are allegedly non received, or as they say it. We can see them, but they are not released by Bitpay so please can you pay again..
Don’t use Arvixe move to a European server go to Iceland, where you can register your website anonymously and where they do not promise you unlimited bandwidth but green energy and a real 99+% uptime.
After having disabled Live Chat support entirely a few days ago, Arvixe have now also put their message boards in “maintenance mode”. It’s been inaccessible for at least 12 hours from what I can gather.
Of course, over the past few weeks almost the only thing going on on those boards anymore was dozens of threads a day complaining about completely unresponsive support, and massive downtimes. As the forums were publicly accessible, I figure EIG just decided to shut the boards down indefinitely to try and fool potential new customers, by making it harder to find out how horrible things really are. As of around 1 week ago, for all intents and purposes, I couldn’t tell whether anyone is even still working at Arvixe at all. Apart from the guy who switches off services that become too uncomfortable, that is.
I’ve seen the same tactics several times before. For example, cloud storage company Wuala went downhill after they were acquired by LaCie. When criticism became louder, they first put the forums in read-only mode, then deleted them entirely. Wuala now is no more. I figure EIG might have finally crossed the critical limit and also tank really hard, really soon. For anyone who knows to try and look for information on why their service is imploding, it’s easier than ever (in large parts thanks to your site) to learn to avoid switching to yet another EIG brand. For all I care about, they can just go bust now (maybe after I’ve transferred away my Arvixe-managed domains). They have no place being in the hosting business.
If YOU want to be TRACKED – USE “CONSTANT CONTACT” This banker owned & gov’t controlled entity – through #EIG Endurance International Group – that has gobbled UP most #Hosting & #Domains will NOW have FULL unfiltered access to YOUR private emails, business NEGOTIATIONS & CONTRACTS – travel records – EVERY TRANSACTION YOU handle – including EVERY EMAIL CONFIRMATION you acquire – will go through #EIG #WebHosting #Hosting #Domains and their “CONSTANT CONTACT” email source.
(Even MORE if YOU use Constant Contact as a networking tool or for your business & personal Newsletters – think of: PayPal – Amazon payments – Everything YOU do – will be tracked – data mined!)
EIG did destroy our Amazing Website of 6 years and we are still fighting them – it’s been OVER 4 months now.
http://click2connect-clickybuzz.blogspot.com/2015/10/business-is-game-played-for-fantastic.html
I think a class action lawsuit is in order… everyone need to constantly back up your own files.. and keep records of your issues. and stand together to stop monopolizing companies like EIG…. and only patronize companies that don’t partner with them…. That would be a huge selling point for legit hosting companies… complain with your money… if all the customers leave all their companies… they will get the point…. only money matters to them… hit them where it hurts the most.. but everyone need to cancel in the same month so their stocks drop…
The EIG companies recently started promoting SiteLock. SiteLock is a scam. They tell you “Your site has malware – call us to fix this”. Prices are outrageous of course.
I got two of these today. I asked for proof or details.
I checked the site with Wordfence and a malware scanner – Clean.
Second site is where it got interesting :
The site was moved to a new VPS host 2 months ago
The ‘site’ is an empty folder
I was sent a ‘sample of the code’ found in the folder.
SCAM
Add to this :
I am not and never have been a SiteLock customer
SiteLock offered to ‘Reset my password’ – for a non existent account
Hostgator allowed their ‘Partner’ to scan my websites – That’s illegal (You can’t get to the Hostgator site from ‘outside’ as it is now hosted on my vps) so this was an inside job
The ‘Malware’ simply does not exist
The domain is not even on an EIG server
Each email is another pack of lies
YES, I have the proof to back this up in court.
More interesting tales (NOT my site)
http://www.jlellis.net/blog/my-experience-with-sitelock
You have to add Cirtex Hosting to the list – from what I gathered, the brand was part of the HostNine/ASO group.
Yes both Cirtex and HostV. They both redirect to HostNine now. Thank you Ana.
Where is Review Hell hosted?
Squidix
I have some websites with Site5 from years ago with a hostPro + Turbo Plan. One of my websites has a high traffic and 2 days ago was blocked and appeared a page of “Bandwidth traffic exceeded”. I’m in Europe and I tried to contact them by chat, usually was quickly in my experience, but it was impossible, so I looked inside my account and found that they had changed the unlimited traffic to 7.81Gb/month. I fixed it, but at 12 p.m. it happened again and I had to change again.
Now it works well at the moment, but this has made me see what it is happening and search for more info and founded your blog. My 2 years contract ends next year on February. I was happy with Site5 almost 10 years, never had serious problems, only 1 day that server was down some hours, but now I’m afraid that the problems have now begun and I want to find a new hosting next year.
I have been on the Internet since 1990, on the Web since 1994, have used different providers. There is one thing common to all: “All hosting companies are evil, forcing the user to deal with the devil they know.” I am about to change again, third or fourth time, thus the search and how I landed here. Useful information.
I am still trying to path up the three years of wasted time and opportunity caused by ipage when i transferred (and they destroyed) my first website from 1-1 to them I didn’t even know I page belonged to EIG until i saw the charges in my credit card . I page LIED TO ME PURPOSELY WHEN I ASKED IF THEY WERE AN INDEPENDENT COMPANY OR PART OF A BIGGER GROUP. THEY SAID THEY WERE AN “UP-AND-COMING COMPANY! I didn’t know about the existence of EIG until fraudulent unauthorized charges appeared in my credit card. I had not been able to contact ANYBODY EITHER THROUGH CHAT PHONE OR EMAIL AT I- PAGE! It was a ghost ship! the chat window ceased to be operational in 2015 and any phone call was picked up by an automated system that would keep you in an automated loop or 50 minutes before it just got disconnected. I had never authorized automated charge, actually, when i first saw them i changed them myself to manual and they changed them back to automatic. Then there was no way to switch them back to manual because it prompted you to contact them on the phone but nobody picked up the phone. Emails are replied automatically and they are set to non-reply. Despite of the fact my credit card expired and i never gave them the new credit card info, HSBC authorized charges with the NEW CREDIT CARD! even as they were blocking my card for honest transactions with honest providers. Credit cards seem to be part of the conspiracy, allowing EIG to post charges with EXPIRED CREDIT CARDS. It’s a really serious and severe issue and i don’t know they can get away with it. I wanted to make sure i didn’t fall into another EIG crap hole. not all their acquired site are up to date in their own website. I allmost got host services with Sitebuilder and after, Blue host! KEEP AWAY FROM THESE FRAUDSTERS, ABUSIVE UNSCRUPULOUS CROOKS! Thanks for providing such a wonderful review of everything web! thanks for helping us decide wisely where to put our hard-earned dollars!
I wanted to add that distrust small “up-and-coming’ companies so much now (particularly those based in the USA and SEA) that i went with a German company that seems serious but so far, for a beginner like me, has been a real nightmare. I haven’t been able to even install Word Press there, the “5-minute-installation’ turned into a 3-unsuccessful-day-installation. Hetzner-online provide ZERO help for people who relied on pre-installed WP before switching to them. Do you have any feedback about Hetzner online? could I redirect my domain names from them (I have a one year contract, with one free domain if i purchase their hosting services, but able to transfer them after 60 days) to a different hosting service without having to transfer them for a year?? without having to pay for them again? I have 4 domain names and just recently understood they are all contain in the main domain name, sharing the same public-html file! this spells disaster in the long run. I’m considering the re-seller hosting services you discussed in another article which i didn’t know about. But how can i got about installing wp to at least try this webhost? Thanks for your help!
This is a brilliant and informative web page, great job on this.
I had never heard of this group until the beginning of this year, when I received an email saying my websites where going being transferred over to ix web hosting’s sister site…….site5.
There was mention of EIG buying IX Web Hosting, my 1st thought is , well this sucks, I don’t know anything about this group, but seems like it had just happened and I just have to accept it.
It was nice of them to tell us, shame they didn’t tell us back in late 2015 when they actually bought IX Web Hosting.
We had paid for 3 years hosting around February 2015 , so was due for renewal February 2018, which is pretty much the only reason why we found out IX Web Hosting had been bought back in 2015.
That along was enough for me and my business partner to change hosting, however there is more.
I did my research by using google and discovered MANY negative comments about there quality of support , something I can back up.
I replied to there ticket informing us our websites being moved many times, eventually I was told to go to site 5 support, which I flat out refused to do, eventually I posted all my concerns in a very well thought out post.
The reply I got is as follows;
“Yes we will notify our customers when their account is getting ready to be moved. If you have any other questions feel free to reach back out. You have a wonderful day.”
They answered one question, when I had posted concerns about the negative reviews on site 5/EIG, also saying I didn’t want my websites moved to site5. I complained about the amount of times I was told to go to site 5 support during the whole ticket they started notifying us of the change.
That pretty much confirmed what we already suspected, we needed a new hosting company.
At first, we liked the look of hostgator, then discovered EIG owned them, so yes, its very easy to leave one company and go to another EIG owns.
As of today, our websites have all been transferred to FastComet, which has so far been very impressive, support has been great and there servers seem really fast compared to where we was before.
I just hope EIG don’t buy fastcomet, we partially considered going to godaddy, as figured godaddy never sell to EIG.
I think it is important to note they also own sitelock… anytime something goes wrong with your site,they love to suggest you subscribe to sitelock.
Buying hosting from EIG is definitely not something I’d recommend to my readers.
I’m glad that SiteGround isn’t a part of them and hope it remains this way forever.
Thanks for the complete list.
This article was useful even if all it did was make me feel better. I have been round and round four times with technical support (Those poor support people are working the graveyard shift due to the ten hour time difference) over some minor vandalism that Ready Hosting used as a pretext to suspend my account and try to sell me Site Lock. My site is back and it’s staying put a few more months because I’ve paid for a year of hosting, but late this winter…
I use to have a EIG host. Arvixie! I signed on before it got flushed down the EIG toilet. From the way EIG is damaging businesses online, when your business site is down your business is down, I believe it’s time for us as the people to file mass complaints against EIG with the federal trade commission, http://www.ftc.gov. EIG is guilty of false advertising and fraud and they appear to be trying to get a monopoly. EIG lies to potential customers as their product does not work as advertised and any hosting company to fall prey to EIG no longer functions afterwards. It’s time to hold electronic products to the same standards of physical products. If it works, great! If not it’s fraud! This is what the FTC is for.
EIG has destroyed A Small Orange. They were great when I started there. I left them much too slowly after every form of failure and lie you can imagine.
“Sitelock” is owned by EIG! It needs to be added to the beware list on review Hell. Sitelock offers extremely expensive rates for website security besides having EIG quietly in the back gound.
Has AIT (Advanced Internet Technologies) been purchased by EIG?
I found this page after doing a little research and trying to leave a negative review about Arvixe. Here’s my story:
While waiting for the overseas support LiveChat attendant, I decided that I will spend my time posting about the absurdity of being charge for a renewal for web hosting that was cancelled in 2018. 2 years ago.
I received an email notification that my domain would expire on 1/31.2020 and then another email that thanked me for my payment for another year of renewal.
Arvixe apparently can’t publish a phone number and all support is handled via LiveChat. I’ve now wasted almost an hour typing to someone in Who-Knows-Where and am being told that the money cannot be refunded.
I’ve shared screenshots and texts of my 2018 email confirmation. The email confirmation shows up in my email history on their website too.
This is ridiculous!
Way back in the late 1990’s, I was using a small webhosting company out of Kansas City to host my clients websites. I didn’t panic when they notified their clients that their company had been purchased. Then, almost to the minute of the “transition,” everything went to crap. My sites were down for more than 2 weeks. It would have been faster if they had strapped the servers on the backs of a herd of pack mules to make the transition.
When I got my invoice for that month, I hit the roof and called customer service. (Those were the days! They hadn’t learned to purge the staff in those days.) Ended up being cussed out by a customer service rep who informed me this wasn’t how he saw his life playing out after graduating from college.
I ended up paying over $40 to send 1997 pennies to pay my final hosting bill.
Had several clients on Hostgator when they were assimilated. Having survived it once, I recognized the symptoms and ran like my hair was on fire! When a company sells to EIG, they no longer notify their clients ahead of the sale. Instead, you’ll notice your down time is growing exponentially, nothing works and support is non-existent.
As a result of my first EIG clusterf*ck, I NEVER pay for more than 3 months of hosting in advance.
I found this thread perusing the knowledge base at HawkHost. Someone asked if they were owned by EIG. After my web hosting horrors PTSD episode subsided, I decided to double check and make SURE they weren’t lying. Found this post. Hawkhost has been great so far. It’s one of several hosting companies I use, because I’m ALWAYS fearful that EIG will buy my hosting company and destroy the business I’ve spent over 20 years building.
After years of using Justhost I lost my emails and there is nothing i can do about it. Their help desk does not help they just say they are looking in to it and adjust the time frame for the response as time goes by. I have no emails doe 3 day and I am getting nowhere and you cannot talk to anyone – avoid