I having been using IXWebhosting as my hosting provider for about two years, and now I am thinking switching to another provider. The reasons are:

1. Long waiting period for the help desk ticket. Usually about 6 hours, and up to 24 hours.

2. Some staff who answer the help ticket do not have enough knowledge and don’t know what they are doing. For instance, they will promise you that your issue is resolved and will not happen again. But when the issue happens again, they will just give you a sincere apology and escalate the ticket to the technical staff. 

3. Poor control panel for Windows hosing (I think they are using their home-built control panel for the Windows hosting plan). They offer unlimited Microsoft SQL Server databases, but through the control panel, what you can do is very limited: add/delete database user, add/delete database, and no more. They do allow users to use Microsoft SQL Management Studio to directly connect to their server to manage your databases, but if your company blocks the SQL server port, then this option becomes useless. I would rather have a nice web interface for me to manage my database, such as PLESK.

4. Performance. The reason I chose IXWebhosting was it offers Windows hosting with a relative cheap price. I guess you get what you pay, right? I recently installed DotNetNuke on this domain and the application runs very slow. It takes about 10 seconds to load the first page, and AJAX gives me timeout error frequently. When I reported this issue to the help desk, I was told that the problem probably resides in the application itself. Excuse me? I take it as an insult to my technical knowledge on DotNetNuke and ASP.NET applications. Besides, I have installed DotNetNuke on another domain of mine, and it runs very fast. They just ignored my question of why the same application runs very well on one domain but not very well on another.

5. Not WordPress friendly. They tightened their spam control policy that prevent WordPress blog from sending any emails. I was told I had to change the source code of my WP blog so that the email could go through, that means every upgrade of WP requires the same modification.

So I am tired of this hosting provider and waiting on the availability of the Windows hosting plan will be offered by HostingGator.com. I have heard of a lot of positive comments on this company and I have visited their web site, I am impressed that they have a forum besides other methods to help customers. The reason they don’t offer Windows hosting is that they don’t have enough staff and they are actually in the process of recruiting new employees for administering Windows hosting plans, so if you are interested in a position in this company, you may want to give it a try. Another thing about HostGator is that it provides completely free web hosting for qualified, nonprofit organizations for one year. After one year, the organization can re-apply to continue to use the free service. So if you are a web master of a nonprofit organization, don’t miss this opportunity. Here you can find more information.

Having my fingers crossed that their Windows hosting plan be available soon.