AXWebhost.com (Adrenaline Extreme) Review

Hello everyone,

I decided to take the time to review my hosting experience with Adrenaline Extreme (AXWebhost) at http://www.axwebhost.com in the hopes to help out prospective customers.

First off, let me say that I have been a customer since early 2005 when the company was owned and managed under different folks. The service, communication, and speed/uptime were awesome. They offered telephone support, chat, and email and I never waited for a response more than an hour. Truley a premiere host for a minimal price (under $10/month).

But buyer beware! The company was sold a while back (or at least that's the rumor) and things have been downhill ever since. First they yanked the telephone support, which I might be able to understand if they simply needed to cut costs. But then chat began to go offline too often for my comfort. (Chat was available intermittently 5 days a week). I'll credit them this: Very recently chat has been available every time I've needed it.

Next, the downtime started. I didn't have a reseller account, however I managed several of my clients' sites at AXWebhost for them. There is nothing more frustrating than being powerless to fix a problem when a client calls me upset that the site is down. I would say that uptime was 90% at best.

Then they changed DNS settings without telling any customers (or at least without telling me, the only contact on all of the accounts). I manage DNS via GoDaddy for most of my domains. All of a sudden one weekend all my sites wouldn't resolve. After much trial and error (getting ahold of support to get the new DNS info) we were back online. 24-48 hours later, that is...

Finally, emails started getting lost. Sometimes we'd get them, sometimes they'd disappear forever. (No bounce back to the sender, so they thought the email delivered fine). This could have just been an aggressive spam filter, but on several occasions this was brought to tech support's attention and I was told, "sorry, our spam filters may have caught it. And no, we don't have any spam filter tools for you to even add whitelists."

I had enough. It was time to migrate my sites and cancel the account. That should be easy enough. Not really. I submitted 5 tickets to cancel over a period of a month to their ticket system. (I was told that tech support couldn't help me over chat, and the "billing department" would handle the ticket). All the tickets remained opened and ignored. Meanwhile I am trying to watch my clients' PayPal accounts and credit cards for activity! Why should I be wasting my time doing this?

Well, finally today I had some success when I forced myself onto the tech support rep over chat and explained that submitting tickets over and over (as they requested) wasn't working and just serving to make me frustrated. Moments later the tech support rep writes back. "Okay, all canceled".

WHAT!? That was is!? So I was basically lied to this past month that only "billing department" could help? What a joke.

Anyway, this is how they treat someone with more than a dozen domains (again, I'm not a reseller, I just manage about 14 client accounts). Hope this helps someone make a better decision that I made.

Ohh not good at all. Have you already found another provider then? What a mess. Ive read countless "horror" stories when people are un-able to cancel. MANY hosts seem to have that problem....I dont understand it. Sounds like they definitely went downhill.
We dont all operate that way I tell ya, but its frustrating none the less when you hear of persistent billing,cancellation problems some people seem to experience.
Wish you the best in the future.

Thanks for the reply! Yea, I've migrated the sites and all is well (I'm very happy to report). I try not to be too hard on hosts because I know it's hard work. I suppose I just wanted to get that off my chest.

I've setup my clients with Google Apps (Gmail) for email and they love it. They're all small business owners with 2-15 employees, so the standard free version is great for them. The sites themselves are hosted by GoDaddy (linux or windows depending on php or asp). I know some people don't like GoDaddy but they've been good for me the past few weeks. Anyway, thanks again. Have a good one.

I'm glad that you have a nice experience with GoDaddy because I have read many negative feedbacks about them.

Yea, I have a few friends that have been really happy with GoDaddy, but a lot of people have negative reviews on various forums. So I decided to risk it. Again, it's only been a few weeks. And also, I require very little from my host (in the way of management tools). If I can use php / asp, mysql / access and I have good speed/uptime, I'm happy.