I get on one of my many websites (hosted by iPower) one day and realize that it's not coming up. It finally throws up a "page cannot be found." So, I called iPower and was on hold for 90 minutes waiting for Tech Support. This was during the middle of all their account transitions to the new platform.

Once I finally got a hold of someone I had to go through the security question ordeal. Since I had never set it (because this was an older account still on the old platform) I needed to log in to vDeck and set it. I tried to login, but it wouldn't accept my password for some reason. So the lady looks and sees that the account has been turned off. But, to turn it back on she either needs a security question (which I can't set) or the last 4 digits of the credit card on the account (which I didn't have). As I said earlier, this was a much older account setup around 4 years earlier, and was paid for by the organization I built the site for, not my own credit card. So, I have to call the organization and luckily get a hold of someone who has the credit card. So I read the last 4 digits to her and she lets me talk about the account now.

So, this is where I tell her that my website is not showing up. She puts me on hold for several minutes and comes back to tell me: "Your account is scheduled to transition to the new platform soon. Since this is a much older account with a lot of data, we need you to backup your site because there is a risk of data loss in this transition."

First off, I was very disturbed by the "loss of data" part, but even more disturbed by the fact that iPower is asking ME to backup the site. There was seriously several gig of data on that site which would take hours to take off. So I told her, why should I be the one to spend several hours backing up my site when you guys are the ones making all the changes? I'm perfectly content on the old platform! If you wanna move it, you back it up and make sure there's no data loss.

But, that issue aside, my other thought when she came back on the phone and told me my site was being transitioned was: that still doesn't explain why my site was shut down... So, I asked her. She said: "iPower needed to verbally warn you that your site was being transitioned. An email would not suffice because so many of them get sent to spam. The only way to get a hold of you by phone was to turn your site off so that you would call us."

WHAT THE HECK!!! I said, "No! The way to get a hold of my by phone is to CALL ME! Not shut my site down..." She said, "No, I'm sorry sir, we have too many customers to call."

She then asked me to update my billing information, because apparently the expiration date on my credit card had not been updated. That's why I couldn't get into the control panel earlier. I told her "You know what, I'm not going to update my billing information. I'm going to back up my site like you asked and move it to a new hosting company."

And that's my iPower story! I have many more, but that one sums up my experiences the best.

- Tyler