Endurance International Group, Inc
Sep 06
Back when I first reviewed iPage and Fatcow I came across Endurance International Group. All because these two hosts appeared in webhostingstuff top 25 hosts. In the 2nd and 4th positions, both out pacing hostgator. Never mind that I have now gone through 30 webhosts on webhostingstuff and I have shown there is no reasonable ranking going on unless you factor in webhostingstuff.com getting something under the table. After all one of the sites that was number 25 is now out of business. From what I can see there is nothing showing that Endurance International Group is going out of business.
http://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/hosts-that-use-exposed-reviews/dont-buy-from-ipage-com-until-you-read-my-review-to-save-time-and-money.html
How did Endurance International Group get my attention?
A chat session with iPage had me wondering how many companies this support operation had to take care of. All because the chat operator had to ask me what url I was referring to. I told the operator that it was the main page, after all a site only has one main/home page. The chat operator kept asking me for the main page until I gave them iPage.com. Having used chat programs with my hosting companies, I can tell you my techs knew what site, and for that matter what page of the site a customer was on. Clearly something that this group should be using as opposed to having customers tell a chat operator what site they are on.
It was my first impression that it was just an outsourced support working with multiple hosting companies. But there was also this that one of the chat operators told me:
Bryan Smith: FatCow is the sister company of iPage.
The chat operator gave me more information then he/she should have. The support company was not well put together because they had to ask which website I was referring to. But by the time I reviewed Fatcow, and was I looking for FatCow’s BBB record. The search engine results brought me to:
It became clear that while it was not only outsourced it was part of a company that buys out webhosting companies. They claim to have natural growth, but all the growth appears to be mostly acquisition. While looking at some hosts its becomes clear that the buy outs don’t happen smoothly. One company out of all those bought out by Endurance International Group sticks out, and that is host4life. It seemed prior to being bought out, people actually liked that company, but the opinion is clearly in the negative now. I have to say that Endurance International Group has me curious. So I am adding another part to my reviews which is all the sites that appear under Endurance International Group.
Endurance International Group appears out of the picture with their acquisition.
I have a bottle of Tylenol on my desk, looking over the bottle I can tell you what company Tylenol is a division of. Which is MCNEIL-PPC, inc. You goto tylenol.com and you find MCNEIL-PPC, inc. When you got to iPage.com and FatCow.com you can’t find a reference to Endurance International Group. I have gone through several of their sites looked at the bottom of the main pages, look through various terms of services. Yet not one site brings me any detail about being owned by Endurance International Group. I have read some sites that indicated that they are the third largest hosting provider in the U.S. having around some 700,000 customers. But nothing open to telling the customers that their hosting company is a division of Endurance International Group. When I was looking at how Endurance International Group, is a green company (more about that in another post). I found a order link. http://www.enduranceinternational.com/green/
I get the following page: http://www.enduranceinternational.com/endurance/hosting.bml?
They have a lot of companies to link to on their greenwashed sites. Greenwashing by means of buying energy credits.
Endurance International Group where hosting customers are a reusable commodity
One thing sticks out to me on Endurance International Group’s website:
Access Millions of Potential Customers
Learn more about the vDeck Integration Program (VIP) which puts your product or service in front of a high-quality, targeted audience of small business owners looking for cutting-edge solutions.
It appears that Endurance International Group is using their customers as an advertising base. Much like what AOL did with their service. This is my assumption, but based on this page: http://www.enduranceinternational.com/vip/
I am going to assume that products are placed inside of a customers login area. Looking at several of the sites randomly they cover their butts from the people they sell the advertising to.
http://www.fatcow.com/legal/legal_privacy.bml
http://www.ipage.com/legal/legal_privacy.bml
http://www.webhost4life.com/legal/legal_privacy.bml
http://www.apollohosting.com/legal/legal_privacy.bml
http://www.ehost.com/legal/legal_privacy.bml
http://www.freeyellow.com/legal/legal_privacy.bml
and the list goes on……. But every site I have look at has the same privacy policy. The part that connects hosting company to Endurance International Group is 5. Online Shopping.
Online Shopping. At some Web sites that you access through links on FatCow, you can purchase products and services or register to receive materials, such as a catalog or new product updates. In many cases, you may be asked to provide contact information, such as your name, address, e-mail address, phone number, and credit/debit card information. If you complete an order for a Web site or service that is not provided by FatCow, FatCow has no control over the third parties’ use of any personal information you provide when placing such an order. Please exercise care when doing so. If you order products directly from FatCow, we will use the personal information you provide only to process that order. We do not share this information with outside parties except to the extent necessary to complete that order.
In addition to hosting fees, Endurance International Group is also making money on the back end off their clients through advertising.
Here is the list of sites that I know of with Endurance International Group
I have heard rumor that they also own Justhost, but at this time I have not found anything to confirm that.
Endurance International Group a company with so much more to review
If you have a horror story, a success story, or information for me to look at with Endurance International Group, this is the place to post.
EasyCGI are owned by the Endurance International Group.
It took me 9 days to get EasyCGI (partnered with SRSPlus) to finally unlock my domains so that I could transfer them to a new registrar. The domains had both been expired for about 14 days at the time.
The manner in which EasyCGI (partnered with SRSPlus) have handled my domain transfer was extremely poor and represents one of the worst customer experiences I have ever had to endure. EasyCGI approached this matter with sheer ignorance and breathtaking arrogance. It took 9 days to resolve a simple issue which consumed so much time from so many parties. Their unprofessional conduct was highlighted when they attempted to remove themselves from any implication of having breached the ICANN Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy.
EasyCGI request that a customer pay $160 to release an expired domain if it has been expired for more than 2 weeks (and this excludes the renewal costs). Here is a quote from EasyCGIs Customer Support person Reed Safford:
“If you do not renew your domain before the 2-week period the domain goes into a period called the Domain Redemption Period. You can get your domains out of Redemption period upon paying $160.00 fee imposed by the registrar. Note that this does not include the renewal fee. Hence I suggest that you renew the domain names at the earliest so that the domain name will not move to Redemption Period.”
This appears to be a blatant breach of the ICANN Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy and I believe represents a form of extortion. For this reason I have also pursued the matter with the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network (ICPEN).
It was only that I persisted with email after email that they finally unlocked my domains for transfer without charging me. But get this, it only happened after I sent emails to the Endurance International Group directly.
SRSPlus attempted to distance themselves from the matter by claiming that they could only do what their partner (EasyCGI) allowed. Despite the ICANN Inter-Registrar Transfer Policy SRSPlus did nothing to help me out.
Avoid EasyCGI at all costs! SRSPlus (Domain Registrar) are meant to be good, but they are actually implicated in this because EasyCGI claim that they are the ones that impose the $160 release payment on expired domains, and that’s illegal! Besides, I would avoid any company that partners with EasyCGI.
You’d be amazed how many hosting companies EIG now controls. Last I heard Host Gator was about to be it’s next victim. Having worked for EIG for a number of years, I can firmly suggest to avoid them at all costs. It’s the exact definition of the blind leading the blind.
I would be curious to know what sites I left out. At the same time I am very interested in the story behind the take over of host4life. I have heard that Hostgator was being bought by them. But I am not sure I am incline to believe that. The owners of hostgator seem a little ego driven. But I could be wrong, and my opinion is based purely off of what I read on their site.
Hi … this is an interesting, if too brief, thread. I’ve been at HostGator for about 3 years, using various hosting arrangements. Over the past 60 days or so, I noticed what seems a change in policy. Last year, for example, a spike in traffic issue, on a shared account, would be solved in minutes. This time, the sites are down and, literally, a Linux System Manager wrote, “I have no recommendations.” The issue remains unresolved. My two cents. Thanks.
While the .bmi extension is an indicator for many Endurance International companies, it is not inclusive of the most recent acquisitions.
Endurance International, not so long ago, acquired Justhost, Supergreenhosting. and Hostclear. None of the companies use the .bmi extension.
Recently Endurance International quietly purchased Bluehost, Hostmonster, and Fastdomain. Again no .bmi extensions are used with the Bluehost companies.
Hello Dr Snodgrass,
Could you explain the .bmi extension, not to mention the purchase of Bluehost, hostmonster, and fastdomain.
I heard that Hostgator was going to be purchased by them, it seems to have been confirmed after news that hostgator backed out of the deal. I would love to know where you guys get this information.
Regards,
Benjamin.
First off I made a typo. The extension should read .bml. not bmi. .bml is an acronym for better markup language which is not so commonly used in place of .htm or .html.
EIG uses the .bml extension at the end of urls for their companys’ websites which they have assimilated.
Ex: http://www.fatcow.com/fatcow/about.bml .bml
The .bml extension is a dead give away the hosting company belongs to EIG.
After the acquisition of Justhost, Supergreenhosting, and Hostclear, EIG doesn’t appear to use the .bml extension. Nor have they forced their clients to abandon cPanel and use the vDeck control panel which had been done on all previous acquisitions. So the Justhost, Supergreenhosting, and Hostclear acquisition should be viewed as non assimilated . In other words EIG is running the new take over as if it were an independent company.
As for EIG acquiring Bluehost, Hostmonster, and Fastdomain, the details were provided to me through inside information of a contact within the hosting industry.
I noticed the topic of EIG buying Bluehost is being discussed at webhostingtalk.com.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1020569
Hello Dr. Snodgrass,
It sounds like you have alot answers to questions I have had about EIG. For one were they trying to buy hostgator? Also I read some where that EIG has been taken over by another company.
Regards,
Benjamin
I have sites hosted with Netfirms and just received an email saying they will soon be transitioning to a new hosting platform. Looking at the bottom of the new user agreement page, I find this: *NETFIRMS is a registered trademark of The Endurance International Group, Inc
Hello Kerry,
Thank you for that update, any chance I can get a copy of that email?
Regards,
Benjamin
Sure Benjamin, Just send me an email and I will forward it to you.
Kerry
Hello Kerry,
I just sent you an email. Once again thanks in advance,
Regards,
Benjamin
I too got the email from Netfirms.
Subject: Netfirms Is Moving to a New Hosting Platform
The body of the email is the same copy as found at http://www.netfirmstransitionblog.com/about/
I spoke with a CSR today who told me about EIG. He thought EIG may be their stock exchange symbol.
All staff here in Canada will be laid off – but some may be offered assignments in the United States. Yikes.
On a related topic, I am having a new DSL service installed tomorrow with 12 meg down and 7 meg upload speed. I may need that…
Now, let’s see where I should go.
Very educational and informative.
Thank you!
I haven’t heard about such massive campaign for buying web hosting companies until I found this post. acquired companies are not so small either.
I know about UK2group, which buys established hosting providers in a similar manner, but this is much hungry beast.
Just to add one more to your list…
I am a nexx.com customer, and when I logged in control panel these days, i was surprised (not so much) with message that informs me about ongoing transition to netfirms.
I have used netfirms in the past, and the service was OK, but after reading few pages on this site, I am starting to wonder if this will continue with the new owners….if staff is replaced, relocated or reduced, i don’t believe, that this will be a good thing. Hope I am wrong about that.
Hey, the .bml extension is interesting. I looked in to this and found out that it is a templating system called the “Better Markup Language”. This lets EIG use virtually identical sites for each hosting company with different themes.
For every EIG host that uses the .bml extension, URLs are interchangeable. For example:
URLs are screwed up intentionally to avoid triggering spam filters.
http://www.fat*cow.com/product/marketplace.bml
http://www.glo*bat.com/product/marketplace.bml
http://www.ip*age.com/product/marketplace.bml
http://www.ipo*wer.com/product/marketplace.bml
http://www.easy*cgi.com/product/marketplace.bml
These are all identical.
but this can also have some interesting results.
Pages that don’t look exactly the same on every site have a slightly different pattern:
http://www.fat*cow.com/fatcow/about.bml
but because the websites are all actually the same page..
http://www.ip*age.com/fatcow/about.bml
Add Netfirms to this list. They bought out Netfirms this year for quite a tidy sum and pulled all the users into their Boston-based data center.
Hello Jason,
I actually got an email from a netfirms client for which I made a post about that at http://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/endurance-international-group/netfirms-com.html
Are you a netfirms customer? If so is the migration going smoothly or rough?
Regards,
Benjamin
I can confirm that the JustHost company is also owned by the EIG Endurance International group. They are horrible and what can we do about it? God almighty they are horrible.
Check out this story. I went to add another domain to my site. It added but apparently not completely. Following I tried to add a joomla site through fantastico. Puff goes the dragon the server was just stuck there and not completing the site. I tried and tried again. They started sending me TOS violations for CPU usage that was over 10%. I was like, WTF, this isn’t my fault. Please fix my account. Still not fixed.
Netfirms was recently bought by Endurance and the results have been awful to say the least. Broken support site, sullen service, secrecy about the real owner and worst of all repeated service outages for extended periods of time.
Hello Peter,
I had some one contact me a few months ago when they received a notice. I was a little surprised as normally they are not so public about an acquiring a company. I suspect this had to do with it being a Canadian based host. Lately I have been tracking their mail out notices to their affiliates to become ftc compliant.
I suspect that EIG is more concerned with purchasing a advertising platform then they are providing hosting services.
Regards,
Benjamin
I’m with Netfirms but just signed up with HostGator. I’m a reseller who has experienced continuous outages for over 3 weeks. Email accounts that just disappeared. Clients emails being forwarded to other clients emails. This has been nothing but a nightmare since they were bought out by EIG. I have lost reputation and time. Never once have I received any kind of apology, just excuses. They told me when I asked them to restore my clients email because they had deleted his email account that the restored email may not be readable. I cannot believe the incompetency of this company. There is no redundancy built into their system. Oh and guess what, they are down again. You should check out their Facebook page.
Yeah Netfirms was to transition to a New much better platform because it was having outages and technical issues. So they were bought by EIG, and the problems have been worse, and let’s not even talk about service. Canned replies, and no idea how long it will take to fix the broken server. Always get I apologize.. but apologies for the sake of PR are not what is needed. Fix the broken infrastructure – have redundant systems, and give real responses to the reported problem not some canned response like “I’m not sure what problem you are experiencing” Seriously? The ticket has 15 messages with a detailed report of the problem, and I get this?
Does someone have a complete list of currently hostings being owned by EIG? Thanks in advanced.
I am now using Host Gator and so far I am very pleased. You can turn in a ticket or chat with suupport and they respond with live answers not canned empty responses. Of course I only needed support for a few start up issues where I had to fix some script issues or have a SSL and SSH set up. No server problems as of yet. Did have one 500 isssue but it was because I had a bad script overloadingmy processes. Support immediately responded identified problem and killed bad script process. Took me less than 5 min to resolve not 5 hours or days.
Hello Todd,
I hope that you at least choose a vps or dedicated solution for your site with hostgator. I can’t tell you how many law firm sites I find on the cheapest of hosting solutions. Too often I think they do it because they do not understand the needs of their site.
Regards,
Benjamin
Hello Edu,
Other then what is listed along with Netfirms, I have no idea they don’t list all their hosts. Your best bet is to look at their bbb record. As you can see there are mentions of bluehost and hostmoster being acquired. There was also the possibility of them buying hostgator, even though hostgator ended up changing course running against godaddy (hard to see them doing that without their own data center).
Regards,
Benjamin
The reason you can’t find anything on Justhost is because it’s a fairly new transition. And also I don’t even know if they did an official migration of servers when acquiring that company.
I used to work for EIG too. I don’t understand why this post is that negative towards them. Yes, maybe some of the migrations didn’t go too well. But it’s understandable when you just purchased 300,000 customers(their websites but NOT the servers) and you need to move them over to your own servers.
There’s a lot more to it especially when you’re not dealing with static HTML websites.
I don’t work for them anymore, but I’m still and always will be a customer. They may “acquire” companies but they continue to stay on top of the Web Hosting industry with A LOT of very satisfied customers. There may be some people with bad experiences. But really, all companies have “haters” and people who unfortunately ran into an issue. Anybody who has ever worked at a call center will know that as they deal with the occassional irate/unhappy customer every day regardless of if it’s Web Hosting or a cable company or whatever you may do for work.
Heck… I was a supervisor, and one time a took a supervisor call from a lady who was a new customer on Ipage who just get her website all setup and working fine and wanted to share how great our support staff and services are. The funny part though is that she couldn’t stop complaining about the company she just left which was one of our companies that we just recently migrated. She didn’t know we were the same company she just left but she was so happy for us to host her site. She had even spoke to another supervisor earlier that day from the company that is migrating to tell them how much she hated us lol
Anyways, they’re a good company. Not sure who the top Web Hosting provider is. EIG must be close. But maybe it’s Godaddy? Look at how much negative feedback they have. I’m sure it’s a lot more than EIG.
One last note regarding migrations. I noticed someone above saying about “broken servers” during a migration. In most cases the servers are fine. It’s the automated process of migrating the site over and updating the connection strings and other elements of the site automatically via some type of migration script that gets ran.
Any knowledgable customer could easily fix their website without having to call in.
1. Correct whatever coding was messed up during the transition.
2. Upload a backup and update the connection strings yourself (don’t have a backup? they allow you to go to the old servers to get backups)
Hello Unknown,
I am going to give you a few rambling thoughts because most of what you gave me is a far stretch to protect your former employer.
First off I think giving me a fake email and no name is a very poor defense for your “former” company. Nor do your comments really put Eig in a good light.
If you do not understand why there is a negative post about eig, you have no idea what this site is about.
In short its about an industry that tells people a host is a good host regardless if it is or not. In some cases like webhostingstuff.com the postion is bid upon. Justhost, ipage, fatcow appeared in the top 5, but after a few months of showing why many hosts in the top 25 did not deserve their spots webhostingstuff.com resorted to blocking ips (perhaps I should have not told him where and what major isps were being used to help me) in some cases whole countries. In the end Michel Low got rid of the top 25. Though I am not done as he has eig sites still, and your former company sent out ftc compliance notices.
http://hosting-reviews-exposed.com/webhostingstuff-com/webhostingstuff-com-a-rigged-contest.html
For other so called top 10 sites its about affiliate commissions. Many of the eig sites appear on there. In short they get paid to tell people to sign up. In many cases not even hosted with any of the so called top hosts. Like hostaz.com also owned by Micheal Low.
As for Just host being fairly new excuse for not being listed, I call bs on that as netfirms is listed in the BBB records within weeks and that was at least a year after justhost.
Did you tell that customer that she just went to another company that iPage belonged to? Because I am sure she would not have stayed. Read some of my posts where chat operators think its funny when they tell a customer the company they are threatening to leave is the same one. Great way not to keep a customer.
As for an Eig site our Godaddy being one of the best, yes if you like cheap hosting then I suppose so. The problem that people like you have is that you think that its all about numbers. Its easy to get big numbers when you offer a so called unlimited package, that once you read in some cases the terms of service is not unlimited and often more limited then a account with limits. Numbers are not as important as retention, number of actually sites that depend on a income. Can you tell me someone dealing with a company like rackspace is less likely to have a big website then a eig host? BTW: This site is not hosted by godaddy (if thats what you were thinking by a quick whois look of my site), it was but 200 visitors a day turned out to be too much for a shared account. This site is about to migrate again as the traffic appears to be a bit much for its current account. I have stated before godaddy is fine to start out with, but its not a long term company. I suppose the same could be said for a mass chicken egg farm operation like EIG, its fine so long as people don’t see where the eggs come from.
Another thing, I have actually used justhost and fatcow. In short, your servers were too slow for anything serious. I warn my design clients and often they cancel after the fact because they think that what you offer is equal to what you can get from Rackspace.
Regards,
Benjamin
Hello,
I happen to think that EIG is a great company. And I do agree with unknown. I too have been an employee of EIG and despite the occational hiccup (which by the way always received immediate attention while I was working for them) they had the customers best interest first all the time.
EIG really gave me a chance to practice my web skills and it was a very rewarding time for me. I worked on the front lines so I interacted with customers on a day to day basis. Unknown is right about a number of things. You can’t expect a migration with 300,000+ customers to go smoothly. There will always be hiccups in a big operation such as this. Call me arrogent, but I feel many are uneducated about what exactly is needed to complete a migration such as this when you are working with servers.
I really feel that EIG has a very promising future ahead, and I can tell you, I don’t think they are going anywhere. I am still to this day a customer of EIG for my business and I always get EXCELLENT support when I call them.
The only thing I feel unknown should have left out of this post was the part about the call they received. Otherwise, spot on.
Actually give some websites to back up your claims of doing business with this company, not to mention which of the EIG companies you are with. Otherwise your claims of doing business with EIG, are just as valid as yeti sightings. Also my suggestion to EIG if they want to send trolls like another company that likes to post fake positive feed back (Unlimitedgb.com), at least try not to offend your customer base.
Also migrations can go smoothly, but they can not be expected to go smoothly when you migrate 300,000 customers through a short period of time. Which from what I have seen of the Netfirms migration it was over a very short period of time. Personally I would have done it section by section even if it took a year.
Personally I have tried a few of the EIG hosts because of design clients, and I can tell you my experience was that your servers were too slow. EIG customers have complained to me about such issues as over pricing on domains and having to transfer because of some pretty weird hoops.
Regards,
Benjamin
Aha! Bluehost acquired by EIG. This explains why Bluehost went from a pleasant company to deal with to one that gave the absolute worst customer service I have ever experienced. Avoiding EIG owned hosts like the plague.
Fascinating read. I’ve been with Justhost for about three years, and have multiple sites with them. One that does 15,000 visits and 280,000 page views per month. Overall, I’ve been happy but they – like all hosts – aren’t perfect. I put up my first web site in 1997, so I’ve been through my share of hosts over the years, many of which seriously sucked.
All that said, I didn’t know Justhost was acquired by EIG. This would explain the one major blip in my experience with Justhost. I had some serious issues with two of my sites and it took three days of back and forth with their tech support – all the while with me explaining exactly what was going on – before I finally got ahold of somebody with the skills to solve the problem.
At the time, and based on experience with past hosts, I remember thinking that they must have gone through an ownership change. A sudden deterioration in the quality of service is usually the best indicator of that happening. Now I realize that is exactly what happened. Since then, things have been good and the few issues I’ve had have been solved quickly.
And finally, I LOVE this site. You are absolutely correct that the vast majority of hosting “review” sites are nothing more that paid shills. The sooner the average netizen learns that, the better.
Keep telling it like it is!
Russ
I have had a horrible, nightmarish experience with ipage that has seriously hurt my business. It took days to figure out who owned the group (EIG).
Their of technical people are knowledge but most are not and they offer contradictory information.
Their method for handling problems is stalling: first, no problem exists; then, they have you take steps that will not resolve the issue; they open a ticket and keep closing it as Resolved, reopen it when you contact them, then close it again; they ask for information, then ask for the same information again; then, they just ignore the customer’s comments and questions.
When you do get feedback it is that ipage is sorry for any inconvenience and understands how difficult things are. This patronizing attitude adds fuel to the fire. You want help that they are unable or unwilling to provide — not apologies and fake understanding.
The problem may surround their voracious appetite to take over the hosting world, lacking capacity of the above server issues. If so and EIG would be truthful, I would understand and work with them.
This current ipage problem has stretched into weeks while my business suffers terribly. This leaves one no option except to change hosts. I finally learned the others than EIG owns and will avoid them but could end up with a host that EIG will acquire.
And, I suppose EIG either owns some of the reviewer sites or the sites get commissions when people subscribe to an EIG-owned site, as others have indicated. So, how do you know where to turn? What a racket.
Buyer beware and file complaints with the BBB, which currently gives EIG a good ranking. I suspect this relates to the difficulty of tracking down who owns the hosts — not like with the Tylenol-bottle example another dissatisfied customer cited.
Hello Russ,
Would you by chance have dates for when you started having problems. I would love to know. Other than Netfirms, EIG does not mention when they take over a company.
Regards,
Benjamin
Hello Sarah,
I am sorry to hear about your issues with this company. Did you keep a copy of your communications with their support, and would you be willing to share them with me?
If so I will shot you an email.
Regards,
Benjamin
Benjamin,
It was early August of last year. Now that I think about it, when I told the 5th or 6th drone I dealt with that I wanted to be transferred to an engineer, (which is what I always do with a host when I run in to the wall of cluelessness), I was told something along the lines of he couldn’t do that because they were in the middle of revamping tech support.
Hi Anonymous I liked the argument blind leading the blind
In Fact endurance-international-group and its all branches are “Nasty”