Ixwebhosting.com – How legit are those video testimonials?

July 18, 2011

Back when I was working on the video that would become the trademark to this site, I was told to look at ixwebhosting.com. There was no site at all at the time, I threw it together in less then 30 minutes prior to making the finale sequences of the video. I was also still in the hosting business running 2 companies starting up a third, and only a year away from the 4th. One of my business partners wanted me to start a blog, and make a post on ixwebhosting.com / featuredprice.com. I never quite understood the point of doing a blog, let alone a post on this host at the time. His reasoning was that the owner of this site operated a company called featuredprice.com, which also had their own review site where they were on top. That is still a post for another day. This post is about something I found back in March when I was looking at a anti-ixwebhosting.com blog. I gave him the idea of looking at the videos. I noticed one problem, and that was none of the sites existed in 2003, or before ixwebhosting.com came into being. Granted there are more details.

First let me be clear before I proceed into what I found out about the these video reviews and give you my opinion. I do NOT think these are fake reviews. The bulk of what I have found are still with Ixwebhosting.com at this time.

Still with Ixwebhosting.com

Here is a list of all the sites in the videos that are still with Ixwebhosting.com

http://www.ixwebhosting.com/testimonials

houndsinthekitchen.com – Created Nov 25, 2008 / Updated Nov 18, 2010 – Ohio
kellsband.com – Created Jul 21, 2005 / Updated Jul 7, 2010 – Ohio
digitaldynamicdesigns.com – Created Sep 16, 2007 / Updated Aug 16, 2010 – Ohio
yunbootcamps.com – Created May 6, 2008 / Updated May 6, 2008 – Ohio
1canalgirl.com – Created Feb 26, 2010 / Updated Jan 27, 2010 – Ohio
djscolumbus.com Created Aug 27, 2009 / Updated Aug 12, 2010 – Ohio
ryanomics.com Created Apr 25, 2006 / Updated Mar 17, 2011 – Ohio
fox-counseling.com Created Feb 13, 2009 / Updated Nov 2, 2010 – *privacy protection*
kellisautosales.com Created Oct 30, 2008 / Updated Sep 30, 2010 – garbage information entered, at risk of having their domain yanked.

The thing I noticed while looking up whois dates and address information was two things. The oldest site is 2005, and all the sites that did not have privacy protection pointed to Ohio. Which appears to be where ixwebhosting.com is based out of. To be exact the addresses are literary in and around Columbus Ohio. Which is weird because on the page says is:

IXWebHosting is trusted by over 500,000 websites and their owners all over the world.

As I have repeated many times, the number of websites does not equal the amount of customers. But numbers are not the issue here, I have no doubt that Ixwebhosting.com may very well have these numbers if not more. My point is that this page indicates they serve the world, yet all the reviews are one tiny spot of the planet. I am willing to bet all the videos were done by the same crew. Not to mention the videos are hosted on Ixhosting.com, not with youtube.com which could generate traffic. Not to mention they could feed in more customer reviews that are from around the world. Back when my oldest host turned 8 years old we had started to ask for testimonials. When we sent the first mail out asking for them, we did not ask everyone. We asked people from the first year. I did not care that they may have been paying less then $10 a month, I wanted feed back from people that had stayed with us since the beginning as who better to give a testimonial? Made it a point to show case their site, as Ixwebhosting.com has done. Also when they signed up, which Ixhosting.com has not done. Granted these were not video testimonials as Ixwebhosting.com has done. Granted the updated does not always indicate when the dns was changed, but I am willing to guess that most of these customer signed up in 2010.

No Longer with Ixwebhosting.com

esotercdetail.com (no longer exists)

servicemasterelectric.com, Site appears to be under a whois privacy, Updated April 8, 2011