It's been almost a month since I switched over to HostWinds from Dreamhost. First, I dumped Dreamhost because their servers are slow, unreliable and it costs way more than comparable services. I chose HostWinds because of some of the praise they have received in this thread. I have to say, my experience hasn't been as good as others here. First the good: HostWinds server speeds are pretty fast, reliability is ok (99.71% after almost 30 days) and the price is very reasonable - thanks to the BHW discount.
The not so good? Even though HostWinds does free website transfers and claims "Moving does not have to be hard." Contrary to what they advertise, it took four days after I signed up and started my transfer (and many issues, runarounds and many hours spent online with their customer service later) to be complete. Part of the problem was that I was transferring over from Dreamhost who has some proprietary control panel instead of cPanel. Before I switched over, I asked the sales rep on LiveChat if that would be a problem. He assured me it wouldn't, but said it might take a little longer. I asked how long and he said "I think it can be done in 2-3 hours". Just to be safe, the next day I asked a different rep how long it would take to manually transfer my three, small WordPress sites over to HostWinds and he claimed it would take 6-12 hours. Either way, I thought, that's ok.
I signed up and started the process on (4/30), sending them all the required info and they immediately let me know "We will get started on this shortly." Sounded good.
I don't hear anything until the next morning (5/1) when I get a message asking for my phpmyadmin login, which I immediately send. On the night of 5/1, since I have heard nothing since the morning (and it's going on 24 hours since the process started), I go on LiveChat and ask a rep there if there's a problem. They tell me there was a slight issue downloading my files, but that everything is ok and my sites should be finished transferring shortly. He tells me that they will give me "two free days" for my trouble (which my account doesn't show - but whatever).
Mid-day the next day (5/2) I open up another LiveChat and inquire about my transfer again, since I hadn't heard anything from them. The rep says there was an issue, but they figured it out and everything should be done soon. I ask how long that meant - a couple hours or a couple days? I was assured that everything would be completed by the end of the day (5/2).
The next evening (5/3), not having heard anything since mid-day 5/2 about my website transfers being completed, I open up a LiveChat again and the rep tells me: "We have moved all files and linked the databases, we also have a few copies of the DB, I suggest you also get copies of all Databases. It seems it wants you to reinstal wordpress. I thought the ticket had been updated. I apologize. If you have to reinstall then after the reinstall we can just reupload the DB and restore all of your content. It should be set, all files have been moved." When I asked if my email accounts were transferred (HostWinds has a "No data loss guarantee" and claims "All of your Databases are transferred") the tech said "I am unaware if the emails were transferred, all I was doing was mainly the databases, which MAY or MAY not contain the email accounts" and that "if you use a 3rd party email client it may store the email. If so try and back it up before you switch." Nice.
I thought it was weird, having to "reinstall" WordPress on my sites, but I gave it a shot and migrated one of the smaller website domains to the new HostWinds server and sure enough it asks me to install WordPress and the site is completely fresh/blank. I tell the tech about the problem and he asks me to open the support ticket again and replies "Looking into this now."
I PM HostWinds CEO Peter Holden on Skype and explain the situation. I don't expect to hear from him, since it's Saturday night, and I don't. That's understandable I suppose. He can't live on Skype.
An hour and a half go by and I don't hear anything from anyone at HostWinds. I open another LiveChat and a different tech - Alex Mankin (the lone customer service tech who seriously did try to help me) - gets on (maybe the other tech I was dealing with went home?) and I explain my issue to him. We literally spend four hours trying different things to get the databases transferred and uploaded. Ultimately we are successful and even though my entire Saturday night was spent on LiveChat with HostWinds, it appeared my sites were transferred, live and propagated ok. Ticket closed.
The next morning (5/4) I get some tweets and emails from people telling me that links and pages on my main site don't work. I check my site and sure thing, the home page appears, but the links to pages all give 404 not found errors. I go to the HostWinds site and their LiveChat is down. I open up Skype and Peter has responded to my previous night's Skype PM's a few minutes earlier asking "do you have a ticket open?" I reopen the support ticket and let him know.
I wait another 45 minutes, with my site still down, and PM Peter again and ask if there's any progress and he finally says "fixed enjoy". When I let Peter know how excruciating the whole experience has been, instead of the very friendly and professional poster I've seen here on BHW, he simply said "yeh manual transfers are a bitch".
Oh, and as a bonus, I discovered that some of my emails are bouncing back due to the fact that the new IP address I've been given by HostWinds has been blacklisted as SPAM by Barracuda Reputation Block List (for SpamAssassin), Cloudmark CSI, ivmSIP, APEWS... I contacted Hostwinds Customer Service and the rep told me straight up "We do not guarantee clean IPs". He went on to suggest I upgrade to VPN so I can get a new IP, but did add "we still cannot guarantee clean IPs." Awesome. So a couple of the companies I do business with, can't receive my emails and I have to email them from my personal account now while I attempt to clean the reputation of this IP address I'm stuck with. Dreamhost might have sucked, but I never had anything like this happen.
If you're transferring sites using cPanel and don't care about clean IP addresses, I'd say HostWinds is ok. Otherwise, buyer beware.