I've used Hostwinds for nearly 2 years and they have been excellent during my stay. However, I am looking at leaving because they have IP issues, mainly, some of the major (Gmail, Outlook, MSN, etc) ISP's block email traffic,... Mere claiming it's SPAM. Apparently, they have some SPAMMERS on their servers and some IP blocks are blacklisted. I have been forced to get a Gmail account so I can send outbound emails, which is a major pain. I've raised this issue with tech support too many times to count but the problem persists. I'd love to stay with them but I have to move on. Mindre

I've moved from Shared hosting to Managed Linux VPS
The support team is sucks, i felt that I'm an auditor or QA on their jobs
They don't validate the requests.
For example, I've asked to only allow access to specific ports to... Mere only 1 country,
so all they did is added the country 2 letters in the CSF config page and added allowed ports to this country
and they didn't remove the ports from TCP_IN section , it means there's no restrictions here, all they did is like confirming allowing my country !!
so this ticket toke 6 hours, and ended up sending them the instructions how to do it , so !!
another issue, VPS assigned with IP address, this IP address was blacklisted on 3 major RBLs and outlook is blocking this IP too, and when i asked them to change it since we need a clean IP because we gonna sent emails from it, they said, it's extra cost option to change it ! and no gurantuee that new IP will be clean, why should i get a VPS with blacklisted IP ?
another topic
i tried to delist our ip from all blacklisted RBLs and outlook too,
but we faced a new issue, that our emails is not delivered in stays in queue for days
because our server lost connection with the remote mail server we are sending emails to.
Support answer: the remote server blocks your IP, talk to them to unblock
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another topic, suddennly with no warrnings your server CPU usage go to 100% with no running prcoess !!!
so you open a ticket and wait 2 hours for an answer that it's fixed !! node issue !!!!!! sorry for inconventict
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another major issue happened with Hostwinds
our VPS in server in Amsterdam,
after we migrate our emails/website from shared hosting to this hosting
we bought a volume storage 100GB and attached it to the server, and moved all emails files on it 70GB!
a history of emails a 7 years history. and everything was good for 3 days and at 4/10/2021 the say facebook was down, the amsterdam server had a network issue at 10PM and we lost all the the connections with the VPS
no way to day anything .. so i've opened a ticket and got no answer, go to live chat and got informed that there's network issue in amsterdam server, and we got access at 12AM but our CPU usage was 100% with no process running
and i toke screenshot from control panel that shows CPU usage and storage usage was 68% of 100GB
they sent me at 2 am a reply that the issue was fixed and they sent me a screenshot from the same cpu usage | storage usage
and i found that storage usage was 1% !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
i replyed to the ticket .. WHERE OUR EMAILS !!!
i supposed to sleep that time 2AM because i've work tomorrow at 8am need to wake up
and i couldn't sleep till they fix the server .
and got no replies, so i went to live chat and i'm fired !!!
from 2 am to 6 am all they said they don't know what happened to the volume storage and filesystem corrupted, maybe you got hacked !!!
WHAT THE HELL, GOT HACKED !! how ?? the server connection was down, and if we got hacked, the hacker will go the cloud volume and corrupt the file system ???? talk in more logic !!!
support answer, they have nothing to do with it , network issue won't affact the filesystem of the volume storage!!
and it's my fault that i didn't subscribe for backup plan!!!
when i asked is the backup plan includes volume storage ,and the golden answer: NO!
so we lost 7 years of emails history and they do nothing !!!
final conclution
Stay away from Hostwinds,
Support are sucks
Server Prices are very good, but no stability, no uptime 99.999999 like they said
alot of down times
delay in support reply on ticket
you need to validate every request with your self
Totally sucks Mindre