1 Year At ZONE.net

Jul 28, 2008

I wrote a while back about my 9 month experience with ZONE.net, and now certain circumstances have come up that have brought the need for me to to move to a different datacenter in southern California. However, my experience "in the ZONE" was exceptional, and I didn't want to walk out on them without a final word here on WHT to let everyone know what a wonderful time it was hosting with them.

In June of 2007 I was beginning to grow my own web development & client solutions business and decided it was time to move from a shared box to a "more private" VDS. I don't jump into things quickly however, so I had planned a week or so of research for the best price/quality/service combination. I spent days on here reading reviews, checked out 20 or 30 different companies and websites, and pitted plan against plan.

Eventually I narrowed it down to "the top three" and finally went with ZONE.net. They lured me in with some amazing deals in the "VPS Offers" advertising forum here, and I liked seeing the activity of their sales guys on WHT.

As you'll see echoed over and over again by happy customers on this forum, I wasn't disappointed by my choice. Throughout the year I filed some 16 support tickets which were all dealt with swiftly and as expected. As my company began to grow, I even went through migrating to a larger VPS plan with them, which was handled perfectly and went through effortlessly. I've "scaled-up" with other hosting companies in the past (when I worked for another company) and have had horrible experiences (plans change and prices fluctuate and you can't always get the same kind of deal you had before), but these guys were wonderful and everything went through without a snag.

Their network is quick, their support is amazing, and their prices are incredible. For clients of mine who need a VPS, I always recommend the ZONE. You won't be disappointed.

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Zone.net Review VPS 1 Year +

Nov 25, 2008

The following is my review of Zone.net. I am currently hosting with them using one of their "Enterprise Managed VPS" products. I will be reviewing Zone.net on the following criteriaricePerformance
Stability
Support

Each section will contain a score of 1(poor) – 10(excellent)Introduction:

I signed up for a Zone.net plan in August of 2007 after doing extensive research here on WHT. After spending a significant time comparing other users reviews and the resources of the different offerings I selected Zone.net as my new hosting provider. While Zone.net's prices were higher they were running an attractive special at the time that made them very reasonable.Price: Pricing is comparable to other providers. As I mentioned above, when offers come up on WHT the package can be very attractive.Rating: 8 (good) Performance:

Zone.net's servers perform very well when they are up and running. There does not seem to be any overselling or other issues that would create performance problems. Load on my VPS is usually light and latency is very good. MySQL performs well as does the control panel (WHM/cpanel).Rating: 9 (very good) Stability:

Uptime was good for the last half of 2007. Unfortunately, I experienced a significant outage in May 2008 and then two more significant outages in November 2008. These outages were both in the several hour – days range. Unacceptable for a service provider and far below the SLA Zone advertises.Rating: 6 (needs improvement) Support:

Shortly after signup I needed assistance moving accounts over to zone.net. Tickets were responded to within an hour (even with an urgency of "medium"). Unfortunately, five months after signing up, my services went down and were having significant issue. I opened a ticket with a "high" urgency as several of my applications depend on db access.

The ticket response time went down to approximately 7 hours. A month later (about 6 months after signing up) and the response time was down to 9 hours for a "high urgency" ticket. With the two significant outages the response time was consistently poor.

Additionally, support often responded with "support elevation" messages – meaning the message usually said something like "we need to escalate this issue to a higher level of support".

Along with the current support response time issues, Zone.net also appears to have either issues with its support ticketing system or a policy of removing unresolved tickets. Within the last month I have had three tickets deleted entirely from the system – support has ignored my request regarding the status of these tickets and what happened to result in them being cleared from the system. I have also had one ticket "closed" automatically while I was waiting for Zone support to respond to it.

When I initially signed up Zone was in the process of implementing a user forum to facilitate communication with users. A few months in, and the forum was up with a section to provide service announcements etc. With the recent outages, I was surprised to find that the forum had been pulled.

During the two significant November issues Zone.net failed to provide users with timely detailed updates on the cause of the issues. In fact, for the November 14 outage that lasted 3 days they didn't even have a page up in their "announcements" section. Several questions posted here in the WHT forums regarding the issues still remain unanswered.

Zone.net used to have a strong presence here on WHT – answering questions, addressing problems, and advising users. That presence has declined significantly over the past 6 months. It is good to see Sean K. back here, his involvement here will go a long way to improving customer communication.

In summary, Zone's support was once very good. Current support issues including long response times, ineffective support personnel, and ticket management issues create an environment where users are not receiving quality service. Zone.net also does not currently have effective customer communication policies in place, particularly to address and inform users in the event of network problems.

Rating: 3 (inadequate) Conclusion:

My overall rating is weighted based on the needs of a typical managed VPS customer.

While Zone provides good performance in the services they offer, the support quality of their offerings has declined through 2008. While an outage is bad for a provider, the manner in which a provider reacts and supports its client base during these difficult times reflects a lot about the core of a company -- and ultimately is when a customer needs his providers support the most. In this regard, Zone has done little to encourage confidence in their users. That being said, if Zone.net can return to its customer service roots and build its support/ client communication infrastructure they may once again be a company worthy of recommendation. Unfortunately, until these changes and improvements are made I cannot recommend Zone.net in this review.Overall Rating: 6 (need improvement)

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Zone.net Review (1 Year)

Nov 13, 2008

I've been a Zone.net customer (actually still am but not for much longer)for about a year now. Up until the major outage they had this week, their service worked well.

Whenever I had an issue level 1 escalated to level 2 support and got to the problem very quickly. Overall, the service worked well enough and I was happy.

Here is where I become critical...

There was a outage this past weekend that had my VPS down from Friday to Monday (4 days). This is where their lack of support showed. First, the level 1 support can't do anything except forward tickets. You can't get anyone on the phone who can actually impact your situation. Second, the flood of calls meant that their level 2 support and higher took longer to respond. During normal situations this is fine...During a crisis, this is a nightmare. Third, the ticket system took hours at times for a response or action during the outage. Last, the web page they put up for the outage was not updated "every hour" as they stated. Their site even went down a few times.

In short, Zone.net did not have the resources to deal with this outage in a graceful manner. The worse part was their lack of communication at all levels.

Granted, they are offering free service and backup systems for 3 months. The damage has already been done with me. I estimate that I lost customers with this outage in the thousands in those 4 days. I can't risk that happening again.

I signed up with Zone.net because of their reputation as a solid company and happily recommended them...until this past weeks outage.

Nobody wants to move to a new service. It is a big pain. You only move if you have to. I've decided to leave Zone.net

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1 Year Review Zone.net

Apr 26, 2008

Unhappy customers are usually highly motivated to write on forums. Unfortunately the same cannot be said for happy customers that are relaxing on the couch because a job gets well done. However, as this forum provided me with substantial support in finding a VPS provider, it is time to give back to this community with my own review.

I signed up for a medium-sized Zone.net enterprise package in March 2007.

During the last year, I submitted 28 tickets on a wide variety of issues including general questions to help me understand things better, all of which got answered, realized, and/or resolved with great competence and speed.

The VPS is running stable, and I cannot say that I recall any downtimes.

So I am afraid that I cannot provide you with any horror stories unless you want to laugh at my very own learning curve. Zone.net is very good value for money, and on that note, let me return to my happy couch and give two thumbs up to Zone.net.

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Zone.net Review -- Leaving After A Year With Them

Jan 25, 2009

First, while my sites aren't currently on Zone (I have moved them away), it is easy enough to prove I have been a customer, because there a numerous posts on here where Sean and I discuss things, including in the Benchmark thread where he encouraged me to rerun the benchmark after they moved me to one of their faster Dell nodes, about a year ago.

Ok, I am someone that likes to give companies 2nd and 3rd chances and benefits of the doubt. But, I can no longer do that.

About a year ago, or a little over, I needed to move my vBulletin site off of shared hosting, because it was becoming unreliable. Fast one minute, slow the next. After reading lots of reviews and asking questions, I was told I could probably get by with a 384MB or 512MB VPS. At the time, Zone was getting very good reviews and touted as having really fast equipment. So, I took the plunge.

Because I not only didn't want to be memory bound, but also wanted the greatest possible CPU share (not that I needed it, but to make sure I didn't see slow downs caused by other sites like on shared hosting), I went for a 1152MB SLM package.

In the very beginning, things went pretty well, but I wasn't overly pleased with support times when I submitted a ticket. It could be anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours for a response, and then sometimes longer to resolve, BUT whenever they did resolve it they fixed the problem, and as I often asked for an explanation (I was trying to learn how to do some of this stuff on my own), the techs typically gave me a nice overview of what the problem was and how it was fixed.

Bottom line, I wasn't happy with how long it took to respond, but when they did, they were thorough and polite.

In the months that followed (early last year) a few things happened. First, I started to have VPS problems, which was always related to other VPS's on the machine hogging resources. As I had guaranteed RAM and should have as much CPU as anyone (I bought the largest package for this reason), I was told that the Virtuozzo software didn't protect a node from one VPS overloading the I/O, so that was the problem. This started to happen with increased frequency, and two problems occurred in terms of support.

First, since they were slow to respond (now starting to be int he 2-4 hour for initial response time frame), my site would be experiencing high load times and sluggish performance or at times even unreachable, and support would take hours to respond, and then might look at it and say "everything looks fine", and I would have to update the ticket multiple times with load averages from top, before they would finally investigate and say, "another VPS was compromised, but it is fixed now, you shouldn't have anymore problems". The problem was that it took hours for the initial response, which was almost always "we don't see a problem", until I 'proved' there was a problem, then they investigated the other VPS's on the node and addressed it.

Second, many issues they had to "forward to admin". Now, whenever that occurred and Sean worked on it, he was a pleasure to deal with and typically fixed the problem, but it got to the point where it seemed like almost all tickets wound up with "will need to forward to Admin" and Sean apparently was overwhelmed and it cut sit waiting for admin for some time.

Now, at this time I should say that the ONLY reason I hung with Zone as long as I did was because Sean went out of his way to try and help me in every possible way. Gave me his cell phone number, told me to call day or night if there was a problem/down time, etc. He moved my VPS on to a node that didn't have VPS's overloading the I/O and I was very grateful for his support, even if he was addressing problems that were not of my own making.

On a number of occaissions, both on here and via email, I was told how Sean understood about the service problems, and they have done xyz to fix them. I was assured that in
the coming months, I would see a completely different level of service from support. However, the support continued to go down hill.
I just typed a couple more instances, but deleted, because I felt this was getting too long, so lets fast forward.

Ironically, one or two days before zone had that 4 day outage on a node that so much was written about, I emailed Richard Alvarez, who appeared to be the man in charge. I gave him multiple examples of poor support (some he termed embarrassing after investigating) and told him how they had gone from a company with a great rep on WHT, to one that is referred to as having fast servers and horrible support. Anyway, he talked about how they were going to improve and standard stuff, and then bam a day or two later, the node is down. While I wasn't on that node, I was on the node they were using to move nodes off to as they were trying to bring sites up. All those times Zone.net was unreachable, I was unreachable because I was on the same node as Zone's main site.
So, while my node didn't have a hardware problem, for four days, my site was going up and down, and support wasn't responding.

At that point, I couldn't risk my primary site (a Broncos football message board on zone), so I got a leased server from hivelocity (became gunshy of VPS's) and moved my message board to HiVelocity, but left a handful of other sites my second VPS with them in their Miami datacenter. As I had been assured by Richard, and then Sean who resurfaced, that they were going to make major changes and there would be an announcement in a week or two about the changes (this was in November and still nothing), I decided to keep my small sites on the Miami VPS and see if the support improved.

Starting in December, I started getting MYSQL crashes. Apache would still be running, but my wordpress and other DB backed sites would get DB errors. On I believe three occaissions I put in tickets and was told "we have fixed this error, it won't happen again" or something to that effect, and it did.

I was growing tired of the same old support problems, either very long waits for response, or failure to fix problems. Finally, on January 2nd, sql crashed again. I put in a "site down" ticket and waited two hours, and nothing, so i bumped the ticket, then bumped the ticket after 3 1/2 hours, still not even a reply. After 3 1/2 hours, I stated that once the problem was fixed, I wanted an explanation from Sean or Richard as to why a "site is down again" high priority ticket goes 3+ hours without a response.

Bump it again at 4 hours, state I am going to bed and hope it is fixed when I get up.

However, i decide I can't do this, as I have had some tickets go 12 hours with zone without resolution or response, so at this point I post an update to the ticket that after 4 1/2 with no response, I state that i am attempting to restart the VPS and then if it comes up, I will begin moving my sites to another host (to my HiVelocity dedicated).

At the 5 hour mark, I update the ticket and state that I have begun migrating my sites to another host, so please do not mess with the server in any way, and to forward this ticket to Sean and Richard.

Finally 6 hours and 58 minutes after I submitted the ticket and with all the updates I described above, including stating that I have just moved all my sites/cpanel account off of my VPS, I get this response:

Hi,
I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused, the servers Mysql is performing fine and I can access the domain [url]well from my end. The domain broncos07.com is not resolving to the IP and it has DNS problem, you need to contact the name server registrar. If you cannot access the working site [url]then you should be having some network issues on your end. Thank You.
Regards,
Binny E.
ZONE.NET

This sums up how zone support has been for quite some time, and what Richard Alvarez deemed embarrassing (when referring to similar support responses). Binny clearly never even read any of the updates, or possibly didn't understand. It is my belief that Binny and Ravi, seemingly the only guys that address tickets these days, do not fully understand English, as it is the only explanation for some nonsensical responses.
So, now I am fed up. I get a VPS with futurhosting to permanently house the sites I moved to my dedi on a temp basis. I move them over and once all is fine, I put in a ticket with zone to cancel both of my VPS's and also an explanation of why, and ask that Richard and JEffrey (the guys that seem to be in charge) see it. I state do no bill my card again.

I put in the ticket to cancel the VPS's on 1/13, and 48 hours later I get an email stating since I haven't updated it in 48 hours, the ticket has been closed. I go and reply to it, reopening it, and again, get no reply for 48 hours. Bottom line, they have still not replied to my cancellation ticket that I entered on 1/13. Then, I get a bill, I reply to the email (which creates a billing ticket), stating I canceled my VPS, not to charge me. Same thing, the ticket is never answered and is closed after 46 hours.
I don't like to bad mouth companies, but people looking for a VPS provider should know that the support from Zone.net has become horrible. Not only can it take hours (7 on my last "SITE DOWN" critical support ticket), but the quality of the support is also now greatly lacking.

At this time, after 11 days, I can't even get them to acknowledge my support ticket about wanting to cancel both VPS's that I have with them.

I cannot recommend this company to anyone looking for a VPS provider.

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1 Year On From Sentris

May 29, 2009

We've been using Sentris mainly for our server needs over the past year, today marks our 365th day with the provider!

Past reviews:

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Overall they've been fantastic to us. Good support when we need it, fantastic network uptime (only recall one time when there were some network problems).

When we've requested for custom things, in terms of hardware or other they are happy to help. They've always seemed to be offering new things with their services over the year, improving their bandwidth carriers, adding more. On the front of it, their site doesn't seem too much, doesn't express the good level of service which I've gotten, probably would expect more from an old site like that.

I don't know what else to say, since they've been pretty great with no problems - suppose its harder to write a review when nothing bad has happened.

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One Year With Medialayer

Nov 3, 2009

I moved from A Small Orange to Medialayer in late June of 2008, and although I was a little unsure on going from cPanel to DirectAdmin, aside from one small thing* I honestly don't miss cPanel at all. Medialayer themselves ported my sites over (I'm always scared I'll mess things up on my own) so really, changing control panels was rather painless for me.

Anyway, as far as actual hosting I could not be happier. The only downtime I've experienced was scheduled and announced well in advance and never for very long.

Support tickets and general inquires are answered ridiculously fast to the point of being scary. I'm still not used to getting replies within minutes instead of hours or days.

I don't currently use a custom plan but the fact that I can request one is a huge plus to me. With my previous host you could add extra bandwidth but not space (you're only option was to simply go up to the next plan) and that always felt very limiting to me.

I'm aware that these days hosts with Medialayer's pricing structure are called "expensive" by some, but I'm still stuck in 2004 and consider them priced just right for what they offer. Also, as far as I'm aware Paypal is still the only payment option, and although that is fine for me, it won't be for others.

* (The only thing I miss is the ability to purge/make unwrittable the stats/awstats folders. I'm not sure if this is a host vs host or cPanel vs DirectAdmin difference, and really it is so minor in the grand scheme of things and only even noticeable to someone stupidly anal such as me.

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One Year Review - VT6

Jul 29, 2008

This is a brief review of my experience with VT6 over the last year.

I have little to say, because it's "just worked". I've had to call upon their helpdesk twice in the last year. In both cases the response was timely and the matter resolved in a reasonable timeframe, both were matters beyond their control.

I'd happily recommend them for shared hosting.

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My Two Year Review With IN(.be)

May 11, 2007

This is my first and last review of these guys. When I first colocated my server with them, they were still known as iHosting. The price was good, the support was excellent, and it was a friendly little place. I never experienced any down time to speak of, and when I needed something changed (like a reverse DNS entry), they took care of it almost straight away.

Of course, then a big mean company bought them. In(forbusiness).(nl|be). From day one I knew things could only go downhill from there on, and I was right. Every time they touched my server in the datacentre, it went offline. Even when they didn't have any business with my particular server. On three occasions they unplugged the power cable *WITHOUT PRIOR NOTIFICATION* so I couldn't do a clean shut down which resulted in a raid array rebuild. That in itself would almost be acceptable, but each time they didn't plug it back in properly.

Then on another three occasions they've messed up my connectivity by not handling the NIC with care. It's a sensitive little thing, and even though I've pointed it out to them time and time again, they keep messing up. Usually they've been kind enough to fix these problems, which they caused relatively quickly. However, it's happened again, and this time they're refusing to fix it for free. Needless to say, I'm not paying for something they broke, and I'm cancelling my account with them ASAP. They'd better not make a fuss about giving me back my server, or I won't be a happy camper.

As if unannounced shutdowns and unplugged cables aren't bad enough, I've also been paying for an APC connection/account for almost two years now. I still haven't received any actual login data that would in fact allow me to do a remote reboot. It's not like I haven't asked them .. I asked them at least every time the server went down, and about every other month as well. Each time my mail was either ignored, or I got some vague reply.

Oh, and about this latest downtime .. they told me they'd be rearranging things in the rack today. I asked them, yet again, to be careful with my server so it wouldn't go down for like a week again. That mail was nicely ignored. After almost a day of downtime, I told them I would be cancelling my account and that they'd better get my server back up ASAP. Their only reply was that that would cost me. After they guaranteed me there would be no more than 5 minutes of downtime while rearranging the rack. Right.

The hosting world has changed a good bit in those years I've been with them. I can now get a reseller account that gives me just as much freedom for less money with more support. And face it, support is what it's all about -- and theirs blows.

I wouldn't recommend this host to anyone, not even if they paid me. Not even if they were the last host on the planet. Never again.

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My 5 Year Review Of Powweb

Oct 19, 2007

I have had several accounts with Powweb for 5 years now and I thought I would write a brief review of them:

BEFORE

I originally went with Powweb 5 years ago based off of a referral from a friend. At the time, the “shared hosting environment” isn’t quite what it is today. For the first several years, I experienced trouble free hosting (for the most part) and truly felt as though I was “getting what I paid for.”

Powweb, back then, was a privately owned company based out of California ( I believe) and I usually got the impression that most of their employees truly cared about their customers and the quality of service they provided. What made them semi-unique at the time, was that they offered only a “one plan solution” (they didn’t offer multiple plan types) and the simplicity of their business model worked well for most.

Powweb was also unique in that they offered community forums which were pretty “open” and it truly allowed customers to discuss problems and issues with one another. A few years ago, they transitioned from private dedicated servers to a clustered environment and that did bring along some hard time, but they got it under control eventually. Overall, I was satisfied with the service.

NOW

A year or so ago Powweb was bought-out by Endurance. If you do not know anything about Endurance, they are a very large web-hosting company which has acquired several other large shared-hosts over the past few years.

Once Powweb was purchased by Endurance, the quality in service immediately decreased. Part of what Endurance does with most of their acquisitions is to assimilate them into their fold. This was a very shaky process and nearly everyone experience a large amount of downtime.

Additionally, Powweb is now plagued by horrible MySQL issues where the service is nearly completely useless. For the past year, Powweb has been either unable or unwilling to fix these issues. It can often take several minutes for even the most basic of queries to run. Any dynamic type of an application: forums, blogs, CMS, are usually rendered completely useless.

To make matters worse, Powweb continues to aggressively advertise these resource heavy applications and then ask for patience as they attempt to get their issues fixed. It has been about a year now, and still it is not resolved. Much of these issues come from the extreme overselling that Powweb does. Nearly every day, all websites (even static ones) come to a complete crawl.

Calling customer support is also a waste of your time. 95% of the time, you are met by a rude person who simply tells you “well, it seems to work for me” or that “we are aware of the problem” (at best). Opening support tickets is also usually not helpful. Tickets are often closed without any contact with the customer and it is very common for them to “give you the run-around.”

I have been told by support several times to keep an eye on the forums for updates on issues and whatnot. Then, if you go to the forums and attempt to get any information from there, you are told that ‘these are only user-helping user forums’ and that you can’t get any official help there, though customer support told you to go to that very place. Additionally, Powweb’s staff practices extreme censorship of the forum and it is common for negative remarks to be removed or posts completely deleted, many times without any acknowledgement of the act.

In addition to the MySQL issues, Powweb also experiences frequent “lock-ups,” CGI issues, email issues, dns issues, and so on and so forth. The list of problems that has occurred over the past year is literally too long to remember.

In conclusion, the Powweb of new is nothing like the Powweb of old. This new Powweb is controlled by an over-selling giant (Endurance) that is only concerned with the number of accounts as apposed to the quality of service. While certainly any business related site should not be in such an environment at all, I would even suggest that people looking for a host for hobby related purposes stay clear of powweb – it’s that bad.

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HostMySite VPS 1 Year Review

Aug 15, 2008

One year has gone by since we bought our hosting plan at HostMySite (HMS) and I thought I'd post another review. You can read my previous review here (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=659594)

The Short Of It
We have 2 IIS Coldfusion VPS (CF VPS+ plan). The first one we had was originally just a CF VPS (for developing) but we later changed it over to a CF VPS+ (more ram, more space, etc). This VPS is 1 year and 1 month old. Our production VPS which currently hosts our website is a healthy 1 year old. The reliability has been great and we never had any speed or performance issues.

We are very happy at HMS. We have had very little issues with the our VPSes and those issues are usually resolved very quickly. Anytime we needed support, it was overall always quick and helpful. We recommend HMS to anyone who needs a Windows VPS.

Security and Friends
The SSL certificate we purchased from our previous host expired so we bought a new one via HMS. At first the order we placed was apparently processed by them but wasn't sent to the issuer for processing. We didn't find out until we sent a ticket in wondering about the status. They immediately processed it for us. Except for the fact that they processed it for 1 year when we bought it for 3. So another ticket flew across the internet and flew back to us just as quickly resolving the problem.

They asked if they wanted them to install it and we emphatically said yes. They installed the certificate and we were set. Or so we thought. We began having issues with our merchant account not being able to verify our SSL certificate. They forgot to add in the intermediate certificate so that third party processors can see verify it's legitimacy. This was resolved very quickly (faster than we expected) and we have not had issues with it since.

The One Thing
The only thing we'd like to mention was an incident that occurred several months ago. One day, out of the apparently gray clouds, for some reason our site could not be connected to. After shaking our fists futilely at the weather gods, we sat down and tried to figure out what was wrong. By doing the basic diagnostics to make sure it wasn't us or our ISP we cursed the Lunar Goddess and contacted HMS to see what was up. They fixed it but didn't tell us what the issue was. Apologies in the form of cup cakes to the Moon was issued.

The next day, the same problem occurred or at least we thought and was told it was the same problem. We could not access our site. This time we did both live chat and started a ticket (for documentation, last time we just called). In the live chat they stated it was an issue with the node and not specific to our VPS and they were working on it. They said it was the same issue as yesterday.

This is where it starts getting dicey.

They also responded via the ticket that the firewall was blocking the ports and not the same issue as yesterday. Now considering only one person has access to the VPS (via RDC) to make changes and he did not log in to make any changes to the firewall (why would we?) that explanation didn't even seem plausible. And the ports blocked (pretty much everything except FTP) didn't make any sense. We went back and forth, with me explaining that after several months of not touching the firewall after setup, why would we inexplicable block ourselves out? Why would we even touch the firewall? Also that it can't be a coincidence with the node issues yesterday and they had already stated it was the same issue.

After a bit of going back and forth, they finally came to the conclusion that the patch they applied to fix the node issue made changes to the firewall which caused the subsequent issue. While this explanation didn't exactly seem completely kosher, we weren't going waste more time asking for a better explanation.

Now given that the total "downtime" of both issues was about 5 hours we thought we'd see how much of a resistance they will put up for the uptime guarantee. The first issue we pretty much knew wasn't going to get any attention because according to their TOS, they will only refund for time it was down when you posted a support ticket. Since we did this over the phone, there was no documentation to speak of when it went down and when it got fixed.

As for the second issue (which did have a ticket) they stated that since the VPS was technically up, the uptime guarantee did not apply even if the problem was caused by them (they didn't specifically say that but it was implied). While we didn't expect anything from it and didn't bother to pursue it, that response raised some eyebrows. While within their rights, it did seem a bit "whoa". They did apologize and were very polite and respectful. It was pretty much what we expected in terms of responses.

The Train Ride
While the above issue may seem bad, it was a one-time event. These things can happen. We haven't had any uptime, access or server issues since that problem. Support is quick and helpful.

The site has been running fine for months with no downtime.

We are overall very happy with HMS and would recommend them to anyone who needs a Windows VPS.

Overall Rating: 9.5/10
Support: 9/10
Reliability: 9/10
Speed and Bandwidth: 10/10

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1+ Year Review - Netdirekt

Oct 7, 2009

I will try to share my experience with all of you regarding the company I rent my dedicated servers - Netdirekt.

I found out about them over an year ago when I needed to move to dedicated server. I decided to give them a try, since I was new in this area and since I am perfectionist in this job (making backup of backups of backups)I thought I don't have what to loose if they disappoint me. At least not much.

So over an year ago, I ordered my first server with them. It was Core2Duo server with 4GB of RAM, with a nice price. By the way, when I saw their 1996 website and their pricing, I was getting ready to get disappointed)

I didn't need much help in the beginning, the hardware and network were (are) top notch. Some months later, 4 if I remember correctly, I expanded my business and ordered a second server with them. So, I am really satisfied with their service.

Couple of experiences I got with them that I would like to share with you.

Once, the hard drive of one of my servers started fiving SMART errors so it needed to be changed. It was Sunday, 1AM, so I didn't expect much and it was the secondary (backup) drive so it wasn't THAT urgent to me. Anyway, I dropped them an e-mail requesting drive change. 15 minutes (yup, 15 minutes, Sunday, 1AM) later I got an e-mail back, their representative asking me am I ready for the hard drive replacement. I replied yes. I told him i shut off the server. 10 minutes later my server was back online, with new drive in it.

Later on, once they had 2 hours network outage and another time 1 hour power outage I think, that is in an year. My servers are checked by Pingdom so I believe their uptime.

Then I left them alone for some months, didn't bother them since I had no issues at all, until 2 weeks ago when I got my third server with them. I believe I have been the most boring client ever to them. 10 times maybe I asked IP transfer from one server to another, and they did that very fast and without making me feel uncomfortable by asking that from them over and over again.

So overall, I am very satisfied with their service. They don't do much (hardware and network only, no management), but I think they are perfect in what they do.
Keep up the great work netdirekt, and you will keep me with you forever.

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Steadfast 1 Year Review

May 6, 2009

We've been a customer of Steadfast for a little over a year with a VPS plan. We had been using a dedicated server from another provider and we were looking to cut costs a bit since the server was very underutilized.

After researching here, we originally signed up on a low-end VPS plan and set up monitoring. Our goal was to monitor the server and service for a couple/few months prior to moving any services over to it; just to make sure the company and VPS would meet our needs.

After a several months of monitoring the server closely we decided to migrate from our ded server to the VPS at Steadfast. We haven't looked back since.

Our criteria for VPS at the time were:

1) Had to run Debian.

2) Reliability of service/provider.

--Uptime of the server itself

--Network reliability

--Redundancy

3) Customer support responsiveness.

4) Price.

Steadfast has exceeded our expectations in all areas. First off finding a host that supports Debian is not as easy as it should be.

(Note to VPS providers: This is a deal-breaker for us. If we can't use Debian then there's much less chance of us signing up for your services.)

Off the soapbox and back to Steadfast: The VPS is quick - with no I/O lag at all. It feels like a dedicated server. The service itself has been reliable and the network has also been responsive. (We monitor our servers from two separate geographical locations).

Further, we've opened more tickets than a 'normal' customer probably would, mostly just to find out what our options are for growth, backups, etc. The team (Karl and others) at Steadfast are very helpful. I don't have any specific recollection of opening a true tech support ticket but I'm sure I have. The fact that it doesn't stand out as remarkable indicates that it was answered quickly and with a personalized (non-generic) response.

We've grown since we started using the VPS and the upgrade process has been painless and quick. Maybe this is true of all VPS providers since all they need to do is allocate more resources, but either way, it's been painless and quick for us at Steadfast.

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Futurehosting 2 Year Review

Oct 6, 2009

I have been with futurehosting since October 2007 and have had my ups and downs. see my history below:

October 2007: Signed up for both a vps in chicago and one in dallas datacenter. I used my chicago server for my primary hosting and my dallas server is used only for DNS failover for 2 websites. I am a small town host that hosts locally only so we have around 15 clients. Everything was working ok, but the chicago server just always seemed slow, ocasional load spikes throughout the day hitting the 5 or 6’s. So finally in May 2009 I posted on WHT to seek some help for why loads were so high and we came to the conclusion in that thread that it must be an overloaded server. So I shot off a ticket to futurehosting to move me to a different node and they did without any problems. Loads seemed to go way down after the move and my server was zippy fast again.

August 2009: My chicago server has been getting progressivly slower throughout the last 3 months and we are back to load spikes again. I finally give up with the load issue and just assume it is my problem.

September 11, 2009: Now I run into a problem with php handeling sessions and ask for help from futurehosting and have a problem with them lying to me. You can see the thread here. Jim at futurehosting is aware of this and apologized deeply. And they reprimanded the admin working on my case.

September 21, 2009: I migrated my chicago server to Wiredtree and still have my dallas server as my backup with futurehosting. Since moving to Wiredtree, all of my load issues have gone away and load sits around 0.25 average.

Please note that in all these cases I have opened tickets with futurehosting and worked with them through the problems.

Now, after I got my history out of the way, here is my review:

Value: 10/10

futurehosting is one of the best values around especially now with their 40% off for life and more ram. I, as an existing customer even submitted a ticket complaining how new customers get this and we as exhisting don’t and they gave me the discount.

Support: 7/10

I think the support of futurehosting is a little below of top tier. When you submit a ticket with futurehosting after 15 min you get a reply stating “we’re working on it”. Then sometimes after 30 min you get a reply “we’re escelating this to sysadmins”. And finally after 45 min the problem is fixed. Now keep in mind this is just one instance, but almos all receive a first ticket stating “we’re working on it” and then 15 min later it’s fixed. Now, I really don’t have much to compare to here other than wiredtree, and when you submit a ticket to them, 15 min later you get a response “fixed”. Now about the server admin lying directly to me when he couldn’t fix the problem. I realise this is a rare isolated instance, but still put a sour taste in my mouth.

Server Performance: 5/10

Performance was good at times bad at times and overall seemed slow at futurehosting. I think, but not sure that maybe they are overloading their servers…

Server Uptime: 10/10

Server was always up, and I mean always. Only around once or twice in two years was there a problem with DDOS on another server that caused routing problems in the datacenter to cause my server to be unreachable.

I hav enever had any problems with my server in dallas and it is always fast and zippy and never down. I have also never really submitted a ticket on my server in dallas because it is used so infrequently. We, however are leaving futurehosting and will be in process of moving our dallas server away from them soon.

Well, there you have it, my review of futurehosting after two years.

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DowntownHost 2 Year Review

Oct 5, 2009

I've recently had some issues with a script I wrote and I contacted support about it. Three techs assisted me with it, but could not resolve it. I later found the problem was with my outputting text when there should be no output at all. I closed the ticket and thanked the techs for their work.

This is just one of the many examples I have of how they are willing to work with the customer, even if it is not their fault. They will do what it takes to keep the customer happy, except fixing the customers' code. Jedito and his team really strive at providing superb support for their customers.

I have a few domains hosted with them and also have pointed others to their services. I currently use two of their servers, one is production and the other is staging. They are quick to get services setup and ready to go, as well as providing quick support through their ticket system. Their live chat doesn't always reach people (when it says it is online), but they respond to tickets within a few hours, sometimes within a few minutes.

I have the Silver plan with them, and I think they recently changed the amount of disk space available from 7GB to 14GB because that's what I now have available. I did not know they were planning that, but it was a pleasant surprise when I logged in to cPanel.

I can't think of any problems I have had with Downtownhost in these two years of experience with them, though I have had problems with my scripts and code. If they make a mistake, they admit it and are quick to fix it. I might have had a little bit of downtime over a year ago, but I think the server went down briefly. The uptime has been superb and the services have been wonderful.

To anyone who is in search of a good web host, Downtownhost is the way to go for shared hosting. I have not tried their other services (well, I am using blogging on the staging server), so I do not know what they are like. I have been with my share of web hosts and I have not found one that is better than Downtownhost.

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What To Expect For £1 Per Month/£10 Per Year

Oct 25, 2009

What could I expect in the web hosting world for £1/m or £10/y?

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PrecisionEffect.com Two Year Review

Oct 27, 2009

I have now been with PrecisionEffect.com for two years and have just paid for year number three. I have to say I have been very happy with the quality and service I have received. For my site I currently need over 7GB of storage space plus over 60GB of bandwidth a month. For me, the few extra dollars a month that I pay for a top quality host are well worth it. It is critical that the site loads quickly and has hardly any down time. I am currently using their failover-enabled server. From what I can tell my site has only been down a total of about an hour over the past two years. I don’t think you can beat that anywhere. I have never had that kind of uptime with any other host.

In the past I have been with web hosts that have put me on servers with 500 or more other hosted domains. PrecisionEffect.com currently has me on a server with only 200 domains (5 of which are mine). I believe not pushing their equipment to the max has been the main reason for the really good uptime.

If I ever do need support, Dave or Steve Garbus (both run PrecisionEffect.com) respond within minutes. Being a smaller size host, they know me and my site and are able to help me quickly. They are also able to help me customize the service I receive on the fly (Adding storage, domains, bandwidth to the plan).

I recommend PrecisionEffect.com to anyone looking for a long term top quality host with fast loading webpages (see their LiteSpeed plans) and excellent support. The couple of dollars extra you will pay for the service will be well worth it and save you in the long run.

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WiredTree 1 Year Review

Jan 10, 2009

I have been a WiredTree customer for about one year and I am very happy with their services. One of the top VPS providers available on the world, WiredTree runs its servers in its own datacenter and it is the real peace in mind company. On January 15th 2008 I've started a VPS 512 in WiredTree using a a WHT promo offer and encountered not only one problem with billing, hardware, software, support! I'm running 16 monster websites of my selected customers on this VPS under cPanel optimized for VPS release 4-R32603 - WHM 11.24.2 - X 3.9. OS: CENTOS 4.7 i686 on Virtuozzo. I've recently rebooted my VPS by command line (SSH) due a new app install exigence and this task was performed in few seconds without only one problem with cPanel!

Uptime: 10/10
Management: 10/10
Support: 10/10
Price: 10/10
Billing: 10/10
Domain for verification: ....

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Steadcom.com 1 Year Review

Apr 18, 2009

I'm here to tell you my experience with steadcom.com shared hosting service. I have been them since 29 April 08 so thats not really 1 year but will be like in 2 weeks.

Speed - First I tell you the speed of my website, it's open fast (really fast for me actually)

Downtime - there is a couple of downtime and hardware/cpanel/diskspace error that make me can't use my website but not like every month and sometimes downtime is like 2-3 hours I can't open my website :/ and sometimes only when I open ticket they will check it and resolve my problem. Thats is not good enuf for me :/

Support - support is decent thats mean sometimes good (maybe when they online?) and sometimes is not. Sometimes support will answer my ticket after 2 -5 hours. :/ this guy Andrew neill is really a good support tech (very good I must say). I think he has work there since last year and other staff I know is Dimitri (CEO) and Grotman (sales?)

Price - This is the best part. They can be flexible If I use all my bandwidth they allow me to upgrade and when I don't need extra bandwidth they allow me to downgrade. Sometimes I pay $11 or $20 a/month depends on my bandwidth

So overall I rate them:
Speed: 10/10
Downtime/Other error: 2/10
Support: 7/10
Price: 10/10

The sad part is starting next month I need to find a new host because this host don't work for me anymore because third party problem, otherwise this host is superb and I will still be with them.

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Downtownhost - 1 Year Review

Oct 10, 2009

I've been with Downtownhost for a little more than a year now, and figured I would share my experiences with others.

When I first signed up with Downtownhost, everything was great. Transferring my sites went super smooth: my server was very fast and support was amazing (got replies in under a minute!). Unfortunately, as time has gone on, I've seen a dramatic drop in server stability and support.

My first major issue with Downtownhost happened in March of this year, when my server was constantly being brought offline with DDoS attacks. I requested that they switch me to a different server, hopefully with less DDoS attacks. Downtownhost gave me a date and time when they would switch my account to a new server. That day and time went, with no word from anyone at Downtownhost. I sent an email to Downtownhost asking if my account had been moved, but apparently they had forgotten to switch me. Jorge was very quick to switch me once I asked to be moved again.

Everything was smooth on the new server until April, when it went down for periods of at least 6 hours or more on several different occasions (at least 3). These extremely long periods of downtime were very angering.

Everything has been fairly stable up until these last few weeks. I recently registered a new domain and went to add it to my cPanel account as an addon domain. Something screwed up within cPanel, so I was unable to add my new domain to cPanel. This issue took over 5 hours to even get a response from Downtownhost (which used to be very unusual). Eventually, the issue was resolved.

Now, my server is timing out several times per day, and my email has now stopped working.

On top of the increasingly longer support response times, nobody *ever* answers me on their live support feature, which is a big downside for me. I'm not sure what has caused this dramatic drop in quality from Downtownhost, but it's not looking like I will be renewing my contract with them

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IMountain 1 Year Review

Mar 28, 2009

[Reposted]

I’ve had a shared "Solarcluster 5 Lifetime" account with iMountain for a year, hosting low-traffic "community" sites, including shops, a blog, forums, CMSs, mailing lists and photo galleries. Here are my impressions so far. I’ve concentrated on things that are different from previous hosts I’ve used (mainly cheap cPanel shared hosting).

Summary
Pros: Very good support, fast servers, solar powered
Cons: Mediocre reliability, price, file permission issues, no forum

Pre-sales and pricing
I found iMountain here on WHT after searching for a host with a good reputation for support and reliability. I was initially impressed by the consistent fast loading of their demo Gallery site, and by their solar powered and "clustered" hosting. However, their prices (for 10 domains) were above my budget and they had problems connecting to Europe (see http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=649322), which put me off. I signed up after they fixed the bandwidth problem quickly, and I discovered there was a 50% discount offer, and a "lifetime" subscription option (both now withdrawn) which made their prices more competitive.

Migration
Moving my sites over to iMountain was not entirely trouble-free. They don’t offer to do the migration for you and I didn’t yet have SSH access at either end, so I had to download all the files and database contents from my old host and upload them again to iMountain by FTP. This took many hours, especially since my local ISP (Virgin) decided I was "abusing" my connection and silently throttled my upload speed to 128 kbit/s! Manually recreating all my databases and mail accounts took some time in the unfamiliar (and buggy) H-Sphere control panel, and some of my sites ended up offline or in maintenance mode for several days.

Support
Support quality is definitely one of iMountain’s strong points. They claim all their support staff are Level 3 and up with 15+ years experience. It’s all done by e-mail and can therefore be a bit slow (sometimes hours for a response), but they generally get to the root of every problem and work to find a workable solution, unlike other hosts I’ve experienced, where it can be a constant struggle just to get a problem acknowledged, let alone fixed. They’re also pretty good at monitoring servers, which means it’s worth waiting a while before raising a trouble ticket. There’s no phone support, instant messaging or user forum though. There’s a tiny knowledgebase, a blog and a ticketing system but they’re barely used.

Speed
Generally, my sites have been much more responsive since moving to iMountain, and this is the main reason I would recommend them. I’ve only raised three "sites slow" tickets in the last year and they’ve all been fixed quickly. At previous hosts, applications that should load in seconds would regularly take minutes or time out completely. Indeed, iMountain proudly state "…we can handle load surges from Digg, SlashDot, etc. When your site is getting the hits of a lifetime, we’re here to make sure your visitors get through…". So far I haven’t tested this, though! Ping times from the UK are consistently about 180ms (monitored by [url].

Reliability
I’ve been monitoring one of my sites at 5 minute intervals for a year [url]
and average uptime has been about 99.5%, which is about the same as my previous hosts. I’m a bit disappointed by this - I had hoped that by paying a bit more and moving to a more reputable host I would see some improvement in uptime. I’m still getting some website users urging me to move to a "more reliable" host.

Reliability is supposed to be one of the advantages of clustered hosting, but the "clustered" hosting that iMountain offers only means that the web server is separate from the database server, mail server etc., not that there are redundant servers that can take over if one of the servers in a cluster fails.

File permission issues
Once my sites were up and running, an annoying problem kept recurring - I would come back later and find some of them down or showing errors. It turns out this is due to iMountain running PHP as an Apache module, which means that files created by a PHP application when someone visits the site (such as cache or log files) can’t subsequently be modified or removed by it. It’s a well-known problem, and the solution here is to simply raise a support ticket every time such a PHP application is installed or moved to get it fixed (not sure exactly how, sorry). It’s all a bit slow and inconvenient. It also affects updates - you have to overwrite the application in situ, instead of doing a clean installation and renaming it.

An alternative solution is to configure the entire site to "cgi mode", which can be done from the control panel. This solves all the file permission issues, but the big disadvantage for me is that it’s no longer possible to override local PHP settings (even using a local php.ini or ini_set), which means register_globals is always ON and the timezone always PST, for example.

Certificates
I found that iMountain’s security certificates for shared SSL, secure mail and FTP connections etc. are all self-signed, which means you get a warning popup whenever you try to access them - a showstopper for an e-commerce site. I haven’t encountered this at previous hosts, and when I raised a ticket they said it would be too expensive to fix this on every server, but I could buy my own certificate and install it. I only needed it for one site and they were good enough to give me a free static IP for it, so I was happy with that, but be careful if you’re planning to host lots of secure sites with them. For email access I’ve simply gone back to unencrypted connections.

E-Mail
Incoming mail is filtered with SpamAssassin and ClamAV and works pretty well. Outgoing mail is sometimes blacklisted though (e.g. by AOL and madasafish), which can be a pain - I’ve had to redirect some mail to users on these domains to go via googlemail.

There’s no real support for mailing lists (but no silly limits either) so you will need to install something like phplist or Dada Mail if you need them. There was initially no support for mail "domain forwarding" (all mail for xxx@mydomain sent to xxx@mysynonymdomain) but they enabled it when I asked.

Control panel
The control panel is H-Sphere, which I have found quite capable but buggy. Obvious things like file uploads, moving directories and CHMOD sometimes don’t work, and very strange things can happen if you try to move and rename things too quickly. Also the menu structure can be very obscure - CRON jobs are found under "FTP User", for example.

Backups
There’s no real support for backups - users are expected to make their own. I found a script to do mySQL backups, but file backups are harder because large directories will time out if you try to zip them. The options seem to be FTP (slow and not very reliable) or rsync (needs SSH access and a unix box).

Solar power
The power supply is not 100% solar - they still connect to the grid, but they sell back almost as much power during the day as they buy at night, so they are still "greener" than most.

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IMountain 1 Year Review

Feb 22, 2009

I've had a shared "Solarcluster 5 Lifetime" account with iMountain for a year, hosting low-traffic "community" sites, including shops, a blog, forums, CMSs, mailing lists and photo galleries. Here are my impressions so far. I've concentrated on things that are different from previous hosts I've used (mainly cheap cPanel shared hosting).

Summary
Pros: Very good support, fast servers, solar powered
Cons: Mediocre reliability, price, file permission issues, no forum
Pre-sales and pricing
I found iMountain here on WHT after searching for a host with a good reputation for support and reliability. I was initially impressed by the consistent fast loading of their demo Gallery site, and by their solar powered and "clustered" hosting. However, their prices (for 10 domains) were above my budget and they had problems connecting to Europe (see [url] [url],which put me off. I signed up after they fixed the bandwidth problem quickly, and I discovered there was a 50% discount offer, and a "lifetime" subscription option (both now withdrawn) which made their prices more competitive.

Migration
Moving my sites over to iMountain was not entirely trouble-free. They don't offer to do the migration for you and I didn't yet have SSH access at either end, so I had to download all the files and database contents from my old host and upload them again to iMountain by FTP. This took many hours, especially since my local ISP (Virgin) decided I was "abusing" my connection and silently throttled my upload speed to 128 kbit/s! Manually recreating all my databases and mail accounts took some time in the unfamiliar (and buggy) H-Sphere control panel, and some of my sites ended up offline or in maintenance mode for several days.

Support
Support quality is definitely one of iMountain's strong points. They claim all their support staff are Level 3 and up with 15+ years experience. It's all done by e-mail and can therefore be a bit slow (sometimes hours for a response), but they generally get to the root of every problem and work to find a workable solution, unlike other hosts I've experienced, where it can be a constant struggle just to get a problem acknowledged, let alone fixed. They're also pretty good at monitoring servers, which means it's worth waiting a while before raising a trouble ticket. There's no phone support, instant messaging or user forum though. There's a tiny knowledgebase, a blog and a ticketing system but they're barely used.

Speed
Generally, my sites have been much more responsive since moving to iMountain, and this is the main reason I would recommend them. I've only raised three "sites slow" tickets in the last year and they've all been fixed quickly. At previous hosts, applications that should load in seconds would regularly take minutes or time out completely. Indeed, iMountain proudly state "...we can handle load surges from Digg, SlashDot, etc. When your site is getting the hits of a lifetime, we're here to make sure your visitors get through...". So far I haven't tested this, though! Ping times from the UK are consistently about 180ms (monitored by [url].

Reliability
I've been monitoring one of my sites at 5 minute intervals for a year
[url]
and average uptime has been about 99.5%, which is about the same as my previous hosts. I'm a bit disappointed by this - I had hoped that by paying a bit more and moving to a more reputable host I would see some improvement in uptime. I'm still getting some website users urging me to move to a "more reliable" host.
Reliability is supposed to be one of the advantages of clustered hosting, but the "clustered" hosting that iMountain offers only means that the web server is separate from the database server, mail server etc., not that there are redundant servers that can take over if one of the servers in a cluster fails.

File permission issues
Once my sites were up and running, an annoying problem kept recurring - I would come back later and find some of them down or showing errors. It turns out this is due to iMountain running PHP as an Apache module, which means that files created by a PHP application when someone visits the site (such as cache or log files) can't subsequently be modified or removed by it. It's a well-known problem, and the solution here is to simply raise a support ticket every time such a PHP application is installed or moved to get it fixed (not sure exactly how, sorry). It's all a bit slow and inconvenient. It also affects updates - you have to overwrite the application in situ, instead of doing a clean installation and renaming it.

An alternative solution is to configure the entire site to "cgi mode", which can be done from the control panel. This solves all the file permission issues, but the big disadvantage for me is that it's no longer possible to override local PHP settings (even using a local php.ini or ini_set), which means register_globals is always ON and the timezone always PST, for example.

Certificates
I found that iMountain's security certificates for shared SSL, secure mail and FTP connections etc. are all self-signed, which means you get a warning popup whenever you try to access them - a showstopper for an e-commerce site. I haven't encountered this at previous hosts, and when I raised a ticket they said it would be too expensive to fix this on every server, but I could buy my own certificate and install it. I only needed it for one site and they were good enough to give me a free static IP for it, so I was happy with that, but be careful if you're planning to host lots of secure sites with them. For email access I've simply gone back to unencrypted connections.

E-Mail
Incoming mail is filtered with SpamAssassin and ClamAV and works pretty well. Outgoing mail is sometimes blacklisted though (e.g. by AOL and madasafish), which can be a pain - I've had to redirect some mail to users on these domains to go via googlemail.
There's no real support for mailing lists (but no silly limits either) so you will need to install something like phplist or Dada Mail if you need them. There was initially no support for mail "domain forwarding" (all mail for xxx@mydomain sent to xxx@mysynonymdomain) but they enabled it when I asked.

Control panel
The control panel is H-Sphere, which I have found quite capable but buggy. Obvious things like file uploads, moving directories and CHMOD sometimes don't work, and very strange things can happen if you try to move and rename things too quickly. Also the menu structure can be very obscure - CRON jobs are found under "FTP User", for example.

Backups
There's no real support for backups - users are expected to make their own. I found a script to do mySQL backups, but file backups are harder because large directories will time out if you try to zip them. The options seem to be FTP (slow and not very reliable) or rsync (needs SSH access and a unix box).

Solar power
The power supply is not 100% solar - they still connect to the grid, but they sell back almost as much power during the day as they buy at night, so they are still "greener" than most.

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OC3Networks - 1 Year Review

Sep 20, 2009

I use services of oc3networks almost year. This happened when problems began with alphared.

So,

1. Support - very good, rapid response to problems. Were some problems at night, but when Ivan was fired, everything fine.

2. Network stability - very good, there was only one off (maintance).

3. Provisioning dept - good, at beginning of our work creating server takes a few days, now it is less than 12 hours.

4. Sales - good, but I would like to make them available on a daily basis. As I know they are here on weekend sometimes.

This is a great data center for your projects. Start work with them, if you're still unsure.

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1 Year Review Eurovps.com

Jan 27, 2009

i have 5 servers with Eurovps.com since Feb 2008

I must have raised around 60 to 70 tickets with them in last 1 year. 90% of the tickets the response time is less than 3 minutes. Sometimes they take around 5 minutes to reply.

But definitely i get back replies in less than 5 minutes all tickets new and pending.

It feels like they have a huge team which is always online waiting for tickets.

Recently i had problems in server on 31st December night 11pm Indian Time. I sent a ticket surprisingly their ticket reply came back in 2 minutes and again in next 3 minutes the second reply came that the server is again up.

Last week they helped me with one server which had few problems. They reinstalled the server for me and also transfered the accounts and checked each website. One of the website had issues de to mysqli extension not installed. They did it too and completed the entire job very professionally.

They also configured one of the servers for application hosting. The server surely has become 2x faster after Eurovps tuning work on the vps. They also called me on mobile to inform me.

I surely recommend eurovps for someone searching for premium and reliable hosting.
one word of caution dont use bad language with them. The people manning the support team are no nonsense people and will not accept rude language. If you are good with them they will also be good with you.

If others also happy with eurovps support then please feel free to post it here.

All in all their servers are pretty fast due to quality hardware and support also very fast .. complete peace of mind for me with eurovps.

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Dotable 2 Year Review

Oct 7, 2009

I've been meaning to post a review here cause I used this forum to choose my host over 2 years ago.

I had never paid for a host before and never ventured into doing much for a website but wanted a small personal low maintenance e-comm website. I wanted a low cost host most of all since I didn't think I'd get a big flood of customers, dotable worked pretty well for the first year or so.
My only complaints with them were,

their abrasive renewal letters, it was like as soon as you got a notice to renew, you had 24 hours to do it. I'm a noob so I felt it was rude but whatever.

I also found the staff didn't seem to understand what I wanted when I submitted a ticket (all of twice a year) consisting of asking them where the virus scanner had gone. I used to have one and then it disappeared. It took 3 tickets and 1 year for Aussie Bob to understand that, I found it very frustrating.

I over all was happy, little downtime, only problem popping up occasionally was expired ssl but now that the company has changed over to new people I was determined to not mind. I didn't want to deal with a change since my website is nice and settled but in the last week I have submitted my first and now 2nd 911 tickets which took a good 12 HOURS to get a reply! I am not the type to use 911 tickets anyhow, I suspect others do so it's a big deal when I click the 911 button. This week I have submitted more overall tickets then I have in the rest of the 2 years I have been with them D: My website has never been so high maintenance! It's not only frustrating but as many of you know it makes you look BAD and you do loose business over it.

The customer service is the type that offers no information, it's like talking to someone where you ask "so did you like this movie" and they answer "yep...." you have to keep prompting the information or you will not get it at all. It is extremely frustrating. They also tend to answer only 1 problem per email.

I really wanted to keep on with dotable but after a long strength I will be looking for another host very soon.

I didn't love Aussie Bob but now I sure do miss him too bad.

Now I am off to research for a reliable host with low cost service for a low maintenance gal and her tiny osc website.

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Staminus 3+ Year Review

Oct 29, 2009

I'm not sure if I ever posted a staminus review before. I know I always meant to but anyway, here is my 3+ year review of staminus.net.

Prelude
I started my hosting company in Aug 2005. It first started with a site I had that got pretty popular and I needed to get a dedicated server cause I was getting kicked off shared hosts and the ones I didn't get kicked off of were fly by night ops that quickly folded. So I get the box and all and start learning about linux and everything else. My first server was at rackmounted.com - a truly great bunch of people that helped me in every way and never lost patience with me. I will never forget the guys there.

The first few months I had enough site donations to pay for the server but I eventually spent more time experimenting and learning my linux desktop and server that I didn't update the site much no more. Then the donations came to an end. Then I started selling hosting under felosi-inc.net domain. I ended up getting enough clients to pay for the server and then some. By that time I was spending all my time on hosting related things that I pretty much abandoned the site. Now I was hosting full time.

I quickly found out that it was very hard to compete with regular hosters. The people I knew and myself always was having problems with ddos so I decided to specialize in ddos protected hosting. At first it worked out but eventually I had to leave rackmounted because they didn't have ddos protection. This is where my journey for a good network began.

The Journey for a Good Network
The first ddos protected network I tried was sharktech, I was there around 5 months. The network outages, not so nice support staff, lack of any ddos stats and null routes instead of filtering made me leave there. Had I stayed I would have went out of business.

My second ddos protected network was awknet. Justin is good guy and all but he is the only one. I could never get no definite answer on how much he would filter for how long from him. It also seemed he had to manually add filters and such, the server stayed down until I could get ahold of him. There was a few fairly long network outages, one lasting 2-3 days if I'm not mistaken. After that and some other issues I decided to try another.

My third ddos protected network was gigeservers. I found out the first day it would not work as there was 80 mbits incoming syn to the server making it unresponsive. When asked they said they just rate limit the attack not filter it all and would not do anything to help me. So I left that server within a week.

My fourth ddos protected network was softlayer. This really didn't work out. Their sales people told me "oh yeah, ddos protection, cisco guard, ya ya" but I came to find out at that time they had to manually add the ips to the cisco guard and would only filter it for 24 hours. After a month or two of doing this I experienced downtime each time until the ip was added and I also had to haggle with their techs to get them to even add it. I asked to speak to a manager once and he told me their network was not for frequent ddos and if I continued as I was doing they would have to let me go.

My fifth ddos protected network was justedge which was no protection at all. Everything came through, he did refund me though and told me that he gave me the login for some firewall at first to mitigate the attacks. He never gave me any information for any firewall.

Home at Last
I had dealt with staminus before as I had a friend who I helped manage his server there. At that time I didn't think staminus was any good as this was the time those low bandwidth dc++ syn attacks were prevalent and I got creamed. I actually went in IRC and argued with Matt for a while over this. Eventually I found out that the attacks that was creaming the server were only around 5-10 mbits, but they was still a b**ch to mess with.

I got a server at staminus, moved all my clients over there. When I seen their custom firewall and attack alerts I knew this was what I needed. Also another great feature of staminus is that any huge attack will be auto null routed instead of consuming the server. Every place I went to before I had the server consumed many times, At staminus this has never happened to this day!

And finally the loyal clients who had stuck with me through the journey was happy and I started to get more clients. There has been a few network outages but nothing worth leaving for. The protection is also the absolute best you can get for the money. The secureport protection is amazing as well at a fraction of the cost of other specialist services.

At first I thought since staminus was only Matt I would have pretty much the same situation as awknet where I had to wait until he came on, but Matt is truly a 24/7 on call person and now he has John there to help him - another great guy. But in reality you rarely ever have to contact support as everything on their end is usually good. Their support is great, fast and they have never lost patience with me. I cant put a number on the times I have put in emergency tickets saying the hardware is bad only for it to be something on my end

I just cant say enough good things about staminus, had it not been for me finally settling down at staminus I don't think I would have the business I have today. For ddos protected networks there is no better then staminus hands down.

Now my entire high risk operation is hosted at staminus and I don't plan on leaving ever. Thanks Matt for the awesome service, support and not losing patience with me, you are the best.

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My 4.5 Year Review Of The Planet

Sep 24, 2008

Very hard to believe that it has been 4.5 (Ordered our first server in January of 2004) years since I first turned up services with The Planet (ServerMatrix at the time) and still have equipment with them to this day.

Here's my quick breakdown....Support - Looking back at our ticket history, we've never opened a ton of tickets. When we needed assistance, they were always quick to assist us and provided prompt resolutions.

Network - Their network is top notch and I've yet to find another provider that's even close to The Planet. We still have some equipment that is on their legacy unmetered Cogent product (now on their premium network, since they dont have Cogent any longer) and we continuously are able to pull the 20m and normally, much much more. Their network has always been top notch.

Hardware - I've acknowledged over the years that The Planet, historically, had issues with replacing failed drives and reloading OS's in a timely fashion. We never experienced that, ever... nor have I seen a complaint about that in quite some time.

We've experienced a single hardware failure with The Planet and the failed item was replaced quickly and at a time we dictated, which was great.

Overall - Fantastic. One of things I've really come to love about The Planet is the dedication to their customer. To this day, I still get a phone call at the office, at the house and on my cell whenever anything goes haywire on one of my servers. I can't count on them to have my back when I'm not watching and I've come to rely on them to respond to and resolve issues before I am aware of them.

Although we have diversified where we place our hardware, we'll continue to partner with The Planet and continue to enjoy the excellent service we've become accustomed to.

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FluidHosting.com 5 Year Review

Apr 22, 2008

Well, this month marks the 5th anniversary that I’ve been with

[url]

Every year I pop in and give a review of the previous year.
This past year was nothing but steady excellent service for 12 months. I'm extreamly happy.

So far, I’ve been humming right along on a shared plan to my amazement. Figured I’d need something else by now, but my package is holding out fairly well. They did introduce Windows Virtuozzo VPS and other new VPS plans that I’m excited about.

But there is not much to talk about when everything works (and works well)… email worked flawlessly all year… hosting uptime had to be 100% or close to it (I did not notice any downtime), support was flawless and fast.

The few questions I had in the past year were answered within 15 minutes. For example, I got stuck on imap setup and had to ask the imap numbers… Dave helped instantly by the chat feature located on the front page of FH. I also asked other little questions during the year, like “will this script work” etc.

After 5 years, what can I say? FluidHosting does an excellent job, so I can focus on what I do best, run my business.
Thanks dave, john, hary, and crew.

I am not paid nor do I receive financial benefit for my reviews… Fluidhosting was recommended from this site, so I make sure I come back to perform a review every year… least I can do.

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Dreamhost - 1+ Year Review

Aug 18, 2008

I hadn't seen a review for Dreamhost lately so I thought I write about my experiences with them.

I originally registered for Dreamhost in April '07, on their "Crazy Domain Insane" Plan (I prepaid for a full year for $29.40!):
Disk Storage: 200GB (Grows 2GB/week)
Monthly Bandwidth: 2TB (Grows 40GB/week)
Unlimited Domains, MySQL Databases, and FTP Accounts
PHP 4 and 5
Perl Support
Python Support
Ruby on Rails
Enhanced Web Security
One-Click Installs (Wordpress, Zen Cart, etc.)

Setup was a breeze and everything was up and running within minutes. I setup my domains with the Dreamhost Nameservers, and the DNS changes began to propagate. For the first 6-8 months I had no problems, my sites responded quickly, and the few times I had to contact support the were very helpful and quick to respond (subdomain DNS issues for one of my sites).

Then right after christmas they had the big billing fiasco (read: [utl], and I ended up getting charged for another full year of hosting (resolved within the next day or two).

Well April rolled around again and I decided to renew my account as I had relatively few issues and didn't want to deal with moving all of my sites to a new host. I was hoping to renew my account and use a coupon like I had the first time around, but Dreamhost no longer offers my plan (they only have a 1 size fits all plan now). I bit the bullet and renewed my plan for another year to lower the price to $120 ($10/month), and I was off on another year of Dreamhost.

Right around this time I had also started to move some of my client sites over to Dreamhost, and we started having more and more issues (DNS, slow response times, slow connections). I also experienced an outage or two with no warning from Dreamhost (supposedly planned).

Dreamhost has a status blog available at: [url] where you can read about the latest status updates, problems, follow up, etc. And I've found it helpful in the past to go here to get my updates (Dreamhost doesn't like to send email updates or alerts when they are making changes), but trying to explain this problems to my clients when I don't even get a heads-up from Dreamhost is a real pain.

Fast forward to August, and I am experiencing MySQL outages and slow slow slow connections/queries, as well as network troubles with Dreamhosts' bandwidth provider. Support has been reasonably quick to respond (telling me they're working on it), and the Status blog has some information as to what's been happening, but I think it's time for me to move on.

So in conclusion, you get what you pay for (and in Dreamhosts' case, that's a cheap shared hosting account). In fact, if I didn't rely so much on sites with MySQL (Wordpress/Zen Cart/vBulletin/etc.), I would probably stay with Dreamhost, as I have found their servers to be rather speedy and not overloaded/oversold (at least on the CPU side of things, not their MySQL servers).

Final Dreamhost Ratings:
Uptime and Reliability: 7/10
Server and Connection Speed: 6/10
Tech Support: 8/10
Customer Service: 8/10
Value: 9/10

Final Score: 7.6/10

(Sorry if this review seems a little jumbled as it's my first time writing a formal review here at WHT)

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Knownhost 1 Year Review

Jun 17, 2008

I've been with Knownhost for 1 year (and a month or so). In that time, I've purchased a second (and soon a third) VPS with them, and moved most of my sites there.

They are fantastic.

The support is great, even for complex tickets where there is confusion, they are patient and generous. The uptime has been excellent, and the servers are fast. I have total confidence in Knownhost ... and I've not felt that before for any other provider.

I reccommend them totally.

I still wish they'd update their website though - I don't think it reflects how awesome they are.

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WiredTree 1+ Year Review

Dec 15, 2008

WiredTree 1+ Year Review

Well its been more than 1 year now since i've been with wiredtree so i decided that i write about my experience in all these months ever since i last wrote about them at [url].

So where do i start and how do i wrap up the review ? I could do it in just few words here which would be absolutely amazing ! Their customer service and their servers Rock and i hope in coming years, we just get to see better of their services !

And i promised myself today, if they ever sell their company and my account to any new entity, i'll 1st cry out aloud for writing all the good reviews and for the good times with wiredtree and then maybe go and bomb the place before a new ordeal with new owners starts because i dont think anyone can ever run wiredtree the way Zac is running!

20/10 to you Zac for running this good show!

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