A2B2 +6 Month Review
Oct 13, 2007
I have been with A2B2/CheapVPS for well over 6 months now. I have multiple VPS with them, both US and UK based, and a mixture of Windows and Linux. I have no complaints about the networks or servers, having only experienced a couple of down times because of chassis swaps and network problems. Support has been okay, but not the best; my suggestion would be that other staff apart from Rus (the owner) have access to facilities so that they are able to set rDNS, reload Windows VPS and other things like that, as far as I'm aware and from what I've seen, these kind of things can only be done by Rus. As those kind of things can only be done by Rus, the support ticket can easily drag on for a bit, and Rus being a new father means that he doesn't always have the time to reply to the tickets.
Although I have my few opinions of the support situation, I will not be moving to another host anytime soon as I'm happy with the state of my servers with A2B2, and as long as the servers are up I'm happy.
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Oct 20, 2008
I've been with A2B2 for around just over 18 months now and feel that I'm well placed to right an overall review.
I originally signed up with the A2B2 brand after having problems with numerous other VPS hosting providers - I won't name names but I'll say that I went through several different companies before ending up with A2B2. I orginally had a VPS on the East coast with DirectAdmin, but I felt this wasn't to my needs so changed VPS plans.
Like in a previous review I can find all these different brand names confusing. It would be better if there was just one brand name offering the whole bag (shared and VPS hosting).
I later on found out about the CheapVPS brand which suited my needs more in terms of what you get for your money and the fact that I don't need any support for my VPS servers. I still have several CheapVPS VPS servers to this day, and find them totally reliable.
Support overall is okayish, could be better in some area but I'm not complaining since I receive a good level of service for what I pay. I have to say its been better with the new support staff, but can find things a little difficult with them sometimes which can result with the intervention of Rus (who is a great guy).
Setup times were always fast, never had any problems in that area either. In terms of server reliability, I've never had any noticable downtime apart from entire DC outages at BS.
So in summary, out of 10:
Support: 8.5
Reliability: 9
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Oct 1, 2007
Ive been with a2b2 for exactly 9 months today, so I guess that now is a good time to post a review.
I better quickly state my package that I had. It was a custom special double ram package that I found over here at WHT:
512mb RAM Guaranteed
1024MB RAM Burst
600GB Bandwidth
15GB Web space
2ip's
Unmanaged
London Bluesquare datacenter
All for ~£14.50 a month
I liked this package and service so much that I decided to pay for an entire year a few months ago. Rus gave me 3 specials options: double RAM, Double Bandwidth or 12 months for the price of 10. I decided to go for the double RAM option so now I have 1024mb RAM Guaranteed and 2048MB RAM Burst.
The main site that im hosting is www.spudmud.com (300,000 + page views in September with around 45,000 Uniques a month) as well as a few very small sites.
Now I better get to the reviews:
1. Speed
The server was extremely fast in all respects. It almost seems like im the only one on my node. The specs as I can see them are 8 x 2.7GHz Xeons so its really is quite a tank with the best hardware.
Once when my site was on the front page of HeavyGames.com I was getting ~1 visitor every few seconds (the game file was ~2MB big) and I did notice that the site was starting to feel the strain (probably because of my bad programming ) and I submitted a ticket to support and Rus upgraded a few of my limits and the server was running super fast again. Since that every new game on heavy games doesn't even seem to effect my server with the new limits (not sure what Rus upgraded but it did the trick).
2. Uptime
Since I got my server I would guess that I have had around 99.99% network uptime and around 99.8% server uptime. There have been one or two network problems but they were fixed fast.
My VPS had one day where it was down for 17 hours because it "Hung" and I was on holiday so didn't know until I checked at an Internet cafe and I issued an reboot request and it was back up within a few minutes. I have never has any problems with my node, just with my own VPS, probably because im not the best server manager.
3. Support
Well all tickets are answered within a few minutes or up to 1 hour max but I would say around a 5 minute average response time.
4. Cost
Im very happy with the price of ~£14.50 for what I am actually getting. Even now when I look in the VPS offers section I don't see many providers offering anything even close to what a2b2 offers hardware and support wise.
5. Features
a2b2 offers HyperVM which is great for rebooting you own server or monitoring your memory usage and traffic usage.
They also offer a DNS cluster for those who want it but I havent set mine up yet.
The only problem with a2b2 is that it has no RAID so I need to backup everything myself but a2b2 offers very cheap backup space so its not too bad.
6. Conclusion
To summarize I would call my 9 month time so far a very pleasant experience and I highly recommend a2b2 to anyone that wants a reliable and fast vps with very good support and a very nice price.
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Mar 30, 2009
Product: 2x VPS
Service: Fully managed
=== Setup and Support ===
I was a little disappointed with the speed of setup. I paid for the hosting, but it took them 5 days to get the VPS online and accessible for me. I was told this was because they were "waiting for the DirectAdmin license to be provided by the provider". Not sure what that means, but I paid for 5 days of nothing.
Once the VPS was up, I received very fast responses to my tickets as I got the server ready for my sites migration from another host. They upgraded Apache/PHP for me, plus installed a PHP module I needed. Later they installed an SSL certificate for me, which helped me out a lot (DA's interface kept failing).
Most ticket responses were within a few minutes, but on numerous occasions the responses weren't great (as you'd expect with such quick replies). Several times I had to retype details I had already provided in my initial ticket -- which made me wonder how carefully they read and understood my support requests.
Overall I was impressed enough after a couple months hosting my own sites, that I suggested that my company moved its customer sites to A2B2.
The setup for this second VPS again took 5 days, which just seems a bit too long to me. Luckily, we had no time pressure on us, but, if your project does, I would certainly seek some kind guarantee from A2B2 before you place your order.
=== Reliability ===
A2B2 have been less good here. Some of the problems I have experienced over the last 8 months include: backups failing (error message "system load higher than acceptable limits"); the VPS being non-responsive (tickets yield the same "the load on the node seems fine" response and there is never a satisfactory investigation); DirectAdmin license expiring and locking us out; Apache randomly going down and not restarting (I'm still waiting on an explanation); and running out of hard drive space.
The last one is the most worrying since it caused numerous failures on customer sites and locked us out of DirectAdmin. On the VPS in question we had used 211MB of 10GB, which raises the question of whether A2B2 are overselling.
The problem was solved by them "deleting some files", which didn't fill me with confidence for the future.
=== Value for money ===
I think the price point for the two managed VPS I have is good, in particular given the amount of work the support team are prepared to do. The margins on selling web hosting to our customers are tiny, so we can accept some of the issues we've experienced. Also, when there has been a problem it has always been fixed. This has sometimes involved Rus stepping in to take over from the off-shore support.
=== Conclusion ===
The good outweighs the bad and A2B2 still probably represents the best bet for UK-based companies wanting a managed VPS service. However, compared to some of the US companies I think they fall (a little) short on the quality of the service and technical competence of the front line support.
I'd rate them thus:
Support: 6 out of 10 (but 8 out of 10 for effort)
Reliability: 6 out of 10
Value: 7 out of 10
Overall: a solid 6.5 out of 10
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Nov 14, 2008
A short review of a2b2.com [url]after a few days - I will update this review thread, when I have more experience with this host.
The short story
My server broke down wednesday morning. All my websites were down, my e-mail were down and I didn't know what to do. The hosts couldn't find the error on the server and I waited for a long time between each answers from the (US based) support team.
After 2 hours were the server still was down I searched for good offers for a new server. I cam across a2b2.com and found their offer and speed of server pretty fine. I contacted their sales department and go answers quickly. After around 1½ hour they found a server that they were able to finish for me the same day! I confirmed the order an paid with credit card a few minutes past 12. I go the IP of the server an hour later and could start changed DNS for my most important domains.
Around 3pm could see the server was up running - and asked the tech team at a2b2 if I could get access to the server. Few minutes later I got the offer that I could install the basic software (like apache and so on) by myself if I wanted - if confirmed and got the root login immidately.
The period between the payment and the time I got the root login was only 3 hours! I can't be better than that. Totally 5 hours including discussions about what server I wanted and so on.
The server is fast (from Denmark where im located) and the support have been execellent so far. I hope this continues, then I will be a happy customer They made my bad day a lot better.
I will try to write a new review when I been at a2b2.com a bit longer (a month or so). Hopefully as good as this one.
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Jun 27, 2008
Purchased a vps from CheapVPS/A2B2 a month ago (There was a special running on WHT..and i wanted the vps urgently so they deployed it within 30 minutes ).Support rocks.My tickets are answered within 10 minutes and they even have msn support!Today, i ordered another vps and they deployed it within 30 minutes again .
I highly recommend Cheapvps/A2b2.
Support 10/10
Setup Time 10/10
Overall Experience: 10/10
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Jan 6, 2007
I'm coming upto a months service with a2b2 and have to say it's been a pleasure using the services. It might not all be fully automated with a nice gui but the service provides everything I need including stable servers for developing
Support = 5/5
The times i've been required to contact them they have replied fast and dealt with the issues i've had and have been polite and easy to communicate with during pre-sales also.
Network = 5/5
I cannot say i've noticed any downtime with them, I will admit i've not monitored the VS too closely but everytime i've tried and SSH session it's been there ready for use.
Server Speed = 5/5
After being with VPSlink for a few months and getting extremly tired of the slow diskspeeds it's been a dream using my VPS with a2b2. no lagging when typing commands.
I've got one of there £12.50 packages but minus CPanel as I wanted to build my own mailserver.
Service, Reliabilty and Support knock the socks off what VPSlink provide I can't speak highly enough of Rus and his team
I will be moving out of VPSLink this month since i've just finished configuring my development server with a2b2, I'm not going to post the url hosted with a2b2 but will provide it in a pm to a moderator if they require it as it's a dev platform I don't really want the world knowing the url
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Oct 17, 2007
I have been hosting my vps with a2b2.com since May/2007 till Oct/2007 .
This hosting company owned by Rus Foster offers great hosting packages with suitable prices. I purchased vps from them and they helped me transferring my website to my new vps , also they have a very nice support team ! Whenever i submit a ticket (via email) they respond asap (usually within minutes.. )
They have been always helpful .. specially when i face a problem with my vps as iam a newbie in vps issues .
My vps was in uk and it was always fast and even faster than usa hosts .. (maybe coz UK is nearer to Jordan than USA )
Not forget to mention that they offer live chat on their website and also on msn .. and also, whenever my vps goes down while iam away from internet .. i just send sms to them in order to get it rebooted!
Now i have upgraded to a dedi server with them and i hope this review will be useful to anybody looking for a good hosting company with great support team and excellent service .
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Nov 25, 2008
So... let's start my review, shall we?
I came into VPS business with EpicVPS, both Amaresh and Raghev (if im right), are excellent persons. Always helped me a lot and their service was overall great.
After some disasters xD, EpicVPS was sold to VAServ. I thought: Okay... maybe it's time to move BUT I should definitely wait a few months and watch how this is going to be.
So, stayed as a client.
I dont know how much months have passed, maybe 6? Dunno, but I do have to say a few things about Russell's company, VAserv.com:
I had some billing problems, specially when they changed to the other software, but all this was solved with screenshots (not that they doubt, just wanted to keep it clear), and in no time, I had it fixed. (Also had one billing issue, for some other reasons, which was solved and today Vladimir just made my day.. heh, not that he offered anything, but telling me kind words... made me feel good. )
Loads... Everyone knows that when you're using a VPS, sometimes you have some stupid users abusing the server , this way you'll get affected as well.
Happened a few times, and I was telling them it wasn't my VPS, etc etc (I've a pretty big vps, and always monitored so I can be sure that everything is running smoothly, this is also pretty secured). I didn't like when they once restarted my vps without asking, and load issue was still there. Again a few days later, they restarted again, like it was my problem. (And figured later that wasn't, but it happens!).
Anyway, this was solved, and their staff was really helpful on this, being really decent with me, just like it SHOULD BE in EVERY company.
Uptime... What can I say, it's true the VPS was rebooted a few times, but, besides that, it's great.
Staff... Always helpful, an extremelly fast support and lovely staff! Just like... hum, Kody, Vladimir... both awesome. (I consider them like business-friends. Honestly, they have helped me A LOT).
It's true that there are a few of them that still need some work heh, but overall, it's really really good.
Support... Extremelly fast and efficient! Top notch. Never saw a company like this.
Hardware... Top notch, NEVER had a disk issue, or something like that. Just like a dream!
Network... PERFECT. But really, just PERFECT. I'm living in Portugal, and I've about 40/50 ms to UK (I choosed UK, but they have other locations), the network is really fast (downloading at 1.7 mb/s from my home, no download accellerators). Also, never had a single downtime.
Billing... Good billing software now. Pretty organised, and simple. I like to keep it simple, easy to use. (And yes, I know that ubbersmith is a COMPLETE software xD)
Price... Excellent. I don't find any place with better prices. Even if I someday find one, I still WON'T move.
Other Issues... Had 2 IP's listed on SBL, reported it, and they already knew, then 2 weeks after the issue was solved. (Yeah yeah 2 weeks, but I emailed SBL and they didn't even answered me , so, vaserv did a great job.)
They just got me as a loyal client, and won't leave them for sure! Rus, great job!
I guarantee you that if you join them, you'll have an excellent service.
Overall:
Uptime: 10/10
Staff: 10/10
Support: 10/10
Price: 10/10
Total: 10/10
What do I want them to get better? Please... just keep providing this quality service.
Join them.
(Domain will be verified as I will submit through the Report button.)
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Jan 28, 2009
I've signed up with Wiredtree for a Managed VPS 12 days ago.
I know it's not enough time to write a review. But I decided to write my first impression then keep you updated by writing a new review at the end of each month, so expect one at 12 February.
For now, these guys are simply the best I've tried.
They reply you in 15 minutes or less and if it took them more, 20 minutes or something, then be sure that they're investigating your problem. If you can't wait for 15 minutes, then go ahead and give them a call on their toll-free number and they'll be with you second by second. Their support wont just solve your problem, but they'll educate you telling you what caused the problem and how did they fix it.
I'm solicitous about security. But with these guys, I finally sleep peacefully knowing that my VPS is well secured.
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May 5, 2009
I joined Limestonenetworks back in 2008 when it was a small company. At the time they offered the best price on the server I was looking for, so I took the plunge. The first 2 months were great, I enjoyed the stable network, and responses from the support team were fairly quick (1-2 hours response time). From there on it was all downhill, my servers were constantly down, and the support team took longer to answer my tickets. I didn't think this was a big problem, so I stayed with Limestonenetworks even though it was having problems with their network. Near December an incident occurred that really pushed me over the edge. My servers had been down for hours, so I opened a support ticket, and one of the agents replied and told me that the downtime was due to an upgrade in their network.
Again, I came to conclude that it could be far worst, so I stayed, one of the reasons was that I didn't want to switch my game servers over. It's important to keep in mind when you are running game servers, IPs play an important part because that's where you get your traffic. Near January the network upgrade at Limestonenetworks was still taking place which caused my bandwidth meter to stop working. This really scared me because I didn't want to get charged for overages due to the fact that my servers were receiving DDOS attacks, and I wouldn't know when to close the ports.
This incident actually turned out to be positive for me because even though I went over my bandwidth quota they didn't charge me for overages. I was very happy because this was like a late Christmas present, so now I was even more happy to give my money to Limestonenetworks. Now you might ask the question, how is this going downhill? Even though they didn't charge me for the overages, I still lost many clients who were angry at the fact that their game server were down.
In the end this network upgrade actually cost me 3 clients who were paying ~$60 per month. I let this slide because at this point I already had two servers with Limestonenetworks and I really didn't want to switch over due to the fact I would lose my IPs. The next month, February, was no different, I had more issues with Limestonenetworks. Starting of this month I was getting large DDOS attacks, which kept pushing my bandwidth over the quota, and I ended up paying close to $200 dollars just for bandwidth overages.
At this point they started to nickel and dime me for every single penny they could get of me. I don't know if they were having financial problems, or if it was due to another reason. Again in March I went over the quota, but at this time they told me that I had to pay per gigabyte which would result in a $500+ charge in bandwidth, and after talking with multiple agents, I was finally able to reach an agreement. They had changed a policy all of the sudden due to the fact that they knew I was a good customer and would keep paying for the overages.
The problem I had here was that I didn't mind upgrading to plan after I knew how much bandwidth was going to be used, since they don't offer any sort of DDOS protection, and game servers result in large DDOS attacks occasionally. I understand that Limestonenetworks was not at fault, but by making me pay per gigabyte was a bit harsh, since I had never been late on a payment, and had multiple servers. Try to remember that I stayed with this company even though I lost multiple clients because of their network outages, but they didn't care about this, all the care about is nickling and diming customers.
From that point on I have been living on the edge because I don't want to pay for an upgrade before hand due to the fact I don't know how much bandwidth my server will be using. Even if I upgrade to a different package it does not offer an insurance due to the fact that if I receieve a large DDOS than I orignally predicted, I would still end up paying per gigabyte.
This company has turned from having potential to just making their customers run away. Now the other problems I had with Limestonenetwork is the support they offer, which has been declining since I joined. The associates are very rude and don't really care about the customer's experience. I didn't include every problem I had with Limestonenetwork because it would make it a very long read.
Network - 10/10
Downtime - 5/10
Customer Service - 2/10
Overall Experience - 4/10
Would I recommend this company? NO, I urge everyone to stay away, unless they like to deal with problems on a daily basis.
Also from reading other topics on this forum, I personally believe that Limestonenetwork is overselling and their network can not handle the load.
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Jul 31, 2007
This is my 1 month review on the company vt6 (vt6.co.uk). There is no doubt about it, they have the fastest reply times and most helpfull support. I started out on the basic plan and have just paid for the next one, i was upgraded allmost instantly but as i found it was no benfit to me i asked to downgrade and was again instantly downgraded and my money refunded.
As for the quality of the VPS, it is perfect. they dont cramm VPS's onto one server so each VPS runs smooth without any problems. Iv also had no downtime at all. Iv been with a few VPS's before this and none come close to pure quality and fantastic support that vt6 provide.
That is all for my one month review on this perfect company that i would deffinitly recommend to anyone seeking low cost quality VPS's (Or hosting that i assume will be exatcly the same)
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Jan 4, 2009
The speed seem good because all my sites still under development.
The support is poor because I send ticket to cancel hosting and get money back and they did not process the ticket.
The Cpanel version is very old and I lost some new features of cpanel.
Now the cpanel does not have button to change password . I unable to change my password now.
6/10 for lunarpages.
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Oct 15, 2007
For those who care to read on:
I came to use Liquidweb thorugh a string of random REALLY bad luck. From "Managed" VPS that ended up not getting patched and fried due to a security exploit (PowerVPS) to a RAID failure, during a backup, causing total data loss and backup loss (RockMyWeb's VDNet). I was ready to pull my hair out. So I decided to kick out the bucks for a Liquid Web VPS Plan 2 (with a great price from a special found here). All I can say is it was a night and day difference.
The server is fast. Remote access to this VPS is a fast as my dedicated server in the office. I thought moving to cPanel was going to slow things down but this thing flies! Wow!
The service is fast. I call support and a person picks up the phone. No e-mail. No long hold times. I call, someone answers, no need to transfer to a higher tech, it's just fixed. Wow!
The one downfall. And it's only a downfall if it's not what you want. cPanel only. I'm a big DirectAdmin fan, but I'm learning my way around cPanel again.
Until I'm ready to do dedicated (I'm guessing it's coming in 2k8) this thing is awesome!
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
1x Web Hosting Talk for hooking me up with Liquidweb.
1x Web Hosting Talk Community for reviewing Liquidweb.
1x Liquidweb for the awesome service!
1x VDNet. It may sound strange but they did answer e-mails faster than anyone I had ever seen (multiple replies in under two mins). They had a great price, but bad luck drove me to change. I'm glad I did, but I wouldn't have a hard time recommending VDNet now that they fixed the problem that caused the loss of my server. (and they did give me a month free) They really did give good value for the price, and offer DirectAdmin which Liquidweb doesn't.
Anyone else care to share?
P.S.
I'm not a fan of emoticons, but I did it out of love for you guys. Feel free to hammer the server a bit and tell me how fast the pages load. They're pretty quick here in Costa Rica:
CR Solutions Group Costa Rica Web Design.
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Apr 24, 2008
I've been with Steadcom for a few months now, and I greatly their services. Such great deals have been offered to me. Each time I talk with the staff, I seem to want to use their services longer. I'm currently working with my own free hosting company and I entrust my uptime and reliability to Steadcom. I've had no problems with either of those aspects and it seems like their network is as fast as Google. If you find a better deal than this, it would be a miracle. I am working on obtaining up to six months with them for my next payment. I would fully recommend Steadcom and their services. I give it all of my reputation and respect as a business owner to acknowledge such outstanding services.
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Apr 26, 2009
I have been with SoftLayer a month now, and this is my review of their company. I will start with my pre-sales experience, going into hardware, their network, server, portal, accounting/sales, and support .
[[[[[[[ PRE SALES ]]]]]]]
I started out looking for a new server by looking at some good dedicated hosts. I saw SoftLayer offered the new Nehalem series, so I went for it. Their sales team is excellent beyond all reasons -- the staff are personal and do NOT try to take your money; instead, they find the best-fit solution for you and work with you by calling you, showing you their specials, and talking to managers.
[[[[[[ HARDWARE ]]]]]]]
The Hardware at SL is top-notch. There's no problem with it, it's clearly stated in the portal what type of motherboard, HDs, RAM, etc are in the server and it's top-notch Supermicro hardware. I've never seen a problem with it, and I have seen the certificate of passing benchmarks as that is done on all SL servers by default.
Their provisioning system is excellent, I got my server in 2-3 hours at MAX. WOW! It is all inside the portal too; you can view the status (PE_BOOT, OS_RELOAD); it's clearly there and excellent. We finally got VIRTUOZZO (thanks natecarlson ) working with it too.
[[[[ SERVER ]]]]]
What can I say? This is the new Nehalem series. I think the deal I got was quite good, I brought several SL servers before I switched to this one, and it did take a while to get it down to this price (especially for SL quality, damn!) :
-Intel Dual Quad Core (2x) X5570 Nehalem 2.93GHZ w/ HT
-12 x 300GB SAS 15K Seagate Cheetah HD's in RAID 10
-12GB DDR3 RAM (to start)
-4000GB Monthly Bandwith
-1GigE Port Speed
-64 IP Addresses
-Monitoring & Automated Reboot
$1,100 a month -- which I think is good for this type of server.
It's blazing fast and 0 problems.
[[[[ NETWORK ]]]]
I started in their Dallas, TX datacenter with a Dual 5450, but decided to get a 2U server with SAS HD's. Sadly, they said they were out of stock in Dallas. They said they can get me an EXTRA DISCOUNT if I went to Washington DC. I live an hour or two from DC, so it was good for me. I debated, and talked to them, they said it was a great place and I went with their Washington D.C datacenter .
It's fast. Blazing fast. They have like 100GBPS connectivity -- with many backbone providers. I've never seen so many . I'm liking the nework speeds and it really is nice.
[[[[ PORTAL ]]]]
The best part. They have their 'manage.softlayer.com' and their mobile 'manage.softlayer.mobi' portals. They are excellent. I don't even need support, and when I do, it's there. I mean, I'm STILL exploring their portal system. It has so much stuff; "Instant cPanel Licenseing, Instant Firewall, Upgrades, IP's, OS reloads, Installs, Backups" -- I love it. It makes my life a lot easier and quiker. I've had a server with ThePlanet, HiVelocity, and more and SL portal blows them all away
[[[ SUPPORT ]]]
The support is great. In the times I need it, it's there. Within 15 minutes I get a response and usually in under an hour, a resolution. It's excellent in what they provide at an unmanaged rate, and the $3 tickets are great in my opinion for those quick issues that you just can't figure out. They even helped me with a bit of PHP help!
[[[ ACCOUNTING AND SALES ]]]
It's there any time I needed it. I got servers upgraded, downgraded, reclaimed, removed, created, OS reloaded, invoices adjusted, and it's there. They respond within 1 hour usually and it's great for a sales team. Personally it's awesome how they have excellent teams for support and sales! The reps are VERY nice and friendly too, and they offer some nice discounts .
[[[ OVERALL ]]]
I give SoftLayer a 10/10+. They are everything I expect from a provider (heck, they are better than most managed providers I've been with) and more. I urge you to try them out, they will try to fit your budget as good as you can do it.
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Mar 15, 2008
I'd first like to follow up with my end at GNAX. I ended up going down to them on the 31st to pick up my colo server and get my refund. All went generally well, except for the "I'll be back in 5 mins" that took more than 30 mins for some sales/billing guy to get me my stuff. Signed some papers, and my money was refunded in full. In the end, a happy ending with GNAX.
Now, while all that was ongoing, I moved over to a dedicated server at Softlayer quick as I could because I knew with 100% certainty that Jeff would have my service terminated when I posted the chat log of him threatening me - a controversial decision I still stand by for what it's worth.
First, lets talk about sales with Softlayer. My God - I have never seen anything like this. With GNAX, sales would consist of me sending a ticket and waiting days, or it getting closed randomly, then having to wait more and more. A 48-hour max setup time with GNAX ended up being 5+ days and still no setup. Softlayer. I was doing Live Chat with an agent who was extremely helpful. Too move the process along quicker, I asked if I could call and speak with him, and sure enough, he game me a toll free number and I spoke with him through the entire ordering process. Not only was he extremely knowlegeable and helpful, but he also pointed me to a special I was unaware of where I got double the RAM and a second hard drive for free. I ended up ordering a dual core Xeon setup, but I actually got setup with a quad Core Xeon X3220. No mistake they said, they were just out of what I ordered so they gave me a quad core for the price of a dual core. And all of this happened in less than 4 hours. Yep, that's right. I went from on the phone with sales to having my brand new quad core for the price of a dual core with twice the RAM and HDD for free in under four hours. I was actually shocked. After being with GNAX so long, I had no idea that anything even under a 24 hour wait was possible (which it wasn't with GNAX btw), and they didn't hold my order because of being short on inventory like GNAX did - they just gave me a free upgrade with no delay!
With GNAX, I have never been able to be in such control of my server as I am now with Softlayer. With GNAX, lets say, I wanted to change or add reverse DNS for an IP, I would have to send a ticket and wait hours and hours and hours for them to do it. With Softlayer, I login to the portal, and click click type, click and it's done and live. All by myself! Their portal is the most powerful thing I have ever seen and it allows me to do and see everything.
Their support, I'm convinced, is second to none. I once had three days of downtime with GNAX because of a hardware problem (their hardware) they just couldn't fix. The motherboard has gone bad and I had to wait three days for them to find another identical motherboard to replace mine with. Apparently, they don't like to keep hardware on hand in case of emergency. In the mean time, I was faced with a lot of pissed off people who couldn't access the server for three days while all GNAX did was "we're looking, we're trying". Three days downtime is unacceptable, GNAX's support is just horrible. Phone support is essentially non-existent. When, on occasion, people pick up the phone, I'm simply told to submit a ticket and they'll get to it - when it's convenient for them. Support with Softlayer is drastically different, I can call support and pick their brains on technical problems for as long as I need. Recently, something went wrong when I was moving IP addresses around with my servers, and I was able to submit a ticket, call them, and they resolved it while on the phone with me. Some other small issues cropped up, and I replied to the ticket as it was non-urgent, and they had it fixed it about 20 mins. THAT people, is how support. Again, after being with GNAX for so long and having to wait hours, and sometimes days for support, having things fixed on the phone with me or via ticket in under 15 mins really caught me off guard.
Sales - part two.
Incredibly impressed with the sales and support I have seen so far, I recently ordered a second server. Again, I did this over the phone and was given an amazing deal - one not even on their site! In the end, it'll save me about $60/month on my second server. Pretty decent I say.
Other stuff.
They have a forum! That's not what's cool in itself, but it's cool that its integrated into my portal account. Now, GNAX has a forum too, but you first have to email GNAX and ask for their blessing to sign up there.
Another nifty thing about Softlayer is their developer API. Their API enables tons of cool things, like I can see my uptime and bandwidth usage from within WHMCS. With GNAX, I would have to go find which one of my logins for their seemingly hundreds of disintegrated services. Having everything being in one place and under one login with Softlayer.
Basically, if you need a dedicated server provider, choose Softlayer. Leaving GNAX (well, being forced out) and moving to Softlayer is the best thing that has ever happened to me an my company.
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Oct 9, 2009
Alright, Ive been with them for a little over two months and I have been with them before. Their support is excellent, their servers' are excellent, their network is excellent, their portal is excellent, and not having to deal with Cogent directly is a joy.
I first singed on with them 11/9/08 till 12/29/08 everything went well I closed my account simply because I didn't need the server again.
My current server with them as of this post is $199.00/mth and I get the following
CPU : Xenon X3230 Quad Core @ 2.66 Ghz
Ram : 4GB
OS : Server Standard 2008 64 bit
1000 mbps 2 TB of bandwidth
Washington, DC Data Center
2x 250GB SATA II
174.37.243.170
Having a server with them has been nothing short of amazing zero downtime caused by them and most anything a managed host will do they will do for you free. I was having issues with routes and simply asked them and within ten minutes they had changed it according to what I would prefer. I have had a DoS attack before that was pushing 800 mbps of traffic and they sent me an email and I opened a ticket and they blocked the attackers' addresses at my switch. Very quickly and not much damage was done. Overall I'm very pleased and I would recommend them to anyone.
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Apr 9, 2009
Here is my review of Virpus after being with them for 1 month.
Uptime: 10/10
So far I have not experienced any outages and I am going to have to give them a 10 on that as I have seen many threads in the outages about them but it appears they solved that issue and I was never effected by any of those.
Support: 8/10
I will give the support a 8 as sometimes on off times it could take up to about 30 minutes for the first response which is great but then after that the responses tend to be around 2 hours or so. Overall though the support is great!
Price: 10/10
I signed up with there plan that was cPanel included and had double bandwidth and ram. I was thinking it was too good to be true and that the VPS was not going to be quality, but I am glad I was wrong!
Performance: 9/10
The performance of the server is overall great so far. I have had no issues as far as the server being anything but fast. I will have to commend them on having great hardware and not overselling there services like a lot of the VPS providers these days.
Overall: 9/10
I would highly recommend them as they have been a great provider overall and I hope that they keep up the good work in the future.
Domain has been reported for verification.
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Aug 22, 2008
I wrote an initial setup experience review of downtown host including support w/ transferring my sites a few months ago. Now I am going to extend the review with reliability, speed and performance.
So far, the support and helpfulness has been the same. Rarely does support wait longer than 10 min to respond to questions. They are always responded with a great attitude.
Reliability of all my sites has been 100%. I have seen no downtime at all since I got my account. Truly fabulous. The only time a site has gone down was not their fault...it was my fault...for messing up the database they restored it within minutes after I sent a high priority technical support ticket too.
Speed and performance go hand in hand. Sites are quick and responsive. Just as responsive as a content management system on any dedicated in my opinion. Download speeds are always the same. Never does the download or upload speed fluctuate by more than 10 kbps up or down from the average (totally unlike dreamhost where it would fluctuate as much as 400-500 kbps depending on the day).
All scripts I have used have responded very quickly without any problems that I would encounter with dreamhost (like cut off scripts due to time it took the servers to run through them).
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Aug 14, 2008
Man, it seems just like yesterday that I initially signed up for a VPS from SolarVPS, but the truth is, I have been with them for just over 6 months now.
What can I say about SolarVPS besides that they completely rock! Not to mention Douglas, but we won't go there
The Network
The network at SolarVPS is nothing short of amazing. I get lightning fast speeds and rock solid performance no matter the time of day. I have not experienced even one network hiccup in the 6 months that I have been with SolarVPS. I constantly get compliments from people about how fast the network really is.
The Hardware
SolarVPS uses nothing less than the best hardware. The VPS node that my VPS is located on has Dual Quad Xeons and performance is amazing. They do not overload their servers and use SLM parameteres with Virtuozzo instead of the old school UBC. I know that I can use all of my resources without battling with other VPS instances on the node.
The Support
Solar's support is by far outstanding. I have never had to wait for extended periods of time to get an answer to even the most complex questions. I can rest assured that no matter the time of day, or night, there will always be a Solar rep there to answer even the stupidest of questions, in a very timely manner. Unlike some hosts that I have used, Solar's support understands my questions and gets them taken care of instead of giving nonsense responses to try and buy time to get the job done.
The Overall Experience
The overall experience at SolarVPS is awesome. I know that I can trust my online business in their hands. SolarVPS is highly recommended to anyone who needs rock solid performance with extreme reliability.
Support - 10/10
Network - 10/10
Hardware - 10/10
The Staff - 10/10
Just a warning... Watch out for that Douglas character that mans their live chat.
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Apr 21, 2009
I've now been with Serveraxis for nearly 36 months and will make this fairly short and sweet - my experience with Serveraxis has been great. Uptime has been excellent with the vast majority of downtime coming from things such as a simple reboot for kernel upgrades. I think in those three years there have only been two cases of unscheduled downtime. Both times Serveraxis kept it's clients well informed and the downtime wasn't major - I believe due to hardware failure. There has been no unscheduled downtime for the past two years on my server, both of those cases were quite a while ago.
Their prices are very reasonable (and have even gone down once or twice) and the few times I've needed support they have been very responsive. They have also increased the amount of bandwidth and disk space multiple times at no additional cost to it's clients during the three years I have been with them.
On the whole, I think Serveraxis is phenomenal for users that just want an unmanaged VPS with rock-solid uptime and a great company behind them.
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Apr 14, 2009
I wrote a review of Tzulo last month before that attack occurred and the thread was lost along with all the other data. So I am writing a review again as I feel they deserve this.
I rented a VPS Large package in March in 2008 through their reseller and a few months later I was shifted to Tzulo as the reseller changed.
Tzullo servers are really great. They are quad core, their customer service is really great. I do own dedicated servers from other companies and Tzulo customer service is the best among all the web hosting companies I have experienced. I have contacted them via their ticket system and crazy hours like midnight and have gotten a helpful reply from them within 5 - 30 minutes.
I run two dedicated gameservers from the VPS I bought from them and I have never had any problems with their hardware. The net connection is really good also because there is never any lag on behalf of the server, I know a person who connects to my gameserver from australia and he gets a latency of only 250. The VPS's are based in Chicago.
They are really cheap considering they are based in USA. I have never seen cheaper reliable hosts in USA. They even offer a $10 'novice' VPS for people so they can check and experience the servers.
They offer linux and windows including control panels like hypervm and virtuozzo. You can do free re-installs, restarts, repairs from the online control panel.
Recently I recommended them to my friend also and he bought the medium package from them and it got activated within minutes of his payment confirmation.
Overall, my experience with them has been the best and that is why I am going through and writing this review again, I highly recommend Tzulo to all of you if you are looking for a good quality cheap VPS.
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Mar 29, 2009
my website is on digitallinx vps from abt 4 months. and in these 4 months i experienced 100% uptime. speed is pretty gud too. and most imp thing i liked abt them is their support that is great. they reply in timely manner no matter wat time of the day and they r really professionals whatever issue i had they always helped me. never heard no from them. i think space and bandwidth can every host provide but professional support is the most that we need. i ll stick to them as long as i could.
1.good speed
2.100% uptime (that's what i experienced)
3.greatest support
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Jan 18, 2009
what can i say, you get what you pay for but i think this is expensive!
i fell to the trap of unmetered bandwith. its true, it was really freaking fast speed.
BUT, ram is limited. especially if you run cPanel. i advise people not to use it.
Tickets were answered very fast. usually within 2~5 minutes. even faster at times.
downside: a bit expensive. even though unmetered bandwith, this is shared. also its tough to push much traffic because of the lack of ram. i think if you bought something with 1gig ram, you can find cheaper VPS.
also you are completely on your own with this VPS. nothing surprised i knew this going in. But then i discovered other services that provided managed VPS at even cheaper price! these were reputable companies too. Next time im just gonna go with managed service. wasted too much time compiling and learning how to do stuff.
I give : out of
I found lot of the reviews on here inaccurate. They are actually not bad.....but imo a bit expensive.
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May 1, 2009
From the moment that I signed up with them to now they have been on top of everything. Right after I created the account it took about 15 minutes for my site to be transferred over from GeekStorage and up and running on their servers. They respond their tickets very quickly, most of the time in less than 10 minutes.
I have not had many issues with them; the only issue I can recall was when a bot posted some weird scripts on my site. Even though my site was the only one attacked Tyler was very quick to respond and even offered me one on one support via Messenger. The problem was resolved with a quick password change.
Not only do they provide excellent support but they keep in contact with their customers. They email me from time to time to see how things are going and if I need any additional help. Most importantly, their servers are blazing fast and by no means do they overcrowd them. I can run Wordpress and Invision Power Board with no hiccups.
If anyone is in need of some quality inexpensive shared hosting then I would defiantly give StableHost a try.
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Feb 15, 2009
I have had a VPS with Level3Hosting for 1 month now and am happy to report that I am very happy with the VPS and the service and support. There was a couple of minor issues at first but these were quickly dealt with. The VPS is semi-managed and since I am quite new to the whole VPS thing I did have questions and concerns and Brian has always been fast to respond (where possible) and always been helpful and informative. Not all support questions were answered as fast as others but always easily within 24 hours and the higher priority ones answered sometimes within minutes. I had seen some negative comments about Level3Hosting here on WHT, as well as positive but I decided to go with what was advertised and so far am very glad that I did. Server uptime has been great (100% for me so far) and the VPS copes with what I have on it which is my own 4 websites and 4 radio ports all running 24/7 with no problems. I have searched for a cheaper deal that has everything I have now and no-one can come close, having said that, I purchased this VPS during the 50% off for life promotion so that explains a lot, however, even at full price it is still a good deal. So to summarise, my own personal experience of dealing with Level3Hosting has been a positive one and I hope that the service I get now is maintained and can continue for a long time as I will be a long term customer if it does.
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Jan 1, 2009
This is a quick review of the VPS Provider [url] I will highlight four things: Support, Speed/Network, Sales/Setup, and Overall.
I have been hosted at [url]for 1 month now about, with my domain [url], we have 3 Dedicated for VPS hosting and a Hybrid VPS for sales, but I preferred a offsite provider for our main domain [url] So we went with GeekStorage!
Support
Support has been excellent. Usually I have to request rDNS PTR but guess what, I didn't! It came all configured and everything. I've had two support tickets, one of which I've quickly resolved myself and the other one was fixed within a few hours.
Overall the support is excellent and nothing is wrong, a few extra techs could do (this is a personal pet peeve of mine but it isn't a problem with most, actually it's not much of a problem with me as I only had 2 support requests.)
Network and Speed
What can I say? They have their nodes at WebNX, a great provider! I get excellent pings, speeds, and my mail server etc. is nice and fast. I have 512MB guaranteed RAM but there are only 2 main sites on the VPS, using about 200-300MB of RAM (with cPanel/WHM).
Uptime has been superior, I've gotten 100% Network and VPS Uptime! Not even a second I've seen the network go down, for any reason. Only time when it was down was when I accidently blocked myself via IPtables, had to use a proxy to get in SSH/WHM and unblock myself , but that's another story there..
Sales
Setup time was average. Took about 36-40 hours for my VPS to setup, a bit long, but they made sure it was running great, gave me status updates, and Jay did everything he could to make my VPS run faster and smoothly through the queue. I used the 'WHT50MORE' special and got a generous 50% off my 2 month prepayment .
Sales is also great. They have an excellent portal and everything. I'd say there are no problems with their billing. I haven't had a chance to open a sales ticket but I'm sure that there would be no problem.
The free control panel that comes with each GeekStorage VPS is perfect, I find that a great need aswell.
Overall
GeekStorage is a excellent, top-notch company. I'd give it 5+ stars, and reccomend it to ANYONE else who is looking for a stable & fast VPS provider. Don't hesitate: Go Geek!
Verification for the MODs: Domain is [url] hosted via GeekStorage (they use dedicated servers/colo at WebNX)
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Apr 13, 2009
We're coming up on around 7 or 8 months with a low-spec machine at CoreNetworks, and overall I'm pretty happy with the service. I picked it up as something cheap for my personal sites, but I've snuck some work stuff on there too. At the time of ordering, the specs of the machine I was given exceeded the specs they were offering (3.0ghz instead of 2.4ghz, if I'm not mistaken), it was provisioned quickly and the option to use KVMoIP and do your own install was great.
Sales were exceptionally helpful prior to ordering the machine, and support were fast and friendly every time I needed their help. The on-demand KVMoIP was setup fast on the one occasion I've needed it - ticket created 9:23AM, Chemito responded at 9:26 and had it hooked up and emailed me the details at 9:34. When I first configured the machine, my third IP address was unusable because something got goofed. I filed the ticket at 12:27PM, it was fixed and I had a response by 12:34PM. In fact if I average out all the tickets I've filed (which admittedly are mostly silly issues), the average resolution time is under ten minutes.
The network isn't bad, the pings are slightly elevated and there are periodic bouts of DoS which are dealt with quickly. The network status page is updated frequently with regards to these incidents, which makes me happy as I'm all about honesty when something stops working. I decided to go with the 3mbps unmetered, because I don't really use the server for much and at the time I ordered it overages were crazy expensive - they appear to have come down in price quite a bit.
The one-time upgrades for RAM and suchlike are great, it helps to keep the bottom-barrel monthly pricing with only a modest up-front cost. They also have an automated remote-reboot system in addition to the on-demand KVMoIP. The setup fees can be a little hard to swallow for the budget market, but on the whole it's completely worth it if you plan on staying any length of time.
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Feb 10, 2009
A few reasons I got hosting with this company. I was having some issues with the support staff at hostpc.com I mean to me they just made me feel they did not care. So any way knowing how busy my site has gotten on hostpc I thought I needed vps. So came in and looked through the offers section and asked many questions to a lot of them that looked interesting and in my price range.
Mddhosting was the one that stuck out the most and every time I talked to support before I got service they really showed they cared about me and were honest and helpful. Much like the feeling I get with downtownhost and everity.
I went ahead and signed up for a vps with them and support iis still the same I mean good. They even helped me with my shoutcast needs which is actually above an beyond and wow have I had to contact them a lot of shoutcast issues which at this time are all fixed and none really had to do with my vps server. All the issues were either the bouncy radio software I was using or a dj messing things up.
the service has been great no down time that I know of and its fast.
This is why I added them to my great host list.
Sites with them are: [url]and [url]
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May 7, 2009
INITIAL CAVEAT: My site is not yet live yet so none of this review takes into account production loads. I am currently using the vps mostly for learning and development.
Website is [url]
Yes I know it's under construction this is more of a side project/learning experience for me in the realm of server management/setting up and running a site through Drupal.
tl;dr 9/10 Much better then I expected for the small price I'm paying. I would highly recommend them.
Sales 10/10
I emailed Rick before signing up and I explained what I would be doing with the site and which level of serviced he recommended. We came to an agreement on there Mach 2 service. His response to this email was quick. Once I signed up setup was instant
Value 10/10
I have there Mach 2 service which for $12 a month (after a coupon I used) offers: 512 mb Ram guaranteed with 1 gig burst, equal cpu and plenty of disk space/bandwidth (honestly I'm not too concerned about those so I dont' know the exact figures of the top of my head)
Uptime 8/10
Had a few hiccups over the first 3-4 days with a total of about 3-4 hours downtime over 2 incidents but was kept informed the whole time and they regularly update the network status page in wmhs if something goes awry. Since then I've had 0 downtime.
Speed 8/10
Again during the first week I experienced some slow down doing various YUM updates but after they performed some work on it everything seems to be going quite fast. I'm EXTREMELY pleased with the download speeds I'm getting from home. I've used this as an intermediary for some video files that my friends and I are editing together and we're consistently getting 400k downloads everywhere from Ohio to Maine. Uploading is a little slower but at 100k it's probably limited by our home pipes. None of have access to a t1 to check.
Tech Support 7/10
I've put in 4-5 tickets and the response times have varied from a few minutes to a few hours. Nothing egregious and certainly better then I would expect from 12 bucks a month (I've got no illusions about you get what you pay for!) They have been very knowledgeable and never have I put in a ticket only to find out I had to explain as if to a child what I needed done (Yea I'm kinda bitter about this from other experiences, does it show )
Overall 9/10
Let me just say that I'm not sure if this is somethign standard among openvz/hypervm vps's but I am in love with the included backup and restore options along with being able to set up notifications if my services go down without having to figure out how to do it using monitoring daemons myself (nor would I know where to begin...)
They have a ton of os options and they load quite quickly if you need to reload (about 5-6 minutes) and I really love the ability to be able to do a quick (like 2 minutes) backup of your entire system once you have it the way you like. I've used this numerous times as inevitable I screw up something while playing around and with 3 clicks and 5 minutes I can have the system the way it was last time it worked. Then once I get everything working I can make the next incremental backup (again quickly) and move on.
Again I cant say that this is unique to vpsspeed but it sure is awesome.
In short I would highly recommend Rick and his team if you are thinking about getting into the vps domain (for lack of a better word)
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