Before going to CP I contacted the owner on here on WHT and asked him some pre sale questions. He was very helpful and informative and he didn’t care how many questions I had.
After signing up with the hosting my account was created instantly and I was ready to go. Then I downloaded the free WHMCS that I got from CP and my hosting was already up and ready to sell. Since signing up with CP I have already sold so much hosting just by marketing their features on my website.
The support team is very fast and informative. The first time I sent in a ticket I expected to wait until a couple of hours later or even a day, I had a reply in under 30 minutes. My issues have always been resolved within a hours even if they happen at 3 a.m. Support is one of the main things I look for in a hosting provider and this company surely provides that.
The servers are amazing, they are configured with many different features and add-ons.
Part of picking my reseller I wanted to make sure I found a host with at least fantastico and other basic cpanel things but CP had the latest MySQL and PHP which is great. It also comes with Ruby on Rails which a lot of customers enjoy having. This has really been one of my key marketing tools.
Like most people think that the most important thing about finding a host is finding one that will not have data loss. Their servers are RAID protected on 7 different discs, this is very re-assuring. I also like the instant back ups they offer which makes it easy to maintain your own back ups.
In all I have to say this is the best host I have ever used I hope to be a long time client. I would just like to thank CP and their support team for such a great experience so far, and especially for migrating all of my 131 accounts manually.
First off, thanks to all you folks at Web Hosting Talk forums for helping a newbie like me in taking the fist step towards an online presence. The inputs of members on WHT have been not only helpful but also educating and informative. Would like to specially thank Jedito and Aussie Bob for their time and assistance as well.
I have now decided to go for Shared Hosting with Crucial Paradigm.
Ijan who goes by the nickname CrucialP has been very kind and has given a huge discount for the first year, considering this is for a uni project. He has patiently replied to all my queries that I have been bombarding him with. Ranging from the real silly ones, right to the technical queries that deal with the uni project.
Most of the questions were, more because I am new to this and apprehensive in taking the next step, which is, choosing the “right” host.
What was surprising, besides the huge discount that brought a big smile on my face, was that once I registered on the Crucial Paradigm website (which was last evening at 5:30pm), they already set up my account and sent me details/password/access etc. before I even made the payment.
Since I already had a domain name registered with Answerable, I made the Name Server changes this morning. I instantly got my splash page up and running.
I thought this would take anywhere between 24 – 48 hours so was surprised to see it happen instantly.
So far, it’s been great dealing with Crucial Paradigm. Thanks Ijan/CrucialP.
I hope to keep posting here in between uni assignments and tinkering with websites to see how this goes further.
Support response time is in minutes. Just like Support everywhere, reading ticket histories gets overlooked, so you often have to repeat entries. Keep entries short to aid reading comprehension. Even at "B," Support is the best I've encountered in seven years and about a dozen hosts.
Gopikrishnan in Support is superb - actually agrees with my tickets, and when the problem can't be corrected, satisfies me with a valid technical reason and suggests a workaround.
After upgrades to cPanel, Horde is initially problematic - you have to reset an option or two and sending email may not work at first.
Has anyone else had a real issue with Crucial Paradim and some of their business practices? We started a VPS there for a project that was time sensitive, we had issues from the start with not only the control panel but support as well. You send a support issue in, it get's picked up by someone and then pitched off to someone else to resolve.
Needless to say the original issue that should have been resolved by the first tech ended up getting touched by 4 techs and took several hours to fix. We ended up going with Linode.com which has worked from signup without any issues at all and yet Crucial Paradim refuses to cancel the account or offer a refund above 30% of the month we paid for, even though all of the issues were due to their CP software and support, and we used their service for 4hrs at the most....out of a whole month!
I have build one site on Crucial Paradigm web hosting at one year ago.Now,I will say,Crucial Paradigm web hosting is very perfect,this include two section,service and hosting.
Crucial Paradigm service is Professional and Efficient.When I encounter difficulties at anytime,I only need to submit one Support Tickets，this problem will resolve timely.Perfect Customer Service is very important for user,Crucial Paradigm works fine at everytime.
Crucial Paradigm hosting is stability and high-performance.Every PHP or CGI script will be running well.And,Crucial Paradigm allow SSH access and offer static IP for web hosting.I have recieved the notice when server will updated at eachtimes.I don't found Crucial Paradigm hosting is break without notice.
Overall Crucial Paradigm is one relied and high-performance hosting company.
I would like to state my first impression from steadfast.
Signup + Account Setup : 5/5
I've signed up and paid with paypal - few minutes after i paid my account was ready and i got the welcome email with all the account details.
Performance + Uptime : 5/5
Download speeds are high and the server i am on is reacting quickly. I monitor uptime with siteuptime and during those two weeks there was no downtime at all.
Support : 5/5
The truth is i only opened 3 or 4 tickets when the account was created and i had questions regarding the mail filters. To all tickets i got answered in less than 10 mins with a detailed reply. It was also nice to see the staff there change shifts as i had different people handling my issues depending on the hour.
Overall, during those first two weeks - i am very pleased being a client of steadfast.
Here is my review for GeekStorage after about 3 weeks with them. I'm also looking on suggestions for a new host, more explained below.
Signing up was a snap and I payed with Paypal. At first everything seemed smooth but I slowly started to notice that my site was loading slowly, even slower than my old host (dot5hosting-yuck) To top it off, the pages that where loading slow where just normal static html pages. Php pages like wordpress and my forum where even slower. At times, the speeds did get a little faster but then at other times they would slow down.
Their support team is alright, some tickets would get answered in less than an hour while others would take more than 3-5 hours. They did help me reinstall some databases and I give them props for that.
Many people did complain in the forums of the same "speed" problem I had but the team offered no solutions except that they "where looking in to it". They claimed that one of their servers had many users abusing the resources. They moved me to another server which was a bit more stable, but again the slow speeds would creep at times.
Overall, GeekStorage was not what I expected it to be. Good thing I still have the 60 day guarantee.
Now here is my question to you all: I'm looking on switching hosts. I want a host that is not only stable (speed-wise) and that is fast. I run static html, and php (wordpress and IP Board) I was looking into Surpass hosting, what do you think about it, is it fast and stable?
Want to share my expirience after 2 weeks on limestone netwroks and psm.
For starters - i'm very happy with the service (~230$/m)
I started out with a webmin controled server without management and after 2 days of try and fail and new threads in wht i finally switched to cpanel with psm service, switch was really fast and limestone has a deal which gets you 5 bucks off psm's monthly fee.
limestone accually reinstalled my server and added cpanel and then contacted psm to get my software initialied (i even got my software configs set as my old server so i'll have a stable move).
software initiation took about 2 days with psm but that's due to special software requirment needed for my site to transfer.
responce times from psm and limestone are lightning fast and besides an overcharge of 39 bucks due to new software bug on limestone(got 40$ back yay), I can barely say something bad about this new system of running my dedi server with both limestone taking care of hardware and psm for all software issues - both do really well and fast on answering any kind of ticket.
ill give one example for this on the ticket i submited yesterday to psm, all my sent php mail() came out as spam on gmail.com, after contacting psm i got answered in less than 1 hour that my reverse dns aren't set correctly - then i got them setup with limestone and it took about 90 minutes to close this whole issue.
being moved from shared hosting to dedi servers I must say to all the new movers out there like I was that the combinitation of limestone + psm is great, you'll get fast and quallity support on all ends.
i've left out other info like uptime because this has been mentioned before and when combining the included psm monitoring with the great limestonenetworks uptime, downtime is a word i really forgot about.
I’m writing a review on Zogmo. We have only been with them for a few weeks, so this is more of an initial review of them. Note: We have moved our equipment to Zogmo from Corporate Colocation (see other thread) over the past few weeks.
Background: After spending a month and a half or so doing research on some colocation providers in Texas, I ended up choosing Zogmo. They had some great reviews here on WHT and Linn was always available to answer any questions that I had, even when places like Colo4Dallas were closed.
Sales: Overall, Linn is a great person. He was always available via phone or email anytime of the day, which is something that was pretty important to me. There was a little bit of a delay in getting the contracts sent out to me and the initial setup was a little slow. I pulled my launch date a little close, but once I was in contact with Scott at Zogmo he was able to fill me in completely and communicate a launch date and status. At the time of sending my servers, I didn’t have my IP’s but the technical support guys at Zogmo got that all setup for me free of charge. As apart of my rack, I should have received a remote reboot port but they didn’t have one on hand, so they had to order one. But, we are still waiting for it to come in (The only thing I wasn’t completely satisfied with, but everything else makes up for it). I think that Linn just got a little too busy when we were finalizing the contract portion, but he was very lenient and he did work with me to get things done. Overall, I would rate sales a 9.2/10
Technical Support: Overall, it’s the best I’ve seen so far. I’m able to get a hold of someone 24/7, which is very nice. The techs there are very knowledgeable and any of my questions are immediately answered or passed onto someone who would know. For the past few weeks I have been working with Scott at Zogmo on getting my rack setup and some miscellaneous issues. He has done a great job with keeping me updated and he went the extra mile every single time to make sure that there wasn’t a better way to fix something and to make sure it was fixed properly. Overall, I would rate technical support a 9.8/10.
Datacenter: They defiantly did a superb job at setting up the datacenter. Everything is very neat and clean, and the datacenter is kept very cool. When they setup my first two servers for me, things were very neatly setup on my rack. I like to have things organized to an extent and have everything recorded in case I need it, and they obviously express the same desire. All the racks were kept closed and locked and they keep records of those coming in and out of the datacenter, so I felt as if my machines were secure. They also had a nice bench setup with a variety of tools and supplies that I was able to use (Not something you see often). Linn had no issues answering any questions that I had and he was happy to show me around the building. They defiantly have a very sound operation and I have been very pleased with my visit to their datacenter. I will give them a 10/10 so far.
My Visit I spent a couple days in Houston, so I could get my servers setup on my rack. When I first arrived in Houston, Linn was happy to pick us up and take us out to dinner. They made me feel as if we were a huge client, when in fact we are one of the smaller fish in the pond. Without a doubt, everyone at Zogmo knows what customer service is and how it should be done – It seems that’s a little hard to come by these days. I was very impressed with the overall experience and I can say that my switch from Corporate Colocation was a good one. Overall, I can say my experience with Zogmo has been great. I would defiantly recommend them to anyone looking for colocation in Houston. You won’t be sorry.
I will do a more detailed review of them a few months down the road, when we have had a little more experience with support and their network.
Anyone knows if crucial.com.au is really Crucial Paradigm? I placed an order on this website for a VPS for a customer of mine on 19th, paid the invoice on the same day using PayPal, but my order was never setup. 2 days ago I submitted a Support ticket but they still don't answer it. It's now over 1 week since I ordered. Just a warning to anyone considering this company.
Crucial Hosting portrays their business to very customer service oriented.
I found their service to be horrible. They take forever to respond to a ticket. Then they respond by asking you to open another ticket.
Their on-line help is week and their tech support people are just rude and un-helpful. After all that when you try to cancel they just basically force you to have to dispute the charges.
I too am having an awful time with Crucial (crucialwebhost.com). I've been with them for three months and each month there has been a server issues that cause my sites to not function. They use Softlayer so you would think it would be better.
When I report problems I feel as though I am being stalled. Some of their people are really good but others just don't want to be there (you can tell) it's a flip of the coin.
We are building a new shopping cart for our ecommerce site and plan to use magento. As I understand it magneto is and incredible cart but also a resource hog that doesn’t work well with $10-20 a month shared hosting.
We have narrowed it down to two options.
The $100 a month plan from crucial. Which is still shared but it is limited. I think they split the server below into ten virtual servers and each virtual server has 5 users. I like them because they seem to be interested in optimizing the server environment for use with magento .
The other option is a fully dedicated server from the planet. . The people building our site recommend this option because it is dedicated.
They have a dedicated sever with the specs below for $147 with the promo code DX [url] Package name- Dual Xeon 2.8 - IDE Harddrive-2 x 80 GB IDE/SATA HDD RAM-2 GB Bandwith-2500 GB 5 IPs
The second week of July AmeriHosting moved my VPS to a new server or something and changed my IP addresses. No big deal, except the move failed miserably. My sites were down for a week. Shortly thereafter, email was down also for a week. What had worked on the old VPS did not work reliably on the new VPS. Messages sent to support went unanswered, or were given inadequate responses. They also could not go back to the old VPS which was working acceptably (and had for 2 years); I do not know why. No backup was made or else they could have gone back. That's what I think anyway. On the new VPS they did not have the same version of PHP or PHP modules. This broke some of the sites; and asking them to correct the problems as they were discovered took several days up to a week. Now the first week of September, and problems persist. This time I cannot issue a backup in Virtuozzo. This has been going on for 2 weeks. I get a response every couple of days about this is being looked into and they will respond, but no one ever does.
I've been told on several occasions the past week that they were going to move me to a new VPS but keep my IP addresses; this has not yet happened and it has been a week.
Twice I was told it would take only a few minutes to do this and it would be done that day. It has not yet been done. To add to the matter, I prepaid for a year, and I have 6 months hosting left with them. So I feel pretty damn screwed. My largest hosting customer has just moved sites from my service to another service this past week, so I am clearly losing revenue from this ordeal. Phone calls have gone unanswered (during the freakin' day!). Messages to billing and support get absolutely no response. Tonight I left a message that I wanted the name of the president or owner and his phone number so that I might enlighten him about the problems his customers are having and the dire straits his business is in.
At one time I would have recommended AmeriHosting.
Not now. Not ever. Don't even consider AmeriHosting. They'll **** you good at some point and harm YOUR business and YOUR CUSTOMERS' businesses, too.
We've been using MyVPSHost without many issues for years now. We use them so much that we've shipped them our own personal hard drive to operate our VPS on. They were always pretty fast and responsively up until recently.
I use cPanel on the VPS and we ran into a licensing issue in which it appears MyVPSHost has installed a server license on our VPS and not a virtual server one (We use cPanel VPS Optimized). You can't access cPanel, WHM, Webmail, etc. due to this error.
I've gotten no response back from MyVPSHost via e-mail, ticket, or phone. Every ring goes straight to voicemail and /dev/null. I've gone as far in desperation as contacting their provider, the name on the cPanel license (FastServers), however since I'm an end-user of a third party they can't help me. I also contacted cPanel who confirmed the machine is probably licensed incorrectly, however since the license wasn't purchased directly from cPanel, they can't help me either...
A quick look on their website reveals a company forum filled with recent complaints, offline servers and no replies from anyone working at the company. Is this an abandoned ship? Susy used to be very quick with everything and now I feel like she was the only person there and she passed away last week because the company isn't saying anything, she's not saying anything... we're just dead in the water.
What's the deal here? And if I get the hard drive back from them... where do I go?
After loads of head scratching and months of searching for a UK Dedicated Server i finally come across Rapid Switch, And at only £46per month after VAT (Tax) i am extremely impressed at my Core 2 Duo Server.
That works out at just shy of $100usd per month which in my opinion for a UK Based server is an AMAZING price!
A few points since i signed up last sunday (1 day before bank holiday monday!) - I paid direct with my Credit Card, no PayPal nonesense - I Submit 2 or 3 support tickets to check response speeds etc, and didnt wait over 2mins for a reply! - They got my server deployed between 11pm and 9am thats on a sunday night/bank holiday monday! - They responded VERY well to my additional IP Request (Within 5mins)
All in all my first weeks experience with Rapid Switch has been amazing, So good ive subscribed my card for the many many months to come using there services!
Brand new to posting on this forum, but been browsing for a while. Also brand new to VPS, but i recently decided to take my first plunge into the VPS world. I've been using Iron Mountain VPS for about 3 weeks now, and since there seems to be very little talk about their services on this forum, I thought it would be useful to post my opinions, and maybe get the opinions of some others about this provider.
My Background: I began my search for web hosting because I had been hosting my own email server at home, but began to have several issues keeping the server up and running (power outages, network outages, power supply failures, etc...). My wife was complaining about her email being down, so I began looking for a more reliable solution I'm also a software developer, so I also had some interest in running some "hobby" type j2EE programs, so I began to look at VPS solutions. Since I am pretty technically inclined, I was just looking for a low cost unmanaged VPS solution with at least reasonable reliability that was powerful enough to run j2ee applications, host email, and run a couple other services like hosting my digital photos and setting up a versioning control repository (svn). I actually took the time to make a speadsheet to compare over 10 VPS providers, and eventually found Iron Mountain to be the best solution for me.
Setup: Their sales department was VERY quick to answer my questions, and very accomodating to my requests. I purchased their Pearl package online, and once the transaction was complete, I recieved an email that I could already log into my control panel. Here is the timline that things happened:
11:35am - Purchase transaction complete 11:36am - Recieve email on my billing info, and how to get into my VPS control panel. 11:48am - Recieved email that my VPS has been initialized, and I can no SSH to my instance 12:22pm - Recieve email that they have already setup a MySQL database for me (on their servers), and it is ready to use (without me even asking mind you). 4:31pm - I send an email (not even a support ticket) saying that I actaully prefer PostgresSQL 4:40pm - Recieve email that they will setup a Postgres instance for me 5:34pm - My PostgresSQL instance is up and ready to go (on their servers!)
So in summary, that is 13 minutes from purchase to having my instance up and running. 34 minutes additional to have a database ready for me to use (without me even asking for one). And another hour of time it took them to get a Postgres instance up for me... Not bad
Perfromance/Reliability: Let me preface this by saying that I am a father of 2 with a full-time job, so I really don't have time to run benchmarks and such. Also, my VPS is more of a personal site, so I don't have to worry about reliability as much as say a reseller or ecommerce customer. So I'm only basing these comments on preception and my knowledge of the technology Iron Mountain uses. In genereal, I have experienced NO downtime, and performance seems VERY quick. My J2EE application almost seems to run faster off these servers than it does on my localhost development environment... which is good enough for me.
Now let me rant about why I am very comfortable with their ability to continue to have great perfromance and reliability. One key here is that this is clustered web hosting! This means they have (for example) 30 servers working together like 1 giant computer. This giant computer runs all of their customer's VPS instances. If one server were to fail, nobody is losing service, it just means that there are now only 29 servers making up this one giant computer until they can get #30 back up and running. This not only protects us customers against one possible cause of downtime, but it also allows Iron Mountain to do server maintanence and upgrades without interupting any of their customer's service. My employeer has a similar setup in their datacenter, so I am semi-knowledgable on the benefits of a cluster. Now their service could still go down because of things like network issues (which is often out of the control of the VPS provider), but at least it removes risk at one point of failure. If you need anything more reliable than this, you should consider other alternatives such as having a mirrored service with another VPS provider on a completely different network.
Another HUGE selling point for me is that they host my databases, email, and spam filters (and DNS if you need to use it) on THIER servers! All three of these can potentially hog system resources (disk space, memmory, and bandwidth), so to not have them taxing my personal instance is HUGE. This also spares me from having to configure and maintain these services on my own. Oh, and to top it off, the perfomance of these services are VERY fast. However, the flexibiblity is there if you decide you want to host your own database and email on your own servers (obviously).
Support: As I mentioned earlier, I only really needed an unmanaged provider, and I haven't experienced any issues to this point, so my opinion on their support is limited. However, I have sent about 5-7 emails their way, and have received a response from them within 10 minutes every time! This gives me quite a bit of comfort should a real issue arise.
The funny part of all this is that I can not tell whether Iron Mountain's plans are managed or unmanaged. I guess they are at least semi-managed, as they have setup a database for me without any questions. I guess my question is whether they are fully managed (ie will do backups and install custom apps for you) or not... Maybe an Iron Mountain rep can chime in here.
Summary:
VERY smooth sailing so far. I have email, databases, subversion, apache, tomcat and more running, and still have plenty of resources left over for more. Sales/Support has been VERY friendly, and I have no concerns their. For what I need out of a VPS, who could ask for more. Their prices are also very reasonable, and their new Quartz plan is an amazing deal for a hobbyist like myself. Not really much to critisize at this point, but I will keep this forum up to date if anything arises.
I've ordered server from LeaseWeb two weeks ago and still wait for the server setup. Its looks to slow for me - we are used to wait only a few hours for servers setup in datacanters in the US.
I'm afraid that such slow response will be also in response and level of the support. Do you think I should cancel this service and look for other provider in Europe? If yes please suggest such provider.
I've paid in advance by paypal for 3 month(~ 500 EURO). Do you think I will be able to cancel that payment?
I've been a layeredtech customer since early 2005, and until this last insane price-hike fiasco, I've never had a major complaint. But now it keeps getting worse.
I wound up keeping this particular server around after the price hike (for several reasons, one of which was misinformation from a LT sales person regarding the prepay option) and several days ago received an email stating that my server would have to be moved, and that due to the chassis type of my old server, they could not move my server, I would need to migrate to a new server.
The email was less than forthcoming with details, so I tried to phone the person who sent me the email. The call went straight to his voicemail, where I left a couple messages asking him to return my calls, which he never did.
Finally I called their Sales department to figure out what was going on, and finally spoke with a nice & friendly guy (in a different department), who he stated that he felt like he was in the middle, and he just wanted to help us (the affected customers) out. Okay, I figure I can handle moving all my custom software to a new server figuring that they would find some comparable piece of hardware to move me to at the same cost.
No.
I was told I would have to pay around 10% more per month for a server with only a slightly faster CPU, only 1GB of ram and only 1 hard-drive (current server has 1.5GB of ram & 2 hard-drives mirrored)
Oh, and I have to have everything moved by the 18th of October. And I'll have to pay for 2 servers while I move. Or, I might be able to have the server moved to a different space at Savvis, but that would likely only be a short-term solution, and this situation would come up again.
I find this really appalling--they really must hate their customers who helped them through the early years!
We first noticed the issue on July 19th, Backups were taking a while to transfer from our own servers, and we were getting tickets from clients asking why this was happening. At the same time, it took about 4-5 minutes to log into the backup console. Issue seemed to correct itself so that backups were possible, and we assumed that scott would be aware of it and would work to resolve it.
Again on the 29th it slowed completely again. We immediately dispatched an email to their support email asking whats up, gave them detailed information such as access to the script and the output so he could monitor it.
The same day a few hours later we got a response that he would run the script and monitor it.
On the 31st, after not getting an update I asked what was going on. He said he ran the script, it seemed to stall for long periods of time and he would know more in the afternoon.
After not getting an update for ~5 days I asked what was going on and I expressed that i was not happy with the lack of communication/updates ont he situation. He updated me later that day saying that we weren't the only ones being affected. Fair enough, he is working on it. Thats all I wanted to hear.
Now ever since that email I received on the 5th (AUG) it has been up and down and all over the place.
After seeing him post on the forums I sent him a PM (10th August), summed up it was basically saying I had an issue, and I need it fixed. I figured since the PM system is usually pretty good at not losing them that he would see it and respond accordingly, that way there was no chance of it being lost from point A to point B as an email.
Well to this day, no response nor resolution.
I really have exhausted all points of communication, and I want to make it clear that I am not bashing them, when it works it's great. But maybe someone else affected can provide more insight..
I've been hosting my personal sites with MonkeyWrench Hosting for around three years now (coming up in January I believe), and I figured I'd share my experiences with them!
I've gone through a few hosts in my time, and some of them have been pretty rough. After using paid hosts, a niche free host started up that I stayed with for around a year before they eventually closed down.
I switched to MonkeyWrench Hosting at that point as a place to host my sites and store my files, and I have to say that I've been impressed throughout the time I've been with them.
Uptime/speed: Fantastic! The sites have been perfectly reliable and speedy whenever I've gone to access them, and I haven't had any complaints from users. I did come across MySQL going down on one of the servers (I have two accounts for different purposes that are on seperate servers) in the past, but it was resolved quickly before I even needed to get help.
Support: I've used the support a few times, but not for anything critical since there's not been the need. However, everything that I have asked was answered promptly in a professional manner.
Pricing: Again, no complaints here. The pricing is pretty cheap, especially for the quality of service receieved. They aren't the cheapest on the Internet by any means, but you generally get what you pay for. I'm aware of what my realistic space/bandwidth needs are anyway, and I'd rather pick a host that clearly advertises what you'll receive over an 'unlimited' host.
All in all, MWH have been a fantastic choice and I couldn't have hoped for anything better.
So, thumbs up to Jonathan, and keep up the good work!
I'll report my domains for the moderators to check them out. =)
I've been very happy with Virpus since I joined. There was 1 issue that has plagued me since the beginning and that was that I was not receiving e-mails on my ISP e-mail, my main e-mail. Not to big of an issue except that I didn't get any news updates or know when my tickets were replied to, or even when I was past due on my bill. 3 tickets later and their solution was for me to use another e-mail address, which was kind of a pain for me since each of my e-mail addresses has a specific reason which only specific e-mail get sent there for organizational reasons.
First off I have to say the VPS I was using was top notch. It easily outperformed my LiquidWeb VPSs and quickly became my primary VPS instead of my backup like was intended. I took advantage of one of their specials a while back which was a 512MB RAM cPanel VPS for $19.50/month which is a steal since the cPanel license alone is $15/month!
So now to why this is probably my final review of this company. Communication is lacking greatly. It was good at first, but now it's non-existant.
Over the weekend all my sites went down and I had no idea why... because I never got the e-mail saying they were moving data centers (if it weren't for a small thread on WHT I would never have known). I also did not receive any updates on extending their ETA so yet again I had nothing to tell my clients. The only good thing was that I run a free hosting company (Host2x.com for reference) and I offer no uptime guarantee since it's a non-paid service.
Ok, so the sites are back online and everything is working nicely... well I recently hit the 70% mark on my disk space usage so time to start looking for an upgrade. I created a ticket on April 23rd asking if they would allow me to upgrade my plan to their biggest VPS plan and to my surprise I never got a reply. I would think that a billing ticket asking to upgrade to a plan that costs more without the transfer of the discount I'm receiving would be a welcome ticket for them to reply to, but I was incorrect in thinking this. So I ended up purchasing a dedicated server last night because I cannot wait to see if they will assist me with upgrading my account or not.
What seemed to be a good company quickly turned to nightmares. I purchased a couple domains. All went well. Then paypal emailed me saying they are high risk and wanted me to confirm I made the payment and service was given. So until I did the payment was held. They blame the held on me and threatened me to release it or they will cancel my account.
So they finally gave them the money and all was well. Well I did a stupid thing and decided to get a VPS from them, they have good deals so I thought, whats the worse that can happen. Well shortly after, I get a email saying because your payments are unreliable, we are waiting a week to setup your vps which is complete udder crap.
So I just said screw it and said give me a refund then and about 2 hours ago I try logging into my client center and my account is gone.
I am hoping one of them see this so we can get this worked out. In the mean time I opened disputes on all of the payments.
I just want to take the time and review Hivelocity. Boy oh boy, where to start. I am just so pleased with the customer support they offer and I don't even own a single product with them.
I currently own a server with another comapny and I am always looking at other options for cheaper prices, better services and etc.
I found Hivelocity through WHT and I took the time to start up a live chat which was answered quickly from Kevin. Kevin was very nice and welcoming. I was asking about discounts they could provide and etc. Kevin showed me their reseller program which seemed to be something I may be interested in. After a 15-20 minute chat with Kevin, he offered to add me on MSN if I ever wanted to chat which I thought was pretty nice.
After I got off live chat with Kevin, I decided to keep researching Hivelocity. I immediately signed up on Twitter (I never had a Twitter Account). I saw they had some awesome deals. They were offering an awesome deal today it looks like this:
"The next person to go to our site, open a live chat and say "I just got your TWEET" gets a Core2Duo 3.0Ghz e8400 for $5 the first month."
By time I even got onto Twitter, I noticed that this was already taken. I kept browsing their Twitter and hey what do you know, another great deal it followed like this: "The 1st $5 Core2Duo sold in about 20 seconds so lets do it again. The next person to open a live chat saying "Give me a $5 Server" gets it."
I decided I was going to be late as the last one sold in 20 seconds. Well, it turned out it did get sold but, I got into a Live Chat with David from Hivelocity.
David informed me that the server was sold and I was a bit too late. What do you know, more great discounts! He offered me the same server for $5 on the first month. I decided not to take advantage of the offer as I wouldn't be able to put much use to the offer. I will be moving to Hivelocity within the next 1-3 months.
Overall I am very pleased with the great offers they provide and the support is just amazing!
Based on the sales support and the deals they provide, I did a bit of a rating on Hivelocity.
Sales Support:5/5 Deals:5/5 Overall:5/5
Also, if you decide your interested in Hivelocity's awesome offers, I would follow them on Twitter! They are constantly updating their Twitter and offering great deals. Their Twitter deals are 100% and it's pretty awesome a company like Hivelocity offers products and support so great!
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.
I've got high end server from WholeSaleinternet.I've been with Wholesaleinternet for 4 months now and I am extremely happy with them.Got an awesome server for a cheap price, a Quad-Core Xeon 8 Processor (3.0GHZ), 32GB RAM, 100mbit port link. Support:
Sales support is slow but tech support is fast!
That you very much Aaron/Wholesaleinternet!, keep up the good work!
I have posted an review earlier as well for 2 month : 2 month review
Let me summarize my experience so far,
Technical Support - 10/10 Really fab. even though I was on semi-managed plan, they never made me feel I was on a semi it always felt as if I was under complete management, they did every task I had asked them to do, which I didn't get on any other semi-managed host earlier.
I have no sort of complaints about their technical team, they tried to solve some problems which were due to the billing dept.
The minimum response for a ticket generally around 10-15mins and the completion with in an hr.
Billing Dept - This is some dept. that has kept me in wonder-land. Some times the replies were so pleasing and most other times the tickets are ignored. From, almost 2nd r 3rd month, the billing dept. tickets don't get regularly replied and used to bump the tickets in order to get a response to the query. Which I got some how, in a apologizing manner (no complaints for that :p)
Now, for the past 1 month we have been having some serious problems.
First, I had recd. some black-listed ip's when we joined virpus, we failed to check them (mistake on our end agreed 100%), which probably even they might not have been aware of.. As, we had a minor mis-understanding with godaddy during domain registration, my friend registered the domain using one of our partner address who resides in Singapore, where as the registration was done from India. Godaddy, assumed this was a spam registration and refunded the amount. So, we had to register the domain through another partner who resided in India. Godaddy was cool after we gave them the complete details, where they wanted some ID proof, and we provided them.
Our ip was on the black-list, we thought since our domain was spam-listed for a day, (until godaddy took it off) it made the hosts to assume the domain was black-listed, so we had manually submitted forms and proofs to most of the anti-spam agencies and mail providers, where they took the ban off the ip with in 15-20 days after we joined virpus.
Our domain was no longer under black-list, but ip was still under black-listed in some sites, such as rediff, it took more than 2 months to set the things straight at rediff, where we did some config added from the tech.dept. such as setting up spf record, and did a few tweaks here and there.
Even after making all these efforts, our ip was still under black-list of some ISP's. Our main domain (the domain which was under bl list earlier) loads well for every user, but our child domains where we have blogs and other activities do not load for lots of users. The ping results in the internet gives 100% but on their particular systems it gives no ping. Some times, the site loads wierdly such as,[url] might load but [url]might not load, and vice-versa, some times local ping fails but site loads, its all wierd and we found the reason to the problem to be ip after some minor confirmation from our end. We were losing our revenue of more than 60% just because of the failure of loading on the site, the tech. dept used to ask the ips which are facing prob to check if they are blocked, but its not possible to give ips of users who visit as guests and others, we have noted reports on other sites that our site wasn't loading for them. We still were able to give few ips for check and found them not-blocked on the ip. The sites are able to be viewed for all from proxy sites such as stage6.info but we can't ask each viewer to go to proxy site to view if they are unable to load, it will become ridiculous and we might lose our entire traffic some day.
We had shifted our domains temporarily to other vps where we noted none of the users had a single complaint, we were there for more than a week, which ensured the problem was not the domains but the ips, again after returning to the virpus hosts, we had created 3 tickets to sales/billing dept. to issue fresh ip's, got 0 reply and mailed to mr.Ken using : kenneth.odem@virpusnetworks.net got no reply after 48hrs.
We have to agreee, Earlier,mr.Ken was so helpful he helped us when we didn't have any funds to issue, since we had an dispute with an item where our payment was delayed by paypal. So, we had paid them almost 10 days later than the due date where mr.Ken was so helpful and saw to it our VPS could stay online despite the payments not been released.
In thanks, we had directly mailed our check we got from an ad-agency, which again made around 5-10 days in the payment, which made our balance stand in the positive note, we have our balance in the account for the past 3 months so that there are no dues left.
But, in the past 1 -2 months the replies have been disappointing.
We planned to leave virpus and join other host, where we burnt our hands, we looked for other reputed VPS and had a few in mind after our staff suggested few good organizations(don't prefer to name them here as it would be mis-leading).
Since, virpus wasn't ready to refund the amount in the credits we decided to continue with virpus atleast as a sideby host. Later, some how our members suggested we used virpus as a main host, so we wanted fresh ip's to get rid of the damn problem we are having but we have recd. no response for the past 1 week.
Now, lately after the maintenance our VPS was down for approx. 26-27hrs on april 25th Saturday, where our traffic is usually on the weekends. We lost the compelete traffic and revenue. When we asked if it come under credits, we got response as : This was the result of scheduled maintenance we cannot, it would not qualify under our SLA. (just giving the main result statment off the entire reply recd. from sales). Its some thing we would like to regret but for sure this isn't some issue, which could make us think to get to a new host.
The reply from the sales dept. has made our staff making funny betting, as one would win if we get a reply and other would if its not replied with in 48hrs, lately the first one is winning () due to lack of communication.
This might be our last month. Our next due date major amount would be taken from the credits, so a very little amount would exist in the account. We will stay with them until our amount with them is spent.
We had enjoyed really good with the tech. dept but the sales dept has been really poor in the recent past. I am forced to say this as even after mailing we haven't got response where, mr.Ken stated if our tickets were lost or some thing, mail to him but either didn't work so far.
Once, earlier when we requested for change of ips we were said some $7 or some thing would be charged for the swap, when we made other enquiries about it we didn't get a response till date
My tickets which lay un-responded: 203497 509467 385781
509467 and 385781 are double-post of the ticket, but got reply for none of the above tickets. Was expecting a reply for 1 atleast.
I was ready to pay excess charge for the new ips as there some mistake from my end in failure to check the ips before getting them but I wanted some concession as the major mistake was from their end while dispatching ips. I am not refusing to pay but I wanted the concession, got no reply and the above tickets are a proof of them.
Our staff online time and their live chat time don't tally, so we can't make any contact to them on live as well.
I am not sure if this is mis-understanding or what, but it has been a mixed experience for me. For sure, their sales crew have to be increased that's some suggestion I would strongly do.
I can recommend this host to any one for the tech. support they provide but can't guarantee them for the sales dept. replies based on my past/recent experiences.
Totally my site down for around ~30hrs including all the maintanence and other reasons, it could be a bit less but I am rounding it off, for sure its more than 28hrs
My over all rating: 7.5/10 Tech. Dept - 10/10 Sales/Billing Dept - 5/10
my site submitted for review via report feature I tried to give all my experience on virpus and I am not against any one for joining virpus nor have any fights with virpus team.
May be if we get response from sales we might still consider continuing with virpus but that stands low at the moment.
First off they did not setup my server for nearly 2 days. I bitched and was apologized about that. They said I would get 10% off my next month.
I proceed to get everything running and start setting up my domains and then blamo its gone! It was reset they said even though I did not have a remote switch. I asked them why they did that and they insisted it was me. Whatever. So I setup everything again and was getting horrible speeds for my photography site. The hell???? They promised me the world when I signed up with them. I also got to deal with "outsourced tech support" from india that was not helpful.
I finally get things running but its still a slow *** server and they try to tell me I needed to upgrade to a much faster plan and get a better processor and memory. I tell them screw that they are throttling my bandwidth. Like memory and processor are gonna make a difference for 3 websites 1 with forums and 1 for photography then my personal site.
Can you share with me about your experience with WBS as a provider? Including account management, support and of course quality of the network, Also I am interested whether they really have a good South America connectivity.
