Exit Review: Dediwebhosting

I signed up with with Dediwebhosting in November of 2007 and canceled my service on good terms June 1st 2008. It was my first experience with a dedicated server and, at the time, my primary focus was a budget solution.

The server was used for hosting my web design clients (around 50), which were mostly smallish & semi-dynamic websites with an average of 4GB/month bandwidth per account. The domain linked in my signature was one of the sites hosted on the server.

Setup & Billing:

Being completely new to dedicated hosting, their sales team was very friendly and helpful with my novice questions. When I was ready to order, I faxed my photo ID & credit card info to them and was set up within a day. The entire process was a lot less painful than I was expecting.

I went with their B600 package (P4 2.8ghz, 1GB, 129GB HD, 100Mbit, 600GB Transfer) - which fit perfectly with the budget I was working with (85.00 + extra for cPanel).

Support:

Although they don't provide any management services, their support department was always quite fast (around 30 minutes) in taking care of any rDNS or IP requests I had. They also made a very good effort in trying to help me with some issues I was having with AOL's mail server (which never got resolved, but was no fault of their own).

Also, I think it also bears mentioning that their support personnel sound like real people. Instead of getting 'it's fixed' or 'this has been done' responses....they usually responded in complete (even multiple) sentences. That may not be important to you (and I don't really mind the short responses), but it was something I noticed and was appreciative of.

Reason for leaving:

Aside from the inability for my hosting clients to send/receive mail from AOL accounts (which was a big deal for the type of people I host), my primary reason for leaving was that my design business was growing and I was ready for an upgrade to more powerful hardware. I found a great deal on a dual-core system with Pacific Rack and decided to move on. I was also hoping that moving to a different data center would clear up the AOL problems (which it did).

They were quick to process my cancellation request - so no problems there.

Overall Experience & Recommendation:

Aside from the AOL issues, my experience with Dediwebhosting was very positive (and I don't blame them for the AOL issues). Their support was friendly, fast and they made an effort to help me with an issue that went beyond their service agreement.

As mentioned above, I rarely received complaints of service or network issues from my hosted clients...so I can vouch for reliablity. As my first dedicated server, I can also say that they helped to make the experience much less intimidating than I thought it would.

Their website is kind of ugly and in need of an update...but as a designer, I'm overly-critical of such things.

So yes, I would definitely recommend Dediwebhosting to someone looking for an entry-level, budget solution (they offer bigger systems, but entry-level is the one I have experience with). I can't promise that AOL would work for you...but I don't think you'd be disappointed with everything else.