I have been with futurehosting since October 2007 and have had my ups and downs. see my history below:
October 2007: Signed up for both a vps in chicago and one in dallas datacenter. I used my chicago server for my primary hosting and my dallas server is used only for DNS failover for 2 websites. I am a small town host that hosts locally only so we have around 15 clients. Everything was working ok, but the chicago server just always seemed slow, ocasional load spikes throughout the day hitting the 5 or 6’s. So finally in May 2009 I posted on WHT to seek some help for why loads were so high and we came to the conclusion in that thread that it must be an overloaded server. So I shot off a ticket to futurehosting to move me to a different node and they did without any problems. Loads seemed to go way down after the move and my server was zippy fast again.
August 2009: My chicago server has been getting progressivly slower throughout the last 3 months and we are back to load spikes again. I finally give up with the load issue and just assume it is my problem.
September 11, 2009: Now I run into a problem with php handeling sessions and ask for help from futurehosting and have a problem with them lying to me. You can see the thread here. Jim at futurehosting is aware of this and apologized deeply. And they reprimanded the admin working on my case.
September 21, 2009: I migrated my chicago server to Wiredtree and still have my dallas server as my backup with futurehosting. Since moving to Wiredtree, all of my load issues have gone away and load sits around 0.25 average.
Please note that in all these cases I have opened tickets with futurehosting and worked with them through the problems.
Now, after I got my history out of the way, here is my review:
Value: 10/10
futurehosting is one of the best values around especially now with their 40% off for life and more ram. I, as an existing customer even submitted a ticket complaining how new customers get this and we as exhisting don’t and they gave me the discount.
Support: 7/10
I think the support of futurehosting is a little below of top tier. When you submit a ticket with futurehosting after 15 min you get a reply stating “we’re working on it”. Then sometimes after 30 min you get a reply “we’re escelating this to sysadmins”. And finally after 45 min the problem is fixed. Now keep in mind this is just one instance, but almos all receive a first ticket stating “we’re working on it” and then 15 min later it’s fixed. Now, I really don’t have much to compare to here other than wiredtree, and when you submit a ticket to them, 15 min later you get a response “fixed”. Now about the server admin lying directly to me when he couldn’t fix the problem. I realise this is a rare isolated instance, but still put a sour taste in my mouth.
Server Performance: 5/10
Performance was good at times bad at times and overall seemed slow at futurehosting. I think, but not sure that maybe they are overloading their servers…
Server Uptime: 10/10
Server was always up, and I mean always. Only around once or twice in two years was there a problem with DDOS on another server that caused routing problems in the datacenter to cause my server to be unreachable.
I hav enever had any problems with my server in dallas and it is always fast and zippy and never down. I have also never really submitted a ticket on my server in dallas because it is used so infrequently. We, however are leaving futurehosting and will be in process of moving our dallas server away from them soon.
Well, there you have it, my review of futurehosting after two years.
I would like to tell my experience with FutureHosting.Biz I hope to this will be helpful who wants to get a VPS from them. First of all excuse me for my English level.
What i have? I had 2 VPS from FutureHosting.Biz actually for 14 months. One of them 32-bit 1024Ram and 40Gb the other one 64-bit 1024Ram 80Gb ram. They are both managed, cPanel with CentOs on Intel Xeon cpus.
For what? I have 32 websites running with PHP/MySQL and a web-hosting company in the first VPS working very well. The other one using for a bandwith monster web-site like Mr.Skin and a free forum hosting site. This VPS works without trouble too.
Setup speed Login details of VPSs sent to me so early like in 3 hours while I was still reading the wellcome guide...
What about the performance I would like to be honest, I wont earn or win something with this review. But I can say never seen a downtime by them. Yes we had some downtimes but these caused from our mistakes. Also I could not remember any crash or something like that.
Support Support staff doing their job as well as possible. I did not have any un-solved ticket in the help desk. I do not want to talk about solution time, because it depends to profession what you wanted from them. But first response comes in 30min always.
Pricing I always check the other VPS providers to learn whats going in VPS providing industry.
But never seen a better one for performance/price/reliability equation.
If you are serious about your website, i think you should think about serious VPS provider FutureHosting
Im still using their VPSs and I hope to stay with them for a long time. Also Thanks for the reliable VPS solutions for FutureHosting.Biz
I have been with Future Hosting since April of this year. I originally signed up during a promotion they had here on WebHosting Talk (for their Platinum Unmanaged Cpanel VPS).
My VPS was setup within a couple hours. Their support team was very helpful throughout the entire setup process.
For the months that followed, I had no major problems and everything was running great.
I would rarely experience an outage (in fact the only outages I experienced were due to network upgrades - and upgrades are a good thing). Future Hosting offered to do a free security setup on my VPS (which I thought was excellent - I didn't have to ask them, they asked me).
In the last month, I started to experience some slow downs on the VPS. Sometimes the slow downs were due to high load issues, the SATA hard drives, or a latency issue. I was setup on one of their Dallas servers when this was happening. Future Hosting offered to move my VPS to the Chicago datacenter. I read some posts on here that their Chicago servers are a lot better, so I accepted the offer to move the server. Jim from Future Hosting did the transfer and I was able to transfer all my web sites to the new server with ease. The speed difference moving from Dallas to Chicago was pretty dramatic. They also changed to SA-SCSI drives, and that makes a huge improvement (I believe Chicago and Dallas have the new drives).
In the end, the service at Future Hosting has been excellent. Support is great as well and their technicans are very helpful (especially Jim - great job). I recommend Future Hosting for anyone who wants a VPS. With the amazing prices they offer, and their excellent service, you can't lose.
So I've been on a hostgator reseller account for a few years, and for the most part they were pretty good. Just recently they did a cpanel upgrade which hosed IMAP because I think they switched to dovecot, and IMAP SSL was mere impossible, always freezing my outlook client etc. That and finally wanting to have more control over the server I started my search for a VPS.
Of course, LOTS of reviews with different viewpoints on the different VPS offerings there are. What better place then to come here to see them. Finally it came down to wiredtree and futurehosting. I finally pulled the trigger on futurehosting.
First glance, I was confused because I wasn't sure when my account was going to be created. I received a welcome email and when I tried to logon to cpanel, it wouldn't bring up a page. In the support chat they said to wait a few hours. After waiting a few hours I tried again but had cpanel errors, because the install was still in progress. See I'm the eager type, hahah so im sure if it was someone else they would have had the patience to wait.
Finally the server was up and running, me new to VPS started opening tickets with questions and "how to best case scenario" help. Just shy of 10 tickets [I would say under 10 minutes before a response was received], because I kept one question per ticket for easy tracking, and I was on my way to getting sites transferred using CPANELS built in transfer tool, which works flawless.
I have to hand it to futurehost, yes there were a few hiccups in the beginning, but it was WELL worth the move. Knock on wood.. I went from a 90ms response time on my old host to 7ms (Chicago DC woot)!
Support, I cannot hand it to ARUN (and the other staff) any better. He did a fantastic job resolving issues and response time was unbelievable.
I would recommend futurehost for those looking for a VPS. I'm still stunned by the quick responses in the support, so I know that when/if I do/did have/had problems it would be resolved instantly.
I purchased a VPS from Futurehosting at their Chicago datacentre back in October. They were running a special offering a 40% lifetime discount, with additional ram and bandwidth.
The additional features are nice but probably overkill for my needs. Who really uses all the bandwidth they say they need!
Server was the Platinum cPanel, that comes managed for $35 or there abouts. They colocate their servers in the Steadfast facility, which alone is a nice bonus. I already have servers with PowerVPS but I`ve been looking for a Chicago server for a while and the knockdown price tempted me over.
I wanted something in Chicago owing to my location in eastern Canada. I get supeb latency as do my clients.
Anyway, server was paid for immediatly and it wasn`t more than a few hours later one evening when I received my welcome emails along with the other things. Everything was up and running, however there was a slight glitch with the cPanel installation which Jim looked into.
The fact they offer a managed service, colocate in Steadfast, advertise quality hardware, offer proactive monitoring (one service free), daily backups and a bunch of other stuff is sweet.
Three months later I am still with them, I would score them as follows:
Support: 8/10, I would really love to give them 10/10 because the team are always responsive but there two things that bug me. The canned responses, when I would prefer an answer as to what happened not the "this has been fixed now". The support desk is frustrating as hell, especially when email piping is not used. You have to login through HSPC then login to the support desk with a different password. Just seems like a series of annoying hurdles which is as I said, frustrating when you`re in a hurry! That said, the techs are responsive and usually reply with five or ten minutes. I can`t recall a long wait for a ticket to be resolved.
Sales/Billing: 10/10, Nothing to complain about here. They do as they say, work within their advertised hours competently. Vik and Jim who generally man this desk are great guys to work with. Vik the owner is very flexible and seems like a standup guy. Example I had a billing issue where I asked if he could wait a few days before I paid the invoice - this wasn`t a problem for him. I`ve even had sales tickets answered after hours, admittedly they take a little longer to reply but still!
Network/Hardware/Uptime: 10/10, the service has been fantastic at the Steadfast facility. I get pings of 46ms average and my clients always comments on the speed of service. I cannot recall any downtime and I monitor it every ten minutes, so far 100% uptime since October.
Overall: 9/10, should have been ten but my two moans about the support desk and canned response, but hey that might be me being overly fussy.
I can highly recommend these guys. A few days ago I ordered another server. Vik won me over when he mentioned the new 32gig nodes being installed at the Equinix facility in Ashburn, yes that`s Equinix. Yes I can appreciate the node is new and lightly loaded so far, but man the VE runs at warp speed. Perhaps in a few months once he has loaded this node more I`ll come back and update on this new VE I purchased.
Mods, I can submit a domain for verification if you like
I would strongly recommend these guys to anyone out there who is looking for a good VPS provider.
In my initial question and answer with them they were prompt in answering my questions.
I have opened about 8 tickets since my signing up and every ticket has been responded to at least within an hour and communication prompt the whole way through the ticket process.
They migrated my server a while back when they had issues with the Dallas location. Flawless transition with good communication. I even scored an extra 194 dedicated RAM out of the move.
My plan provides:
30 Gig HD 450 Gig Bandwidth 512 MB Ram 194 MB sign up upgrade 194 MB Dallas Center thanks upgrade. Cpanel Managed Server
$49.95
Currently, they are offering 550 Gig bandwidth with the Platinum plan. If I had an issue with them, and I don't, it would be that I could not be upgraded to the 550 without losing my RAM upgrades.
I have Cpanel, Vbulletin, and Phpbb installed. Sitting idle they consume about 175 MB of RAM.
So, in closing I would recommend Futurehosting to anyone interested in a VPS.
With all of that being said..... I would like to give honorable mention to Knownhost who answered all of my questions just as fast as Future. The 194 RAM and a Cpanel were the differences for me... and for the same price I felt like I was getting a little more. If future folded... Known will be the next stop!
I signed up with FutureHosting.com in June of 2007 when my site's traffic was too much for the shared hosting account at GoDaddy (their hosting is horrendous, btw). After looking around WHT here, I discovered a relatively new VPS hosting company called FutureHosting.biz and, because of their great prices, I decided to give them a try.
Having no idea about anything related to managing a server (and still don't, for the most part), the extra $5/month was definitely worth it. Their support is very prompt to respond to tickets. I think the longest I've ever waited is about 30 minutes, but that typically their response time is about 10-15 minutes. If the situation is something they can solve for you, they do it, rather than spitting back a step-by-step tutorial on how to fix it or make the necessary changes yourself.
A couple situations that are noteworthy:
1. Apache kept going down on my VPS fairly regularly. Since I didn't have the automatic ping service, it would be down for up to a day at a time before I realized it. They would kindly restart apache for me each time, but after a couple weeks of it, I started to complain. They told me about the ping service, but I didn't see why I should pay for an additional service to keep my sites online when their hosting service couldn't do that on it's own. Why should I pay for a service that can't stay online and then pay more for a service to be notified each time it went down? Vik, the owner, contacted me and said they would add the ping service to my account for no extra charge. Fortunately, Apache hasn't screwed up much since then anyway.
2. There have been several times when FutureHosting went out of their way to help me fix problems or address issues that technically weren't even their problems. For example, I was having trouble with a certain CMS and they helped me troubleshoot it and get to the root issue even though it didn't really have too much to do with the VPS.
3. More recently I had them compile Red5 on my VPS so I can integrate video recording with one of my sites. Unfortunately, it kept failing because it requires at least 1 GB of available memory, and at the time my VPS only had 768 MB total. So, rather than making me go all the way up to a dedicated server just to experiment with my new site, they created a custom package for me and threw in 384 MB for FREE!
A couple things I wish were different.
1. I wish they had a phone number (or Skype account) to call for emergencies (like when sites go down or something).
2. I wish they had live chat on their support site.
3. I wish that when support finishes upgrading PHP, MySQL, restoring something from a backup for me, or whatever, that they'd actually check my site to make sure it's up and running. Too often they complete the support ticket, only for me to come back later and say, "Thanks for doing the upgrade/restore/fix for me so promptly, but none of my sites are responding, or they have an Internal Server Error message displayed." Of course they go back and make the correction fairly quickly, but that last little step would be greatly appreciated.
SUMMARY: I've found that FutureHosting is always very sensitive to the needs of their clients, and that they also value their client's opinions very highly on a personal level. The past year and a half with them have not been perfect, but I am definitely a loyal customer and will probably never use another webhost as long as they're around. Overall, I'd give them 9/10 stars.
P.S. I see I'm supposed to verify my domain in order to make this review legit, so if an admin or mod wants to contact me about how to do that, that would be fine.
I signed up with FutureHosting for a managed Linux VPS. I'm about a week into going "live" with the nameservers switched over and am very happy! I was going to wait a month before posting but these guys have been so patient and thorough with the tickets I've submitted I wanted to give my initial thoughts
Overall 9.5/10 Great Host. Very patient and thorough support. Very Good response time. Surprisingly low pricing. I highly recommend for your VPS. Very Good response time on Support BUT no phone support
Signup 9/10 Signup was straightforward. I think they have a higher volume than normal with their promotion. It took a bit of time to set up the VPS (under 10-12 hours) but I'll take a few hours' delay if I'm getting a good product/support for months/years.
Speed 10/10 They publish their speedtests here [url]I just downloaded a couple test files (5-20MB each) from my VPS and I get to about 1.1 MB/sec. At that point it may be a limit from my ISP (FYI speedtest.net gives my download 14000 kbps = 1.7MB/s). No issues on speed! : Support : Overall: 9/10 Speed: 9/10 Thoroughness: 10/10 'Other': 8/10 Very good response. For NORMAL PRIORITY issues, within 5-30 minutes I get a response that someone's attending to it and soon thereafter I have a resolution. Some tickets have taken longer but they haven't been critical issues so it's really okay. You can prioritize your tickets as CRITICAL or SERVER DOWN and I'm sure they're even faster.
They have gone back and forth with me and been patient with my questions (I've never administered a VPS before) and I GREATLY appreciate that. I've had many tickets with them and other hosts may have just said "this is really not an issue with the VPS" and left me to learn it myself-- FutureHosting has been very helpful.
Sometimes (probably due to my own vagueness/lack of knowledge), my actual request/issue is unclear. I think this is where phone support would be very helpful; it's not currently offered. (and this is why Other gets an 8/10)
Reliability 10/10 I've had no downtime so far! My nameservers/DNS switch took longer than expected but that has nothing to do with FH.
Pricing 10/10 With their DoubleRAM/Bandwidth+30% off OR 50% deals, Pricing is great I think. Others had recommended WiredTree to me given their lightning quick response times. I'm sure they're amazing but they were also almost double the price. FutureHosting has had very good support at a great value IMHO
I'm not sure how you 'validate' my domain/review but just let me know and I'll PM you the information on my domain.
The following is my review of FutureHosting.com. I am currently hosting with them using one of their "Elite Managed VPS" products. I will be reviewing FutureHosting.com on the following criteria Price Performance Stability Support Each section will contain a score of 1(poor)-10(excellent)
Introduction:
I switched over to FutureHosting late last year after Zone.net unraveled. The following is my six month review of my hosting experience with FutureHosting.com.
Price:
Pricing is very competitive to other providers. When coupled with WHT offers the hosting packages can be very attractive.
Rating: 9 (very good)
Performance:
Performance has been fairly good. I have had some issues with SMTP timeouts over the last month and I am currently experiencing some lag on a new VPS. I am confident that support should be able to resolve these issues.
Rating: 7 (good)
Stability:
Site uptime has been very good and I have had only minor hiccups in my SMTP service.
Rating: 8 (good)
Support:
Support has been very quick to respond to my initial tickets -- usually within 15 minutes (for example I just opened a low priority ticket and I can see that 10 minutes later support has already logged into my server to install an application for me). The only issue I currently have with support is that they don't always communicate what was causing an issue and what they did to your server to resolve it (something I like to be aware of). Additionally, some of the new techs who are learning don't always read through the support request so you have to go back and forth to fully explain the issue. Arun, Alex and the other veteran tech's are very very helpful though (I have had a significant number of tickets with Arun and he has been excellent despite my many requests).
Rating: 8 (good)
Conclusion:
Six months into my time with FutureHosting and I have been pleased so far with their service. The price is great, performance is good, and support has been very responsive. I would gladly recommend Futurehosting to other WHT users.
I have been working for more than one year with FH, and now WT for a few months, and I wanted to tell you how was my experience with them so far.
We all know FH have good reputation here so I decided to go for them with a managed 1GB (+256MB special) fully managed VPS. The improvement over past hostings (modvps, dreamhost...) was notorious, both in speed and service. Tickets were resolved fast and servers were fast and reliable. Had a couple of downtimes but nothing important. However service was going worse with time, and had couple of misunderstandings with them and what I consider not a perfect service (not bad, but not perfect) and for the specs I was paying (1250 RAM) I would expect better performance so I decided to move to another server.
I have to say that after the complete transition to the next hosting I had a big mistake on my side on the new VPS, and the only way to solve it was to recover the old backups on the old VPS. After cancelling with them they were so kind to reopen my account for a few days for free in order to recover my backups. Very nice.
I would rate them 8 out of 10 (around 1 year with them)
So after FH experience I decided to move to WiredTree. They are more expensive but everybody were speaking wonders about them so I decided to give them a try. And wow, everything was as good (or better) as expected. WiredTree has been so far the best host I have ever been, both in performance but specially on service.
I started with a VPS with 512 MB of RAM and performance was better than my 1GB+ RAM VPS with FutureHosting! While in FH I was getting email warnings and processes killed because high CPU and RAM usage, same website in "worse" VPS was running better. In addition of that, and as many people said, service was outstanding, with all tickets replied in less than 20 minutes. Impressive! For the first time in 10 years moving to host to host I was having the impression of not being oversold like all the ones I have been before and with a Support as good as you could expect (fast, efficient, and with a human touch not trying to sell you every of their additional services)
And WT have so many nice features that make a pleasure to work with them. They are constantly hearing customers and improving network and services based on their comments, adding nice additional features from time to time, and I always have the feel the whole network is improving with time.
Additionally, they saved my *** couple of times restoring backups (when I didn't had my own ones!) or adjusting some things should have been fixed on my side (being not an expert this is really appreciated!).
They are a little bit pricey than competitors, but after trying them for a few months, they absolutely deserve it, this is exactly the kind of service you could expect at any level. I recommend them to any potential VPS customer, and I hope I can stay with them for long time
I've had two VPS’ from FutureHosting for 6 months now and I'd thought I'd do a quick write-up of my experience.
First of all the setup of the two VPS’ went very well. They are both 32-bit 128MB RAM unmanaged plans with CentOS, in Dallas, TX.
I had my login details sent to me within 1-2 hours which was excellent. I use them to host a nameserver for my webserver and on the other, a few Multi Theft Auto game servers (which are very low on resources).
The performance has been excellent throughout the past six months, so good that I haven't had to worry about how they're performing. Although there have been a few times where the servers have been a bit slow. I contacted them about this and they offered to move me to another node, which was done within 6 hours and no downtime, which solved the problem. There have also been one or two outages but I was very satisfied with the time taken to resolve these (only a few hours) although one was just a failed RAID card.
Apart from that these VPS’ have been performing tremendously and I cannot fault them at all - every supplier will have an outage or two and I was not worried, it is inevitable.
Network-wise I haven't had a single problem, no outages, great speeds, and low latency, just what I need.
Their support is really great, not only have I had an average response time of 30-40mins for 95% of my tickets (which is a lot better than some), they've been really friendly and informative, with explanations of why things have happened or what things mean. They really do go out of their way to help you any way they can, and for an unmanaged plan, I cannot fault them in the slightest.
I am very pleased with FutureHosting, and hope to stay with them for a long time to come yet. In fact I have just ordered another unmanaged VPS from them.
I'd like to take the time to say a big thanks to FutureHosting for a really great experience.
It's rare that I care enough about a company to give it praise. That's because, for the most part, I expect a service to work correctly and it doesn't deserve praise for working as I expected (and paid for).
Well, today, I break from my own philosophies. I was looking for a new VPS provider about two weeks ago because I felt like my sites were a bit sluggish and was also curious what the current opinion was on my then-current provider, Zone.net. I was a bit concerned at the fact that several people complained about lack of support (something I had noticed as well on my own account with them), so I started my journey on finding a new provider.
I bumped into FutureHosting's special offer on WHT's offers section and looked up reviews of the this place. Reviews were fairly sparse (surprising, considering the fairly good deal they offered and as I will see, the awesome service they provide) but all positive.
So while I would've loved to become a WiredTree or a Knownhost customer, I decided to take a gamble and get a better spec'd VPS for the same money.
I sign up very late night, get an email the next morning saying everything was all set up. Try to log-in. Nothing. Contact support...within minutes, they answer, finding out that there was a problem with that particular config of servers in that datacenter.
Immediately offer to move me to another datacenter (Dallas, Chicago, etc) at the same price even though the special offered was in Seattle.
Setup the Dallas VPS node, and I get stuff setup there. And then my site seemingly goes down. Contact support and again, within a few minutes, get a response detailing what is wrong (a rare bug which caused misrouting)...again, it was fixed in a reasonable fashion.
The next day, I get an e-mail from Vik Patel, their CEO! He apologized for the situation and assured me this was a very rare set of cisrumstances and offered me a great deal to compensate me for my troubles. I was impressed at the level of involvement of the management!
Bottom line: A night and day difference between Zone and FutureHosting support -- I used to be with dathorn.com on their reseller plans a long time ago, and I haven't seen support times like Dathorn's until I moved to futurehosting.
Powerful VPS's, reasonable prices. I think my site is much speedier on FH's servers.
I went from SolarVPS to FutureHosting.biz after over one year at SolarVPS in may this year. The main reason was lower price per month, since I’m only hosting my personal sites, with no income what so ever. I paid almost $60/mo at SolarVPS and got a deal at FutureHosting that cost me around $30/mo.
I have a custom Gold plan with 512 MB RAM, 20 GB HD, 400 GB bandwidth, Plesk 8.4 30 domain, 3 IP’s and managed plan in the UK.
I have to say that SolarVPS always has been great, and they have very good hardware and support. So I was unsure what I could expect from FutureHosting
The setup was fast, only three hours from I ordered to the VPS was ready. I had some problems with FTP transfers, but I did get help from support and they changed some settings and I was up and running again.
The next support ticket I opened was about port 3306 and remote access (I’m using Navicat to take daily backup of my MySQL databases). The first reply I got was that the port was open in the firewall. But after a new mail to support, they fixed the problem, and told me that the port was not open in the firewall. They used around 5 hours to solve this problem.
Since I’m on a managed plan, I decided to set them on a test, to create a backup solution that takes a weekly backup of my main sites, and transfer them to my home server. They created a script that takes a .gz backup of all my files, and transfers them to my home server.
They also made a script that’s copy all of my logfiles to a directory that I can access from my home server, that’s I use for my Webstats (I’m using WebLog Expert that’s only runs on Windows).
So they have made two custom scripts that’s help me to secure my data, and give me all my logfiles. So I have to say that they really deliver fully managed plans.
I have had little downtime on the VPS since I started using them in May. Right now my VPS has been up for 59 days, and still have top performance.
I’m very happy with the service and support from FutureHosting.biz and I hope I will stay for a very long time. Keep up the great work, and I hope you will stay in business for ever.
I decided to go with Future Hosting after the reviews I saw on WHT and it's been a while since I follow their reviews here but I did not need a VPS back then. Now I got over 30 websites each located at a different host, so I decided to transfer them to one single account and decided to go with VPS because reseller is small for us and we don't need a dedicated server yet.
First thing I did is look again for Future Hosting reviews which were very good and what made me take my decision very fast is the 95% off the first month. I signed up with them on october 31 2007. Few hours later I get the confirmation that my VPS is now setup and I get the login information. I had a plesk managed VPS. I logged in to plesk added one domain and I tried adding another but I got an error that I can't add more domains, so I directly open a ticket and tell them about it, and hey fixed it, no big deal.
I point my base domain to the VPS and decide to do some tests and make sure everything is working fine before transferring all the domains. I created then a hosting account for the base domain. First problem I face is I can't access webmail.mydomain.com, again I open a ticket, they fix it with adding a record for webmail.domain.com in DNS zone, now I don't know if this should be done automatically but the support there said I should do this for every domain I add. Now I can access the webmail and had some problems logging in which I fixed.
I tried to send and email, it worked just fine, then I try to receive and email but the emails kept bouncing back and not begin delivered, I open another support ticket and they tell me that there is a problem with qmail they will work on it. Last night I get an email that it's working fine, today I try sending emails and it's being bounced back from the server, this time the email reached the server but the server bounced it back.
Again I open a ticket and I am told that there's a problem with qmail. Few hours ago, I got an email from tech support telling me that they want to change the hostname from domain.com to subdomain.domain.com. It's the first time I face this problem,I always used mydomain.com as hostname but I am willing to do anything to make my VPS work properly, but this is not nice having a hostname as subdomain.domain.com. I asked them several times, that if they need to reload everything on my VPS to go ahead and proceed with it because I didn't transfer anything to it, I am just still testing, but they didn't reply to this request.
Although I am not mad at FH people because they've been trying to fix things for me since day one, and I am willing to stay with them at the moment, I mean these problem won't get me to the point to give up on FH, but it's also frustrating that in one week I am still having problems with my VPS.
What do you think, should they reload my VPS, should I ask for that or do I let them fix the problem, and should I accept that they use subdomain.domain.com instead of domain.com?
So far I will give 5 stars for FH support, let's hope I will give 5 stars for the server stability.
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. =)
This is a brief review of my experience with VT6 over the last year.
I have little to say, because it's "just worked". I've had to call upon their helpdesk twice in the last year. In both cases the response was timely and the matter resolved in a reasonable timeframe, both were matters beyond their control.
This is my first and last review of these guys. When I first colocated my server with them, they were still known as iHosting. The price was good, the support was excellent, and it was a friendly little place. I never experienced any down time to speak of, and when I needed something changed (like a reverse DNS entry), they took care of it almost straight away.
Of course, then a big mean company bought them. In(forbusiness).(nl|be). From day one I knew things could only go downhill from there on, and I was right. Every time they touched my server in the datacentre, it went offline. Even when they didn't have any business with my particular server. On three occasions they unplugged the power cable *WITHOUT PRIOR NOTIFICATION* so I couldn't do a clean shut down which resulted in a raid array rebuild. That in itself would almost be acceptable, but each time they didn't plug it back in properly.
Then on another three occasions they've messed up my connectivity by not handling the NIC with care. It's a sensitive little thing, and even though I've pointed it out to them time and time again, they keep messing up. Usually they've been kind enough to fix these problems, which they caused relatively quickly. However, it's happened again, and this time they're refusing to fix it for free. Needless to say, I'm not paying for something they broke, and I'm cancelling my account with them ASAP. They'd better not make a fuss about giving me back my server, or I won't be a happy camper.
As if unannounced shutdowns and unplugged cables aren't bad enough, I've also been paying for an APC connection/account for almost two years now. I still haven't received any actual login data that would in fact allow me to do a remote reboot. It's not like I haven't asked them .. I asked them at least every time the server went down, and about every other month as well. Each time my mail was either ignored, or I got some vague reply.
Oh, and about this latest downtime .. they told me they'd be rearranging things in the rack today. I asked them, yet again, to be careful with my server so it wouldn't go down for like a week again. That mail was nicely ignored. After almost a day of downtime, I told them I would be cancelling my account and that they'd better get my server back up ASAP. Their only reply was that that would cost me. After they guaranteed me there would be no more than 5 minutes of downtime while rearranging the rack. Right.
The hosting world has changed a good bit in those years I've been with them. I can now get a reseller account that gives me just as much freedom for less money with more support. And face it, support is what it's all about -- and theirs blows.
I wouldn't recommend this host to anyone, not even if they paid me. Not even if they were the last host on the planet. Never again.
I have had several accounts with Powweb for 5 years now and I thought I would write a brief review of them:
BEFORE
I originally went with Powweb 5 years ago based off of a referral from a friend. At the time, the “shared hosting environment” isn’t quite what it is today. For the first several years, I experienced trouble free hosting (for the most part) and truly felt as though I was “getting what I paid for.”
Powweb, back then, was a privately owned company based out of California ( I believe) and I usually got the impression that most of their employees truly cared about their customers and the quality of service they provided. What made them semi-unique at the time, was that they offered only a “one plan solution” (they didn’t offer multiple plan types) and the simplicity of their business model worked well for most.
Powweb was also unique in that they offered community forums which were pretty “open” and it truly allowed customers to discuss problems and issues with one another. A few years ago, they transitioned from private dedicated servers to a clustered environment and that did bring along some hard time, but they got it under control eventually. Overall, I was satisfied with the service.
NOW
A year or so ago Powweb was bought-out by Endurance. If you do not know anything about Endurance, they are a very large web-hosting company which has acquired several other large shared-hosts over the past few years.
Once Powweb was purchased by Endurance, the quality in service immediately decreased. Part of what Endurance does with most of their acquisitions is to assimilate them into their fold. This was a very shaky process and nearly everyone experience a large amount of downtime.
Additionally, Powweb is now plagued by horrible MySQL issues where the service is nearly completely useless. For the past year, Powweb has been either unable or unwilling to fix these issues. It can often take several minutes for even the most basic of queries to run. Any dynamic type of an application: forums, blogs, CMS, are usually rendered completely useless.
To make matters worse, Powweb continues to aggressively advertise these resource heavy applications and then ask for patience as they attempt to get their issues fixed. It has been about a year now, and still it is not resolved. Much of these issues come from the extreme overselling that Powweb does. Nearly every day, all websites (even static ones) come to a complete crawl.
Calling customer support is also a waste of your time. 95% of the time, you are met by a rude person who simply tells you “well, it seems to work for me” or that “we are aware of the problem” (at best). Opening support tickets is also usually not helpful. Tickets are often closed without any contact with the customer and it is very common for them to “give you the run-around.”
I have been told by support several times to keep an eye on the forums for updates on issues and whatnot. Then, if you go to the forums and attempt to get any information from there, you are told that ‘these are only user-helping user forums’ and that you can’t get any official help there, though customer support told you to go to that very place. Additionally, Powweb’s staff practices extreme censorship of the forum and it is common for negative remarks to be removed or posts completely deleted, many times without any acknowledgement of the act.
In addition to the MySQL issues, Powweb also experiences frequent “lock-ups,” CGI issues, email issues, dns issues, and so on and so forth. The list of problems that has occurred over the past year is literally too long to remember.
In conclusion, the Powweb of new is nothing like the Powweb of old. This new Powweb is controlled by an over-selling giant (Endurance) that is only concerned with the number of accounts as apposed to the quality of service. While certainly any business related site should not be in such an environment at all, I would even suggest that people looking for a host for hobby related purposes stay clear of powweb – it’s that bad.
One year has gone by since we bought our hosting plan at HostMySite (HMS) and I thought I'd post another review. You can read my previous review here (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=659594)
The Short Of It We have 2 IIS Coldfusion VPS (CF VPS+ plan). The first one we had was originally just a CF VPS (for developing) but we later changed it over to a CF VPS+ (more ram, more space, etc). This VPS is 1 year and 1 month old. Our production VPS which currently hosts our website is a healthy 1 year old. The reliability has been great and we never had any speed or performance issues.
We are very happy at HMS. We have had very little issues with the our VPSes and those issues are usually resolved very quickly. Anytime we needed support, it was overall always quick and helpful. We recommend HMS to anyone who needs a Windows VPS.
Security and Friends The SSL certificate we purchased from our previous host expired so we bought a new one via HMS. At first the order we placed was apparently processed by them but wasn't sent to the issuer for processing. We didn't find out until we sent a ticket in wondering about the status. They immediately processed it for us. Except for the fact that they processed it for 1 year when we bought it for 3. So another ticket flew across the internet and flew back to us just as quickly resolving the problem.
They asked if they wanted them to install it and we emphatically said yes. They installed the certificate and we were set. Or so we thought. We began having issues with our merchant account not being able to verify our SSL certificate. They forgot to add in the intermediate certificate so that third party processors can see verify it's legitimacy. This was resolved very quickly (faster than we expected) and we have not had issues with it since.
The One Thing The only thing we'd like to mention was an incident that occurred several months ago. One day, out of the apparently gray clouds, for some reason our site could not be connected to. After shaking our fists futilely at the weather gods, we sat down and tried to figure out what was wrong. By doing the basic diagnostics to make sure it wasn't us or our ISP we cursed the Lunar Goddess and contacted HMS to see what was up. They fixed it but didn't tell us what the issue was. Apologies in the form of cup cakes to the Moon was issued.
The next day, the same problem occurred or at least we thought and was told it was the same problem. We could not access our site. This time we did both live chat and started a ticket (for documentation, last time we just called). In the live chat they stated it was an issue with the node and not specific to our VPS and they were working on it. They said it was the same issue as yesterday.
This is where it starts getting dicey.
They also responded via the ticket that the firewall was blocking the ports and not the same issue as yesterday. Now considering only one person has access to the VPS (via RDC) to make changes and he did not log in to make any changes to the firewall (why would we?) that explanation didn't even seem plausible. And the ports blocked (pretty much everything except FTP) didn't make any sense. We went back and forth, with me explaining that after several months of not touching the firewall after setup, why would we inexplicable block ourselves out? Why would we even touch the firewall? Also that it can't be a coincidence with the node issues yesterday and they had already stated it was the same issue.
After a bit of going back and forth, they finally came to the conclusion that the patch they applied to fix the node issue made changes to the firewall which caused the subsequent issue. While this explanation didn't exactly seem completely kosher, we weren't going waste more time asking for a better explanation.
Now given that the total "downtime" of both issues was about 5 hours we thought we'd see how much of a resistance they will put up for the uptime guarantee. The first issue we pretty much knew wasn't going to get any attention because according to their TOS, they will only refund for time it was down when you posted a support ticket. Since we did this over the phone, there was no documentation to speak of when it went down and when it got fixed.
As for the second issue (which did have a ticket) they stated that since the VPS was technically up, the uptime guarantee did not apply even if the problem was caused by them (they didn't specifically say that but it was implied). While we didn't expect anything from it and didn't bother to pursue it, that response raised some eyebrows. While within their rights, it did seem a bit "whoa". They did apologize and were very polite and respectful. It was pretty much what we expected in terms of responses.
The Train Ride While the above issue may seem bad, it was a one-time event. These things can happen. We haven't had any uptime, access or server issues since that problem. Support is quick and helpful.
The site has been running fine for months with no downtime.
We are overall very happy with HMS and would recommend them to anyone who needs a Windows VPS.
I will try to share my experience with all of you regarding the company I rent my dedicated servers - Netdirekt.
I found out about them over an year ago when I needed to move to dedicated server. I decided to give them a try, since I was new in this area and since I am perfectionist in this job (making backup of backups of backups)I thought I don't have what to loose if they disappoint me. At least not much.
So over an year ago, I ordered my first server with them. It was Core2Duo server with 4GB of RAM, with a nice price. By the way, when I saw their 1996 website and their pricing, I was getting ready to get disappointed)
I didn't need much help in the beginning, the hardware and network were (are) top notch. Some months later, 4 if I remember correctly, I expanded my business and ordered a second server with them. So, I am really satisfied with their service.
Couple of experiences I got with them that I would like to share with you.
Once, the hard drive of one of my servers started fiving SMART errors so it needed to be changed. It was Sunday, 1AM, so I didn't expect much and it was the secondary (backup) drive so it wasn't THAT urgent to me. Anyway, I dropped them an e-mail requesting drive change. 15 minutes (yup, 15 minutes, Sunday, 1AM) later I got an e-mail back, their representative asking me am I ready for the hard drive replacement. I replied yes. I told him i shut off the server. 10 minutes later my server was back online, with new drive in it.
Later on, once they had 2 hours network outage and another time 1 hour power outage I think, that is in an year. My servers are checked by Pingdom so I believe their uptime.
Then I left them alone for some months, didn't bother them since I had no issues at all, until 2 weeks ago when I got my third server with them. I believe I have been the most boring client ever to them. 10 times maybe I asked IP transfer from one server to another, and they did that very fast and without making me feel uncomfortable by asking that from them over and over again.
So overall, I am very satisfied with their service. They don't do much (hardware and network only, no management), but I think they are perfect in what they do. Keep up the great work netdirekt, and you will keep me with you forever.
We've been a customer of Steadfast for a little over a year with a VPS plan. We had been using a dedicated server from another provider and we were looking to cut costs a bit since the server was very underutilized.
After researching here, we originally signed up on a low-end VPS plan and set up monitoring. Our goal was to monitor the server and service for a couple/few months prior to moving any services over to it; just to make sure the company and VPS would meet our needs.
After a several months of monitoring the server closely we decided to migrate from our ded server to the VPS at Steadfast. We haven't looked back since.
Our criteria for VPS at the time were:
1) Had to run Debian.
2) Reliability of service/provider.
--Uptime of the server itself
--Network reliability
--Redundancy
3) Customer support responsiveness.
4) Price.
Steadfast has exceeded our expectations in all areas. First off finding a host that supports Debian is not as easy as it should be.
(Note to VPS providers: This is a deal-breaker for us. If we can't use Debian then there's much less chance of us signing up for your services.)
Off the soapbox and back to Steadfast: The VPS is quick - with no I/O lag at all. It feels like a dedicated server. The service itself has been reliable and the network has also been responsive. (We monitor our servers from two separate geographical locations).
Further, we've opened more tickets than a 'normal' customer probably would, mostly just to find out what our options are for growth, backups, etc. The team (Karl and others) at Steadfast are very helpful. I don't have any specific recollection of opening a true tech support ticket but I'm sure I have. The fact that it doesn't stand out as remarkable indicates that it was answered quickly and with a personalized (non-generic) response.
We've grown since we started using the VPS and the upgrade process has been painless and quick. Maybe this is true of all VPS providers since all they need to do is allocate more resources, but either way, it's been painless and quick for us at Steadfast.
I've recently had some issues with a script I wrote and I contacted support about it. Three techs assisted me with it, but could not resolve it. I later found the problem was with my outputting text when there should be no output at all. I closed the ticket and thanked the techs for their work.
This is just one of the many examples I have of how they are willing to work with the customer, even if it is not their fault. They will do what it takes to keep the customer happy, except fixing the customers' code. Jedito and his team really strive at providing superb support for their customers.
I have a few domains hosted with them and also have pointed others to their services. I currently use two of their servers, one is production and the other is staging. They are quick to get services setup and ready to go, as well as providing quick support through their ticket system. Their live chat doesn't always reach people (when it says it is online), but they respond to tickets within a few hours, sometimes within a few minutes.
I have the Silver plan with them, and I think they recently changed the amount of disk space available from 7GB to 14GB because that's what I now have available. I did not know they were planning that, but it was a pleasant surprise when I logged in to cPanel.
I can't think of any problems I have had with Downtownhost in these two years of experience with them, though I have had problems with my scripts and code. If they make a mistake, they admit it and are quick to fix it. I might have had a little bit of downtime over a year ago, but I think the server went down briefly. The uptime has been superb and the services have been wonderful.
To anyone who is in search of a good web host, Downtownhost is the way to go for shared hosting. I have not tried their other services (well, I am using blogging on the staging server), so I do not know what they are like. I have been with my share of web hosts and I have not found one that is better than Downtownhost.
I have now been with PrecisionEffect.com for two years and have just paid for year number three. I have to say I have been very happy with the quality and service I have received. For my site I currently need over 7GB of storage space plus over 60GB of bandwidth a month. For me, the few extra dollars a month that I pay for a top quality host are well worth it. It is critical that the site loads quickly and has hardly any down time. I am currently using their failover-enabled server. From what I can tell my site has only been down a total of about an hour over the past two years. I don’t think you can beat that anywhere. I have never had that kind of uptime with any other host.
In the past I have been with web hosts that have put me on servers with 500 or more other hosted domains. PrecisionEffect.com currently has me on a server with only 200 domains (5 of which are mine). I believe not pushing their equipment to the max has been the main reason for the really good uptime.
If I ever do need support, Dave or Steve Garbus (both run PrecisionEffect.com) respond within minutes. Being a smaller size host, they know me and my site and are able to help me quickly. They are also able to help me customize the service I receive on the fly (Adding storage, domains, bandwidth to the plan).
I recommend PrecisionEffect.com to anyone looking for a long term top quality host with fast loading webpages (see their LiteSpeed plans) and excellent support. The couple of dollars extra you will pay for the service will be well worth it and save you in the long run.
I have been a WiredTree customer for about one year and I am very happy with their services. One of the top VPS providers available on the world, WiredTree runs its servers in its own datacenter and it is the real peace in mind company. On January 15th 2008 I've started a VPS 512 in WiredTree using a a WHT promo offer and encountered not only one problem with billing, hardware, software, support! I'm running 16 monster websites of my selected customers on this VPS under cPanel optimized for VPS release 4-R32603 - WHM 11.24.2 - X 3.9. OS: CENTOS 4.7 i686 on Virtuozzo. I've recently rebooted my VPS by command line (SSH) due a new app install exigence and this task was performed in few seconds without only one problem with cPanel!
I'm here to tell you my experience with steadcom.com shared hosting service. I have been them since 29 April 08 so thats not really 1 year but will be like in 2 weeks.
Speed - First I tell you the speed of my website, it's open fast (really fast for me actually)
Downtime - there is a couple of downtime and hardware/cpanel/diskspace error that make me can't use my website but not like every month and sometimes downtime is like 2-3 hours I can't open my website :/ and sometimes only when I open ticket they will check it and resolve my problem. Thats is not good enuf for me :/
Support - support is decent thats mean sometimes good (maybe when they online?) and sometimes is not. Sometimes support will answer my ticket after 2 -5 hours. :/ this guy Andrew neill is really a good support tech (very good I must say). I think he has work there since last year and other staff I know is Dimitri (CEO) and Grotman (sales?)
Price - This is the best part. They can be flexible If I use all my bandwidth they allow me to upgrade and when I don't need extra bandwidth they allow me to downgrade. Sometimes I pay $11 or $20 a/month depends on my bandwidth
So overall I rate them: Speed: 10/10 Downtime/Other error: 2/10 Support: 7/10 Price: 10/10
The sad part is starting next month I need to find a new host because this host don't work for me anymore because third party problem, otherwise this host is superb and I will still be with them.
I've been with Downtownhost for a little more than a year now, and figured I would share my experiences with others.
When I first signed up with Downtownhost, everything was great. Transferring my sites went super smooth: my server was very fast and support was amazing (got replies in under a minute!). Unfortunately, as time has gone on, I've seen a dramatic drop in server stability and support.
My first major issue with Downtownhost happened in March of this year, when my server was constantly being brought offline with DDoS attacks. I requested that they switch me to a different server, hopefully with less DDoS attacks. Downtownhost gave me a date and time when they would switch my account to a new server. That day and time went, with no word from anyone at Downtownhost. I sent an email to Downtownhost asking if my account had been moved, but apparently they had forgotten to switch me. Jorge was very quick to switch me once I asked to be moved again.
Everything was smooth on the new server until April, when it went down for periods of at least 6 hours or more on several different occasions (at least 3). These extremely long periods of downtime were very angering.
Everything has been fairly stable up until these last few weeks. I recently registered a new domain and went to add it to my cPanel account as an addon domain. Something screwed up within cPanel, so I was unable to add my new domain to cPanel. This issue took over 5 hours to even get a response from Downtownhost (which used to be very unusual). Eventually, the issue was resolved.
Now, my server is timing out several times per day, and my email has now stopped working.
On top of the increasingly longer support response times, nobody *ever* answers me on their live support feature, which is a big downside for me. I'm not sure what has caused this dramatic drop in quality from Downtownhost, but it's not looking like I will be renewing my contract with them
I’ve had a shared "Solarcluster 5 Lifetime" account with iMountain for a year, hosting low-traffic "community" sites, including shops, a blog, forums, CMSs, mailing lists and photo galleries. Here are my impressions so far. I’ve concentrated on things that are different from previous hosts I’ve used (mainly cheap cPanel shared hosting).
Summary Pros: Very good support, fast servers, solar powered Cons: Mediocre reliability, price, file permission issues, no forum
Pre-sales and pricing I found iMountain here on WHT after searching for a host with a good reputation for support and reliability. I was initially impressed by the consistent fast loading of their demo Gallery site, and by their solar powered and "clustered" hosting. However, their prices (for 10 domains) were above my budget and they had problems connecting to Europe (see http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=649322), which put me off. I signed up after they fixed the bandwidth problem quickly, and I discovered there was a 50% discount offer, and a "lifetime" subscription option (both now withdrawn) which made their prices more competitive.
Migration Moving my sites over to iMountain was not entirely trouble-free. They don’t offer to do the migration for you and I didn’t yet have SSH access at either end, so I had to download all the files and database contents from my old host and upload them again to iMountain by FTP. This took many hours, especially since my local ISP (Virgin) decided I was "abusing" my connection and silently throttled my upload speed to 128 kbit/s! Manually recreating all my databases and mail accounts took some time in the unfamiliar (and buggy) H-Sphere control panel, and some of my sites ended up offline or in maintenance mode for several days.
Support Support quality is definitely one of iMountain’s strong points. They claim all their support staff are Level 3 and up with 15+ years experience. It’s all done by e-mail and can therefore be a bit slow (sometimes hours for a response), but they generally get to the root of every problem and work to find a workable solution, unlike other hosts I’ve experienced, where it can be a constant struggle just to get a problem acknowledged, let alone fixed. They’re also pretty good at monitoring servers, which means it’s worth waiting a while before raising a trouble ticket. There’s no phone support, instant messaging or user forum though. There’s a tiny knowledgebase, a blog and a ticketing system but they’re barely used.
Speed Generally, my sites have been much more responsive since moving to iMountain, and this is the main reason I would recommend them. I’ve only raised three "sites slow" tickets in the last year and they’ve all been fixed quickly. At previous hosts, applications that should load in seconds would regularly take minutes or time out completely. Indeed, iMountain proudly state "…we can handle load surges from Digg, SlashDot, etc. When your site is getting the hits of a lifetime, we’re here to make sure your visitors get through…". So far I haven’t tested this, though! Ping times from the UK are consistently about 180ms (monitored by [url].
Reliability I’ve been monitoring one of my sites at 5 minute intervals for a year [url] and average uptime has been about 99.5%, which is about the same as my previous hosts. I’m a bit disappointed by this - I had hoped that by paying a bit more and moving to a more reputable host I would see some improvement in uptime. I’m still getting some website users urging me to move to a "more reliable" host.
Reliability is supposed to be one of the advantages of clustered hosting, but the "clustered" hosting that iMountain offers only means that the web server is separate from the database server, mail server etc., not that there are redundant servers that can take over if one of the servers in a cluster fails.
File permission issues Once my sites were up and running, an annoying problem kept recurring - I would come back later and find some of them down or showing errors. It turns out this is due to iMountain running PHP as an Apache module, which means that files created by a PHP application when someone visits the site (such as cache or log files) can’t subsequently be modified or removed by it. It’s a well-known problem, and the solution here is to simply raise a support ticket every time such a PHP application is installed or moved to get it fixed (not sure exactly how, sorry). It’s all a bit slow and inconvenient. It also affects updates - you have to overwrite the application in situ, instead of doing a clean installation and renaming it.
An alternative solution is to configure the entire site to "cgi mode", which can be done from the control panel. This solves all the file permission issues, but the big disadvantage for me is that it’s no longer possible to override local PHP settings (even using a local php.ini or ini_set), which means register_globals is always ON and the timezone always PST, for example.
Certificates I found that iMountain’s security certificates for shared SSL, secure mail and FTP connections etc. are all self-signed, which means you get a warning popup whenever you try to access them - a showstopper for an e-commerce site. I haven’t encountered this at previous hosts, and when I raised a ticket they said it would be too expensive to fix this on every server, but I could buy my own certificate and install it. I only needed it for one site and they were good enough to give me a free static IP for it, so I was happy with that, but be careful if you’re planning to host lots of secure sites with them. For email access I’ve simply gone back to unencrypted connections.
E-Mail Incoming mail is filtered with SpamAssassin and ClamAV and works pretty well. Outgoing mail is sometimes blacklisted though (e.g. by AOL and madasafish), which can be a pain - I’ve had to redirect some mail to users on these domains to go via googlemail.
There’s no real support for mailing lists (but no silly limits either) so you will need to install something like phplist or Dada Mail if you need them. There was initially no support for mail "domain forwarding" (all mail for xxx@mydomain sent to xxx@mysynonymdomain) but they enabled it when I asked.
Control panel The control panel is H-Sphere, which I have found quite capable but buggy. Obvious things like file uploads, moving directories and CHMOD sometimes don’t work, and very strange things can happen if you try to move and rename things too quickly. Also the menu structure can be very obscure - CRON jobs are found under "FTP User", for example.
Backups There’s no real support for backups - users are expected to make their own. I found a script to do mySQL backups, but file backups are harder because large directories will time out if you try to zip them. The options seem to be FTP (slow and not very reliable) or rsync (needs SSH access and a unix box).
Solar power The power supply is not 100% solar - they still connect to the grid, but they sell back almost as much power during the day as they buy at night, so they are still "greener" than most.
I've had a shared "Solarcluster 5 Lifetime" account with iMountain for a year, hosting low-traffic "community" sites, including shops, a blog, forums, CMSs, mailing lists and photo galleries. Here are my impressions so far. I've concentrated on things that are different from previous hosts I've used (mainly cheap cPanel shared hosting).
Summary Pros: Very good support, fast servers, solar powered Cons: Mediocre reliability, price, file permission issues, no forum Pre-sales and pricing I found iMountain here on WHT after searching for a host with a good reputation for support and reliability. I was initially impressed by the consistent fast loading of their demo Gallery site, and by their solar powered and "clustered" hosting. However, their prices (for 10 domains) were above my budget and they had problems connecting to Europe (see [url] [url],which put me off. I signed up after they fixed the bandwidth problem quickly, and I discovered there was a 50% discount offer, and a "lifetime" subscription option (both now withdrawn) which made their prices more competitive.
Migration Moving my sites over to iMountain was not entirely trouble-free. They don't offer to do the migration for you and I didn't yet have SSH access at either end, so I had to download all the files and database contents from my old host and upload them again to iMountain by FTP. This took many hours, especially since my local ISP (Virgin) decided I was "abusing" my connection and silently throttled my upload speed to 128 kbit/s! Manually recreating all my databases and mail accounts took some time in the unfamiliar (and buggy) H-Sphere control panel, and some of my sites ended up offline or in maintenance mode for several days.
Support Support quality is definitely one of iMountain's strong points. They claim all their support staff are Level 3 and up with 15+ years experience. It's all done by e-mail and can therefore be a bit slow (sometimes hours for a response), but they generally get to the root of every problem and work to find a workable solution, unlike other hosts I've experienced, where it can be a constant struggle just to get a problem acknowledged, let alone fixed. They're also pretty good at monitoring servers, which means it's worth waiting a while before raising a trouble ticket. There's no phone support, instant messaging or user forum though. There's a tiny knowledgebase, a blog and a ticketing system but they're barely used.
Speed Generally, my sites have been much more responsive since moving to iMountain, and this is the main reason I would recommend them. I've only raised three "sites slow" tickets in the last year and they've all been fixed quickly. At previous hosts, applications that should load in seconds would regularly take minutes or time out completely. Indeed, iMountain proudly state "...we can handle load surges from Digg, SlashDot, etc. When your site is getting the hits of a lifetime, we're here to make sure your visitors get through...". So far I haven't tested this, though! Ping times from the UK are consistently about 180ms (monitored by [url].
Reliability I've been monitoring one of my sites at 5 minute intervals for a year [url] and average uptime has been about 99.5%, which is about the same as my previous hosts. I'm a bit disappointed by this - I had hoped that by paying a bit more and moving to a more reputable host I would see some improvement in uptime. I'm still getting some website users urging me to move to a "more reliable" host. Reliability is supposed to be one of the advantages of clustered hosting, but the "clustered" hosting that iMountain offers only means that the web server is separate from the database server, mail server etc., not that there are redundant servers that can take over if one of the servers in a cluster fails.
File permission issues Once my sites were up and running, an annoying problem kept recurring - I would come back later and find some of them down or showing errors. It turns out this is due to iMountain running PHP as an Apache module, which means that files created by a PHP application when someone visits the site (such as cache or log files) can't subsequently be modified or removed by it. It's a well-known problem, and the solution here is to simply raise a support ticket every time such a PHP application is installed or moved to get it fixed (not sure exactly how, sorry). It's all a bit slow and inconvenient. It also affects updates - you have to overwrite the application in situ, instead of doing a clean installation and renaming it.
An alternative solution is to configure the entire site to "cgi mode", which can be done from the control panel. This solves all the file permission issues, but the big disadvantage for me is that it's no longer possible to override local PHP settings (even using a local php.ini or ini_set), which means register_globals is always ON and the timezone always PST, for example.
Certificates I found that iMountain's security certificates for shared SSL, secure mail and FTP connections etc. are all self-signed, which means you get a warning popup whenever you try to access them - a showstopper for an e-commerce site. I haven't encountered this at previous hosts, and when I raised a ticket they said it would be too expensive to fix this on every server, but I could buy my own certificate and install it. I only needed it for one site and they were good enough to give me a free static IP for it, so I was happy with that, but be careful if you're planning to host lots of secure sites with them. For email access I've simply gone back to unencrypted connections.
E-Mail Incoming mail is filtered with SpamAssassin and ClamAV and works pretty well. Outgoing mail is sometimes blacklisted though (e.g. by AOL and madasafish), which can be a pain - I've had to redirect some mail to users on these domains to go via googlemail. There's no real support for mailing lists (but no silly limits either) so you will need to install something like phplist or Dada Mail if you need them. There was initially no support for mail "domain forwarding" (all mail for xxx@mydomain sent to xxx@mysynonymdomain) but they enabled it when I asked.
Control panel The control panel is H-Sphere, which I have found quite capable but buggy. Obvious things like file uploads, moving directories and CHMOD sometimes don't work, and very strange things can happen if you try to move and rename things too quickly. Also the menu structure can be very obscure - CRON jobs are found under "FTP User", for example.
Backups There's no real support for backups - users are expected to make their own. I found a script to do mySQL backups, but file backups are harder because large directories will time out if you try to zip them. The options seem to be FTP (slow and not very reliable) or rsync (needs SSH access and a unix box).
Solar power The power supply is not 100% solar - they still connect to the grid, but they sell back almost as much power during the day as they buy at night, so they are still "greener" than most.
I must have raised around 60 to 70 tickets with them in last 1 year. 90% of the tickets the response time is less than 3 minutes. Sometimes they take around 5 minutes to reply.
But definitely i get back replies in less than 5 minutes all tickets new and pending.
It feels like they have a huge team which is always online waiting for tickets.
Recently i had problems in server on 31st December night 11pm Indian Time. I sent a ticket surprisingly their ticket reply came back in 2 minutes and again in next 3 minutes the second reply came that the server is again up.
Last week they helped me with one server which had few problems. They reinstalled the server for me and also transfered the accounts and checked each website. One of the website had issues de to mysqli extension not installed. They did it too and completed the entire job very professionally.
They also configured one of the servers for application hosting. The server surely has become 2x faster after Eurovps tuning work on the vps. They also called me on mobile to inform me.
I surely recommend eurovps for someone searching for premium and reliable hosting. one word of caution dont use bad language with them. The people manning the support team are no nonsense people and will not accept rude language. If you are good with them they will also be good with you.
If others also happy with eurovps support then please feel free to post it here.
All in all their servers are pretty fast due to quality hardware and support also very fast .. complete peace of mind for me with eurovps.
I've been meaning to post a review here cause I used this forum to choose my host over 2 years ago.
I had never paid for a host before and never ventured into doing much for a website but wanted a small personal low maintenance e-comm website. I wanted a low cost host most of all since I didn't think I'd get a big flood of customers, dotable worked pretty well for the first year or so. My only complaints with them were,
their abrasive renewal letters, it was like as soon as you got a notice to renew, you had 24 hours to do it. I'm a noob so I felt it was rude but whatever.
I also found the staff didn't seem to understand what I wanted when I submitted a ticket (all of twice a year) consisting of asking them where the virus scanner had gone. I used to have one and then it disappeared. It took 3 tickets and 1 year for Aussie Bob to understand that, I found it very frustrating.
I over all was happy, little downtime, only problem popping up occasionally was expired ssl but now that the company has changed over to new people I was determined to not mind. I didn't want to deal with a change since my website is nice and settled but in the last week I have submitted my first and now 2nd 911 tickets which took a good 12 HOURS to get a reply! I am not the type to use 911 tickets anyhow, I suspect others do so it's a big deal when I click the 911 button. This week I have submitted more overall tickets then I have in the rest of the 2 years I have been with them D: My website has never been so high maintenance! It's not only frustrating but as many of you know it makes you look BAD and you do loose business over it.
The customer service is the type that offers no information, it's like talking to someone where you ask "so did you like this movie" and they answer "yep...." you have to keep prompting the information or you will not get it at all. It is extremely frustrating. They also tend to answer only 1 problem per email.
I really wanted to keep on with dotable but after a long strength I will be looking for another host very soon.
I didn't love Aussie Bob but now I sure do miss him too bad.
Now I am off to research for a reliable host with low cost service for a low maintenance gal and her tiny osc website.
