We would just like to take a minute to say how impressed and satisfied we are with one of our primary colo providers, G3 Technologies [url]. Brendan at G3 is a absolute pleasure to deal with. The facility is secure, well maintained and the BGP network Brendan has created is powerful and reliable.
I wouldn't trust anyone but Brendan and G3 when you need premium colocation.
Mods, you can PM us for proof that we use G3 or you can just trace hostvault.net ;-).
Well almost a year ago I came here and read lots of posts, asked lots of questions and settled on getting my two servers from LayeredTech.
When I bought both my servers, they were from their clearance rack because although my sites were pushing terabyte level traffic at the time, their CPU/etc needs were fairly low. Of course how these things tend to go, I am looking at needing a third server this summer. Time to look at raising prices I guess
One thing that people seemed to complain about with Layeredtech at that time was the "lack of support". I personally have not seen that over this time I have been with them. For example...
Last Monday SMARTD reports an hard drive error. I submit a ticket and with in 30 mins we were scheduling a down time with them so they could test the drive. They ran the test and it came back with "one or more errors" so they offered to replace the drive and reload. I decided to take advantage of a forced down time to remove that horrid piece of junk called PLESK and asked for a fresh install of the OS, with nothing (I have see the grass on the control panel side, and its not greener!) and while we are at it toss more ram in the machine.
So they offered to bring up a complete new server and run them parallel for a few days!
Which is exactly the choice I opt'd for. I am happy to say we completed that move last Saturday and my users are much happier with the server speed increase (from doubling the RAM and removing PLESK as the rest of the hardware was basically the same)
I would and do happily recommend them to anyone that needs a unmanaged server. Their ticket response time has always been top notch, and other then this drive failure, we have had no hardware issues. Both our servers are in teh Savvis data center, if that means anything.
I can remember not so long ago, Layered Tech and Soft Layer were pitched as being pretty much equal in pricing. When it comes to high-end VPS nodes, I've seen it so far to be more feesable to lease them, maybe on RTO, rather than buy hardware and rack it up so when I came to request a quote from the two providers, it seems to be that Layered Tech charge some what $800 more for the same configuration as Soft Layer. Who is actually worth the money in your opinion?
The quote:
Quote:
Dual Processor Quad Core Xeon 5335 2.00GHz (Clovertown) - 2 x 8MB cache 2 x 1.00TB SATA II 24 GB FB-DIMM Registered 533/667 100 Mbps Public & Private Ports Public Bandwidth 2000 GB Bandwidth Monitoring Host Ping Notification Email and Ticket Response Automated Notification Operating System CentOS 5 (64 bit) Primary IP Addresses: 1 IP Address Secondary IP Addresses: 4 IP Addresses Lockbox 1 GB Network IDS/IPS Protection Unlimited SSL VPN Users & 1 PPTP VPN User per account Nessus Vulnerability Assessment & Reporting Quantity: 1 Discounted Total: $599/month, $0 setup
For exactly the same quote, Layered Tech wanted $1,400 per month. Although I have no plans to go with either right now, who is actually worth the money?
I didn't even know about this company until I saw one of their PDU in somebody's cabinet in the datacenter.
They don't list any prices or vendors, I emailed them waiting for reply.
One thing that caught my eye was the number of additional outlets per strip. We never daisy chain out PDUs so even though we have the power to put more servers per circuit we never could. It has at least 3-4 more outlets than Raritan PX and APC, which means we can put 3-4 more servers per circuit.
How are their products? The look pretty robust from what I saw in the cabinet.
I've found an interesting offer from this provider. After doing some research I found one topic which didn't really describe the quality of their service.
For people looking for a vps, I thought it's important to get a feel for their technical support team. So for the first time, I've had to use it. . .
My problem is that MySQL CPU utilization is around 25% at all times and it is lagging the box like crazy. All of my sites hosted only get around 200k uniques per month. <<snipped>> The lag seemed to start around the same time I added multiple cronjobs at various times and frequencies to grab RSS feed data and check to see if it should add a new entry into the DB.
I am not a linux guru, so I opened a ticket and asked for help and suggestions on what to do. . .
Response:
Quote:
I could try tweaking the mysql configuration so the service uses less resources, but this usually just helps with the memory use.
I was looking for him to either say yes the cronjobs are doing it or I have poorly coded queries. . something useful and related to CPU usage. But no.
So then I say sure, tweak. I ask if he agrees that the cronjobs are the problem and what options I have to remedy the situation.
Response:
I have tweaked the mysql configuration for you. Yes, most likely those cronjobs are causing the big CPU usage in mysql.
Basically he completely ignored my question on what other options I have or recommendations on what to do next. Needless to say I am furious. I ask for advice and get absolutely nothing useful in return. Not to mention his short answers make it seem like I'm lucky he even reads my entire question.
I've been with Zoom for 2 years now, and I'm leaving as soon as I find another host. Here's why: once a month, for the last 3 months, emails I send to a Yahoo.com address are bounced because Yahoo is blocking all email from my mail server. When this is finally dealt with, it turns out Yahoo blocks everything coming from Zoom (or my shared server -- sorry I'm not technical) because of spam originating there. Now, *I'm* not sending spam, and spam is annoying enough to deal with in my in box, but now other people sending spam are stopping me from sending my little 20-30 emails a day!
Here's how tech support has worked for me when this problem comes up:
1. I go on and open a chat with support.
2. Someone In India eventually says hello to me.
3. I state my problem.
4. Long wait.
5. Someone In India eventually comes back and says "hello" again.
6. Now I'm pissed. I tell Someone In India what the problem is and give her email headers and tell her to pay attention.
7. Another long wait.
8. This Someone In India gives me an email address at zoom to email directly about this problem.
9. I email TheAddressIWasGiven @ zoom explaining my problem...and THAT EMAIL BOUNCES! Despite the irony of having an email begging for help with bounces get bounced itself, I am not amused.
10. I go to call Tech Support... DOH! They no longer have phone support.
11. I fill out an online support and send it in. I wait No reply. Emails to Yahoo still bouncing.
12. I fill out another one. I wait.
13. I get an email telling me my second support request is being closed since they are working on the first one. Really? First I've heard of them working on it.
14. 20 minutes later I get an email saying they're working on the first request.
15. A day or so later, I get an email telling me it will all be fine in a day.
16. Sometimes it's fine, sometimes I get another email telling me to go to Yahoo and fill out a form to get them to unblock it.
17. I fill out a form at Yahoo and it gets unblocked within hours. I am currently suffering from the latest email bouncing and am at step # 14. Which is what drove me here to find a real host. Something about getting lumped in with spammers is just....icky. Yucky.
Also, they spontaneously took my little web site off line several times because they messed with directories. It took days to get right. My business is not web-based, but it was still annoying.
Anyway, there's my cautionary tale about Zoom . A few mistakes are forgivable, but this is too much.
I was a happy client of Ruby Ring tech, but few days ago my Shared server Cpenl got missing in action... It showed some issue on listens... i submit a ticket to Ruby Ring tech and they said they will fix it soon... but for about 3 days nothing happen... suddenly today my shared server is also gone missing... cant connect to any of my websites and page cannot be displayed on cpanel also.. I submitted tickets.. but still no answer, now about 12 + hours downtime....
I was a happy client of Ruby Ring tech, but few days ago my Shared server Cpenl got missing in action... It showed some issue on listens... i submit a ticket to Ruby Ring tech and they said they will fix it soon... but for about 3 days nothing happen... suddenly today my shared server is also gone missing... cant connect to any of my websites and page cannot be displayed on cpanel also.. I submitted tickets.. but still no answer, now about 5 -6 hours downtime....
I'm wonder whats happening.....? hope that they will fix the things soon.... plzz if any 1 of Ruby Ring tech see this reply to this thread.... i like to know whats going and how soon you can give the server back
I had purchased an SSL certificate from Go-Daddy. The Tech support people at GigaPros were more than willing to give me the advice I needed and to get the certificate installed for me in very short order.
Polite courteous professional service, excellent response times and top notch support. This company offers excellent value for the money! I highly recommend GigaPros!
So we have a single Layered Tech box hitting our server with around 90 MBit/s for almost 12 hours straight now, resulting in over 400 GB excess traffic so far. An abuse report was sent about 4 hours ago (Ticket-ID: XZP-97559-339) with evidence included, but so far there was 0 reaction besides the auto-reply.
A phone call to the number listed on their website resulted only in a message that there is no one available at extension XYZ. I didn't try repeat calls since playing international phone tag is not quite my idea of fun.
I realise that it was/still is early in the morning at their location, but nonetheless, I'd expect a company their size to respond a lot faster to reports such as this.
I'd like to start an ongoing thread here listing the 'Good Hosters with Good TELEPHONE tech support'. In other words, out of the 1,000s of host companies, this may cut it down to less than a dozen.
( And for all you Hosters out there who really want your company to grow, and want to know how, - it's easy: just read here.)
Good telephone support is the #1 ultimate requirement, because:
-It's a lot faster and easier for both the user and the host company, because you can state and answer all questions and clarifications on the spot, you don't need to continually pass new emails with new questions and clarifications, back and forth for days on end, until the issue is solved. It saves tech time and user's time. And saves a lot of nerves.
- It's the best way to sort the good guys from the bad. A bad company isn't going to bother to answer the phone, - or will make you wait way too long, - because they are likely getting endless complaints. The good guys are always ready to answer the phones, with a friendly voice, - because they really WANT to please the customer.
- If a company can't be bothered to pick up the phone, we can't be bothered to even consider them. They're a joke, and so won't be listed here on this thread. (So, before adding or listing any Hosters here, please verfify that they do have Good, quick, friendly, telephone support,; ideally 24/7, but 9am to 10pm might be acceptable, if it was supplemented by some emergency contact. AND:
- Hoster ALSO needs good EMAIL support (and preferably, Chat online, extended hour availability). (I spend a lot of time overseas). It sems all emails should get a non-automated response within about an hour, - and then support should jump on fixing any problem.
I only need support a few times a year. To answer some questions, or fix a problem, or do an install. That's lesss than 1 hour total, so any company paying maybe $18/hour tech support should be able to handle this. It IS reasonable to charge a custm for extended calls, beyond say, 90minutes a year, IF you don't count the 80%? Of times an issue is the Hoster;s fault of stmg gone wrong, and don't count the 'hold' times.
ALSO IMPORTANT: - Uptime - site Speeds - Monthly plans, no contract (Only a dishonest host will try to force you into a contract, where they can then ignore you.) - Reasonable price. (? Maybe $12 to $18/month for a basic business site. We don't need massive bandwitdths, - we all know that's an overselling scam, and can't ever be delivered.) - a good upgrade plan of bigger options. Maybe even VPS. - Dedicated IP, and availbility of SSL -PHP 5, mysql, phpMyAdmin, etc - cPanel ( Some Hosts are using problematic panels, like Hsphere, which are slow to load, slow in operation, require many more clicks, have too many options, spread apart on many separate pages. Time is money, and this really slows down the ability of a small business to manage his own site in effective time. For example, one WHT user wrote somewhere: "I don't feel that HSphere's interface is nice at all, although I have worked with cPanel and DA all my life... I just found it to include un-necessary features or split features up in to different hard to find pages, such as backups - mysql backups you had to find on a completely different page than file backups, and then there were options to have it in the home directory or server-end backup, in which then you had to wait a good 10 minutes before it was ready. cPanel, just hit backup and hit download and instantly it does everything you need...".
I have used several hosters. Currently on Aplus.net and Godad, which have phone support, and mediocre service.
My LIST So Far: - Liquidweb: a very impressive company with good, 24 hour support. But to get dedicated IP, you need to go with their $25/month plan. Yikes! - NewIdeaHosting.com. A very small company. My call was returned, and the owner chatted with me for an hour on the phone! Plans have small bandwidth, but promises No overselling, and personalized attention. Extra $5 for dedi IP. He specializes in Small business sites, and small eCommerce sites. He has only 250 accounts, on 3 servers. He rents servers from the Equinox data center of Chicago. Seems exceptionaly honest. - MegaHosters. Excellent phone support and WHT reviews. But company was taken over by another company, and so may well go downhill in future. Another problem: uses Hsphere. - Steadfast. Has a good rep on WHT, and seems impressive. Tech answered the phone immediately, but they say they prefer emails. Sales phone has limited hours. Good price on $20 SSL. But, uses Hshhere. - JodoHost 24 hour phone. But, uses Hsphere. An Indian company with office in Florida, and good rep. I like the idea of outsourcing phone support, if it makes it more available and affordable. But, the accent on the phone was very hard for me to understand, so maybe this might not work..... - Hostgator. Yes, it's a big overseller, but seems to get good reviews/results anyway, and good phone support. - ? ThePrimeHost ?? Mostly good WHT reviews; some dissenters. Site says 24hour phone, but when I called on several nights, no one ever answered... - Can anyone add to this list? Please list only hosts that meet the above minimum requirements of phone support, etc. Especially useful is hosters you've tried. TO AVOID: - Avoid Arvixe. I had a horrid experience with them, here: [WHT forum]:/showthread.php?p=5097822#post5097822 - Avoid WebHostingBuzz. This company never returned my phone msessage inquiries.
if our host is experiencing technical problems, or if they're in financial collapse. Since 5 PM Sat., many sites hosted by powerfulhosting.com of Santa Monica have gone dead, mostly on NS01.POWERFULHOSTING.COM and some on NS1.IOCUS.COM They include:
and many more. Over the weekend, tech help claimed the problems were assocaited with an "upgrade" to a new server. As the site owners started talking to each other, and the outage grew into the work week, Powerful Hosting stopped responding to inquiries, even from longtime clients. Their phone mailboxes are full and silent.
Now, I'm not an administrator or even a very quick FTPer, but these stores have burned to the ground and there are are livelihoods on the line. Can anyone in this community find any evidence suggesting a geniune technical glitch on their servers? A couple of people in our group think maybe they can't pay a server bill, in which case we all need to bail out immediately.
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.
I have been using 1 and 1 web hosting for almost 3 months now. In that time my site has never been down. I use them to host my website but i use google App for my email server.
In the three months that i have been hosting with them i have only had to put in one ticket due to a mysql database issue. Which then turns out something that i have done.
I would recommend 1 and 1 to my friends and family.
Since I've been noticing a thread about how this company is a scam and a fraud and will take your money and run.... I wanted to post my review of them.
Super VPS #2 ($9.95) was bought on 11/21 at 5:42 PM. I received the VPS login information about 4 hours later.
I have this VPS for a VPN server that I run for my personal use. I have so far had 100% uptime and nothing has been wrong. Everything is working great.
I have sent in a number of ticket with things that I need to be enabled for the VPN to work. All of my tickets were responded to within a reasonable time limit. I say reasonable for the following reasons:
1) I used to work in the hosting business and it's almost impossible to give a hour resolution unless you have a big time staff
2) this VPS in UNMANAGED so I didn't expect support to be online waiting for my ticket Andy has been a great person and I truly thank you for everything you've done on my VPS for me.
The VPS has great connections to the internet. Although I ALWAYS prefer that Cogent be left out when I buy a server or VPS, this one came with it but most of my routes take Level 3 and Internap so I am perfectly fine with it. They also setup rDNS for me in a matter of minutes.
I have pushed 4GB so far and am not having any problems with any one else's VPS affecting mine.
So to sum it up:
Support = 8/10 (If you offered a guaranteed response in xx minutes that would be great)
Network = 9/10 (I prefer not to have Cogent since they send you all over the USA unlike other carriers)
Price = 10/10 (Find me a $10 VPS that offers all this on a stable NOT OVERSOLD node)
Uptime = 10/10 (So far so good!)
Overall Experience = 9/10
If you are looking at a VPS and just want to try this out, you really can't lose anything with this $10 plan. I would highly recommend The NY NOC.
Note to mods: I have submitted my IP and info through the ticket system.