Gate, Hostway, And KickAssVPS Experiences

I have used this forum a lot recently and just wanted to give back.

I had my site hosted with gate.com for about 2 years which had been "OK". I wanted shared windows hosting with a real SQL Server account included and there weren't many options. Gate.com was only $10 at the time for a shared windows site with 100MB MS SQL included. Down time has been nowhere near 99.99%. Several times a year the the site was down for days at a time. I was nearing my 100MB SQL limit and noticed that SQL was no longer included with their new plans, so I started doing some research on this site.

Right after that they migrated to new servers. Based on some domain names, setup screens... that I've seen recently, I believe that they were bought out by hostway.com. Since then, everything has been horrible.

They moved my SQL database to a new server, but kept the old one with the old name visible on the web. Since you can't have 2 computers with the same name and they didn't tell me about the change, the new server had to keep the old name but I couldn't access it with that name. They never told me about this change and never gave me access to the new server. After calling, one tech support guy actually gave me a CNAME as the server name. Like I could access the server using a name ending in hostway. <- yes, not .com, just a dot at the end.

The aliases that were pointed to my domain were redirected to some investment club. One tech guy tried to fix it by deleting the alias from my account and then re-adding it.

The script he used to do this automatically charged my credit card for $10 for each alias and only worked for one of them. He said it was up to me to contact billing to fix this. Three weeks later, the alias that worked was broken again - pointing back to the investment club.

Gate.com also had phone support (originally a plus), but hold times during this transition period could take an hour. Filling out a ticket took 3 weeks for a reply.

I had already decided I wanted to try out a VPS because I had a couple more sites I wanted setup and I didn't want to get nickled and dimed for each one. Again, I wanted Windows Hosting with SQL Server included. Based on some reviews I read here I decided to go with KickAssVps.com. Their Plesk license includes 10 domains for free (I need 6), they have a free SQL Server 2005 1GB coupon (still available on this site until October 1st), and RAM was great at 960MB which I now realize is a lot more than I need.

Have only had the site for a 9 days but so far I am happy. Registered the account late on a Saturday and it was setup by 11PM that night. Questions have been answered in a couple of hours. The KickAssVPS.com site doesn't have the greatest support, but you aren't using any custom tools from them. Help for Plesk, Virtuozzo, DNS setup, IIS... can all be found online and so far I haven't had much of a problem.

I get about 8500 page-views a day and RAM is still under 300MB. Having SQL off server instead of using SQL Enterprise Express is great. Users of the site have commented that the site and chat both respond noticeably faster now. Remote Desktop is also very fast.

Uploading about 1GB of images took a very long time, but not sure if that was on my end or the server.

Sorry for the long rant. Just needed to release some aggression against my old provider.