Geek Storage Hosting 5 Month Review
Mar 27, 2009
My earlier one month review of Geek Storage got deleted with the whole WHT-take over thing, and I figured it was about time to write a new review anyways.
GeekStorage has been a dream host for me. I have a developer package with them. I recently upgraded my account to unlimited domains, because I am slowly migrating all my domains and sites over to them.
I am paying ~$7 a month for a ton of features. I could actually get it cheaper, if I paid more in advance. Right now I'm paying quarterly, but after this next session I will most likely switch to yearly and get an even better rate. I'm getting 10GB storage, 250GB bandwith (the next upgrade would be $8/month for 25GB/500GB). I get unlimited domains, MySQL, PostGreSQL, blah blah blah. So it's feature rich, very affordable, and it's not overselling.
The features outweigh anything I've seen. The setup for PHP performance sticklers like me is incredible. The Litespeed web server is the way to go in my opinion. It has the ability to use apache modules, so that is great for easily modifying rewrite rules and whatnot with an .htaccess. Litespeed is so incredibly fast, I'll never settle for less again. Hopefully, as long as GeekStorage keeps up it's act I won't have to!
If you ever want an Apache or CGI module or anything of that nature, all you have to do is submit a ticket and they'll install it! I've never seen such a personal host where you can make requests like that.
GeekStorage also has PostgreSQL, a major selling point for me. However, nobody else on the server uses it. I say this because my only ticket so far was when I first joined GeekStorage and PhpPgAdmin (postgresql phpmyadmin equivalent) did not connect correctly. I put in a ticket and they fixed it right away.
Downtime? I haven't had any. I'm not sure how to track that, but I have some moderate volume niche sites that are constantly getting organic traffic. I have consistently made sales through these sites and have not noticed any drop-off. Everytime I go any of my sites hosted at GeekStorage, they load up quickly. I'm at ease of not having to worry about my sites going down.
Most of my sites are kinda greyhat, so I don't like to post them. So here's one you can use to confirm I have hosting with GeekStorage: [url]
So their website is: GeekStorage.com. If you want fast shared hosting, tons of features, lots of space and bandwith without overselling, and people who know what the *@)# they're doing, and all at an awesome price-- then I can recommend GeekStorage. They've been a class act so far
If you have any questions or something I didn't get to I'll try to keep an eye on this thread, otherwise you can PM me.
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May 14, 2009
I'm usually not to active in these parts of the forums, but I try to contribute anytime I can. Today, I will be reviewing Geek Storage now that all of my content has been removed from their servers and placed on another web host.
Intially: (Jan 15 '09)
The signup process was pretty easy, as it should be with all web hosts. I got a pretty good deal with a coupon and paid for the entire year. I didn't really see any bad reviews about Geek Storage at the time and was lured in by their "Powered by Geek" advertising.
Support: 8 - I honestly think I submitted one ticket, and it was to thank Jay for such the great deal and to let him know if he needed help with any design aspects of the website, I'd help.
Speed: 8 - My website performed well, much better than my other web host, so I assumed the LiteSpeed was doing it.
Now: (End of April - Now)
Support: 2 & Speed: 0 - I'm honestly an easy client for web hosts, I rarely submit tickets and when I do I would like them answered. The first ticket I submitted was regarding the website speed on their Zeus server. I submitted a ticket to the help desk that went unanswered for basically over a day (w/ High Priority).
So, I looked for the Live Chat to find out they don't offer any type of Live Support...
I then proceeded to PM Jay on WHT, and didn't receive a reply for another 2 days.
He told me that they would be receiving a new server and new hardware to amp up the servers and asked if I wanted to wait for the new one, or be moved to another server they own. I told him to move me somewhere immediately since my clients couldn't even order through my cart without running into Timeout screens or blank pages. Now, two weeks later, I'm still on Zeus. I went into the community forums and noticed a 50+ post thread about the performance of Zeus and how nothing was being done to the problem.
Overall:
I think Geek Storage is lucky they have such a good design promising "You're in Geek Hands," because that's what lured me in. I'm out about 7 months of payment, but money is the least of my worries... I just want my website to be fast and accessible!
I really think these guys need to invest in hiring more people and purchasing better servers before all their clients are gone with many bad reviews about them.
I switched to a new web host and it's already been a major change. The speed is incredible because their servers aren't overcrowded... And it was a major plus seeing someone on Live Support at 1am to help me immediately with my SSL Cert.
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Dec 17, 2008
I've gone Geek! I just switched to GeekStorage hosting a little less than a month ago, because my previous host was just ridiculous. I won't get into it because I could go on for days about my old host, it was just plain horrible. I'm not really one to mudsling or drag people's livelihoods down, so I'll just let them remain anonymous. Alot of the problems probably weren't in their control but they were numerous. That's enough of that though, because I've packed my bags for greener pastures and don't even want to look back.
Anyways, so I've been at Geek Storage for about a month now, on a shared hosting plan.
In this time I must say that I have been quite impressed with them. I've been through a number of hosts throughout the years, and have been studying the hosting game for years now. So since I know what to look for, I shopped around here at WHT for a couple of months and was drawn to Geekstorage. It was not an easy decision to make, finding a host, I'm very very picky.
First of all, I've fallen in love with the Litespeed http server. I still have all the benefits of apache, such as mod_rewrite, and any other apache modules. With Litespeed, PHP code executes blazingly fast. When I first benchmarked a Zend framework bootstrap on the servers, I fell in love. And once it was cached in memory... well let's just say it was like the time when Bruce Willis was dead at the end of the Sixth Sense. This is coming from a HUGE performance stickler... I am rarely impressed by these kinds of things. Some bigger MySQL queries that took ~0.148s to execute on my old host don't even have a benchmark reading on these servers (they round off to 0.00001s). I don't know why there was such a remarkable difference, perhaps just more memory available on the server compared to my last host.
The servers have Ruby/RoR installed, as well as Python. I am a really big fan of Python, in fact I believe it will take over the scripting world in the coming years, becoming more popular than PHP and Perl. So this was a selling point to me, since I want to get into Django development more.
Another selling point to me was PostgreSQL databases. Though I am using MySQL for all my current projects, the scope of some bigger projects I am looking into getting off the ground in the future (when I can only find the time...), require a more robust database system. What's funny is when I first signed up for GeekStorage the PostgreSQL database connection settings weren't working correctly, and PhpPgAdmin (the postgreSQL phpmyadmin equivalent) was not working. I sent in a support ticket and the problem was solved almost immediately. I think I may be the first client to use the pgsql databases!
I guess I should probably put a link to one of my sites here. This one's kinda greyhat, in fact I wouldn't even reccomend going to it because I've shoved an barrage of ads onto the page. The myspace crowd seems to love them. Here's the URL anyways:
[url]. Coming soon: Popups and peel away ads,
I haven't experienced any downtime, any slow page loads, or any other problems of that nature. I hope it continues to be that way, and as for now I am very happy with my decision. The best part to me, is it seems I have found people just as geeky about technology as me. Everything is the current version, Ruby, pgsql, mysql, PHP, etc. All up to date and ready to go. I love staying current on technology, and the Geeks really seem to know their stuff.
And before you ask I'll be sure to give the 3-month, 6-month, and 1-year reviews in due time Geek Storage Web Hosting
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Mar 18, 2008
I tried couple hosting providers before we came to empire-hosting. most of them were shared hosts and one was vps.
We use a 512MB ram vps with DirectAdmin to run our sites.
At empire-hosting for the firs time in my experience with hosts, I saw what is meaning of word "managed"!!! You don't need to know anything about your server. System administrator will think about all updates, fixes, problems instead of you. You just need to bring great site to your visitors, and that all.
Support is fast and helpful. There wasn't problem they couldn't solve. Dale who is admin there is really a great person. Guru admin .
For every downtime due to system upgrades mail was sent couple hours before it occurs.
the aren't the cheapest, but they aren't overselling and you get fast and reliable server for your sites.
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Nov 5, 2008
Some of the other hosting companies I have tried are:
1&1
Virpus
Godaddy
And another one I stayed with for 2 weeks and can not remember the name of it. I have tried other hosting companies before. So I do have something to compare Future Hosting to.
Before I signed up with future hosting I had a website running joomla with a bridged SMF forum and another site running MDPro and MDForum. MDPro is a cousin to Postnuke and MDForum is kinda like PHPBB. When I signed up with a hosting company, most of the time I got a VPS and 256 megs of memory - or what ever the company had in that range. For some reason the pages took 10 - 20 seconds to load on the joomla site. The MDPro site was a little faster, but not much. Even though I submitted several trouble tickets, it seemed that tech support could not figure out why the response times were so slow. The usual answer was my site was "high traffic" and that was why the pages were loading slow. I often wondered how 10 - 15 people on a webpage can be high traffic? I tried the joomla support forums, the smf support forums - I looked for help everywhere I could.
After getting no help from one hosting company, I signed up at another, and another, and another. I had almost given up on ever owning a website.
That is when I came to Webhosting talk and started doing some serious research and that is when I found Future Hosting.
When I first signed up with Future Hosting in March of 2007 I got their 256 mg VPS server to run my new VBulletin forum on. It was a new hosting company, a new forum and a new adventure.
After the first month I must say that I was impressed. I had just left the last hosting company because of server performance, so I was surprised when people actually started signing up on my forum and posting stuff. I was even more surprised when the server allowed more then 15 or 20 people on it at a time. And I was REALLY surprised when the pages loads in just a couple of seconds, instead of 10 - 20+ seconds.
A few months later it was time to upgrade to a new server. And then a couple of months later my site was moved to a new data center.
The last time I needed serious tech support was in November of 2007 - exactly a year ago. During that year the only little bumps that have happened were asking the tech support people to update MYSQL, or update PHP for me. A whole freaking year with no server problems. You just do not hear about stuff like that. But somehow the techs at Future Hosting keep these servers up and running 365/24/7.
In the last week of October 2008 my site started experiencing slow load times and connection issues. So I opened a support ticket. Tech support and I exchanged several messages back and forth over the following days. But this time things were a little "different" - the connection problems would come and go. By the time I opened a ticket, and tech support looked at the site, everything was normal. There were a couple of times the tech support person saw high memory usage, or high CPU usage, but it lasted for only a couple of minutes.
Finally, one of the support guys checked the apache server at the right time and found my site was under a small DDOS attack. The Apache server had around 1,000 active connections to it.
After the tech support people installed some security software, the sever is back to normal and everything is running great.
Currently I have the the Elite package with 768MB of memory and 40 gigs of hardrive space. On this server I run 8 websites.
2 - VBulletin forums.
2 - SMF forums
5- Wordpress sites
One of my forums gets over 1.8 million page views a month, has over 332,000 post, gets 900 - 1,000 members visiting every 24 hours, 700 - 1,400 post every day and around 2,884 members visiting every 30 days.
My VBulletin forum - [url]
My wifes VBulletin forum - [url] My wifes site opened a couple of months ago. Anyone interested in digital cameras - go sign up.
Even with all of these sites and traffic, I still have around 500 megs of free memory and use just a fraction of the CPU.
It seems that most of the time when you read a review its negative. This is just the opposite, I am very satisfied with Future Hosting and highly recommend them to anyone looking for a serious hosting solution to real world needs.
Before I found Future Hosting I had almost given up on finding a good host. In fact, I was considering getting out of the website business all together. It seemed that no matter what host I tried, I would get the same results. Whether it was slow page loads, or terrible support - every company I tried seemed to be just alike. Until I read a review about Future Hosting here on webhosting talk.
Here I am 20 months after signing up with Future Hosting. And I am telling you, if your sick and tired of your host - dont live in misery, dont live with slow page loads, dont deal with poor tech support. Contact Future Hosting and get your website up and running like it should be.
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Aug 17, 2008
Well I've decided to start up a pretty stable car community. So I searched the forums and found addictivehosting.com to be pretty good for my needs.
Well the first two months went pretty nicely but this month has been pretty spotty for me. They recently had some network problems causing the hosting to become unstable.
I submitted a ticket and recieved an answer fairly soon telling me about the problems and that they will be moving to softlayer. A few minutes later an email was dispatched saying that the move would be flawless causing minimal downtime. Well little to find out that something with the move caused my mysql databases to become currupt and I've lost all the data from that day and the DNS is still spotty for most of my users.
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Aug 31, 2008
last month i came here asking about a VPS provider to replace my shell provider that died, i was on a very tight budget and ended up with VPSLinks smallest package, Link-1, 2.5gb disk space, 100gb monthly bandwith, 64mb ram, 1 dedicated ip, all for $7.95 per month.
I signed up, the setup was done before i managed to get to the login panel (must have been instant). There i was presented with OS choices, i choose debian. 10 seconds later my VPS was online and ready for me to connect with SSH. Very good
Setup - 10/10
Installed all the stuff i need (My IRC server, my bouncer, and bitlbee gateway) this takes up about 60mb ram (few, just inside the limit) and all was well.
Networking is the only problem i have with VPSLink so far, there are odd lag spikes every now and again that last around 20 seconds, there was also just under an hours downtime this month. The administrator in vpslinks IRC channel had this to say.
[lylev] No, I cannot. I did just receive word from our network administrator that one of our racks main switches died, but instead of dropping connections, it created a routing loop, overloading the rest of the network. That one rack has been taken offline, so the rest of the network is back up, but some clients will still be down.
There is real room for improvement with networking, so i'm giving it 5/10.
Customer support was pretty nice, the representatives in the IRC channel are quick to reply with informative answers, links to pages with more information, they also have a large wiki with various configuration examples and tutorials. I can't give them 10/10 because i didn't really have to deal with the customer support that much, i only asked one or two questions, so i don't know how they'd be with more in depth questions. On that basis i give customer support 7/10.
So that really puts us at an overall rating of about 7/10, not bad at all really for $7.95/month.
I'll do another update at the 3 month mark, hope this is useful
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Aug 30, 2008
I will keep this short and to the point.
1. Great uptime. The only downtime I had was that weekend of July 20/21 when they got DDoSed. They stood behind their SLA and credited me with a full month of service without any hesitation or protest.
2. Great Servers. I use my hosting as a development and presentation environment for projects for clients and quality hosting is a must. I rarely see loads higher than 3.00 (it is a quad core server). Combine that with their litespeed webserver. I have never seen slow page loads.
3. Great Support. Tickets are almost always answered in just a few minutes. I have the pleasure of dealing with Karl (the owner) or one of his highly qualified techs, rather than some high school kid who can't tell a bit from a byte (who you often get at other hosts).
Bottom line: I highly recommend them. Keep it up!
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Jun 27, 2008
suggestions on vps with 1.5TB/month in bw, 10gb storage?
i finally understand the limitation of shared hosting.
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Jan 28, 2009
I've signed up with Wiredtree for a Managed VPS 12 days ago.
I know it's not enough time to write a review. But I decided to write my first impression then keep you updated by writing a new review at the end of each month, so expect one at 12 February.
For now, these guys are simply the best I've tried.
They reply you in 15 minutes or less and if it took them more, 20 minutes or something, then be sure that they're investigating your problem. If you can't wait for 15 minutes, then go ahead and give them a call on their toll-free number and they'll be with you second by second. Their support wont just solve your problem, but they'll educate you telling you what caused the problem and how did they fix it.
I'm solicitous about security. But with these guys, I finally sleep peacefully knowing that my VPS is well secured.
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Apr 1, 2009
Im recently purchase vps from aquarius storage
[url]
im choose plan A4
its very good price for vps with xeon processor
and im get my vps setup on 2 hours included cpanel
usually im bought vps need at least 24 hours cause waiting cpanel license and etc. but aquarius only need two hours
than i submit ticket to get my whm to be setup and optimize and install some software.
and they do fast response and do it .
i just cant believe it will get this kind of services.
its real FULLY MANAGE VPS
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Mar 31, 2009
i want to write this small review for Aquarius Storage i been with them a few weeks now and they are great , great prices and the best of all great support , i ran into a few issues at first , issues i could resolve my self if ihave done further reading and they were nice and help me and even pointed me into some usefull information and tutorials thats great helping customers manage their own vps insted of charging ridiculos prices for simple task like i seen in the past with other providers , keep the good work guys
my site is digitalxeon.net is still on development so there no relevant information on the site yet
thanx Aquarius Storage keep it up!
Support: 10 out of 10
Reliability: 10 out of 10
Value: 100 out of 10
Overall: a solid 10 out of 10
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Jan 20, 2009
I need a hosting with 5-10 GB Hard-drive Space and about 500 GB of bandwidth (maybe a bit less). Without any features (apache, php, etc). I need only Ftp to upload and share video files.But not very expensive, not more than $10-$20.
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Sep 24, 2009
I need to put a proposal for a client who has 20 TB data storage (files/images).
Will propose PHP/mysql - mysql for meta data of files and other authentication etc. Application/mysql could just be ~10 MB.
The storage would increase (incrementally) ~ 1 TB per year.
And data needs stored at a different place for Disaster Recovery point of view.
Need to figure storage costing.
Please give me some pointers:
a) How to find high storage hosting provider?
b) Has any one experimented with Cloud Computing, and if so any ball park potential costing? I attempt S3 and could not figure costing.
c) or any other suggestion.
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May 5, 2009
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.
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Feb 2, 2009
how come the difference between shared and resellers storage is so different? If you buy shared, you can get stupid amounts of storage like 250 gigs or even unlimited for $5 a month. Yet the same company sells a reseller account for $30 and you only get 20 gigs.
Assuming you are going to split that up and sell that 20 gigs in 1 gig blocks to try and make money, why wouldn't your potential customer buy the shared account instead, and get way more space? It seems backwards to me. Shared $5 should be 20 gigs, and resellers $30 should be 250 gigs. I'm talking about big name trusted sites, not fly-by-nights who have unlimited everything.
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Sep 26, 2008
Which companies besides for Dreamhost allow the storage of backup files on their shared hosting accounts?
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Sep 20, 2007
I'm completely torn on going the absolute budget route vs spending more for something that'll allow easy upgradeability in the future. I basically need lots of space but file sending-- media like mp3s, video, etc.
it'll be raid 5 and I'll need at least 2-3TB initially but the ability to expand would be nice.
option 1:
nice chassis with plenty of hotswap bays with sas expanders
expensive sas raid card
option 2:
cheap chassis to serve "immediate" needs and go with more later.
not sure what I'd use as a card? maybe even onboard?
regarding reliability: I once saw a database of failure rates of different models. raptor was the most reliable of the "desktop" drives. anyone have the link? I'm wondering of the seagate ES drives are worth the extra money vs the non-ES drives. they're supposedely more reliable and the "server versions" of sata drives.
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Jul 18, 2008
Just got a letter from InMotion. They don't like I uploaded my backup files to them, which makes their hosting benefits totally pointless to me and I will be moving to some other cheaper hosting since I basically only use email.
So I need some place to store my backups... I need only about 5 Gb, and I don't care about bandwidth, as I don't plan to download them unless all my HDDs will burn or get stolen or something so I don't need bandwidth. And it should be no more than few bucks/mo.
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Oct 26, 2008
For those host which are not overselling, they have obviously the space for file storage. But should they allow file storage on their shared hosting account, if they aren't overselling, and the files are legal?
Well, this can also be counted as a survey I need
It would be best if you provide a reason if your vote is no.
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May 3, 2008
I was looking over the employers offers section and found this:
[url]
After reading a reply I found out that this company has ripped Geek Rack's website design [url]compared to [url]. The guy claims that the site isn't ripped.
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Aug 21, 2007
on good hosting setups for getting large amounts of disk space.
I would like to be able to offer up to 2Gb storage space for 100s, maybe up to a few 1000 users - any solution should scale well. The files would be static files that might be up to 400Mb in size.
It would be nice to be able to give users FTP access to their disk space, although it's not a core requirement.
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Jul 31, 2007
This is my 1 month review on the company vt6 (vt6.co.uk). There is no doubt about it, they have the fastest reply times and most helpfull support. I started out on the basic plan and have just paid for the next one, i was upgraded allmost instantly but as i found it was no benfit to me i asked to downgrade and was again instantly downgraded and my money refunded.
As for the quality of the VPS, it is perfect. they dont cramm VPS's onto one server so each VPS runs smooth without any problems. Iv also had no downtime at all. Iv been with a few VPS's before this and none come close to pure quality and fantastic support that vt6 provide.
That is all for my one month review on this perfect company that i would deffinitly recommend to anyone seeking low cost quality VPS's (Or hosting that i assume will be exatcly the same)
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Oct 11, 2008
are there any month to month hosting with not setup fee
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Jan 4, 2009
The speed seem good because all my sites still under development.
The support is poor because I send ticket to cancel hosting and get money back and they did not process the ticket.
The Cpanel version is very old and I lost some new features of cpanel.
Now the cpanel does not have button to change password . I unable to change my password now.
6/10 for lunarpages.
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Oct 15, 2007
For those who care to read on:
I came to use Liquidweb thorugh a string of random REALLY bad luck. From "Managed" VPS that ended up not getting patched and fried due to a security exploit (PowerVPS) to a RAID failure, during a backup, causing total data loss and backup loss (RockMyWeb's VDNet). I was ready to pull my hair out. So I decided to kick out the bucks for a Liquid Web VPS Plan 2 (with a great price from a special found here). All I can say is it was a night and day difference.
The server is fast. Remote access to this VPS is a fast as my dedicated server in the office. I thought moving to cPanel was going to slow things down but this thing flies! Wow!
The service is fast. I call support and a person picks up the phone. No e-mail. No long hold times. I call, someone answers, no need to transfer to a higher tech, it's just fixed. Wow!
The one downfall. And it's only a downfall if it's not what you want. cPanel only. I'm a big DirectAdmin fan, but I'm learning my way around cPanel again.
Until I'm ready to do dedicated (I'm guessing it's coming in 2k8) this thing is awesome!
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
1x Web Hosting Talk for hooking me up with Liquidweb.
1x Web Hosting Talk Community for reviewing Liquidweb.
1x Liquidweb for the awesome service!
1x VDNet. It may sound strange but they did answer e-mails faster than anyone I had ever seen (multiple replies in under two mins). They had a great price, but bad luck drove me to change. I'm glad I did, but I wouldn't have a hard time recommending VDNet now that they fixed the problem that caused the loss of my server. (and they did give me a month free) They really did give good value for the price, and offer DirectAdmin which Liquidweb doesn't.
Anyone else care to share?
P.S.
I'm not a fan of emoticons, but I did it out of love for you guys. Feel free to hammer the server a bit and tell me how fast the pages load. They're pretty quick here in Costa Rica:
CR Solutions Group Costa Rica Web Design.
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Apr 24, 2008
I've been with Steadcom for a few months now, and I greatly their services. Such great deals have been offered to me. Each time I talk with the staff, I seem to want to use their services longer. I'm currently working with my own free hosting company and I entrust my uptime and reliability to Steadcom. I've had no problems with either of those aspects and it seems like their network is as fast as Google. If you find a better deal than this, it would be a miracle. I am working on obtaining up to six months with them for my next payment. I would fully recommend Steadcom and their services. I give it all of my reputation and respect as a business owner to acknowledge such outstanding services.
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Apr 26, 2009
I have been with SoftLayer a month now, and this is my review of their company. I will start with my pre-sales experience, going into hardware, their network, server, portal, accounting/sales, and support .
[[[[[[[ PRE SALES ]]]]]]]
I started out looking for a new server by looking at some good dedicated hosts. I saw SoftLayer offered the new Nehalem series, so I went for it. Their sales team is excellent beyond all reasons -- the staff are personal and do NOT try to take your money; instead, they find the best-fit solution for you and work with you by calling you, showing you their specials, and talking to managers.
[[[[[[ HARDWARE ]]]]]]]
The Hardware at SL is top-notch. There's no problem with it, it's clearly stated in the portal what type of motherboard, HDs, RAM, etc are in the server and it's top-notch Supermicro hardware. I've never seen a problem with it, and I have seen the certificate of passing benchmarks as that is done on all SL servers by default.
Their provisioning system is excellent, I got my server in 2-3 hours at MAX. WOW! It is all inside the portal too; you can view the status (PE_BOOT, OS_RELOAD); it's clearly there and excellent. We finally got VIRTUOZZO (thanks natecarlson ) working with it too.
[[[[ SERVER ]]]]]
What can I say? This is the new Nehalem series. I think the deal I got was quite good, I brought several SL servers before I switched to this one, and it did take a while to get it down to this price (especially for SL quality, damn!) :
-Intel Dual Quad Core (2x) X5570 Nehalem 2.93GHZ w/ HT
-12 x 300GB SAS 15K Seagate Cheetah HD's in RAID 10
-12GB DDR3 RAM (to start)
-4000GB Monthly Bandwith
-1GigE Port Speed
-64 IP Addresses
-Monitoring & Automated Reboot
$1,100 a month -- which I think is good for this type of server.
It's blazing fast and 0 problems.
[[[[ NETWORK ]]]]
I started in their Dallas, TX datacenter with a Dual 5450, but decided to get a 2U server with SAS HD's. Sadly, they said they were out of stock in Dallas. They said they can get me an EXTRA DISCOUNT if I went to Washington DC. I live an hour or two from DC, so it was good for me. I debated, and talked to them, they said it was a great place and I went with their Washington D.C datacenter .
It's fast. Blazing fast. They have like 100GBPS connectivity -- with many backbone providers. I've never seen so many . I'm liking the nework speeds and it really is nice.
[[[[ PORTAL ]]]]
The best part. They have their 'manage.softlayer.com' and their mobile 'manage.softlayer.mobi' portals. They are excellent. I don't even need support, and when I do, it's there. I mean, I'm STILL exploring their portal system. It has so much stuff; "Instant cPanel Licenseing, Instant Firewall, Upgrades, IP's, OS reloads, Installs, Backups" -- I love it. It makes my life a lot easier and quiker. I've had a server with ThePlanet, HiVelocity, and more and SL portal blows them all away
[[[ SUPPORT ]]]
The support is great. In the times I need it, it's there. Within 15 minutes I get a response and usually in under an hour, a resolution. It's excellent in what they provide at an unmanaged rate, and the $3 tickets are great in my opinion for those quick issues that you just can't figure out. They even helped me with a bit of PHP help!
[[[ ACCOUNTING AND SALES ]]]
It's there any time I needed it. I got servers upgraded, downgraded, reclaimed, removed, created, OS reloaded, invoices adjusted, and it's there. They respond within 1 hour usually and it's great for a sales team. Personally it's awesome how they have excellent teams for support and sales! The reps are VERY nice and friendly too, and they offer some nice discounts .
[[[ OVERALL ]]]
I give SoftLayer a 10/10+. They are everything I expect from a provider (heck, they are better than most managed providers I've been with) and more. I urge you to try them out, they will try to fit your budget as good as you can do it.
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Mar 15, 2008
I'd first like to follow up with my end at GNAX. I ended up going down to them on the 31st to pick up my colo server and get my refund. All went generally well, except for the "I'll be back in 5 mins" that took more than 30 mins for some sales/billing guy to get me my stuff. Signed some papers, and my money was refunded in full. In the end, a happy ending with GNAX.
Now, while all that was ongoing, I moved over to a dedicated server at Softlayer quick as I could because I knew with 100% certainty that Jeff would have my service terminated when I posted the chat log of him threatening me - a controversial decision I still stand by for what it's worth.
First, lets talk about sales with Softlayer. My God - I have never seen anything like this. With GNAX, sales would consist of me sending a ticket and waiting days, or it getting closed randomly, then having to wait more and more. A 48-hour max setup time with GNAX ended up being 5+ days and still no setup. Softlayer. I was doing Live Chat with an agent who was extremely helpful. Too move the process along quicker, I asked if I could call and speak with him, and sure enough, he game me a toll free number and I spoke with him through the entire ordering process. Not only was he extremely knowlegeable and helpful, but he also pointed me to a special I was unaware of where I got double the RAM and a second hard drive for free. I ended up ordering a dual core Xeon setup, but I actually got setup with a quad Core Xeon X3220. No mistake they said, they were just out of what I ordered so they gave me a quad core for the price of a dual core. And all of this happened in less than 4 hours. Yep, that's right. I went from on the phone with sales to having my brand new quad core for the price of a dual core with twice the RAM and HDD for free in under four hours. I was actually shocked. After being with GNAX so long, I had no idea that anything even under a 24 hour wait was possible (which it wasn't with GNAX btw), and they didn't hold my order because of being short on inventory like GNAX did - they just gave me a free upgrade with no delay!
With GNAX, I have never been able to be in such control of my server as I am now with Softlayer. With GNAX, lets say, I wanted to change or add reverse DNS for an IP, I would have to send a ticket and wait hours and hours and hours for them to do it. With Softlayer, I login to the portal, and click click type, click and it's done and live. All by myself! Their portal is the most powerful thing I have ever seen and it allows me to do and see everything.
Their support, I'm convinced, is second to none. I once had three days of downtime with GNAX because of a hardware problem (their hardware) they just couldn't fix. The motherboard has gone bad and I had to wait three days for them to find another identical motherboard to replace mine with. Apparently, they don't like to keep hardware on hand in case of emergency. In the mean time, I was faced with a lot of pissed off people who couldn't access the server for three days while all GNAX did was "we're looking, we're trying". Three days downtime is unacceptable, GNAX's support is just horrible. Phone support is essentially non-existent. When, on occasion, people pick up the phone, I'm simply told to submit a ticket and they'll get to it - when it's convenient for them. Support with Softlayer is drastically different, I can call support and pick their brains on technical problems for as long as I need. Recently, something went wrong when I was moving IP addresses around with my servers, and I was able to submit a ticket, call them, and they resolved it while on the phone with me. Some other small issues cropped up, and I replied to the ticket as it was non-urgent, and they had it fixed it about 20 mins. THAT people, is how support. Again, after being with GNAX for so long and having to wait hours, and sometimes days for support, having things fixed on the phone with me or via ticket in under 15 mins really caught me off guard.
Sales - part two.
Incredibly impressed with the sales and support I have seen so far, I recently ordered a second server. Again, I did this over the phone and was given an amazing deal - one not even on their site! In the end, it'll save me about $60/month on my second server. Pretty decent I say.
Other stuff.
They have a forum! That's not what's cool in itself, but it's cool that its integrated into my portal account. Now, GNAX has a forum too, but you first have to email GNAX and ask for their blessing to sign up there.
Another nifty thing about Softlayer is their developer API. Their API enables tons of cool things, like I can see my uptime and bandwidth usage from within WHMCS. With GNAX, I would have to go find which one of my logins for their seemingly hundreds of disintegrated services. Having everything being in one place and under one login with Softlayer.
Basically, if you need a dedicated server provider, choose Softlayer. Leaving GNAX (well, being forced out) and moving to Softlayer is the best thing that has ever happened to me an my company.
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Oct 9, 2009
Alright, Ive been with them for a little over two months and I have been with them before. Their support is excellent, their servers' are excellent, their network is excellent, their portal is excellent, and not having to deal with Cogent directly is a joy.
I first singed on with them 11/9/08 till 12/29/08 everything went well I closed my account simply because I didn't need the server again.
My current server with them as of this post is $199.00/mth and I get the following
CPU : Xenon X3230 Quad Core @ 2.66 Ghz
Ram : 4GB
OS : Server Standard 2008 64 bit
1000 mbps 2 TB of bandwidth
Washington, DC Data Center
2x 250GB SATA II
174.37.243.170
Having a server with them has been nothing short of amazing zero downtime caused by them and most anything a managed host will do they will do for you free. I was having issues with routes and simply asked them and within ten minutes they had changed it according to what I would prefer. I have had a DoS attack before that was pushing 800 mbps of traffic and they sent me an email and I opened a ticket and they blocked the attackers' addresses at my switch. Very quickly and not much damage was done. Overall I'm very pleased and I would recommend them to anyone.
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Apr 9, 2009
Here is my review of Virpus after being with them for 1 month.
Uptime: 10/10
So far I have not experienced any outages and I am going to have to give them a 10 on that as I have seen many threads in the outages about them but it appears they solved that issue and I was never effected by any of those.
Support: 8/10
I will give the support a 8 as sometimes on off times it could take up to about 30 minutes for the first response which is great but then after that the responses tend to be around 2 hours or so. Overall though the support is great!
Price: 10/10
I signed up with there plan that was cPanel included and had double bandwidth and ram. I was thinking it was too good to be true and that the VPS was not going to be quality, but I am glad I was wrong!
Performance: 9/10
The performance of the server is overall great so far. I have had no issues as far as the server being anything but fast. I will have to commend them on having great hardware and not overselling there services like a lot of the VPS providers these days.
Overall: 9/10
I would highly recommend them as they have been a great provider overall and I hope that they keep up the good work in the future.
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