LiquidWeb: 1 Month Review

We purchased a VPS II plan with LiquidWeb about a month ago. Since I'm waiting for client feedback before launching the site, I thought I'd stop by and offer some first impressions.

Setup

Setup went very smoothly and fairly quickly. There was a bit of a mixup because they called my boss to verify the use of his credit card, and I'd used a different one than he anticipated. However, the problem was resolved quickly, and I appreciated that they had verified it. We made the purchase in the morning, and had access to the server by that afternoon.

Tech Support

So far, I've had reason to contact tech support three times:

IMAP

When we first got account access, I logged in and quickly looked over setting and server status. One thing I noticed was that IMAP had failed and would not restart properly, but I was not concerned, as we had no plans to use the service.

Two days later, my inbox (on another server) was suddenly flooded with approximately 3,000 IMAP failure alerts all arriving at once. Apparently our server's mail queue had been backed up. And now, since IMAP still would not restart, I was getting additional new alerts approximately every 30 seconds.

I submitted a support ticket and also called at the same time. I waited about 15 minutes (a bit longer than I would have liked) before the phone was answered -- by a very friendly and competent tech. She said there was nothing they could do to track down the mail queue problem now that it had apparently resolved itself, but she walked me through disabling IMAP and IMAP monitoring via the control panel. Since we didn't need the service anyway, I did not ask her to attempt to get it to start properly.

Hostnames

Our automatically assigned VPS hostname clashed with an existing hostname the client had in use. I, being an idiot, tried to use the WHM panel to change this, and promptly caused WHM to lock me out with "invalid license" messages.

I submitted a helpdesk ticket. About 45 minutes later, a tech updated the license for us.

FTP

We were having trouble connecting via FTP (credentials were accepted, but further communication timed out or was refused), and traceroutes -- from any network we tried, including third-party servers in other states -- were failing after they reached Liquid's network.

Oddly enough, HTTP was working fine, and tracerts from the Windows command line completed perfectly normally.

I received a fairly prompt response from a tech, who tried some standard things to resolve the problem (asking us to try passive FTP; updating and restarting the FTP service; changing settings; etc) over the following few days, without any progress.

I was frustrated that the FTP ticket didn't get any responses when they weren't making any progress on it, even after I reminded them that it was extremely urgent and asked whether I could provide them with any further diagnostic information -- I felt as if it had been abandoned.

With a deadline looming, I finally called support, and within seconds had another tech on the line. He reviewed the ticket, and I walked him through the problem and some of the things we'd tried. He couldn't reproduce the problem on his end, and we went back and forth for perhaps half an hour trying to identify what was going on.

Finally, he asked me to try connecting using a "www.subdomain.domain.com" instead of "subdomain.domain.com". Which worked. As far as I can tell, this is just a strange quirk of WHM/cPanel. The traceroute mystery remains unresolved, but FTP access is now painless.

Overall impressions

So far I'm reasonably happy with the service. Their front-line staff is quite capable and friendly, and initial response times have ranged from excellent to adequate.

I was rather frustrated at points by the lack of communication about the FTP ticket, but in the end it was resolved quickly once I called. I will probably use phone support more readily than the helpdesk in the future -- or at least follow up more aggressively on the phone.

I'm not enamored of WHM / cPanel, but that's not the host's fault.

I haven't had an opportunity yet to judge uptime or server or network performance. I'll try to check back in with a 6-month update that better covers those aspects.