There don’t seem to be much Zipservers Reviews on this board so thought id post up a quick one
Sadly its time for me to say bye bye to Zipservers due to the fact that I have to move on and get something more powerful for one of my servers
I signed up with them back in September I think, and got a cracking brand spanking Deal AMD Athlon 3200 with 2GIG RAM 2 X 80 Hard Drive , Cpanel Managed monitored (with reboot responses) etc for $120 Per month :O Through Server Genie.. I ordered back then few hours later got a phone call nice friendly chap told me they don’t have the mobo in stock so they going to give me an upgrade which I thought ok Fair enough!
Since 9 months I have been with them I have to say its been a Pleasure being with them, tickets are responded promptly, reboot requests are quite fast and support issues were great
(although I never knew who they were since no one seemed to sign their name at the bottom of the tickets)
well ... I'm thinking in taking VPS from this company
and i want to know what is your opinion in the company service ( services , browsing speed , the protection , the technical support and the servers power )
I'm currently a JaguarPC reseller client, and I'm full satisfied with them, they've a great support with great friendly customer care & their service is so nice.
Now, I'm planning to upgrade to VPS, then when I searched here for reviews about JaguarPC VPS, I found some bad reviews. I found an Advertisement for ZipServers and visited their site and found some prices near to JaguarPC prices but I can't found any reviews about them here !!
here's what I'm planing to buy :
ON JAGUARPC =================== APOLLO PLAN 38GB Diskspace 576MB RAM Guaranteed 1536MB RAM Busrtable 750GB Bandwidth cPanel + Fantastico ClientExec License Virtuazzo Control panel $60.97/month
ON ZipServers =================== 40GB Diskspace 768MB RAM Guaranteed 2GB RAM Busrtable 550GB Bandwidth cPanel + Fantastico ClientExec License Virtuazzo Control panel ((Not mentioned in their website , but their sales representative told me it's included)) $59.95/month
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.
Package offered to WHT: Unmanaged 128MB RAM 10GB Space 300GB Transfer HyperVM / LxAdmin Root Access 2 IP Addresses $9.95/mo US 10mbit/s (true)
I have been a customer of this provider for almost two months now. They have provided great support (especially concerning their response time). Uptime has been 99%+ as advertised - very reliable.
The package they offer above is one of the cheaptest I have found on these forums or on the net. Most others offer similar packages but only provide 1 IP and 150GB/mo transfer. If this company continues with well managed servers and customer support, I believe they will be well worth the investment a customer makes.
I subscribed to SkyNetHosting at 27th December 2008.
At that time, it was a great experience for me, I had some questions with their packages, so I submitted the tickets and I got speedy and helpful support.
My websites with them are working really fine until recently. Starting from February, their server started to experience several downtime and the worst is, the accumulated downtime in a recent week is more than 30 hours.
I am extremely sad when I submitted the tickets to ask about it, they take more than 8 hours to reply me, which they updated me that the server is still down. I was expected them to tell me the server is alright now after half a day of downtime.
They finally decided to migrate the server when they think they cannot do anything to stop the downtime, which is explained at the following address. http://skynethostingtalk.com/viewtopic.php?t=1359
My nightmare started again here, my websites experienced long down time again, which is more than 3 days, I wonder why do they take such long time to migrate servers?
After the migration, I thought all the bad things came to the end, but appatently I am wrong.
Few of my websites are showing strange content, which I think the content from other website on the server.
Few of my websites are showing the "cPanel Great Success" page, including the following message.
Great Success ! Apache is working on your cPanel® and WHM™ Server If you can see this page, then the people who manage this server have installed cPanel and WebHost Manager (WHM) which use the Apache Web server software and the Apache Interface to OpenSSL (mod_ssl) successfully. They now have to add content to this directory and replace this placeholder page, or else point the server at their real content.
I also cannot login to my FTP and Shell account.
Yesterday, I got new problem with them again, one of my website is showing some errors, which I think it was the error I have seen when I am working on the website. Which means, it was a outdated copies of my website, how could it be here when the website was working properly?
I suspected that they restored a outdated backup to my website without my notice.
I submitted a ticket to ask for help, they replied me after 9 hours, said that:
Hi,
The backup was created just before migrating the server. Please check now and let me know for any further assistance.
I am so tire with the downtime and I do not even care that they took 9 hours to reply me. The problem is, the ticket do not give me any solution and my website is still down!
Again, I submitted a ticket for it just now, I wonder how long would they take to reply me and recover my website this times?
I have found skynethosting.net from WHT about 2 months back while I was looking for a new reseller plan. They have a decent looking site, plan details are listed clearly, on top of that they had good features for the price plus I got a coupon from www.sgwebhostingtalk.com where I got my space doubled along with a $10 discount.
(3/10) Order Process/Account Setup: I have placed the order and waited and waited almost a day without my account details ;( Then I had contact sale over live chat and they had setup my account over the chat since it was urgent for me. The live chat was helpful but I would have been happier if I got the account details in the first place. Not a very good first impression !!! (8/10) Support: Support is fast. The average response time of 2-1 hour for most of the tickets and there have been few that took few hours to get done such as such as a problem with GD etc. From the support Jessica was amazing and she seems to know anything about everything (10/10) Uptime: I haven't noticed any downtimes with them and my servers uptime meter shows 100% for this month and 99.9... something for last month which is a good thing.
(8/10) Speed: My site was loading fine except one time I noticed a lag, I opened a ticket and they have corrected it and I never had that problem again.
(9/10) Value for Money/Features: This is an absolute plus I get 5 SEO IP's, Rvsitebuilder, clientexec and 15GB space with 200GB bandwidth on a non overloaded server. I guess this is one of the main reasons that I had decided to go with them in the first place. The features rocks I'll probably update this page after few more months and let everyone know if its going to be good or bad. hopefully it will still be good -
I bought a 1and1 VPS. It was a good quality server, I don't think it was setup right. I called their tech support multiple times about my servers issues. Such as it freezing and i can't restart it. Then the tech support said he would tell their computer department, and 13 hours later, my server is still frozen and I cannot log on.
I would not and do not recommend 1and1 to anyone. It was a very bad exerience and I will always stay away from them. Sorry 1and1 but your service isn't all that great.
the server up time is 100% , support is very great and i can say they are online 24 hours per day ,i didn't need them much but each time i check they were online .
their only problem is the slow connection , i have 100 Mbps but i can't pass 1 mb from the server ftp or httpd ( tested using 100 Mbps ovh server ) .
over-all rating :
support : 10/10 up-time : 10/10 price : 8/10 ( yeah , a bit expensive but they have good offer in dedicated servers section ) connection speed : 6/10 hardware quality : 10/10
after all they are good company , and a good choice if you are not looking for high speed connectivity , they will be one of the best choices for their price .
I've been with Rackspace for about a year and a half, thought I'd share my experience. It was.... so-so.
Quick summary: They try hard, but their techs don't seem to know what they're doing. I give them an "A" for effort and a "D+" for results.
Sales
The Rackspace sales process is tricky. They will quote a very high price for a very long contract, but it is negotiable. I got quotes from 3 places: Rackspace, InetU, and Datapipe. They were originally all about the same, but Rackspace negotiated down 30+%. I did agree to a 2-year contract, because I had heard lots of good things about Rackspace and didn't anticipate any problems, but in hindsight that was not a good idea. Ask yourself why they need you to sign such a long-term agreement... why are they so worried you'll want to leave, after all? In the future I'll avoid contracts longer than 12 months.
Hardware
Top-notch. I never had a problem. Not much else to say here.
Features / control panel
Rackspace has its own account management portal for things like billing, bandwidth graphs, support tickets, DNS, etc. It is quite good, intuitive and easy to use. One nice feature is the ability to manage multiple users on your account and give them different permissions.
One thing that could use some major improvement is the server monitoring system. "Rackwatch" as it's called is very limited. Most monitoring systems even at discount hosts have more advanced features. Rackwatch did not always catch website outages for us (even extended downtime), so I had to use an outside monitoring service. Also, Rackwatch gets turned off during scheduled and emergency maintenance, so if you want to know your real uptime, eg for SLA credits, you'll need outside monitoring.
Uptime/Network
Decent. The bandwidth is high quality. The only major problem we had with the network was last fall, when their entire datacenter went down several times over a few days due to a car accident outside. I won't rehash the details here since it was all over the Internet at the time. They did issue a credit for a small portion of the monthly fee that month. I think they had another major outage this winter, but it didn't affect our server.
Support
Rackspace has built their reputation on "fanatical support." They do try very hard, much harder than other hosts I have used, but I was not impressed by the level of technical knowledge. I had some problems in the beginning because they told me some wrong things about how their database backup software worked, which caused some crashes. Later, a technician logged into our server to install new managed backup software (without scheduling a maintenance window beforehand or notifying us), and managed to kill the ethernet and bring the whole system down. Rackwatch conveniently "missed" the outage but it showed up on our other monitoring service and we tracked down the cause in the server logs. I brought this up in a support ticket but it was ignored.
The good thing about Rackspace is that you can get them on the phone anytime, and they will respond quickly to support tickets -- Not necessarily with the right answer, but at least they respond quickly. I think that's basically what they mean by "fanatical".
Earlier this year Rackspace started upgrading its managed backup system, and that's when things really went downhill for us. First there was the issue with the Rackspace tech killing our server and then ignoring us. Then, we were having serious load issues for about a month. It caused major problems on our website and we were frantically trying to figure out what was wrong with our application for a couple weeks. Finally it turned out that it was caused by their new backup software hogging all the system resources during evening primetime. If we had a more experienced staff here, we probably could have figured that out relatively easily ourselves, but we don't -- that's what we're paying Rackspace thousands for. If they are going to make changes to the server like installing new backup software, it's up to them to make sure they don't destroy the system. We finally figured out what the problem was and mentioned it in a support ticket, but that ticket got ignored, too, and we gave up. Since Rackwatch couldn't detect the downtime (it just checks whether http is running, not whether it's actually serving up pages), they didn't recognize it as downtime for SLA purposes/credits.
We don't have time/desire to babysit our web host, so we decided in the end to move our server elsewhere. Now we regret the long-term contract, because we'll end up in collections if we don't cough up the several thousand dollars left on our term. If you ever do sign a long-term contract, I strongly recommend that you insist on a clause that lets you out of the contract if service is sub-par. I'm sure the "big guys" do this. We didn't think of it at the time we were negotiating, but wish we had.
Conclusion
Overall rating: 5/10 From what I've heard, this was not a typical experience with Rackspace -- most people seem to be pretty positive about them. We might have been unlucky. But I also think they have a very powerful PR machine, and you can probably find a comparable host for half the price who spends a little more money on techs and a little less money on advertising and polishing its image.
I'm starting with GoDaddy since I've been with them the longest. I left AOL and created my first site in 2000. I went with another host first. They were reliable, but they didn't provide me enough space, so I went with GoDaddy. I thought their first superbowl commercial was hilarious and decided to give them a try in 2005. Their monthly rate was very close to the $2.95 I had been paying for my previous host. I think paying by the year, it averaged about $3.29 a month. Godaddy offered a huge amount of space and bandwidth for that, and I got more email accounts than I would ever use as well.
The best thing I can say about this host is that I have NEVER noticed any downtime with them. I visit my site at least once a day, and it was always up. That is the most important aspect of a host for me, and everyone brags about 99.9% uptime. I can now tell you from experience that not all hosts are being truthful about that percentage, but Godaddy is.
The next thing that is almost as important as uptime is how economical they are. I have quite a few domains with free hosts, which are good for sites that you don't maintain that much and have little traffic. I'm not made of money, and I make very little from my websites, so I can't afford more than a few dollars a month in hosting. Godaddy was the cheapest out there in 2005. Not only cheap but reliable. I can't stress how important those two aspects are, or how hard it is to find both those.
Now the few negatives, and the reasons I left godaddy in the spring of 2008 (which was also one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made online). You get 100 email accounts with hosting with a max of 100 MB total for those accounts. So you can either have 100 accounts with 1 MB email storage or 10 accounts with 10 MB storage, but there was no way to change that max of 10 MB per account. I didn't like that at all, especially with all the free email accounts out there with 1 GB storage. I was paying for hosting and only getting 10 MB for my main email account? I ended up creating a yahoo account that I used more often for the storage. Well, goaddy has now fixed that issue, so we can put all 100 MB to one account if we want to. It's still too low of an amount, but I can live with it.
I know enough about how the web works to get myself into trouble, but when I set up my first ftp account with godaddy, I had no idea that it would become part of my root path. So anytime there was an error on my forum, my ftp account name would be shown to all my users. I chose my own name when I created it and didn't like that aspect at all. I emailed godaddy, since I couldn't change the username in my control panel. They responded that it was impossible to change it. I told them that I might have to leave them if I couldn't, which I did end up doing. This was probably the main reason I left and it would still bother me that I couldn't change it. I'm now back with them and was able to create a new username that was more suitable. I don't know if they still don't allow you to change your ftp account, but that's a moot point for me now.
Lastly, I had been doing a cron job for backing up my forum database. Godaddy did some upgrade of their software, and it conflicted with my jobs. It would no longer run, so I complained to support. They blamed me for it somehow and didn't seem willing to fix the problem. I researched and everything pointed toward Godaddy not upgrading properly, but I couldn't convince them of this. Well, it turns out that all my subsequent hosts have one problem or another with doing cron job backups, so it was pointless to leave one host for another for this reason. I don't even do the cron jobs anymore, since it wasn't worth the frustration. And what good are they if you don't download them frequently, and your current host suspends you for no good reason? Of course, that is why I have returned to godaddy, but that's a different review.
Unfortunately, since I left godaddy last year, I lost the special price I was getting. They are a bit more now, but paying for 2 years brings the average price down to $4.50 a month (they get cheaper the more years you pay for at once). $4.50 a month is still lower than most of the hosts out there, and I know I can rely on godaddy for uptime. Again, uptime and price are the most important to me. Yes, they have their faults, but believe me when I tell you, NO host is perfect. You just have to weed through the unprofessional and/or bad ones to find the best choice. Oh, and the third most important thing about a host is that you can trust them. Reliability is very important. You want to know that your account is safe with these people. That they won't suspend without good reason or treat you like you don't matter. We are the customers after all. They wouldn't be needed if not for us, but a few hosts seem to forget that fact. So far godaddy has proven they can be trusted.
IMO.... Stay far away from Bluehost... not worth it.
Actually, I took notice of all the discussion over on phpBB about bluehost. They quickly close and locked such discussions. It's obviously due to there income from Bluehosts advertising through them. Anyhow...it's how I ended up here since this is where they tell us to come. lol
Here is my letter I sent to their admin since I know I can't post it on their site....
Hello,
I couldn't happen but notice the extensive advertising of Bluehost on your site. I also took notice of the quick closing of discussions pertaining to hosting companies, especially of Bluehost. It's obvious that they help support phpBB financially, but please take into consideration the companies you promote to your users. This could in return have a negative effect on here.
With my personal experience with this company, I have nothing good to say about them. I am the executive director of an ad agency that had several clients hosting their sites with them. Due to awful experiences over and over again, we now fully and highly recommend that no one hosts with them. Actually, we are located in the same town as this company and it's well known throughout the community to stay away from them.
An example of what we dealt with..... One of our largest billion dollar clients had several accounts hosted with them. One lovely evening, we took notice to an awful notification of suspension on this clients site. According to them, the site was shut down due to an automatic response that reacted to a bad piece of script. As such, without warning, it shut the entire site down. With immediate phone calls, no one was willing to help us out nor explain the situation. No one cared and there was no more information beyond a bad piece of script. It took almost 48 hours to get all of our files and data copied over so we could host it on another server. 48 hours with a huge account is like eternity and a loss of significant income and reputation. There was never an explanation nor any attempt to help. Once we moved the site over, we never experienced any issues. Couple weeks later, two more sites that this client hosted through them had the same exact issue. Not only did they pull ALL of their sites off their servers, but so did the rest of our clients due to our recommendation.
No money is worth supporting and aligning oneself with a company of such a negative reputation and statistics that prove it.
I truly hope you take this into consideration.
(BTW...I forgot to mention the awful notice they put up on the site. In huge letters it says "This site has been suspended" Then it goes into about having the owner of the site contact them. Sorry...but it's a very negative message that was display. They could've at least posted something along the lines of... Sorry for the inconvenience, xxxxxx is currently unavailable due to technical server issues" Then they coulda called us to inform us of this issue Better yet..they could've warned us about the message and situation and given us a chance to do something about it beforehand.... but absolutely no customer service what-so-ever. Very poor business practices.)
I have to say. They are a pretty nice company. I was able to get everything setup under a couple of hours, thanks to Douglas with my clean neat install of CentOS 5.1 x64 with cPanel. I love the resource usage interface provided by the Virtuozzo control panel as well as the emotion and motivation their team has to provide quality service.
The VPS has been very stable, fast and reliable. Have not had any problems. This is my 3rd day. I will keep you guys updated as how it goes. Overall, it is great, their discount and increase of resources for their current promotion is also great. Looking forward on also getting a Windows VPS soon.
I've been with SolarVPS now for about a year, and have absolutely no intention of leaving. They have simply given me no reason what so ever to consider going elsewhere. Support is lightning quick and the staff are quite knowledgeable and very polite. Also very important is that their prices are quite competitive with a wide range of VPS customizations available to get a package to suit you, and you can get some really good value for money if you commit to a large amount of time or happen to hit one of their many special offers.
It has not all been smooth sailing though, but in no way do I attribute all that solely to SolarVPS as I've caused myself a few headaches from using unstable app versions. In March this year my site had a 95.024% uptime, which simply put is not flash. However, this is much more of an exception rather than the norm as I had an uptime of 99.579% in April and a fairly amazing 99.921% in May. In this you have to consider this is not just VPS uptime, but everything on top of that which I use to deliver my site contents, i.e. web app, PHP, IIS 6 & MySQL. Overall I have a site uptime of 98.257% in the last year, and most of that downtime was cause by using the APC opcode accelerator with FastCGI on IIS which is not a reliable configuration. You can see my uptime stats here
Background Well, my first venture into VPS did not go as smoothly as anticipated. I originally signed up for the VPS1024 at Wired Tree on special offer and although setup was fast and extremely smooth and ticket responses were extremely fast and helpful, they failed on one fundament - security.
A hacker managed to get into my WHM (on three occasions) and Grove Portal at Wired Tree (on numerous occasions) and deleted my site through WHM as well as messed up WHM settings. Although Wired Tree did their best and did help with my problems, security flaws (on my behalf perhaps), I felt it would be best to join another VPS provider.
Liquid Web So after browsing WHT and the VPS section for offers, I eventually decided to get an account at Liquid Web, what with their glowing reputation.
Sign-Up and Account Activation Signing up was painless and after receiving a telephone call from their sales team to confirm the order, I received my VPS account info on Monday morning gone via email.
Security The main concern was making sure I secured WHM as best I could from the start as I did not want my WHM hacked into again. It was suggested by myself that we protect WHM to only allow IPs I provided to access WHM. This was then set up within a few hours by their technician. Now the support ticket at the end was brilliant. These guys explain what they have done and how they have done it - I've never had this kind of response from a provider before. WHM was well and truly secure and was done in a prompt and highly effective manner.
Support Tickets You may have read my earlier post where I had to wait 42 minutes to receive a response to a support ticket. Well, prior to this, responses were extremely fast to numerous support tickets I did post and it was only this isolated time where they failed to mimic their 30-minute response SLA and so were forgiven as the work they carried out in securing the server, installing GD and Imagick and generally taking the time to make sure I was happy at all times whilst communicating with them over these tickets was way and beyond the call of duty for me.
What I will say though is that it would have been good to receive a response when I was asking for progress of a ticket. I had to post two times before I got an answer and it would have been good just to say "we are working on this for you" as a sign of courtesy and acknowledgement of my response to a ticket for an update.
Well, so far so good. Its only been 3 days with LW but I think I have found a great provider and no disrepect to Wired Tree but I think LW have an edge in terms of their technicians and the knowledge based on tickets I posted at both hosts for info. You just feel the LW techies are more knowledgeable in the way they go about working and responding to tickets.
I've been been with vpsFarm for 7 weeks and so far so good. vpsFarm is a no-frills, low-cost, self-managed VPS provider. This is my first experience with web hosting. (However, I have setup a test server at home so I was comfortable going with a self-managed service.) Pros:
(1) Zero down-time so far
(2) Good server performance (with Xen1024 plan)
(3) Low cost
(4) Unlimited transfers (no metering)
(5) Response to my single support question was the same day and fully resolved the issue
(6) Almost-instant account setup
Cons:
(1) No frills or extras (e.g., no cPanel/Plesk/Directadmin, no auto-backups, no automatic server transfers for upgrades). This is a true do-it-yourself service. (This shouldn't really a problem since it's not advertised otherwise.)
(2) My single support question was regarding missing kernel modules -- while the issue was dealt with quickly, I think they should have been in the initial OS setup in the fist place (or at least noted up front).
