PowerVPS 4 Years Review
Oct 9, 2009
I decided to post a short review regarding PowerVPS. I've been with them for almost 4 years, and it's been great.
After terrible experiences with some reseller accounts, I decided to get my own VPS.
Truth be told they were a bit pricey when I signed up but I decided to try and see if their support was as great as everyone was saying, and at that point I reached the conclusion that peace of mind and tranquility are more important to me.
I must say they are great and it was the right choice. Very fast and knowledgeable support, always taking care of everything, answering requests that sometimes were related to third party scripts or settings. Overall it was an amazing experience and I would recommend them in a heartbeat. In almost 4 years I can recall just one major downtime and that's because it happened recently otherwise I'd have to start searching the closed ticket logs to refresh my memory regarding the last time I had any problems.
I have really been blessed with a great and stable VPS provider, and for that I thank everyone here who have shared their experiences regarding PowerVPS.
I decided to post this review now, because soon I might be moving my VPS somewhere else and decided that before I go maybe others will find this review useful (like I found other reviews in the past). The only problem now is that I'm paying $84.50 for a VPS which comes with Fedora Core 2 (which is pretty much outdated), 20GB of disk space and 768 MB RAM. Right now, this is lot over the average price of other really good providers like ServInt, KnownHost, WiredTree. Taking into account the current economic situation and the fact that I don't make any money from the VPS, I cannot afford them anymore.
However a really big thumbs up for PowerVPS and for the quality of their hosting and their support.
The site I currently host with them: [url]
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Sep 14, 2007
The Beginning
I moved over to Power VPS after having been on shared hosting at my first provider for 4 years. Basically, they were overcharging me like crazy. Then I had a very brief false start with a big name hosting company. They didn't answer my very first ticket "My SSI includes are not working" for 2 days. By that time I had already been spooked and signed up with PowerVPS.
I got a 256 mb "Managed" VPS with CPanel plus a few extra IPs; and the signup process was painless. With one or 2 exceptions everything seemed okay. I heard a few comments about my sites being slow, but no other problems.
The Middle
Things went well for the first year or more. Tickets were answered promptly, and because I was serving just my own sites (not reselling), I encountered very few problems. One that did arise and perhaps should have been a signal of what was to come. I honestly can't remember the issue, but when support told me that if I wanted such-and-such to work I should log in as root and modify some obscure (to me) *.ini file. I didn't want a dummy like me poking around in the nether regions of my server. After voicing my concerns, a tech went ahead and edited the file.
As time went on I noticed that more and more I had to explain my problem issues more than once. It appears that when an email ticket is escalated, the details from the previous email do not go along for the ride. I occasionally had to explain and/or clarify the problem a number of times. In fairness, some of the problems may have arisen from my non-tech descriptions .. but! .. what should PowerVPS expect from folks who rent a "Managed" VPS?
The End
I had a problem with my site email not working, so I submitted a ticket. The answer I got back was from a tech informing me that email was working no .. and had tested it. The problem was he had turned on and tested "Squirrel Mail".
Getting the regular email working took several more tickets with occasional shards of information/advice coming from different techs. There was no 1 definitive answer.
On 2 occasions, someone changed the password on my WHM.
A couple of months back I got an email telling me that PowerVPS would be doing a kernel upgrade on the server. (I honestly believe that, at that time, management already knew about the <iframe problem with a number of servers). Okay, so we were down for an hour .. fair enough.
Then I noticed some malicious (iframe) code in on a page. I alerted support. They told me the entire server was infected and would have to be rebuilt. According the the info I got, Fedora 2 had a vulnerability.
Now begins the insanity.
Removing all that malicious code from all my sites (and Apache man pages), ten uploading again took more than 8 hours. Rebuilding the server took almost 7 hours. I was glued to the forum reading, "We're working on it," messages until I couldn't stay awake any longer. Next morning I woke up to find all my sites still off line. A support ticket informed me that all was well with my server .. and had been for 8 hours.
"No it ain't!" It turns out that an Apache module had been installed wrong.
Come on folks .. check your work!
Then I started reading about more servers on PowerVPS being infected ans asked support what was going on. They still had the infection.
They had rebuilt the servers with Fedora 2 yet again!
A long frustrating email to management resulted in an admission that my server had been rebuilt wrong. The only recourse I had was to backup my files (not a CPanel backup), let them rebuild the server, then reload everything .. including setting up and loading a number of mySQL databases.
So about that ime PowerVPS had a sale going. The only way existing customers could benefit from more ram, more space, more bandwidth was to upgrade to a bigger new server.
So I asked about upgrading but to a DirectAdmin Control Panel and they said fine .. but I either had to backup and upload, or pay for 1 months backup space. They pointed me to a script that "might" work for a CPanel to DA restore.
C'mon guys .. I've been here 2 years, had all sorts of problems that were your fault .. twice .. and you want me to pay for what most hosts would do for free?
"Our 10GB of ftp backup space runs $7.99 per month."
Summary
PowerVPS was a good company when I started with them. They offered good services and seemed to be good folks. IMO, somewhere along the way, they seemed to have lost or changed their focus from "good service" to "strictly bu$ine$$". I have moved to another provider. Would I ever consider going back to them? I don't think so.
... the end
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May 17, 2007
I meant to do this a long time ago but just got around to it. I originally signed up with PowerVPS due to all the good reviews that I found here on WHT. I have been with them for a little over a year now and could not be any happier. I have the biggest VPS plan they have. Yesterday I purchased another VPS for a small project.
Their support is top notch, most questions get answered within 2 - 30 minutes of being put in. Their tech support is knowledgable and usually have the problem fixed before I even realized they have responded back to my ticket.
Im not going to make this very long I just wanted to say I have been with them for over a year now and would not go anywhere else.
Thanks PowerVPS for the excellent service and support!
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Apr 3, 2009
well I have been with imountain now since 11/01/07 and they still are by far the best hosting company I have ever been with.
I started on a simple clustered shared plan, moved to their clustered semi-dedicated plan and now am on my own dedicated server (opteron 246 with 4GB of RAM). my server runs a wordpress blog that last wednesday night had 868 concurrent connections and ran as smooth as if there were only 10 concurrent connections. WP-Cache, xCache and memcache (huge server) are utilized as well as offloading images to steadyoffload.com
uptime
There were a couple of issues in the past but nothing major for me. The MYSQL outage didn't affect me as I wasn't on the house database server cluster that went down. there are the occasional issues for a few minutes here and there but nothing major at all.
Hyperspin show my uptime 99.891% since January (there was a large DDOS attack in there).
I can live with that considering I have failover in that if the imountain server goes offline a splash page from another hosting account(In UK) shows up within 3 minutes stating the server is offline and will be back up soon. When imountain comes back online within 3 minutes the splash page is gone and my blog shows again.
support
This is imountain's strongest aspect IMO. Their support is very knowledgeable, fast and even will help with 3rd party scripts. The have helped me setup a couple of custom things, always answer my questions with personal responses, not canned messages and always get issues solved.
They also have phone support which I have used once just to ask them about an issue real quick. For me email support is better.
price
I can't go into this topic much for certain reasons but their prices IMO are competitive.
con's
HSPERE control panel which takes some getting used to. I have it mastered now but when I first signed up I was lost as hell.
what i would like to see
I would love to see a customer forum. At one point they said they were going to install one but at this point nothing has come of it.
If they don't want to do a forum, I would like to see more updates on their blog when issues arise.
Still would like to see support sign the names to support tickets so I know who is who. if the support ticket does have a name it is always imountain.com not the techs name.
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May 1, 2009
I write this review somewhat sadly as it marks the end of a hosting experiment. It started off as a hosting experiment in which I wrote my own control panel and used mpm-itk, but unfortunatly it just wasn't that popular, cPanel is the "Windows" of the hosting world now, its very hard to get people to try something else, this combined with the exchange rate have forced me to move closer to home.
I posted a previous review about CoreNetworks some time ago (i think it may be lost now due to the DB issues at WHT), but to recap i signed up for there $24.99 server. I was intially pretty dubious due to the price, but i have been happily proved wrong! Really since my last review not much has changed, server uptime has been excellent, i've not suffered from hardware or network issues. A few months ago a 0-day roundcube exploit infected my server and started to perform a DOS and using alot of bandwidth, they dealt with the issue very professionally, shutting down the network connection to the server and giving me the oppertunity to fix the problem.
If you are after a cheap and trouble free, and i cannot stress this enough completely unmanaged server, i would strongly recommend CoreNetworks enough.
I only have one DNS record left linking to the server (katie.hostby.net)
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Jan 6, 2009
Not really full five years. I signed up for essential VPS plan in March 2004 (so for few months it will be full five years).
My VPS is fully managed and support is great. It is real 24/7 and response time is always about 5-15 minutes, and almost always with problem solved (there is no annoying replies like; need more information's, please let us what you want or something like that) They always fix the problems and they always know how to fix things.
It was some big failure with hardware (I can not remember date) but they deal carefully with that, move all of us to different machines, clients was well informed, and generally there was not any long downtime (as far as I can remember)
Network are great. They have direct link with Deutsche telecom which means very good connection for Europe.
Few times I request backup for accidentally deleted files, and they recovery them fast.
Only critic for billing. One month (I can remember when) they charge me for extra bandwidth. It was caused by some attackers on server I do not know, as none of my domains cause that (It was some bandwidth leak other than http, ftp or mail, that I am not familiar with). Normally I can not spend even 10-15 % of total bandwidth , but that particular month it was 300%, so they charge me for all. I do not know if it is my fault or not, but maybe they should protect server better or whatever.
Other than that I have never had any problems.
I recommend them to anyone as they are really ''peace in mind'' company.
For the time being I will keep to use Servint services. I hope I will not forget to come back here again after five years with 10-years review.
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Feb 26, 2009
I was a member of hivelocity for about a year and 4 months. I really like this company.
They have very fast support even if you don't buy the golden ticket for support for dummies like most websites want you to buy for help with your server which is called managed servers.
I went with an unmanaged server because i knew my way around the linux system. Any type of trouble i had all i had to do was go to live support and ask a question and they would right away check on the problem and fix it. I even remember sitting in the chat support for a few hours while they discussed things that were wrong and how i make my server more secure. They also even upgraded a few things for free for me that i didn't have the time to do myself. I also liked the ability of being able to go unmetered for bandwidth for a little bit more money instead of hundreds of dollars more.
Although if you know very little about linux or servers in general i would suggest the managed package.
But i would recommend them to people who are looking for a great company who doesn't lack the support a lot of websites out there tend to have with cheaper prices.
I have had servers from other websites such as managed which worked out for a while but their support was very bad and since years ago they have moved up higher in prices which lead me to find other web hosts to fit my needs.
Now before you jump to any conclusions the only reason i left hivelocity is due to i quit my job and needed to put my money elsewhere for a while.
They even let me go a month past due just so i could save my files which i really owe them one for that.
1-10 being 1 the lowest in the following catagories.
Support - 10
Server - 10
Price - 8
Company - 10
uptime - 10
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Sep 20, 2009
I am so overwhelmed by the quality of hosting provided by Medialayer, that I decided to review them after being almost 2 years on their servers. My "bread and butter" website is hosted on their server and all I experienced in these 2 years was sheer quality, stability and prompt customer support (very rarely required).
It is a saying that you get what you pay for, and it shows. Medialayer is not one of those hosts with "unlimited everything" plans for $3 a month. I am on their starter shared plan which is $9.95 a month with 500 mb of space and 10Gb bandwidth. Some may find that costly, but believe me, it is worth every cent.
Uptime: Excellent. I have never seen my website down or someone complaining about it. No downtime experienced whatsoever till now.
Speed: Rocket fast. Scripts execute rocket fast too.
Ease of use: Excellent. They provide direct admin (instead of cpanel) and never faced any problem with that either.
Customer support: Blink of an eye, round the clock. I am from the opposite part of the world (GMT +5.5) and at 11 AM my time, I get instant response to a support ticket if opened. Secondly, they go above and beyond, - I had a problem with one of my php scripts and these guys studied the script and pointed out the flaw (which might have been harmful) if not rectified.
I will be more than happy to let anyone know my website, mods please let me know how do I prove the authenticity of the review, with my website. These guys deserve a lot more than just a review.
Conclusion: The best host so far I have got. In these aspect I must tell you, I have 3 more hosting service providers, Medialayer smokes them apart. And my personal thanks to Gurpreet Virdi via this forum for running such a tight ship consistently. I believe, the success of a website business depends on the hosting heavily, so Medialayer folks - it has been my pleasure to stay with you all these time and thank you for everything.
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Apr 26, 2009
I signed up for service with TMS in August of 2005.
Signup - When I intially signed up I decided to pay with Credit Card I was then asked
"In order to complete processing of this order, we will need Credit Card
verification done via Fax. We will need a copy of the credit card, a copy
of a picture ID and a printout of the e-mail below with your signature faxed
to us at XXX-XXX-XXXX."
or I could have the option of using paypal... I wanted the server fairly quick so I decided to go with paypal. (This may be a problem for some people but I was given the option and if I had no other choice I most likely would have sent them what they requested).
I paid via paypal in the morning and the server was setup @ 2:17 PM.
I had absolutely no problems with this server and had no tickets until October
when TMS opened a ticket to let me know I only had 100 gigs remaining of bandwidth and by their estimates I would go over for that month. I was asked if I would like to prepay for bandwidth or I could have server port shut off once bandwidth is reached... I decided to prepay. (TMS is the first server provider who has actually gave me a warning before I went over... I was amazed)
In September I ordered another server from TMS to do some testing on server was setup within hours and I had no problems once again.
In January I added another server to my account. Once again setup was fast and I had no problems. 1 year later I cancelled this server (mainly because I could not justify the cost and it usually just sat around doing nothing)
April 2007 is when TMS Moved from The Planet to Colo4Dallas. I was in my opinion given short notice to schedule my server move but once again I really did not have a problem as the servers are just for fun projects I am working on. Move went smoothly and servers came back online faster than I expected.
Every server at TMS is on 100mbps port, I am always able to burst to the full 100mbps - which is something I have never been able to achieve anywhere else I have been.
In the almost 4 years I have been with TMS I have only had 21 Tickets on my account and only 1 of those has been because of a problem with TMS (A server was acting weird so they replaced it for me completly), Tickets are always answered within minutes reboots are fast and quick. (I usually request reboot even tho Every server comes with remote reboot port)
I do have one negative but it is an industry standard and not limited to TMS.
I saw some offers on WebHostingTalk for new TMS Servers. I had asked if I could be upgraded to one of these new servers... Unfortunetly I was told I could not, however I could upgrade at the normal price which was $40.00 more than the Advertised price... I did upgrade one of my remaining servers but the other I decided not to. I just felt being a customer for so long I should have already paid off the hardware and upgrading should not have been a problem at promotional pricing. HOWEVER I do understand this is an industry standard and every host that I have used has this same policy.
Overall I would give TMS a 10/10 I love TMS and would recommend them to anybody! Price is good / Service is Amazing / Staff are friendly
I however am always on the lookout for new hosts and I will most likely being cancelling my second server to find a provider with a more competitive price(TMS New Customer pricing is awesome). (I moved my third server to FDC and have been very happy).
My review is mostly how I "feel" about the company, if you have anymore specific questions feel free to post them.
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Aug 31, 2008
I want to share my positive review of The Planet service.
I have been using servers at The Planet for almost 3 years since the time YourHost posting weekly deals on WHT.
If you're an old member here, you would remember how people waited for the new weekly special (especially the Christmas one).
In general, i'm satisfied with their service, very stable network, fast support, competitive offers from time to time.
I really like The Planet "Escalation Procedures", which i request phone call for any issues affecting server uptime.
I received a few phone calls when doing hardware upgrade, monitoring system notify server down ...
They don't just send an alert email but they call me to notify server down.
Support response time is usually 15-30 minutes.
There was a period that it takes a few hours to get a reply, i think during the merging of EV1, but it was improved shortly after that.
Hardware quality: I never experience any issues with hardware, the oldest server is 3 years old and running well.
My Rating:
Network: 9 (there is no 10)
Support: 8.5 (some room for improvement but still the highest ranking among other providers i use, LT, SL, DN ...)
Hardware: 9
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Dec 19, 2008
I got a VPS with smokyhosts in summer of 2007, and now is as good a time as any to write a review here on WHT (where I found them in the first place).
Quite honestly, the reason I went with them initially was that they were the only ones meeting my requirements (price!) at the time - with their discount offer.Support
My VPS was setup fairly quickly. I made the payment during the night and had the access details when I checked again in the morning, can't say exactly how many hours but surely fewer than five.
In all, I've called upon their support three times -DNS settings in resolv.conf got cleared (and I obviously didn't know what they were before) - they responded with the nameserver IPs, which I then put in myself.
VZPP backups not working due to some reverse DNS issue - Fixed overnight.
My IP range blacklisted at outblaze (I contacted Outblaze, who obliged by whitelisting my IP) - I also contacted smokyhosts support, so that they'd be able to identify which one of their clients caused this. Not sure of the action taken one this.
I always was ready for the "unmanaged" service I had purchased - so I always asked for support I "deserved" and not what I thought "would have been cool to have".
eg., instead of "I'm unable to send emails" I first found the root cause myself and then did a "my NS settings are messed up - please re-send details" instead.
All in all, although I never really taxed their support with anything large (which in itself might be considered a good thing), I always got satisfaction when I did.Uptime
I have been with two other VPS providers before this and I have to say the uptime here has been the best.
There hasn't been an instance when I wasn't able to reach my site (or someone else reported having problems) when I wasn't aware of the issue beforehand. I was always notified in advance.
I'm not having site monitoring/tracking so no numbers, unfortunately.
Total of three known downtimes. The longest one being due to data center outage.
But if it's any good - my VPS's uptime as of writing this is 154+ days and even the last restart was of my doing.Speed
On my VPS I'm only running three low-to-medium traffic sites for my friends - one SMF forum and two wordpress blogs. That includes HTTP/SQL/MAIL/POP/IMAP/FTP ... the works).
Mainly command line administration assisted by an extremely light control panel (ISPCP - for my friends to manage their own sites).
Each of my friends is happier now with the speed/stability than with previous VPS providers (slower speeds) or shared hosting providers (messed up/badly configured/unstable hosting environments).
Server load as of writing this, with 6 users online on the SMF forum - 0.07 0.06 0.03.
The only times I've seen load figures close to 1 are during the nightly backups that ISPCP does (gzip).
Data transfers are slower than you'd expect with a 10 mbit connection, but still good enough. Various site speed test tools report that my SMF forum loads in about twice the time WHT does.Overall
My hosting requirements are pretty simple (and easily met, imo) - a plain-vanilla, no-frills, unmanaged, low-medium config VPS with an excellent uptime. Constant/recurring nagging issues, no matter how trivial, are a total turn-off - I like my environment to be stable.
So far smokyhosts has met these requirements pretty well.
I understand I'm supposed to report my own post and submit one of the domains hosted ?
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Aug 7, 2008
I signed up with tronictech.com on 2004/04/22 after seeing them on WHT offers section.
It has been 4 years and about 4 months now.
It is unsupported hosting. I don't need support as long as the server and services are up, so it was a good deal for me.
Speed has always been satisfactory. I had no problems about it. Both download/upload speeds and script execution has always been fast enough.
Network and uptime: I have noticed a few downtimes (i am talking about 4 years) but they didn't last long.
Support : Surprised? Yeah, i had opened a few support tickets about WHM / Cpanel or payment issues. The few problems were after a server move,caused by Cpanel/WHM and the way i had played with NS records. David replied them quickly and with an exact solution. Support was very fast and helpful considering it was unsupported hosting.
I'm not a reseller but i have an account with reseller capabilities , i host 6 projects of my friends and i host my 3 domains with them. Neither me nor my friends who are using this service ever complained about the service.
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Aug 31, 2007
I have been with them for 1 year and 4 days. I could say, everything was great even I got some problems at the first month, but after that, everything was going smoothly.
1, Uptime: 99,999%
2, Support: 10/10.
I would like to thank their support team a lot. They helped my site grows with stable server. The respond time is about 30 minutes in average and even it is a stupid question. They are very polite and quite friendly. When I got problem with database, they tried to restore and helped me to fix the database, even it is not their job.
3, Speed: 9/10. Because the datacenter is based in US, we are in Japan and Vietnam, so, the speed is not so fast, but acceptable.
Unfortunately, my forum now needs at least 512MB RAM, but their power-2 is too expensive for me to upgrade so that I can not stay with them.
I am very happy and pleasant about their service. I strongly recommend powervps.com. They are one of the best vps I have ever used.
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Apr 11, 2007
After reading and researching here on WHT I thought powervps sounded like a good choice, especially after some good email correspondance between myself and Rob.
Unfortunately I'm off to a bad start:
I sign up, pay the first month and get the confirmation phone call. I then receive a welcome email with my ip's and how to access directadmin and other bits and pieces.
I send my first support ticket in - I cannot access directadmin at all via FF or IE via 2 different ISP's.
The ip is changed for directadmin (no explanation as to what the problem was).
I can now get access to the main directadmin menu but I can't use any links without the login screen reappearing and most of the time my login credentials are not accepted.
Another support ticket sent and reply email informing me that the issue was a permissions issue on directadmin and that it's rectified (it isn't rectified but at least an explanation was sent).
I had hoped for better, especially seeing as these are initial setup/default configuration issues that should not exist.
I'm disappointed that I've experienced these issues already and my gut feeling already is not a positive one.
It seems support is good, but as above, these initial issues should not exist, after all I want to get on and start putting sites on and start using the VPS but I'm being delayed.
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May 15, 2007
My previous hosting was with servint for 1 year and after that I was looking around to find a better or more powerful vps solution.
There were three hosting which I was keen on :
1. Steadfast.net
2. PowerVPS
3. Servint
Servint was excellent, but I like to try something.. what I heard was steadfast have more superior network.
While I was browsing, PowerVPS come-up with a promotion which I can't refused, hence I took the PowerVPS-3 deal straight away...
3 months So far:
1. Network has been really good (Fantastic)
2. Server... there were some problems where my server load went up to 50 and the support people help me fix this.. apparently this is due to one of the VPS node having some issues.
3. Support... Top-notch... very fast and friendly.. I like to personally thank John, as he has made my server running much better.
4. Price.. well I got the deal which I think was the best in the market
As result I am seeing my business picking up very quickly in the past 2 months and again I like to put this review out so people can decide who they would use based on other people experience.
Go Power :-)
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Jun 8, 2008
i am a customer of jetnethost for 2 years hosting dedicated servers from them.
the first thing in mind of reviewing them is that they provide excellent support. Some hosters such as dreamhost or etc, require a 24 hour response cycle. Jetnethost has an instant response cycle. Not only do they do some instantaneous response thing, but they also fix the problem instantly. One time, i accidentally clicked "block all incoming connections" on my windows dedicated and locked myself out from windows remote , and i asked for support. Byran, the guy from jetnethost, personally opened a KVM within 15 minutes and i got my server back functional.
prices
of all the servers i have seen from various companies, from karyhosting and hostgator or such and such, i have never seen competitive prices before. Because i am a long term customer, byran gave me discounts and discounts, and i currently got a great deal. i have a Xeon 3.0GHZ with 4 cpus for such a great price.
actual hosting
some sites such as dreamhost offer you 2.2tera bytes of transfer for 9 bucks. that's not true at all. because once you reach 500kb/s of download speed from your users, your whole site lags and slows down, this is because dreamhost oversells. but in jetnethost, they don't oversell. i get premium bandwidth, and whenver my site gets overdue for bandwidth, byran kindly increases some so that my site is functional. He cares about individuals, and not just money. I currently pay some worth of money for 500gb's of premium bandwidth, but i'm sure he will kindly raise it to 800gb if i max out before the month is over because he is such a great guy.
reliability
because they do'nt resell, they have great response times. as well as that, their servers never lag, i am put on tier 3 bandwidth as he speaks, and i get ultra low latency even if i'm far away about 13000 miles. i'm not sure how he makes money ,but it's awsome. i get twice the value of my money when i host here. Before, i hosted for server4sale, where they resold servers from burstnet, and they lagged decently. in jetnethost. byran owns the servers himself and colocated them in datacenters, that is why you never receive lag.
so if your interested with jetnethost, i suggest you speaking with support because they will glady provide you instant stuff such as quotes and etc. jetnethost is great!
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Sep 9, 2008
How did A Small Orange get the name? Years ago Tim Dorr, owner/operator, used it as his AYM screen name. There's a great interview with him from 2005 here. Even have a look around if you want.
"A Small Orange" is an Atlanta based web hosting company with a great attitude. It began as my backup host for my web based voiceover site and now it is my main host. I first read about them on this forum where they came highly recommended. When I first joined they would only accept 25 new accounts a night to ensure the best customer experience.
It took me two nights to get mine and I'm still there. Don't worry, they haven't done that in years and you can sign up any time.
The first thing I check when selecting a new host are their forums. A Small Orange (ASO) has a very active one that has "support" members who post, and even Tim himself. "Pre-sales Questions" is a popular area.
Not that this takes the place of a superb tech support who won't quit until the problem is solved. I've found them to be very patient with folks who may not be the most tech savvy. That would be me. There is a thorough Knowledge base online as well as an ASO Wiki written by staff and customers. Plus, step by step demonstrations of CPanel functions. The only issue I've ever had happened a couple of weeks ago. I had a problem with a disappearing sub domain. It was a CPanel code problem. Tech support was nothing short of amazing.
Their plans are very reasonable. All have the same features. Even their "Tiny plan" with 75 MB of space and 3GB Bandwidth at $25 a year has all the features of their most expensive "Super plan" with 4500MB of space and 100GB Bandwidth. Turn any account (except Tiny) into a Reseller account for $5 more a month. You can easily upgrade or downgrade as needed. Plus there's ASO Extreme which is just for file sharing. No scripts, e-mail or Cpanel. But, you get 1500MB of space and 100GB Bandwidth for $20 a month.
As far as up time, I don't think my site has ever been down for longer than a few minutes. The time I caught it they were doing some server maintenance. I'm always on my site since one of my web pages is my browser start page. I've hosted two sites with them, one for me and one for a local band. They were on different servers and both had the same great performance and reliability. ASO's business concept is to not overload shared servers. Period. I can go online any time and check my hosts status from a web site and CPanel. If there's any problem it's corrected quickly.
ASO offers CPanel and the latest updates and features. I like to check my stats often and use a lot of subdomains. Latest Visitors and AWStats helps me keep tabs of things. It has everything you'd expect from CPanel.
Believe me, I'm no expert. But, I do recognize a friendly attitude and willingness to help when I see it. The most important thing is that my web site up and online. If it didn't work well and consistently, I wouldn't be there. If that ever changes you can bet I'll be the first to leave. So far I am very impressed with A Small Orange.
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Jul 17, 2008
I’ve found pair Networks via this forum and have been its customer for more than 2 years now, which gave me quite a good insight in this company. So here some thoughts about pair Networks.
Some background
Pair operates its own Data Center with over 1.500 servers, hosting more than 190.000 sites. If you are concerned about the server saturation, these numbers are speaking for themselves pretty much. Among the customers are such high-profile sites as Barack Obama, The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, Dan Brown (Da Vinci Code), Tom's Hardware etc. Quite impressive and it actually says a lot about the host’s structural reliability.
Stability
It’s a truly business class host with an amazing stability. The server load is always nice below 1. During more than 2 years the site I’m hosting there was down for two times: once due to the massive ddos, and the second time due to the planned server maintenance.
Technical support
I’ve got phone and e-mail support on my plan (webmaster). The standard support response time is reasonably soon. The so called ‘urgent’ support reacts literally immediately. The nice thing with Pair is that you actually don’t need any support, because all services are up and running at all time.
Control Panel
Pair is using a custom CP. It’s transparent and as useful as a CP could be. I can’t remember a situation when I was missing some feature in this panel.
Price
Pair is not cheap, but it’s not overpriced either. From my point of view, they were able to find a really well balanced price for the level of services they’re offering. If you’re a hobbyist using your site for fun (and therefore the stability and uptime is not really an issue), you can find tons of cheaper hosts. If you’re hosting any critical site, where the stability, speed and uptime do matter, you’d better pay a few bucks more: servers are not oversaturated and overloaded, no kids experimenting with 'custom' scripts, best hardware, best manpower etc. I’d like not to be involved in over- and underselling discussion, Pair has earned its stripes based on this business model.
Speed
Download speed (from Belgium) is as good as it gets from any US-based industrial-grade site through our broadband line: approximately 400 KB/s. Downloads from Apple, Adobe etc. sites have exactly the same speed.
These all were PRO’S, where are the CON’S?
In more than 2 years I haven’t noticed any serious, structural shortcoming. And I don’t like to make it up just for the sake of false objectivity. Pair Networks is by far the best host I’ve ever had.
Site for verifying purposes: [url]
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Sep 23, 2009
I see it only gives me the option for monthly, quartly, semi-annually, and annually, what if i want the billing cycle to be 2 years and 3 years?
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May 27, 2009
We started off with them early on with a webserver + DB server special a couple of years ago.
Even at that point, they had the best value for money offer in terms of dedicated boxes. Nothing has changed, thankfully
Today we host 6 boxes with webnx, all 6 boxes are required to power a single website, so we have the full gamut of servers from multiple db servers, webservers & load balancers. All of these boxes are well decked out in terms of configuration thanks to the great pricing Dan/Dario & their team offer.
In terms of service, it is tough to beat them. In terms of a personalized approach to service, it is next to impossible to beat them. Their advice is spot on, their abilities are phenomenal and their focus on consistently providing you with the best offers is something that very few companies can aspire to become.
Their networks are fast and over the last couple of years, there have been some blips - but most of them have been resolved rather fast. In terms of communication, they are succinct and accurate.
There have been two instances when I lost/changed my credit card and had to delay payments to them - but they have always stepped up and allowed me the flexibility to do so. The folks at WebNX understand people and businesses - it is wonderful to keep growing with them. I don't worry too much about scaling infrastructure anymore thanks to WebNX because I know they are going to be around to provide the best infrastructure you can buy at the most value for money price point.
They are also flexible - no cookie cutter approach to business or servers. They understand needs and advice accordingly and when are you are working with them you don't need to worry about if they are trying to sell you something extra without needing it.
It is one of the few businesses I have worked with which makes me feel good that I've been a customer with them for so long.
The kind of folks who help you grow without too much of a worry because you know they're great folks when it comes to their business.
A lot of folks on this forum mention that the sales reply speed could be used as a proxy for the company's support response times. IMO, it is the exact opposite for WebNX - sales queries to them get responded to rather late. But support queries are sorted out really fast. Three years of experience with them bears this out
WebNX does a lot of things that come well together and you will appreciate it once you've spent some time with them. For your growing business needs - they might be a great beat.
Wishlist:
1) Their reboot times are consistently fast - but I can't wait for the automated reboots. That would make our life a lot easier.
2) More locations
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Aug 5, 2008
I've been with Blurstorm for 2+ years and I can say alot of good thing about the company and support. I even gave them a 5 out of 5 of webhostingjury and went as far as to say I would give them 10 out of 5, so you can imagine how happy I WAS with their service until this past week.
I has been an absolute hell. First the server kept blocking my ip and locking my session, when I would try and upload files with filezilla. They suggested to try a different ftp software which I did and it worked. At first I thought it was my computer/isp/router, so I tried it from my friend computer, same thing. And by the way, I never had this problem before. So I didn't make a big deal out of it, even though I prefer filezilla.
Now a couple of days ago, seems every time I would browse the pages or try and use the admin section the site would go down, or at least that's what I thought. After sending 8 hours going back and forth with support(Robert) through their support ticket system, because there is not live chat, Robert tells me there is nothing else they can do because they dont see any errors happening and I would have to pay a 3rd party monitoring service to find out what the problem is.
I mean I completely understand that if they cant find the problem but the site was working couple of days ago and I havent done anything different, so something must of happened on their end. Also I uploaded the site onto a friends server with a different hosting company and the site works perfectly with no problems.
Now being left high and dry with no help from Blurstorm, I did a couple of more test and found out that the site was not down but was blocking my ip and locking my sessions and the only way around it was for to renew my ip and to try again, but that would only help me for a couple of mins before it locked it again. Again, I also tried it from my friends computer and same thing. So I know for a Fact that it has to be from Blurstorm's end. I told that the server was blocking my ip and locking my session and haven't heard from them for over 16 hours, which is horrible customer service compared to the way they were before.
The main reason I stayed with blurstorm was for their support and quick response and I've referred them a boat load of business, and this was not the first time i've had problems with the server and support but I didnt make a big deal out of it and from now on no more referrals.
Well there is my review, sorry it's a little lengthy but just wanted to give an indepth review.
Second part - need suggestions for new hosting
From what I've gathers from searching that are reliable
precision effect
jaguarpc
innohosting
which would you recommend from those or any others?
And my site is based on joomla 1.5 + virtuemart so it should work with it.
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Apr 30, 2007
I have rented PowerVPS servers for a couple of years now. In fact, I have a special XMS setup and one VPS.
Up to now support has been excellent. But man...over the last week there have been so many problems, and even attempts to brush me off with shoddy tech support.
Could it be they have grown too big too fast?
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Jul 20, 2007
Over the past few weeks I have been having problem after problem. What worries me is that 2 seem to get fixed then pop up again a week or so later.
3 examples
-server compromised because of an apparent OS vulnerability
-hours and hours spent removing malicious code from .htm pages
-message in forum from tech support that new OS used to rebuild servers
-server rebuilt, but on same OS as before
-tech advises that if I want to be safe, VPS should be rebuilt on newer OS
-email is down server wide
-tech fixes squirrel mail, not popmail
-I report email still down, and different tech fixes
-email down a week later
-I change password to WHM after server compromised
-suddenly I can't logon
-tech fixes the problem
-today again, I can't logon
A number of questions go unanswered .. several tickets never closed.
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Jun 24, 2007
On occasion I have mentioned problems with PowerVPS. It seems only fair that I give everyone an update. Since switching to a VPS account (several months ago) I have been very impressed. While it has meant a much bigger load for me and a steep learning curve, I now have a server that I can configure to my liking and the support could not be better. I am very very pleased with the service and the amount I have learned from the support staff at PowerVPS. I would now recommend them highly.
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Oct 5, 2009
We are the clients of LayeredTech for 4.5 years. Basically, we're fed up with poor service and below are the details. Love the stories about stupid circumstances leading to major catastrophes? You'll love the story below.
Another incident took place in June. We have ordered another hard drive for our server. During the maintenance, their technician obviously dropped an existing hard drive (never admitted by them), causing the bad sectors to appear immediately after upgrade. They were trying to replace it, but replaced a wrong hard drive (!). Their second attempt to fix things up resulted in a broken SCSI controller (!). Their verdict: the server is dead and can't be restored. It resulted in a huge downtime of three days. During these three days, we experienced the lack of professionalism from their staff (besides group leaders), poor coordination between the shifts (another shift comes and they have no idea of what the previous shift has started) and poor response times.
Now, they are moving their data center forcing clients to order a new server (you guys probably heard about it) and we have the same experience: poor coordination of departments. Friday: technicians offered a configuration and suggested to submit a ticket to sales (I've no idea why clients have to transfer information between their departments). Sales came on Monday refusing to fulfill this order suggesting to order a new server from the web site. We gave another attempt and placed an order, asking to upgrade memory and disk - the features we already purchased. Their response? It's not upgradable. Nothing was suggested.
I'm not to tell about the other issues, about red eyes of our technicians that can't get to bed waiting for their support to reply and restoring the server from backups. I'm not telling about our IPs whitelisted in major mailing services; years of work discarded by moving our server without asking us if we like to. Finally, I'm not telling about minor issues; they happened for these years.
Guys, we're fed up with LayeredTech and moving our server out (we have one more and refer it as "hostage"). Yes, we loose money for the purchased memory, for purchased a hard drive and for a setup fee from another provider. But we can't deal with them anymore. Anyone thinking about LT - keep away. Dear fellows who already own a server there - let's keep our fingers crossed; LT is great when nothing happens, but horrible dealing with incidents. Good luck, guys.
For LT management: if you want to proof the facts, my client ID is 4553.
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Dec 2, 2008
Since everyone else seems to be doing the review-your-VPS-provider thing, I thought I'd join in.
Providers we/I have used, either for business or personal use. Note that with most of these companies, we/I usually have the smallest available offering - we aren't trying to do shared hosting on any of these VPSes, but typically use them as nameservers or mailservers, though I host one or two personal websites on a couple of these, and use or have used some as VPNs, et cetera.
(I should also point out that I'm not as uptight and anal as some folks here; I don't monitor every single DNS slave and secondary MX server via a dozen different services, then shoot off a half-dozen support tickets every time a single service reports it can't ping the machine, nor expect a response to each one of those tickets within five minutes. So, if you're one of those under-medicated OCD types with three cellphones, two crackberries, and no girlfriend, take my comments about uptime below with a few grains of salt; I have no pseudo-scientific graphs, charts, or spreadsheets to substantiate my perceptions, which are just that: perceptions.)
That being said:
JVDS: Were really quite good, back in, oh, 2004 or 2005 or so. Once acquired by DedicatedNOW, however, it went through a steady month-by-month decline until earlier this year, when they finally settled down to that special level of appalling mediocrity below which even they could not manage to descend. We finally gave up on them this fall, and regret not having moved away from them years ago. JVDS "support" is actually so bad, that not only did I give up on them completely, but I to this day remain hesitant to open a support ticket with any other company, for any reason, lest I experience a repeat of the rude, traumatic, and terrifyingly inept horrors that have been perpetrated on me by the "support" staff from JVDS/DedicatedNOW/Fortress ITX. Best avoided, IMO.
Crystal-VPS: Have been with them since sometime in early 2006, as far as I can tell. Had some network problems... once. Other than that, and a few amusing communication mixups via support ticket (they speak English, I speak American), they've been great.
They're a much-overlooked option for UK VPSes, and I'd recommend 'em, if you're in that market.
VPS4Less: I've been a customer since April of 2007; I actually have a couple of VPSes with them: one "basic", and one "minimal". If you can live with their limitations - modest memory and disk space - they provide an excellent service, especially given the price. I probably wouldn't try to run a hosting business on one, but as a nameserver or mailserver (what we use them for), they work great. Since '07, one of our VPSes had unscheduled downtime - once - due to a hardware failure on the host, which was fixed in about five hours.
BetterHost.ca: I got a VPS with them in December '07, for a personal project. Not the world's most powerful VPS, but the uptime has been perfect or near-perfect, and I've never needed to contact support. I could probably get more bang for the buck elsewhere, but I'm happy enough with their track record of uptime to stick with them.
Welcome2Inter.net: I also picked up a VPS from these folks in December 2007. Much like VPS4Less, they provide unmetered VPSes in Germany. Much like VPS4Less, I have nothing but praise for them - the service and uptime over the past year have been excellent.
Virpus: We used them for a VPS this summer, for a short-term project. The price was right, the service was good, but we no longer needed the VPS after the project was over, and, with our main, dedicated servers in the same facility, I'd be a little hesitant to use 'em for anything really important, just because of the eggs-in-one-basket thing. As far as I can tell, Virpus are 100% excellent, but let down by their upstream, Wholesale Internet, who some months are 100% excellent only about 99% of the time.
CheapVPS: The unmanaged VPS side of A2B2, or whatever it's called this year. Run by Rus Foster, one of the two smartest Linux gurus I've ever had the privilege of communicating with (the other being Steven of Rack911), and who used to own JVDS back when it was awesome. They don't advertise much, as far as I can tell, but their service is excellent, and they occasionally have some special offers on their website that can't be beat. Not, obviously, a provider for those who need hand-holding around computers or think CPanel is the greatest thing since cheese, but an attractive option for those who who are competent enough to be entrusted with a command line. We've had a VPS with them since early this summer, and highly recommend them.
NYNOC: Everybody seems to hate on these guys, but we've had a VPS with them since October of this year, and the only complaint I have is consistently high iowait, though that seems to have improved in the past few weeks (knock on wood!). I believe the only time I had to contact their support was to get a PTR setup, which was done in under an hour. I like 'em, so far, but don't let that stop you from hating them, if that's what makes you happy...
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Nov 23, 2008
3 years with beachcomber
Hello,
I have been with beachcomber for 3 years.
First on Fortress ITX, then on SoftLayer and after that in Gnax.
I liked the Fortress ITX better but at the time they were limited on the servers they have.
The Softlayer site stayed farer from Europe and I have after that moved to the GNAX datacenter.
The service from BeachComber was very good and usually i was able to solve almost any issue quite fast.
Usually they are 20-22 hours per day online.
The chat service was very nice.
Then they have been bought by pugmarks. Pugmarks was very fast on answering tickets and on being on chat.
But just one week after their change of owner i have a strong server attack with thousands of index.php files being affected.
They made a full restore of the server (they charge for it) but after finished the restore the hacker was back in the server and they dont know what to do.
They told me to contract someone to reinforce the security.
I have contracted jonesolutions and they were able to stop the attacker.
But then i stayed with a full managed server where i have to pay more to have a second management.
The last thing they have done is to refuse me the chance to sign for their server promotion under beachcomber because i was a client of pugmarks.
That was the reason to quit.
But if you may sign directly with beachcomber they are very good.
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Sep 25, 2007
Today, i will tell you the history of last 2 years which includes some good providers and what are their pros and cons, and if they can improve those things then everyone will benefited.
First i launch my website on shared hosting and I choose site5 for that, due to exciting pricing and features but actually features (rollback) doesn't work well and they have taken back by site5 but on my server there is some problem and that's get restarted in 10 days and downtime was around min 1 hour. But after various complaints they reduce the load on that server and then no looking back but site5 customer service is simply ok, get a response in 6-7 hours. But after 1 year load on my site increases and they asked me to please move on VPS because we can't handle so much load.. I paid them on yearly basis and they refund my whole money of the second year which i already paid in advance.
Then my second hosting service is PowerVPS, no doubt when you move from shared to VPS you will get better performance but actually I am getting the best server performance..? I have no idea because speed little bit improved and looks no other problem and i think i am getting the best after paying $120 per month when for shared service i am giving same amount for a year. But actually on PowerVPS i am hosted on lowest performance server when i am on the highest paying plan and that is revealed by the customer executive after 6 months stay. The problem with PowerVPS is the admin is very rude and can't listen to you but customer service is very helpful and gives you very prompt reply and help you in every matter. PowerVPS servers are also very prone to hacking and this can you check by searching on WHT, and they always replied server is hackable due to your script but no idea which script.. quite interesting :-) When server hacked and asked them to backup the server then they charge $85 per hour for backup your data which is too high and billing time was also not accurately logged. But in my plan 600GB bandwidth is allowed and 1-2 times i gone till 700 GB and they didn't charge anything, that's really good.
Now from last 2 months i am with SolarVPS and want to say this is one of the best i used till date and if they improve 1-2 things then probably i will be solarvps customer for long time. After transferring of data on solarVPS, many members of my site asked me what you have done on site... site is too fast now. Which is never said by anyone before when my site on powervps and my site is graphics heavy. The price is also half on solarvps in comparison to powervps. And like to mention admin is very very helpful. On some matters which i arise to check the customer service, they totally denied to do but after talking to admin the customer service done that task in a few minutes. Response from solarvps is also very prompt. But few things i didn't like about solarvps and hope they will do anything...
a) If server goes down for any reason then they must post in the forum about what's the problem but they didn't do, like few days before server goes down, even solarvps site is also not opening but actually don't know what is the problem... except some server problem.
b) They asked you to buy a extra bandwidth in advance @.25 per GB, but how anyone can calculate if they required more this month or not like on my website sometimes i used 400GB and sometimes 600GB without doing anything extra. Secondly they say otherwise we will charge $.50 per GB for overusage but customer service said when you touch 600GB then account will be blocked and have only limited access but admin said account will not be blocked and we will charge on overusage but actually don't know what going to happen because both giving different answers and also not have a bigger plan. So, why don't they give + 50GB on every account (or on client prompt payment records) and asked the user to take action within this 50GB otherwise we will blocked the access and if month finishes within that 50GB then don't charge anything. Hope they will do something soon because i am looking for a plan which gives me same service and price with better bandwidth, but i like to stay with them if they do something.
Currently i am also using hostgator.com for another website and no doubt customer service is very good and online availability at every time its awesome. If looking for shared hosting account then they are must look.
PowerVPS - 2.5 Star because of admin rude behaviour, charging high price and don't give the server as per their cost and inform the user that they are on the best config .
SolarVPs - 4 Star for nice behaviour by admin and wonderful performance by server. If bandwidth problem is solved then 5 Star.
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Oct 26, 2008
Last month i have problems and outgages with a node in powervps vz45 in the 205.234.106 .20 and in other threads i mention previously that server.
Last 1 october, node have a rare problem and they say in a few days they move accounts to other node.
Because a SERIOUS Problem with my personal life, this last week i dont get backups, and wednesday a thief in house stole my mobile HD (without passswords and ciphered).
The Friday my VPS crash.... and three days later they are restoring the backup... and None of the 140-180 sites yet online.
I read in other thread a more problem about they laterly, but for me is near fatal, because 33% are my best customers (i plan to migrate to other host the server the 15 of the month but for the personal thing i cant.
88 USD monthly and three days to recover the Nodes ?
No way, as soon as possible i go to liquidweb.
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Oct 25, 2008
The downtimes in powervps still stay.
In the forum here i put a story about when i was changed to vz45 from vz69 some months ago and the problem is growing. One month ago, around 1/oct, was a half day.
Yesterday i detect a problem at 08:40 am aprox, and they are working in that but something is AWFUL here.[url]
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May 18, 2008
A partner and I are in the beginning stages of consolidating our website operations.
I have a managed dedicated server account with Liquid Web whom I am extremely happy with. I have been with them for about 4 years and have nothing but good experiences with them. They have always been there for me.
My partner is with PowerVPS. He is just as happy with them as I am with Liquid Web and has nothing but good things to say about them and their services.
With that said, we only need one. I have compared the plans and prices for fully managed dedicated servers on both sites and it does appear that Liquid Web is slightly more expensive between the two for similar specs. However, the most important issue with me (as well as my partner) is not price...but the level of support we get for the price.
What other factors can any of you provide about either Liquid Web or PowerVPS that we may have overlooked in the comparison process?
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