I regret to bring this to a public forum but having seen that solarvps has a presence here I am hoping that a resolve to this issue can be found, and any public opinions are welcomed.
Having been a customer with solarvps since 2006 without any cause for concerns it does not make me happy with some recent issues I have had with them. So I have had a vps server hosted with them since 2006. Sometime in February when attempting to login to my VPS I got an error, I left it as this happens sometimes, it happened for 4 days in a row so I thought this is a little strange logged in to my control panel, to see no VPS server was listed under the account. There was no invoice generated either. Ok this is strange but I just assumed it had been terminated, no invoice came through and that particular server was a backup server so I sought hosting elsewhere.
4 months pass I get an email from solarvps stating my account is overdue with charges applied. I contact them back straight away asking what they are billing me for I have explained the situation time and again to them, I have asked the questions why the server disappeared from my account, why I wasn’t able to access the vps remotely and why no invoices got generated at the time to which I have had no response, I have asked more than 5 times now. The only response I keep getting form them is threats if I do not pay to hand over to a collection agency and the possibility of legal action. To which I have replied each time that I will contest any such action and seek legal advice myself.
Granted I should probably have contacted them at the time but really they are at fault more than I am for not asking them what has happened, I truly believe I am not in the wrong here but nobody within solarvps is prepared is looking at the facts of what has happened here.
Well anyway I hope bringing this to a public forum will bring a resolve and maybe some answers. I am getting no response from anybody within solarvps and would be happy to take this away from the public if they are willing.
I am not unfair nor does it make sense that a customer for so long would just decide not to pay you one month and kick up a fuss over such a small amount of money but the fact that I am not in the wrong with this matter, I am not prepared to pay them no matter how much bullying tactics they wish to adopt in trying to make me.
I was wondering what people thought of Liquid Web, my friend has his site (twivo.com) with Liquid Web and says they are absolutely amazing. But I want to know what other people think of them.
Are the amazon's EC2/S3 solutions a viable alternative to dedicated hosting? The thought of capacity/bandwidth/computing power on demand sounds great in theory. Could it host a basic LAMP setup?
If you've done any research in this area i'd love to hear your thoughts. Are they apples and oranges?
Hope this is the right place for this question. I'm interested in hosting with 1and1.co.uk as they are good value and allow multiple domains to be hosted (incidentally, will nosy people be able to figure that the different domains are hosted on the same package?).
Just wanted to hear your thoughts and experiences? It seems cheaper to host on their American site compared to the British site. Am I allowed to do that?
I was having problems with shared hosting so I'm having a crack with a VPS from wiredtree. I have been with them 3days so thought I'd post up an early review on my first thoughts then update 3months on, 6months and 12months.
I'm new to the VPS world and have never had any experience with server management/functions other than with-in cpanel so you could say I'm a total noob, so this is coming from a newbie perspective. Ok so here goes for the pros/cons so far.
Pros:
- The set-up was fast once sorted (see the first con).
- The payment system and ordering process was easy to follow.
- The support is very fast helpful and understanding (this is for their online support not phoned them yet).
- The start-up e-mail is useful and gives clear direct instructions.
- The prices are fair and in-line with the market.
- Their 'Grove' control panel is clean and clear and gives you access to vital functions and information, such as DNS, server stats, billing and support. Cons:
- When I set-up my account they didn't ring to confirm I had to chase them to get it sorted but once it was confirmed my server was up in under 1 hour.
- On their bottom package they give 348mb ram which before you put anything else on the server over 60% of this is used by other functions/softwares. Of course these things can be turned on/off when needed but I feel this should be mentioned at sign-up so people can understand and plan what they are going to need.
- Their knowledgebase has so far failed me as the issues I have had (mostly due to being a noob) are not listed on it and there are no other way other than submitting a ticket to find out about the small easy to solve problems, but their support is fast so no biggy.
Overall its not been a bad start It has had some floors but I'm happy and things are running smoothly.
Like I said these are only first thoughts on the service and I will update at later dates to give a clear picture on their service.
Is security really that critical? If so, why are some of the largest software companies providing such a bad example for the rest of the industry? Why would someone want to target my website? Why is security often overlooked?
These are all common questions that arise on a daily basis within the online industry.
The rest of this article will provide some detailed answers, along with practical examples and true scenarios.
I've spoken with numerous hackers over the past short while. I can't count the number of times I've heard the line "Ignorant site owners deserve to be hacked". In my opinion, that's like claiming that cars without alarms deserve to be stolen, or homes without alarm systems deserve to be burglarized. It's not just wrong - it's illegal.
Security risks and vulnerabilities affect the entire online industry. When a single website is hacked, there are usually multiple other victims. This is most commonly seen with widely distributed software. A potential attacker has the ability to install the software on a test environment, locate the vulnerabilities, then attack random victims even before anyone else is aware of the potential exploits. Once a vulnerability is located, the attacker simply needs to search for other environments using the same software, and within minutes there are hundreds, often thousands of potential victims.
Typically, in the race to market, software providers are encouraged to release their products as soon as the applications are usable. Critical development procedures are often overlooked or intentionally bypassed. One such miss is an application vulnerability assessment. Although the product may be usable, the effects of a vulnerable application could be severe.
Sadly, nobody is "off limits" when it comes to hacking. Most hackers feel safe committing online crime, since the online industry has evolved much faster than the security industry. Many applications are not created with the intent to recognize hacking attempts. Some hackers view their actions as a competition - Who can attack the most valuable website? Who can exploit the most user databases? In many cases, these attacks are bragged about within the hacker's immediate network. The competitive nature of these hacking groups has become so severe, there have been reports of attacks between competing organizations.
You might ask, "If I use industry standards, won't my environment be secure?". The short answer: no, but it helps. Hackers are not restricted by industry standards. Most security companies only implement new standards once at least one victim is reported. This often gives hackers plenty of time to locate other vulnerable environments, and before long, the number of victims can increase rapidly. Hackers are some of the most innovative individuals within the online industry. The most logical way to combat them is to use similar methodology for security purposes.
What are your thoughts of Ultrahosting.com, I didn't find may reviews here on WHT.
I talked with the sales rep. and he said they host people such as: Mazda, Chrysler and Xerox.
Here's some info he gave on their server:
Quote: Paresh: to provide some way of background...Ultrahosting is part of our parent company Momentum Paresh: Momentum handles Managed Service Operations for Enterprise level customers Paresh: Ultrahosting sits in the same data center as these clients
We run our site from a dedicated server at Rackspace and have done for 6 years now. Whilst i'm very happy with the level of service provided we're starting to consider small cost savings by moving to other providers.
We did select LiquidWeb and have attempts a couple of moves to the new server but so far without success (most recent being yesterday with 12 hours of frustration!). A lot of the problems seem to be down to cPanel/WHM being a lot more "locked down" than were were used to with Webmin (that runs on Rackspace servers) and being somewhat unfamiliar with cPanel/WHM.
We have asked advice from LiquidWeb support and whilst they seem to be reasonable in responding, i've yet to feel the "heroic" aspect although this might just be due to being spoilt at Rackspace for many years. Support responses tend to be quite "rushed" and do the minimum asked for rather than going that extra "mile" which was seemingly indicated during the sales cycle.
My question is this - do people have thoughts on potential other fully managed providers? Should we even be looking for a new provider?
Specs looking for:
- Fully Managed - Dual Xeon Quad Core - 2GB RAM - 2 x 73GB SCSI RAID - Some form of Remote Backup - Linux
We're currently paying about $850 for the server at Rackspace which has the following specs:
I had them for about 6 months and it was great until some time in the middle of May I got an email from them saying "my website is overloading/overlimits and even small dedicated sever wont handle the load" I had "Failover Reseller Plans" which allows 10,000MB space & 200GB bandwidth. The only script my website had at the time was a phpBB forum. My forum got about 2-3 posts per day with an average of 300 users per day. How could it cause overloading/overlimits ? Their "abuse team" wasn't very helpful at all! I got fed up with it and moved my site to a new webhost => servint
However, their support team was amazing. They replied to my tickets very fast. They were always online even at 3 or 4 am !! And most of the time they were very helpful and wouldhelp you with anything.
Would I go back to them again? i'm not sure ...maybe or maybe not
Servint So I moved everything to Servint VPS after this whole incident. I really have no word to say about Servint except that they're AWESOME! I really like them & their support team. I had them for about 4 months and no complaints about them. However due to my financial prob (spend all my $ on gas & rising cost of everything) I had to downgrade to a reseller account instead
I'm looking for a way to get a little more mileage out of Apache + PHP environment without losing Apache capabilities. In shared hosting environments, losing features such as .htaccess and a real mod_rewrite are not even on the table. I'm also not willing to accept the performance hit and connection issues that are inherent with FastCGI, so that means mod_php.
In this particular situation, there are two busy sites, which are the problem.
These are a few ideas I've been thinking about.
1. mod_proxy + nginx: mod_proxy sends static content requests to nginx. This requires two sets of vhost files to be maintained.
2. mod_cache: Caching common static content such as page graphics .css, .js, etc.
3. squid
If you've been down 2 or more of these roads, I could benefit from your experience.
I am looking for a vps account, perferably managed. My price range is up to about $60 a month. I am looking at solarvps and they seem to have good reviews, I was just wondering if anyone could share there personal experiences with them. How is there uptime, speed, flexibility and support.
My choice of VPS provider has come down to FutureHosting and SolarVPS... I like SolarVPS because Douglas has experience with hosting a high traffic SMF forum and therefore I hope he would be very useful and understanding if I encounter resource problems from my SMF forum.
I've looked at the VPS packages on the SolarVPS website and I can't seem to find a UK VPS with 1gig of RAM... am I going blind? Most VPS providers I have looked at always have that and more.
It is human nature that we more frequently post scathing critiques, but I would like to take the time to post a positive review.
I run a trading system that day trades in real-time. It is written in Java. However, the API that it connects to runs under Windows. Because I live in a remote place, the bandwidth here is "unreliable". Having your broadband die when you are fully leveraged and there are only 20 minutes to the close is a serious dose of adrenaline that I personally do not care for.
For this reason, I was looking to host the trading system where the power and bandwidth were more reliable. To save money, which is always foremost in a traders mind, I decided to try a VPS solution.
After searching the net for a while, and finally realizing that the majority of posts worth reading were posting in these forums, I came upon SolarVPS as the outfit I wanted to try. There was a post where a user was commending them on their support, and mentioned speaking with "Ross" and the posting gave me the impression that I could count on SolarVPS.
I purchased the Windows Server 2003 VPS.
The fact is, I am very happy with SolarVPS. I had initially not been able to login. Why? Because, as a longtime unix admin, when the instructions said to "login as root", I assumed the login name was "root". I posted a support case that I could not login. I received a response in less than 20 minutes indicating that I needed to login as Administrator. Duh. This is windows.
I had another question, which I posted as a case, and it was replied to within 4 hours, even though I had marked it as a low priority.
The process of setting up my account was painless. I was able to try the first month at 50% off, which I thought was fabulous. The installation was reasonably fast. Everything ran smoothly and I had no complaints whatsoever.
Would I recommend SolarVPS to you? If you want a VPS hosting solution, I would strongly recommend SolarVPS. They gave me a great service at a very good price with excellent support. I would recommend them to my mother.
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 did a search, and found mostly good things about solarVPS here. I want a little more re-assurance and hope that others that had good or bad experience with them can chip in on their VPS service.
I'll tell you my story right now. I got the VPS and they charged me $60. The page didn't even look like a paypal page and I didn't know when I went through the order process that I have been charged. They accepted my payment even though they had the radio button that said first month a dollar. They even didn't have cpanel installed at first! They gave me the email and I had to contact them to install cpanel! They have this stupid contrat thing and they will take you to a collection agency for failure of the billing system that they have. It says DO NOT MAKE PAYMENT! but how can you tell? They are a complete total scam! The vps firewall was dropped for no reason during the morning. I asked why and they left the chat. They have good VPS if you got the extra $59 to cover the beginning.
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
I've narrowed down my VPS search to one of these providers.
SolarVPS. JupiterLX 832MB Total SLM RAM 30gb storage 600gb bandwidth with cpanel 100Mbit uplink fully managed not sure about the datacentre, the site says Euroconnex around £45 per month
or
Clustered.net 512 RAM 512 swap RAM Server has 2 x quad-core Intel Xeon "Clovertown" @ 2.33Ghz (18.64Ghz) Max of 15 servers per node 25gb storage 300gb bandwidth with cpanel 1Gbps uplink 1 hour replacement fully managed Looks like the datacentre is redbus interhouse in UK £55 per month
Which is going to be the better quality provider? Clustered offer a 100% uptime guarantee, and for every hour a server is down they refund you a days hosting.
Clustered seem to offer tape backups? solarvps offer off-site hosting, which might come in handy as well.
I searched the forum for clustered.net, but didnt find many reviews.
From my first impressions I think clustered seem to be my best bet, although I will get less in the way of storage and bandwidth, I feel there website makes me think I'll get a better quality service. There website talks about how redundant everything is. Hopefully people can backup what I'm thinking.
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.
i have an VPS account at SolarVPS. I have had some bad days lately. When i go to Virtuozzo on my Plesk cp. i see this
day - in - out 12 0.00 0.01 13 0.07 0.48 14 0.06 99.61
why is it like this? i don't used like 20GB last month (for all of my sites). but now it goes up to 100GB???? Why is this happening? how can i stop it?
In last three years I used five famous VPS providers and currently I have registering with Solar Vps. The service is excellent; Response to support tickets is very fast.
I suggest in anyone want to have 100% uptime server + good service, register with Solarvps.com Company.
Man, it seems just like yesterday that I initially signed up for a VPS from SolarVPS, but the truth is, I have been with them for just over 6 months now.
What can I say about SolarVPS besides that they completely rock! Not to mention Douglas, but we won't go there
The Network
The network at SolarVPS is nothing short of amazing. I get lightning fast speeds and rock solid performance no matter the time of day. I have not experienced even one network hiccup in the 6 months that I have been with SolarVPS. I constantly get compliments from people about how fast the network really is.
The Hardware
SolarVPS uses nothing less than the best hardware. The VPS node that my VPS is located on has Dual Quad Xeons and performance is amazing. They do not overload their servers and use SLM parameteres with Virtuozzo instead of the old school UBC. I know that I can use all of my resources without battling with other VPS instances on the node.
The Support
Solar's support is by far outstanding. I have never had to wait for extended periods of time to get an answer to even the most complex questions. I can rest assured that no matter the time of day, or night, there will always be a Solar rep there to answer even the stupidest of questions, in a very timely manner. Unlike some hosts that I have used, Solar's support understands my questions and gets them taken care of instead of giving nonsense responses to try and buy time to get the job done.
The Overall Experience
The overall experience at SolarVPS is awesome. I know that I can trust my online business in their hands. SolarVPS is highly recommended to anyone who needs rock solid performance with extreme reliability.
Support - 10/10 Network - 10/10 Hardware - 10/10 The Staff - 10/10
Just a warning... Watch out for that Douglas character that mans their live chat.
I have been with SolarVPS since the end of January and for the most part I have been very happy with them (even wrote a good review of them on here!), with very few issues with the server or support. In the last month I have been seeing a lot of problems with my server and have contacted support on a few occasions. First off I don't care for their new support SLA, they only offer phone or live chat for "emergenices" and have been quite rude to me in both occasions I have contacted them. It also seems like they have outsourced their help (I was told when I signed up in Jan that they didn't do that) which is frustrating. I was on the live chat help today and the operator was very cavalier and even "hung up" on me when I still had questions. I then got back on and finished asking my questions, he then "hung up" on me again without waiting to see if I was done asking questions. That is just rude and poor customer service. I am pretty disapointed at this point.
I am also annoyed with their little screw up with Parallels and how slow they have been to resolve it (over a month) so billing has been a pain in the butt.
Anyways that is just my two cents and I was wondering if anyone else had experienced the same issues, or if it is just me.
I have signed up today and i made some simple questions on their support ( how long does it take to configure the VPS etc. ). That was about 7 hours ago and i didn't got any replies yet.
I am currently deciding between these 3 companies for a vps solution. They all seem to be solid and provide good deals. I would just like to know everyone's experience in terms of speed, uptime, support handling and stablility.
Just thought I would post up a review on what I thought about SolarVPS, as I've had nothing but joy with them.
It was back in 2007 when I decided that shared hosting was getting to slow for my website, and I was advised to get a VPS plan. I was originally with Bluehost, who provided outstanding customer service and value for money, and I was very reluctant to move from them. My worry was that I would move to a service where I was pretty much neglected, and left with 0 support, and many server issues.
However I came across SolarVPS on these forums, and gave them a go. Well I used the lifetime discount voucher, so my package was pretty cheap as it was. My server was setup instantly after payment, and things have been going fine since.
I've recently started up a new project, and needed a new VPS hosting package. So I came along to these forums again today to look for some juicy VPS deals. Came across a fair few, some which did seem very good value for money, but the issue about customer service was bugging me. What if the CS was delayed, what if my support tickets were not addressed, and what if their live chat was only live a few hours in the day. After finding some good deals, I thought hell with it, I'l get another plan with SolarVPS.
So I found their nice 20% off coupon which I applied to my account, making the pan I bought again, pretty good value for money. Bought the plan, immediately received some emails regarding my purchase. I went to the live chat and was talking to one guy, Douglas, about setting my server up. It's the one time that I've felt I was talking to a human via live chat. Not only did this guy sort me out in a snap, but he had a great sense of humour to which is always a bonus.
So, within an hour, I now have a nice new plan setup with SolarVPS that I KNOW I will be pleased with.
Let me just gloss over the points about SolarVPS I think really stand out: ....
