I've had a Ubiquity dedicated server for 3 months now. I wasn't going to post a review for a couple more months but felt compelled to do so after reading another thread entitled "Ubiquity Servers Stay Away".
I experienced a similar situation to what the member (who posted the Stay Away thread) experienced with my initial server configuration. My server config was supposed to consist of an E6600, 2 GB RAM, and 250 GB HD. The server I was provisioned with had 1 GB RAM and a 160 GB HD. And like the member I had already invested quite a few hours configuring my server before noticing the problem. But this is where our similarities end. Because Ubiquity's support staff did almost everything possible to fix these problems and accommodate me. I was able to contact their support staff immediately via their Live Chat. When I told them that I had already spent valuable time configuring my server, they installed a 250 GB HD in addition to my existing 160 GB drive so that my configurations on the server would be preserved. When I found out that they did not have any compatible RAM in stock to add to my server, I insisted that I needed it within 2 days (I had a deadline to get the server configured for Xen and the RAM was crucial). Not only did they order the RAM with next day shipping, one of their support staff members (who lives 4 hours from Chicago) guaranteed me that if the RAM did not arrive in time, he would purchase it himself, drive to the DC, and install it. Luckily for him, the RAM came in time, because I was ready to hold him to his word. Lastly, they adjusted my billing cycle so that I was not charged for any of the days in which my server specs were incorrect.
I want to add that I actually expect all these things from someone I do business with. If they make a mistake, they should correct it and make it up to their customers. What really stood out about this experience was Ubiquity's honesty, willingness to admit their mistakes, and accommodate my requests.
The other thing I noticed throughout this experience is that Ubiquity's core staff is not located in Chicago (I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure). The only times I experienced support delays was when Ubiquity's support staff had to page/contact their hardware person at the DC and wait for that person to do the work. Yes, I said "person", as in " uno", "one". At one point, there was a 2 hour delay because that person wasn't reachable. To be fair, this was after hours on a weekend, so they may have more people available during business hours. More importantly, to me at least, is that they were again honest about the situation, and they were able to deliver what they promised in the end.
I haven't needed to contact Ubiquity for anything else since that time. My server is running as it should be, and their network has never been down.
I bought a vps with Ubiquity in the Los Angeles area for small game servers and I am very happy with it. I can tell that it is not oversold and the level of support I get is amazing. I called at 3 AM and had a question they picked up and were happy to help me. I would like to point out how much Michael has helped me with the vps. I asked him to change the container name and it was done within a few minutes.
Before I ordered there was an issue with the invoice and they resolved it very quickly.
There network is very fast and stable. I live about 60 miles form San Fransisco so the ping is very low. Around 23-25 MS as this is kind of expected.
Ubiquity is a great VPS provider and and I am very happy I choose them for my small game servers.
I needed a hosting provider that offers mono hosting and found Ubiquity Hosting. I signed up with their Shared Hosting service plan called Cleveroy. I chose the 12 months Price at $5.95 USD (Free Domain). This is one of two plans that do not have any setup fees of $20 USD.
According to their link (ubiquityhosting[dot]com/web-hosting/service/mysql) about MySQL that they provide it states:
"What can I do with MySQL?
When teamed with the other flagship hosting applications of the open source community we run including Secured Linux Server, Apache Web Server, and PHP, the possibilities of your web applications at Ubiquity Hosting Solutions are virtually limitless...." The keywords here are "virtually limitless". By that, I assumed they allow stored procedures and triggers even in a shared environment. That was why I signed up.
Upon doing so I realised I am not allowed to use those features and therefore requested a refund.
They refunded a partial amount and that left me fuming. According to their TOS, it states:
"Every web hosting account with Ubiquity Hosting Solutions - excluding all dedicated servers - features a 45-day money back guarantee. If you choose to cancel your account within the first 45 days and notify us by sending an e-mail to support@ubiquityhosting.com. We will refund all routine account fees, exclusive of any set up or domain names fees. Accounts closed after 45 days do not qualify for refund of any pre-paid fees."
The plan I signed up for did not have a setup fee.
I would like to enquire with you guys whether I am entitled to get a full refund or a partial refund as per their TOS.
I signed up with Ubiquity hosting in June. I was looking for an unmanaged VPS solution, and I liked that they had a Chicago data center since Chicago is closest for me.
The server I'm hosting is fairly basic, just a personal server for use by myself and my family.
* apache, mysql - used to host some personal web sites (a few WordPress blogs for family members, fan site for a band) that don't draw a lot of traffic -- averaging 700 hits/day, 226 Mb/day. * sendmail & dovecot IMAP - only 2 mail users including myself. * nagios - used to remotely monitor some servers at my day job.
Total bandwidth for August was 16 GB in / 6 GB out for August, so the bandwidth usage isn't intense.
Sales:
The guys at Ubiquity were great as far as the sales process goes. Very helpful, even switched the installed OS for me at no charge when I changed my mind on what OS I wanted.
Service/Support:
For the first few months, Ubiquity was great.
A few weeks ago (Sept. 9), I started having some problems. Most of the time, the server was just ridiculously sluggish. Apache, sendmail and IMAP connections would time out. Any commands typed at the command line took several seconds to respond. At first, Ubiquity said there was nothing wrong. Then they decided it was a problem with another user on the node running an IRC script. They said they warned the IRC script kid to knock it off, but performance never improved.
About a week later, the performance got even worse -- now, it was bad all the time, not just most of the time. Finally, on Sept. 17 Ubiquity says that some disks in the raid array my VPS is stored on failed. A week later, they've finished rebuilding 4 of the 11 disks in the array and the server is still unusable -- still getting timeouts on apache, sendmail and IMAP connections.
Support-wise, for me, having an unusable server for 2 weeks and counting is a deal-breaker. I'm already in the process of moving moving my server elsewhere (but I'm not done yet and have not requested cancellation yet, so Ubiquity guys, if you're reading, please don't pull a GeekStorage and just up and delete my stuff.)
The support from Ubiquity on the above described problems was inconsistent. When the problems first cropped up, as I said, they pretty much just said they didn't see any problems on the node, but could move me to another one. Then they changed the story to the IRC script explanation and just closed the ticket without any further explanation (for example, "so, at this time we won't move your VPS to another node."). I repeatedly asked whether the usage I described above was within the capabilities of their VPS solution, but never got an answer. At some times, I'd get quick responses in the middle of the night. Other times, questions went a day with no reply.
So, bottom-line, good sales process, and when things are working, they work well. But when things aren't working well, it seems Ubiquity isn't able to rectify them in a timely manner and/or reliably communicate with customers about the issue(s).
I'm now hosting with Future Hosting. I'll be back with a review of them in a few months.
The short: Professional, honest, and competent. I've learned that when dealing with VPSes, if you want to be fancy you need to tolerate problems. While Icertainly had some interesting issues [url] with Ubiquity, besides a few of them they fall into the categories of 'stuff happens' and 'should get a dedicated server, instead'. It ran two of the most active adult communities in the world without a hitch. Except my members are addicted to them like crack and 15 minute lag issues are the end of the world for some : )
So now, four months after I left Acceleratedweb for Ubiquity [url]I am the proud owner of an overstock server from Ubiquity and am reviewing their VPS.
As the first link suggests - it wasn't my first shot with Ubiquity. I think that says a lot for making "If you ever want to come back." offers. They now have $125/month of my money, most of that guaranteed (I dislike having only one host so am probably going to try poking Futurehosting again after Lenny becomes a VPS install option there, or maybe Steadfast).
I really appreciate Ubiquity's patience with me while I learned how to self manage. I've come to detest control panels and have gotten rather good at it, especially after custom designing my own LAMP stack (handled over four thousand php page landings and forty thousand queries a minute from seventy connections... bad AJAX is a good DDOS simulation).
Typical Response Time: Ten minutes or so - pretty fast, though resolution can often be longer. The clock on vz010 is off by six hours on reboot. Very annoying.
General attitude: Not as individually detailed as AcceleratedWeb was, but this is okay, since I know more on my own now. Beyond that, they are generally pleasant compared to other VPS host's I've tried.
Server ping: Originally around 15 milliseconds. 40 now, and the same to my new server -
I wonder if echo requests or replies are throttled. I'm not sure if I'm a good judge here - the forums rarely take more than 2 mbps during any given minute unless I'm downloading a backup.
Server uptime: There was a crash a few days after I moved the forums to the VPS. November was around 99% with that, but otherwise it's closer to 99.8%, if you count occasional local outages. There is a router in between their network and their VPSes which sometimes goes haywire, which seems to be the main culprit.
Server speed: This is a bit tricky. Ubiquity only gives you access to one core. This may seem bad, but occasionally VPS members get hoggy, do you want one person out of thirty bringing your VPS down or one person out of four?
In the end, raw disk bandwidth is what counts for performance for me. The VPS server itself has a monstrous amount of RAM making this, usually, a non-issue. Occasionally though another VPSer would do something disk-heavy enough for us to suffer. "Get dedicated" <- we just did, that's why this review is here : )
Security: Ubiquity only took my root password when trying to diagnose the mystery disappearing disk space issue. They run a RAID and perform daily backups, and their control and billing software has no obvious security issues (though their billing software is plenty funky in other ways).
Price: Futurehosting is a bit more expensive but offers the future protect deal, while Ubiquity only permits one backup via the control panel. Pretty competitive for what is offered and allowed.
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I did have issues with Ubiquity. Their DNS servers fritz occasionally. There was the mysterious disk issue that caused me to leave them in the first place. The server crash really made me grit my teeth. The system clock on vz010 gets set ahead 6 hours on reboot - very annoying (and the butt of a lot of time travel jokes on my forums). Even though that only happened twice. There are lag spike issues, but it never brought the forums down after the first time and even then it was resolved within 15 minutes.
Something I've learned and made it a bit of a mantra. Tolerate mistakes, cheap, do what you want - pick two. Or better, a good balance between them.
The support staff is both professional and, in general, technically competent. If something is over someone's head, it happens, it gets forwarded on and is generally dealt with. The only thing I really blame them for is letting vz010's clock be off for six hours after I notified them - but they were apparently rather busy.
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I looked over dozens of VPSes for the criteria I wanted, and paid for several.
I needed a US host, in a fairly liberal state - I do not want my server hijacked by puritan authorities as had happened in Florida and Pennsylvania. I needed to host adult content, with an irc policy that makes sense. I needed to run Debian Lenny, and manage it on my own.
Out of all of them, Ubiquity was the only one that let me do everything I needed to, reliably and with confidence, for a price I could comfortably afford.
I will warn everyone now! I have posted warnings in the past.
I have had nothing but bad experiences with Ipower. Lately the problems have gotten worse. Even after Ipower says they have fixed the problem, my server crashes again and again. I have been searching for a new company, but have had no luck. I am also looking at getting a lawyer because Ipower has failed to keep their promise and their tech support supervisors are wise asses. They treat you like crap and act like they are the smartest people in the world. They argue with customers and frustrate the hell out of you.
If you have had a problem with Ipower post a reply! We need to steer people away from them.
I'm not one to post bad reviews, mind you, I am one of the ones that hate negative reviews the most. But my experience with this company is absolutely terrible, and I feel people should know about it. I personally have nothing against them, but this company has lost me about 1-2 thousand dollars in customers/licenses/files etc etc.
I originally ordered servers via them back in the early days of ConnectHost due to the fact that everything was so cheap and NetXServers wasn't as big then so neither was the budget. The server was fine for the last few months (March-June), but this wasn't the server with the problems.
A month or 2 ago, NetXServers started offering VPS's. I decided, due to the low cost of IP addresses, and the actual server that I would buy one for a VPS server. It was good for about 2 months I think, and then last month, the server went offline. I contacted BurstNET (As fireballhost is a BurstNET reseller) for a reboot. They had told me the server had been cut off for non payment. As the payment went through FireBallHost, I contacted them. They told me they didn't know it was cutoff. The data was unable to be recovered as the server had been formatted and reassigned to a new customer. NetXServers lost 23 customers and had to deal with about 15 PayPal disputes. This ended up with our NetXServers account being suspended for a day. Matthew, the owner told me he would pay for a new server. 2 days later, he 'found' some fees that BurstNET had charged him and that we had to pay them before they paid us anything, so we got the choice of him paying the invoice to BurstNET or we pa y it THEN he buys us a server. As the amount we had to pay was much higher then any cost for a new server. I just left it, and as we had 2 servers left with them, I decided just to forget about it to stop a huge argument.
2 Days ago, one of our servers (the old server2.connecthost.net) was taken offline. This was fine as we didn't need it anymore, and we had infact submitted a cancellation request a week before, so it didn't seem to strange.
30 mins ago, a customer emailed our support desk to say their VPS was offline. The support staff immediately alerted me and I contacted BurstNET to reboot the server. I was told to 'contact the reseller' regarding the server, which means it's been cut off. The support tech (A very nice and helpful one at that) tried to locate the server, but it had already been formatted. So now, I'm again, a server down and 4x $20 customers are now left VPS-less and they're going to have to be refunded. But here is what annoyed me most about this server cutoff. The server bill was actually paid to FireBallHost on June the 7th.
Dear NetXCorporate,
This email confirms that you sent $DOLLARS USD to Robert Buranich as a subscription payment.
Which in effect, means they've cut us off and stolen the money. Anyway, I'm calling a lawyer tomorrow and I plan to sue them for all they've got. These are the kind of people we need to stay away from and keep off and out of our hosting industry.
I have been hosting with An hosting / Midphase for almost 5 months. I am really disappointed with service quality. Here is my honest review:
My Background
* Four years hosting experience with other hosting companies * 9 years experience as consultant in IT * I have almost 200 websites and have 3-8 employees working for my websites in the last 6 months. * I generally keep the websites in shared hosting accounts to minimize downtime.
Account:
I signed up for cheap hosting around thanksgiving time last year. It is something like 4.95 or 5.95 USD per month. I have 40 subaccounts (domains) an huge amount of disk and bandwidth. I just use 2-3% of available resources (disk and bandwidth).
Review
I am very disappointed with the service at midphase. Here are the details:
Technical Support:
First two months were fine. Once midphase was acquired by another hosting firm located in Europe, service quality declined rapidly. Support requests were addressed in 4-5 hours in the first two months. Later, they started to respond slowly.
Most of the time, I felt that my tickets are never read. It was like a robot responding my emails. Answers were generic and has nothing to do with my questions.
The second issue is that they seem to have lost customer touch. I remember telling customer service representative that my website is not showing up at all. I am told that it is OK. I pinged my website from 9 different computers. None of them showed that it is accessible. It is really frustrating to get an email like "Please check it again and if you have a problem still please run the following command ..."
Overselling
I checked the websites on the server where my shared hosting account is. There are almost 350 websites. It is reasonable.
Bad Neighborhood effect The strange thing is that some of the websites are spamy on the server. I am pretty good at Search Engine Optimization. All I can tell you is that my two websites were heavily punished by google due to bad neighborhood effect. I asked Midphase to change my server. I got nothing.
First site was getting 3000-3500 uniques per day before switching to anhosting. Number of visitors were almost the same in the first 3 days. On the fourth day, it dropped to 400/day. Whatever I do, it never bounced back. Number of indexed pages on website were almost 4000. Now it is just 930. It is unique content. It is an established website for three years, I can't be sandboxed. Anyway, I gave up building that site.
I decided not to host any websites on anhosting even though I paid 1 years' price as there is no point in getting pissed off by bad neighborhood effect.
One employee just placed a newly developed website on hosting without my consent. Here is the result. Website was PR2. It dropped to 0 in 6 weeks. Number of visitors dropped by 74%. I decided to abondon that domain.
FTP
Worst service... After I decided to completely abondon an hosting even though it is paid for a year, I just used it for FTP.
In fact, failure of FTP is the main reason I am writing this review. I just get the following error. "Disk full -please upload later".
This is the first time in my lifetime I get "full disk" error from a shared hosting provider. It is very likely to be the only one in my life.
Uptime
host-tracker.com is the service I use to check server uptime. Here are the stats for the week of 2008-02-18.
Weekly uptime:71.86% Downtime:1 day(s) 23 hour(s) Day 2008-02-24 Uptime:98.53% Downtime:21 min(s) 10 sec(s) Day 2008-02-23 Uptime:100.00% Day 2008-02-22 Uptime:100.00% Day 2008-02-21 Uptime:97.48% Downtime:36 min(s) 14 sec(s) Day 2008-02-20 Uptime:59.48% Downtime:9 hour(s) 21 min(s) Day 2008-02-19 Uptime:6.27% Downtime:22 hour(s) 29 min(s) Day 2008-02-18 Uptime:40.79% Downtime:14 hour(s) 12 min(s)
This is simply unacceptable. Those stats are for the first website I abandoned at anhosting.
Support Tickets
Once I got so mad and told them that I am going to leave a negative review at webhostingtalk.com. I am told that it is OK. I was busy and decided to keep quite to discipline them.
2 months later, I now have ftp problem. I decided to mention spesific issues happened two months ago. Guess what??? The ticket that I threaten to leave a negative feedback was removed without my consent. This is insane.
Network I remember that their network engineers messed up with routers once. Anyway, they fixed it in few hours.
Conclusion I have been living in US for 5 years. An hosting is the worst service company I have ever interacted in this country.
If I am given a chance to get the money back for the remaining 6 months in my contract, I won't hesitate for a minute to get the money back.
I recommend staying away from anhosting or midphase. It is just waste of money, time and other resources.
I have been customer with HostGator for almost two weeks and my experience has been TERRIBLE, AWFUL etc.
The server I am being hosted on is overloaded daily to the point when my SSH times out and my website is unaccessible. I have been told that the customers who overuse their resources have been removed and that it should work fine - surprisingly, it does not.
Days ago I have been also assured, by the live support rep, that load averages will stay around 2s or 3s after the server will be filled as the accounts were still being added. That is not happening even though there are no accounts being added anymore to the server (as I was told few days later).
As I am writing this, the load averages are: 121.74, 66.47, 49.90
I currently have a VPS with ubiquityservers .com. It's used for simple web serving as well as a proxy tunnel for playing games like Aion. (Without SSH socks proxying, ingame latency is about 800+ms. With proxy, it's about 280ms.) Since most companies charge about US$6 for the proxying service, it makes more sense for 7 of my friends to just buy a cheap and simple VPS to try.
I must admit that I'm pleasantly surprised with ubiquity. I placed an order for the server on Wed 3:41 AM (according to email) and server was already up and running by Wed 5:16 AM.
I created my first ticket about login issues (it happens, so I don't blame them) at 8:36 AM and got the response in 2 minutes. WTF? I've never seen this kind of ridiculously fast response time, not with LayeredTech, PacificRack or iWeb (they are good hosts nevertheless). Maybe the techs just happen to be looking at my ticket first by chance but it was very pleasing to me.
A week later, they got DDOSed. I emailed to ask about the connectivity at 1.06PM (I'm on GMT+8 so it's probably really late in their DC.). I got the response in 5 mins. O_O. I'm pleased with their response times once again. The whole issue got resolved quickly.
2 days back, I decided to be a little adventurous and out try OpenVPN. I contacted them for support as /dev/net/tun was not writable in the containers. After 2 mails, the request was forwarded to the VPS admins who promptly enabled it for my container.
I did some searching on their wiki and found that my 'baby vps' is being shared with 127 other containers. It's only $18 so there's nothing I can complain about.
I am writing this post because I feel that this host deserves a mention. If anyone wants to try out a VPS, do give them a shot.
I'm currently looking for a host with either unmetered bandwidth or diskspace, or specified numbers but with 100s of GB of space and above 1TB bandwidth.
Hi, I know how important is to have a reliable web host, especially when you have customers who are ... let's say hard to be pleased. I run SEO services company based in Eastern Europe and work mostly with customers from Spain and UK. Most of them want me to find a web host, web designer for them and to develop their web sites. Sometime from the scratch line, sometimes to work on site with tens thousands of visitors.
I would like to express my appreciation to my web host - HC Servers. I think this is very professional and competitive managed hosting company. I have 1 Core 2 Duo based machine and 2 Xeon based managed servers with them hosted in Amsterdam, all three used by UK property development companies, clients of mine. My clients are very satisfied of the customer support provided by the web host. Me too.
I don't need very special level of customization, besides CentOS Linux, Mail server, PHP, MySQL and some social software on the servers. Anyway... I received proper server managemenr any time I need it.
There is no perfect hosting company, so I can add one thing that HC Servers need to improve. Some times it takes up to 48 hour to have the server online for some configurations. I presume that they don't have anything in stock and probably need to buy some parts. But this is reasonable for me, ezpecially for the price I pay. I know there are many good hosts here at WHT. Well I'll add next on the line - HC Servers.
I figured I'd put up a review for a great company I'm dealing with.
I decided to offload some servers to a management team and found WaveWeb.com Their servers pricing are great for the service they provide.
I requested a WHMCS/CPanel setup, which was completed immediately. I have had issues with clients and specific requests which are performed 24/7 around the clock by a crew of technicians.
They also explain the fixes to me, and warn me of specific issues to prevent vulnerabilities etc.
So far I have found them great and are steadily improving.
I definitely look forward to dealing with them in the future.
My server with them is:
64.191.44.213 or pctechcrew.com for a test domain to show the authenticity of my review as is usually requested. I run a webhosting company however, didn't want to disclose the domain and break forum rules.
This is my first review here on WHT, but this company deserves a review. I started out with TMS (Tailored Servers) sometime in February of 2008. I was testing servers from several different providers looking for just the right one when I spoke to Jose for some pre-sales questions. Jose was very helpful right from the start, answering all my questions via live chat on MSN. After our discussion I decided to give him a shot. The server was set up and ready to go within 2 hours after my payment. Great first impression without a doubt!
Let's talk hardware and support. I have for the most part purchased budget servers from TMS, although his higher end machines are in my future. I had a hard drive that went bad in one box, sent in the support ticket and quickly received a response that they would change the drive out for me immediately.
Not only that, but they upgraded my 80GB hard drive with a 160GB Hard drive.
They had to reinstall my OS as well, all of which was done within an hour after my ticket, and my server was back on line! I had backups of my data and got it all transferred and ready to go shortly after. I think my only other trouble ticket was that I needed a reinstall most likely due to personal error. Again, my server was back on line within just a an hour or so. They have always been quick to respond to tickets and attend to any issues.
I started a Gaming Group on line and used TMS to host my dedicated box for the servers. We never had a single latency issue or any downtime to our servers, well other than when I rebooted I was so happy with TMS that I asked him if we could link our website to him to show him some support. Jose even went so far as to check out our website design and create an image for us that matched our website theme. That's taking the extra step, of course I could have done it myself, but the offer to do so was a bonus.
The network at TMS is also top notch. They have fantastic up link providers and I have yet to have one single network issue. The speeds are always great. They also have MRTG graphs, remote server reboots, and reverse DNS for your IP's in their control panel for easy access.
To sum it up, Tailored Servers is a fantastic dedicated server provider that goes above my standards. With a reliable network, quick support, and good hardware, they are a very capable of handling your server needs. I have had up to 4 servers with them, and just those 2 tickets in almost 6 months is pretty impressive. I'd give TMS two thumbs up and recommend them to anyone needing dedicated hosting in Dallas.
Thanks to Jose and the team at TMS for their great service and support!
I am going to tell you about my experience with netrack servers
Well about a year ago I had a managed vps from netrack servers. Setup time was about 4 hours which was good. They called me to verify the order first and i said ok and then later it got setup. When i first logged in it it was slow and the download speeds were about 30 kb/sec. it was about 12AM so i was thinking there was some work going on. Later i then submit a ticking asking how to setup dns. They said you need to redirect not point your domain to your ip. Well if i need to do this then why did they say in the welcome email point your domain to these nameservers. The speed did not get better it got worse. So then i asked why it was so slow and they said oh you need more ram. It was a hassle to try to get a refund they they kept saying no. I did end up getting it eventually. so whatever you do do not use them. You get what you pay for. What was interesting is the second i canceled they removed my account in the support place. Hum they running low on diskspace? I did get a refund like i said but don't use them. Are they even listed in the BBB? Use a more reputable host.
I have been with Dimension Servers for I don't even know how long, definitely over a year by now. And why? Because I have never, ever had a single problem with this amazing host. Anything i need help with, the support is almost instantaneous and all problems cease to exist.
This host has pretty much taken me through the best online voyage possible. From a blackmailing incident the host protected me in, to major site transfers, I felt safe, secure, and comfortable at all times.
There was no downtime as far as i could tell, and even if there was it was back up in no time, so fast that it didnt even draw my attention.
The value is great. The guy doesnt oversell, and when I had a recent incident in which i overused bandwidth by quite a bit, he did not shut down my account like most hosts would. He contacted me and we figured something out.
I feel as though the internet is becoming filled more and more rapidly with Walmart type hosts; the companies grow so big that they don't care about a single client. They have thousands more, what will one ignored complaint do? This is not the case with Dimension Servers. It reminds me of a friendly local market in which everything is attainable with superior quality, and at the same time everybody knows each other and is willing to help out.
It is this friendly host environment/attitude coupled with superior service and quality that puts Dimension servers on the top of my list, and that is where the host will remain. I am very happy with my hosting and i strongly recommend this host to anybody from a internet beginner to an experience web enthusiast.
I am now with Rackspace's new cloud servers. I understand that they are still under a "beta testing" but I decided to give it a go.
Over all I like it. There are however some annoying parts which I will list first.
1. DNS manager issues... I have many DNS records for my domain and it seems that the DNS manager isn't so forgiving. It gives you the ability (or you think so) to delete an individual record however I have never been able to do that. It would always return with an error which is quite annoying. So I moved my DNS servers to another location and have been happy since.
2. Chat support is too much like dell tech support. The first person you get doesn't really know what he is talking about (I have been talking with them a few times about the above mentioned DNS issues and they confirmed multiple bugs within the system but this was at level 2 support and it was quite annoying having to explain the problem to everyone that I spoke too) What I ended up doing is going with Slicehosts chat room where I always found a very helpful hand (they are the same company so it's not stealing). They helped me with many of my issues.
3. The documents/wiki is very hard to find. If I didn't get a link to it from a tech support guy then I wouldn't of known it was there. All it is, is a wiki formatted silcehosts article repo. But it is quite helpful. My tip is to make it more visible.
Overall I am happy with the speed and stability of the server. So thanks Slicehost/Rackspace for your service.
I read a lot of bad reviews about that companys, but all of that reviews are of shared hosting and vps. I want see a review of someone who buy a dedicated server from they.
Over the last 5ish years we have had servers with ServerBeach, The Planet, Layeredtech, and now VolumeDrive. Over the years each has had its share of ups and downs but now almost all of our servers are with VD. First before I start let me say this, Josh and Jeff are two of the best guys that I have ever had the pleasure of doing business with. Each of them know when they get out here I owe them a beer and steak dinner on the strip.
Ordering. 7/10
This is one area that sometimes is a little out there, there website does not work at all for ordering or at least not when I tried last. However ordering is simple, send an email to info and say order this. Get back an email saying OK. Pretty simple. The only problem is pricing, sometimes it takes Josh a few days to get a price for the server, or a bill just shows up and I am like, ok well cool.
Server Pricing. 10/10
This has to be one area where VolumeDrive shines. The prices they offer are almost unbelievable but hey it is there business model not mine. I can vouch anytime anyplace that these servers are 10Mbit unmetered servers. I have had 5 download servers, currently 3 that almost run 10Mbit 24/7. Each servers avg monthly bandwidth usage is around 2500 GB’s +-300ish GB’s and I have never once gotten a bill or even a letter of “dude your sucking down all the bandwidth” nothing; and even better yet I get these download boxes for all of $50/month. I won’t even hint at the great prices I have for Dual processors Quad Core Xeons with 8GB’s RAID1 10k Drives with cPanel.
Old Network. 8/10
First off we all know about the XO/BurstNet turn on that well didn’t so I am not going to beat that horse anymore. The old network was to me “ok” nothing special, and nothing really bad either. I will say that there is less of a “snappiness” in server responses it always seemed to take an extra second for the pages to load or more so the server to respond to a request. At one time I had all 5 download servers on the old network and they all were pulling the bandwidth like it was water, and are shared servers were humming along. I was always able to pull 10Mbit when needed.
New Network. 8/10
The new network to me I have not seen that much difference in performance. I have 2 download servers on the new network and oddly enough the bandwidth usage has decreased and instead a solid green graph via mrtg, I have spikes and dips all over the place. The shared servers on the new network do see to answer faster, and feel much more zippy or snappy. Still able to get all the bandwidth and speeds they offer so no complaint there.
Support. 9/10
I personally don’t think Josh or Jeff sleep, have wives/girlfriends/kids/lives. J They must live and breathe at their DC’s as no matter when I send an support email in, it gets answered in like 5 – 15 minutes even at 11 my time PST and there in EST. I feel that for an unmanaged server provider these guys are amazing, I have asked them to do things that I even offer to pay them, and they do for free. I have had to have 2 servers reloaded, and both times the servers were offline in 15 minutes, the current hard drives, slaved and a new drive placed in the box. Allowing me to move anything and everything from the old hard drive. Now I have to put out a few negative items as well. Sometimes they just don’t know and we kick ideas back and forth, which is not a problem at all but it does show that they are humans and we can’t expect perfection. J I also have an open support ticket with then about inbound speeds for a week that is unresolved, but continued updates, so can’t yell about it at all. Reboots I almost forgot take anywhere between 2 – 15 minutes and the boxes are back online.
Server Delivery. 4/10
This is the one area of VolumeDrive that really needs worked on, and worked on badly. Of the 13 servers I have had 10 currently; I don’t think any of them have been online in less than 72 hours. My servers have been online from 4 – 14 days. If you need a server now, I am sorry Josh and Jeff, VolumeDrive is not the company you need. However email them first as I do know that they get shipments in all the time. Now another problem that I have had is they don’t always get the servers right. Twice now I have ordered boxes that have been delivered without cPanel installed. Minor oversight that I did not freak out and scream, but annoying nonetheless, my last box was well just off by a lot, enough that I did send a not so polite note demanding it is fixed. To which I will admit Jeff had it corrected/upgrade/formatted in about 20 minutes. Now to their defense I have 2 Dual Processor Quad Core Xeons with 8GB and RAID 1, which were online in about a week and setup perfectly. So my two most complex setups were perfect, but some of my basic boxes borked... Go figure.
Server Upgrades. 7/10
I have had a few servers upgrade with new parts, this process is pretty painless I send off an email saying I need such and such for server so and so, and its ordered no questions. That is where the lack of pain stops; from then on it is for us a bit of pain, as several times now I have had to check after a week of no upgrade if the parts were ordered. Then reschedule upgrade times with our customers, this is to say the least an embarrassment a few times as we are left with cake on our faces. Now a huge plus there upgrades are very inexpensive and I have yet to be charged for the upgrade itself.
Billing. 8/10
This two is an area that I personally think needs worked on as they only except PayPal which is not bad, but most of us have our credit/debt cards for a reason. Now a huge plus for at least us, is that every server that has been order is just that; ordered, setup, and online, then a bill is sent. I have never had to prepay for a server, ever. Same with all the upgrades. Now I know that Josh strives for customer service and support first, but sometimes are bills are behind, at least before the PayPal subscripts get setup. Last week I paid out about $600 in past bills because things were behind. Which is not a problem, but from a books point of view in two weeks the bills are coming out again. Again another point where VolumeDrive shines is during this billing mix up which some of it was our fault I am sure, I asked that someone call me because at $50 for some of these servers $600 is a few odd bills, to discuss this. No less than 3 minutes after that email was sent my phone rang, and it was Josh ready with details to go over everything, and after the phone call I received a detailed email of the conversation.
Overall. 7.6/10
Overall I am very happy with VolumeDrive, yes there has been some extended times on delivery that has made us look stupid but once online the services are strong and they just work. I can and will continue to use VolumeDrive for some time to come, the only reason we have another provider is for our higher bandwidth needs and dedicated 20 – 100 Mbit ports. Their prices are simply amazing, and once everything is online and working their service is awesome. Again I am a very happy customer and will continue to be a happy customer for the foreseeable future.
Well, this isn't so much of a review as me saying what's happened in the last week since I ordered a server from them.
November 29th- Ordered a server, expected 2-3 days till my server was up. It turned out to be 2-3 business days (M-F). This, I admit is my fault for not reading carefully. A few more days, I did not mind.
I also submitted a ticket requesting more information on delivery dates and they said that my server would be up in 1-2 days.
December 2nd- I submit a ticket (Tuesday) just checking that they still remember by server. It's fine, they give me information on how their process works and why it may take up to three days.
December 3rd- It's now been 3 days, so I submit a ticket. I get a reply saying that it will be up tomorrow.
December 4th- Still no server.
December 5th- Still no server.
So basically, now I'm just hoping that I will get this server within the next little while before all of my players (I'm using this to run a web based game) disappear from the 2 day downtime so far.
I figured id share in my experiences as a host and a client. For the last several months we have had a dedicated server with apthost as well as a VPS, I must say even as a host myself they are very good on their word and what they say they will do. I am not one to post about any host they are in the top of my list as far as Customer Service, Performance, Price as well..
Now i have heard good an bad about them but you know what only my experience can tell me what is tru and what my experience tells me about them is they got there stuff together.
And just like they said FFmpeg came on the dedicated box all setup with cPanel and ready to go eve Red5 as well.
It's a bit early for a meaninful review given I've only been with them just over a month so far, but I'll keep this updated at time goes by.
Network: 10/10 - Still early days obviously but so far zero downtime. All boxes are on a 100Mb port too which is a major plus, other providers tend to charge extra for that.
Support: ??/10 - I can't comment on their support as it's something I never used.
Ultimately though, given they are an unmanaged provider, support really should be limited to tracking down hardware issues etc.
Hardware: 10/10 - Spot on thus far, and very well priced too.
Sales: 10/10 - Ordered Saturday, box online Sunday (with an odd drive combo so some work must have gone into it too).
Other:-
Initially I was going to go with Softlayer, in fact I even filled in the order form a couple of times but got cold feet. Then browsing through WHT's offers section, I came across one of TMS's specials, quite frankly it was too hard to turn down. After a few searchs on WHT to confirm their reputation I ordered straight away. Don't be put off by the frankly awful looking website.
Once you are a customer, their client area has everything you need, including access to rDNS, you do not need to create a ticket & wait for a tech to do it, their system allows you do set it up.
and initially I never thought a 10Mbit port was a bottleneck for me, however I've since seen my peak bandwidth usage at 24Mbit. The free 100Mbit port is deffo a good thing.
i know i put up a review a few months back about Volumedrive but i thought id put up antoher since ive now been with them longer and got more servers with them.
firstly i have 3 servers with volumedrive at the moment (may be 2 shortly undecided yet if i need the third.)
one is a celeron with 1gb ram and 120gb hd running windows 2003 basicly all its doing is streaming media.
second ones a very special deal i managed to get for a amd athlon x2 4200+ with 120gb disk, 2gb ram and ffew other bits and peices, using that for my main website and couple of vpses
third is a new one ive only had about a month, its a amd athlon 64 3400+ 1gb ram runing plesk using it for hosting some of my clients sites (moved from managemyservices whoes support is totally useless and very very cocky/offensive in my opinion - i highly do not recommend them)
all in all baring a few minor netowrk hiccups (burst provide VDs network loop so their is soem small downtimes) ive had no major isues at all and josh and team have gone above and beyond multiple times to help out - my newest server they managed to get turned around and setup in under 48hours as i needed it urgently.
i highly recommend VD and also feel free to email them as they are always willing to try and cut a deal
I thought I would write a quick review of Corenetworks.net!
I've had a server at Core networks for about a year now, and have worked with support as well as billing.
Support Lets start off with the most important thing, support. I am not one to need hand-holding from support, but every once and a while I need things like IP-KVM access, hardware upgrades, hardware replacements, etc. I've put in four requests for IP-KVM access via their ticketing system since I started hosting there, and each request was fulfilled within 30 minutes. I have to admit that 30 minutes is impressive for a dedicated hosting company. It must be remembered that they are unmanaged hosting, and managed hosting services cost extra. I find this scenario fits most technical people well because more resources are put into *real* requests such as hardware, kvm, etc instead of resources being used for hand-holding (i lost my root password, my apache process is not starting, etc)
Hardware The price compared to the hardware you get is exceptional. A lot of hosting company's out there will push overused hardware on you. (some larger companies reuse hard drives over and over, check the smart drive lifetime with smartctl) The hard drive I was provided had a usage time of 3 months. That is VERY good compared to the average active drive life time at other hosting providers of 2-4 years. The hardware has been reliable and fault free (i have 2 machines now with no problems)
Uptime This is the greatest part, every other budge dedicated hosting provider i've been with has had horrible power (sometimes reboots every few days, and the occasional downtime of a few hours) I have not had a single power outage or reboot since I first started at core networks! One of my severs has an uptime of 355 Days.
Network The network is not blazing fast... with the package I got. I decided on the metered 3Mb connection (no extra cost) There is also an unmetered connection with a bandwidth limit, if anyone can chime in on this it would be great . I do know that I have always had a 3Mb full pipe on this plan (up and down) which is more then enough for my hosting purposes.
Features Core networks has all of the features of the big-boys: Remote power management, bandwidth mrtg graphs, network status page, Free IP-KVM, etc.
Cost The company does utilize it's cheaper servers as a bargaining tool for sales. It seems they unleash their $24/mo servers for a week or two to drive sales and then mark them as sold out. Currently I have the $49/mo servers (with a bit extra oomph) and I am ecstatic with the price. If you can catch the $24/mo servers, get them when you see'em!
Overall Overall I would recommend corenetworks.net to anyone who is seeking a quality server for personal use or small business use. I am not sure how the service would meet enterprise level businesses, but they do have more expensive plans and I see no reason those would suck.
I posted a review about Tailor Made Servers (TMS) back in December of 2008 however it was wiped out during the infamous "WHT Incident" but I see that it has returned, although in a very incomplete state. Here is a repost of the original review along with a few minor changes to celebrate our 2 year anniversary! (Changes made to original review will have a red font color.)
Technical Support [10/10]:
First things first, TMS are an un-managed provider so don't expect any hand holding if you run into some obscure software or operating system problems. That's not to say TMS wouldn't help you, I'm sure they would to some extent, but it should never be expected from an un-managed provider.
We have a total of 74 tickets recorded with TMS since April of 2007. Twelve of those tickets were high priority requests to either manually reboot a server or check the console. Three of those high priority tickets were false alarms, but the other seven tickets were all answered within a few minutes at the very most.
When I say the tickets were answered, I don't mean a canned reply of "We're looking into it!" then an hour later someone decides to start working on it and then another hour later it's finally resolved. If you submit a high priority ticket, it's given immediate attention and resolved as fast as humanly possible.
Manual reboots take on average 10 minutes, some have been performed in a couple of minutes while the longest we ever had to wait was about 15 minutes which is what they advertise. There have only been a couple of hardware issues, a failing NIC was recently replaced in under 15 minutes, a server died last month and a chassis swap was done in under 3 hours. Hard to find any faults here - the technical support & response times are very reassuring and above average when compared to a lot of other un-managed providers.
Network & Uptime [10/10]:
TMS are located in the prestigious Colo4Dallas facility and using an impressive blend of InterNAP, Level3, Time Warner and XO Communications for bandwidth providers. There are also InterNAP FCP devices in use to attempt to provide the most efficient routing possible and also work around any problems thanks to its intelligent routing capabilities. This differs from BGP in the sense that BGP will always provide the shortest path possible - not necessarily the best path.
The latency and throughput are what you would expect from a reasonably multi-homed provider in Texas. Typical response times to my location in Ontario, Canada are about 60ms while response times to the United Kingdom are around 110ms. Average response times to other parts of the US are nothing short of impressive, 25ms to Chicago, 35ms to Los Angeles, 20ms to Atlanta and 50ms to Seattle.
There was a network blip on March 31, 2009 that caused some instability due to an apparent network upgrade that went wrong. These things do happen, however I feel that communication could have been a bit better in terms of notifying clients in advance. Outside of that one issue the last significant outage was in May of 2007 when a faulty router module had to be replaced and the downtime was a little under 1 hour. TMS clearly has a solid network and should satisfy everyone from web hosting providers looking for maximum uptime to die hard gamers looking for the lowest latency possible.
Hardware Quality & Deployment [10/10]:
All of the newer servers are Dell so you know you're getting quality hardware. The hard drives are a mix of new and old, but they all work perfectly fine with no S.M.A.R.T errors detected using multiple short & long tests. Some people would prefer to always have brand new hard drives, but that's not very economical for a lot of providers and I'm totally OK with that.
Servers are deployed extremely fast during business hours. In most cases if you order a server in the morning, it'll be setup later that afternoon. I've never had to wait more than 6 hours for a server, but I tend to order in the morning so I can't comment on how fast deployments are later in the day or on weekends.
The best deals for TMS are listed under the Dedicated Hosting Offers forum and not on their website, so be sure to check them out. Ordering a server from TMS is completely hassle free and straight forward. You pick the server configuration, pay via PayPal or Credit Card and wait for deployment. There's no faxing or scanning of documents and what not for verification of orders - but I'm sure JoseQ does his own fraud screening.
Overall [9/10]
I can't say enough good things about Tailor Made Servers! The staff is very knowledgeable and genuinely shows that they care, the response times are nothing short of incredible and I can honestly say I sleep better at night knowing our servers are in good hands if something goes wrong.
It truly is a great feeling not always having to worry about network problems, or how long it's going to take to get a manual reboot done, or replace failing hardware if need be. TMS are on top of their game, definitely one of the most underrated and under mentioned providers on WHT!
Why did I rate TMS 9 out of 10 after this glowing review? Well, there's always room for improvement and I don't think it's realistic to rate any provider a 10 out of 10. So what can be improved? When I first posted this review last year, I mentioned that KVM access would be nice and I believe they have since been added - perhaps JoseQ can clarify on that. You know, I honestly can't think of anything major I would like to see improved at this point.
That's pretty much it; if you're looking for an unrivaled dedicated server provider definitely take a look at Tailor Made Servers! Their best deals are always under the Dedicated Hosting Offers forum so be sure to check that out or send TMS - JoseQ a message to see what they can do for you. You have my word, you will not be disappointed and the only regret you'll ever have with TMS is not signing up earlier.
Tailor Made Servers - TMS - 1 Year and 8 Month Review - Highly Recommended!
Here's my long overdue review for Tailor Made Servers [url] and I'd like to urge everyone looking for a high quality unmanaged provider to take a few minutes to read this. I'm terrible at writing long posts, so I apologize if this review is a bit all over the place - it's just so hard to contain my excitement!
Technical Support [10/10]: First things first, TMS are an unmanaged provider so don't expect any hand holding if you run into some obscure software or operating system problems. That's not to say TMS wouldn't help you, I'm sure they would to some extent, but it should never be expected from an unmanaged provider.
We have a total of 57 tickets recorded with TMS since April of 2007. Ten of those tickets were high priority requests to either manually reboot a server or check the console. Three of those high priority tickets were false alarms, but the other seven tickets were all answered within a few minutes at the very most.
When I say the tickets were answered, I don't mean a canned reply of "We're looking into it!" then an hour later someone decides to start working on it and then another hour later it's finally resolved. If you submit a high priority ticket, it's given immediate attention and resolved as fast as humanly possible.
Manual reboots take on average 10 minutes, some have been performed in a couple of minutes while the longest we ever had to wait was about 15 minutes which is what they advertise. There have only been a couple of hardware issues, a failing NIC was recently replaced in under 15 minutes, a server died last month and a chassis swap was done in under 3 hours. Hard to find any faults here - the technical support
I got my first dedicated server, So I'm not sure if this is what typically happens to everyone on every dedicated server setup, or if it's just my bad luck, or if it's a reflection of the guys at FDC.
At this point, I'm not sure if I should stick with them or not, it's been slightly weird, to somewhat humorous to just down right frustrating.
Only good thing is, it's not an actual production server, I was just seeing how FDC was as a company before I comitted. So other than the upfront cost and time spent dealing with this, we haven't thankfully impacted our customers in anyway.
(1) Contact sales, no response for two days. (*) contacted them on friday, so I figure that was probably the delay in the response, quite understandable.
(2) They said they'll have to contact me by phone (*) Sure not a problem, please contact me within these hours...
(3) They contacted me out of the hours specified (*) ugh...maybe I didn't make myself clear in the email, oh well whatever, atleast they did contact me.
(4) Was promised server will be up by tomorrow (*) Oh okay, he sounded nice on the phone
(5) Servers were not up by tomorrow had to email to find out what's going on (*) They just got their shipment in and everything will be setup by the end of the day.
(6) It wasn't set up by the end of the day. Contacted them again.
(7) They got it up the next day, Server finally up, but I can't even ping it. (*) Took them a day but they got that resolved
(8) I can finally ping it but I can't remote into it. (*) I'm guessing someone forgot to enable RDP?
(9) Get another bill, Server 2008 Standard $20 more dollars (*) I've never requested a update from web edition to standard. Maybe with all that reinstalling of the server, someone felt like upgrading me without seeing If I wanted the upgrade or not? Or maybe Remote desktop isn't possible in Web Edition and they upgraded me, if that's the case cool, if not I'm not sure why the upgraded me from Web to Standard.
You figure it's clear sailing from here on out. Grab all my windows updates.
Right click on my computer, left click on properties...Windows not activated, automatic update will be done in 2 days.
(11) Contacted support, can I validate now, or just let it validate in 2 days. (*) Support says it's not a problem and just to validate it now
(12) Validation failed. (*) OMG this can't be happening...opened up a ticket.
(13) It looks like it was the wrong key, and we're waiting for msoft to get us a valid one it'll only take an hour.
3 hours later it's still not validated. They say they'll do it, and they'll email me, weird thing is they closed off the ticket? aren't things done by ticket status, if the ticket is closed then how do they know it needs to be done...
FDC is nice and all, decent response times on tickets, usually within 5 minutes, I've had response times with other companies(registrar) avg time was a day.
Anyhow I must be driving them nuts with all the tickets I've opened up, don't think it's any fault of my own though. Like I said earlier I'm not sure If I should stick with them or not, Is this typical? or is it just my bad luck, or is it just FDC?
All was good until last month, i request to reinstall os 3 days later they told me that server i'm renting will be replaced do to hardware problem. So takes another 1 days to setup another server. Ok server was up with what ever they claim better hardware. Problem is w/tech support! They don't respond on tickets what so ever+ they will close your ticket w/out resolving the issue. now im waiting for past 3 hours for them to reboot my server and so far nobody moved a finger. Im glad this service month to month. This will be my last month with lame tech support company. Advice STAY AWAY or you will lose customers and waste money.
I inquired about this sales. New company good price Good service. WRONG.
So I get on live chat and talk to Mike and tell him all the requirements I ahve He says no problem pay for managed hosting at $25 a month and we will install all of that for you. So i go to check out enter in there coupon code for 20% off for lifetime and when i get to the paypal page to pay whole different story. Says 20% first month then regular price the rest. So I cancel out of that go back to live chat and get Mike I tell him what happened he says no it is 20% for life. So i take his word for it and head back over to checkout. This time it wont let me there site has a problem and wont complet checkout. So back to live chat I go. this time they transfer me to victor. Who informs me they will only install my stuff if I pay $25 a month and pay them $50 and hour. I tell him I have a guy to install it all for one-time fee of $35 can you do it for that no our fee is $50. Plus they want to charge me $25 a month for fully managed. When i can forget the fully managed and only pay one-time $35. Victor found he would rather argue with me and then try and insult me about a typo error.
Stay away they will not be in business for long. See bottom of chat below. ....
