Ubiquity VPS Four-month Review (and About Adventures With VPS In General
Mar 5, 2009
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 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.
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've signed up with Wiredtree for a Managed VPS 12 days ago.
I know it's not enough time to write a review. But I decided to write my first impression then keep you updated by writing a new review at the end of each month, so expect one at 12 February.
For now, these guys are simply the best I've tried.
They reply you in 15 minutes or less and if it took them more, 20 minutes or something, then be sure that they're investigating your problem. If you can't wait for 15 minutes, then go ahead and give them a call on their toll-free number and they'll be with you second by second. Their support wont just solve your problem, but they'll educate you telling you what caused the problem and how did they fix it.
I'm solicitous about security. But with these guys, I finally sleep peacefully knowing that my VPS is well secured.
I joined Limestonenetworks back in 2008 when it was a small company. At the time they offered the best price on the server I was looking for, so I took the plunge. The first 2 months were great, I enjoyed the stable network, and responses from the support team were fairly quick (1-2 hours response time). From there on it was all downhill, my servers were constantly down, and the support team took longer to answer my tickets. I didn't think this was a big problem, so I stayed with Limestonenetworks even though it was having problems with their network. Near December an incident occurred that really pushed me over the edge. My servers had been down for hours, so I opened a support ticket, and one of the agents replied and told me that the downtime was due to an upgrade in their network.
Again, I came to conclude that it could be far worst, so I stayed, one of the reasons was that I didn't want to switch my game servers over. It's important to keep in mind when you are running game servers, IPs play an important part because that's where you get your traffic. Near January the network upgrade at Limestonenetworks was still taking place which caused my bandwidth meter to stop working. This really scared me because I didn't want to get charged for overages due to the fact that my servers were receiving DDOS attacks, and I wouldn't know when to close the ports.
This incident actually turned out to be positive for me because even though I went over my bandwidth quota they didn't charge me for overages. I was very happy because this was like a late Christmas present, so now I was even more happy to give my money to Limestonenetworks. Now you might ask the question, how is this going downhill? Even though they didn't charge me for the overages, I still lost many clients who were angry at the fact that their game server were down.
In the end this network upgrade actually cost me 3 clients who were paying ~$60 per month. I let this slide because at this point I already had two servers with Limestonenetworks and I really didn't want to switch over due to the fact I would lose my IPs. The next month, February, was no different, I had more issues with Limestonenetworks. Starting of this month I was getting large DDOS attacks, which kept pushing my bandwidth over the quota, and I ended up paying close to $200 dollars just for bandwidth overages.
At this point they started to nickel and dime me for every single penny they could get of me. I don't know if they were having financial problems, or if it was due to another reason. Again in March I went over the quota, but at this time they told me that I had to pay per gigabyte which would result in a $500+ charge in bandwidth, and after talking with multiple agents, I was finally able to reach an agreement. They had changed a policy all of the sudden due to the fact that they knew I was a good customer and would keep paying for the overages.
The problem I had here was that I didn't mind upgrading to plan after I knew how much bandwidth was going to be used, since they don't offer any sort of DDOS protection, and game servers result in large DDOS attacks occasionally. I understand that Limestonenetworks was not at fault, but by making me pay per gigabyte was a bit harsh, since I had never been late on a payment, and had multiple servers. Try to remember that I stayed with this company even though I lost multiple clients because of their network outages, but they didn't care about this, all the care about is nickling and diming customers.
From that point on I have been living on the edge because I don't want to pay for an upgrade before hand due to the fact I don't know how much bandwidth my server will be using. Even if I upgrade to a different package it does not offer an insurance due to the fact that if I receieve a large DDOS than I orignally predicted, I would still end up paying per gigabyte.
This company has turned from having potential to just making their customers run away. Now the other problems I had with Limestonenetwork is the support they offer, which has been declining since I joined. The associates are very rude and don't really care about the customer's experience. I didn't include every problem I had with Limestonenetwork because it would make it a very long read.
Network - 10/10 Downtime - 5/10 Customer Service - 2/10 Overall Experience - 4/10 Would I recommend this company? NO, I urge everyone to stay away, unless they like to deal with problems on a daily basis.
Also from reading other topics on this forum, I personally believe that Limestonenetwork is overselling and their network can not handle the load.
This is my 1 month review on the company vt6 (vt6.co.uk). There is no doubt about it, they have the fastest reply times and most helpfull support. I started out on the basic plan and have just paid for the next one, i was upgraded allmost instantly but as i found it was no benfit to me i asked to downgrade and was again instantly downgraded and my money refunded.
As for the quality of the VPS, it is perfect. they dont cramm VPS's onto one server so each VPS runs smooth without any problems. Iv also had no downtime at all. Iv been with a few VPS's before this and none come close to pure quality and fantastic support that vt6 provide.
That is all for my one month review on this perfect company that i would deffinitly recommend to anyone seeking low cost quality VPS's (Or hosting that i assume will be exatcly the same)
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 came to use Liquidweb thorugh a string of random REALLY bad luck. From "Managed" VPS that ended up not getting patched and fried due to a security exploit (PowerVPS) to a RAID failure, during a backup, causing total data loss and backup loss (RockMyWeb's VDNet). I was ready to pull my hair out. So I decided to kick out the bucks for a Liquid Web VPS Plan 2 (with a great price from a special found here). All I can say is it was a night and day difference.
The server is fast. Remote access to this VPS is a fast as my dedicated server in the office. I thought moving to cPanel was going to slow things down but this thing flies! Wow!
The service is fast. I call support and a person picks up the phone. No e-mail. No long hold times. I call, someone answers, no need to transfer to a higher tech, it's just fixed. Wow!
The one downfall. And it's only a downfall if it's not what you want. cPanel only. I'm a big DirectAdmin fan, but I'm learning my way around cPanel again.
Until I'm ready to do dedicated (I'm guessing it's coming in 2k8) this thing is awesome!
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
1x Web Hosting Talk for hooking me up with Liquidweb.
1x Web Hosting Talk Community for reviewing Liquidweb.
1x Liquidweb for the awesome service!
1x VDNet. It may sound strange but they did answer e-mails faster than anyone I had ever seen (multiple replies in under two mins). They had a great price, but bad luck drove me to change. I'm glad I did, but I wouldn't have a hard time recommending VDNet now that they fixed the problem that caused the loss of my server. (and they did give me a month free) They really did give good value for the price, and offer DirectAdmin which Liquidweb doesn't.
Anyone else care to share?
P.S.
I'm not a fan of emoticons, but I did it out of love for you guys. Feel free to hammer the server a bit and tell me how fast the pages load. They're pretty quick here in Costa Rica: CR Solutions Group Costa Rica Web Design.
I've been with Steadcom for a few months now, and I greatly their services. Such great deals have been offered to me. Each time I talk with the staff, I seem to want to use their services longer. I'm currently working with my own free hosting company and I entrust my uptime and reliability to Steadcom. I've had no problems with either of those aspects and it seems like their network is as fast as Google. If you find a better deal than this, it would be a miracle. I am working on obtaining up to six months with them for my next payment. I would fully recommend Steadcom and their services. I give it all of my reputation and respect as a business owner to acknowledge such outstanding services.
I have been with SoftLayer a month now, and this is my review of their company. I will start with my pre-sales experience, going into hardware, their network, server, portal, accounting/sales, and support .
[[[[[[[ PRE SALES ]]]]]]]
I started out looking for a new server by looking at some good dedicated hosts. I saw SoftLayer offered the new Nehalem series, so I went for it. Their sales team is excellent beyond all reasons -- the staff are personal and do NOT try to take your money; instead, they find the best-fit solution for you and work with you by calling you, showing you their specials, and talking to managers.
[[[[[[ HARDWARE ]]]]]]]
The Hardware at SL is top-notch. There's no problem with it, it's clearly stated in the portal what type of motherboard, HDs, RAM, etc are in the server and it's top-notch Supermicro hardware. I've never seen a problem with it, and I have seen the certificate of passing benchmarks as that is done on all SL servers by default.
Their provisioning system is excellent, I got my server in 2-3 hours at MAX. WOW! It is all inside the portal too; you can view the status (PE_BOOT, OS_RELOAD); it's clearly there and excellent. We finally got VIRTUOZZO (thanks natecarlson ) working with it too.
[[[[ SERVER ]]]]]
What can I say? This is the new Nehalem series. I think the deal I got was quite good, I brought several SL servers before I switched to this one, and it did take a while to get it down to this price (especially for SL quality, damn!) :
-Intel Dual Quad Core (2x) X5570 Nehalem 2.93GHZ w/ HT -12 x 300GB SAS 15K Seagate Cheetah HD's in RAID 10 -12GB DDR3 RAM (to start) -4000GB Monthly Bandwith -1GigE Port Speed -64 IP Addresses -Monitoring & Automated Reboot $1,100 a month -- which I think is good for this type of server.
It's blazing fast and 0 problems.
[[[[ NETWORK ]]]]
I started in their Dallas, TX datacenter with a Dual 5450, but decided to get a 2U server with SAS HD's. Sadly, they said they were out of stock in Dallas. They said they can get me an EXTRA DISCOUNT if I went to Washington DC. I live an hour or two from DC, so it was good for me. I debated, and talked to them, they said it was a great place and I went with their Washington D.C datacenter .
It's fast. Blazing fast. They have like 100GBPS connectivity -- with many backbone providers. I've never seen so many . I'm liking the nework speeds and it really is nice.
[[[[ PORTAL ]]]]
The best part. They have their 'manage.softlayer.com' and their mobile 'manage.softlayer.mobi' portals. They are excellent. I don't even need support, and when I do, it's there. I mean, I'm STILL exploring their portal system. It has so much stuff; "Instant cPanel Licenseing, Instant Firewall, Upgrades, IP's, OS reloads, Installs, Backups" -- I love it. It makes my life a lot easier and quiker. I've had a server with ThePlanet, HiVelocity, and more and SL portal blows them all away
[[[ SUPPORT ]]]
The support is great. In the times I need it, it's there. Within 15 minutes I get a response and usually in under an hour, a resolution. It's excellent in what they provide at an unmanaged rate, and the $3 tickets are great in my opinion for those quick issues that you just can't figure out. They even helped me with a bit of PHP help!
[[[ ACCOUNTING AND SALES ]]]
It's there any time I needed it. I got servers upgraded, downgraded, reclaimed, removed, created, OS reloaded, invoices adjusted, and it's there. They respond within 1 hour usually and it's great for a sales team. Personally it's awesome how they have excellent teams for support and sales! The reps are VERY nice and friendly too, and they offer some nice discounts .
[[[ OVERALL ]]]
I give SoftLayer a 10/10+. They are everything I expect from a provider (heck, they are better than most managed providers I've been with) and more. I urge you to try them out, they will try to fit your budget as good as you can do it.
I'd first like to follow up with my end at GNAX. I ended up going down to them on the 31st to pick up my colo server and get my refund. All went generally well, except for the "I'll be back in 5 mins" that took more than 30 mins for some sales/billing guy to get me my stuff. Signed some papers, and my money was refunded in full. In the end, a happy ending with GNAX.
Now, while all that was ongoing, I moved over to a dedicated server at Softlayer quick as I could because I knew with 100% certainty that Jeff would have my service terminated when I posted the chat log of him threatening me - a controversial decision I still stand by for what it's worth.
First, lets talk about sales with Softlayer. My God - I have never seen anything like this. With GNAX, sales would consist of me sending a ticket and waiting days, or it getting closed randomly, then having to wait more and more. A 48-hour max setup time with GNAX ended up being 5+ days and still no setup. Softlayer. I was doing Live Chat with an agent who was extremely helpful. Too move the process along quicker, I asked if I could call and speak with him, and sure enough, he game me a toll free number and I spoke with him through the entire ordering process. Not only was he extremely knowlegeable and helpful, but he also pointed me to a special I was unaware of where I got double the RAM and a second hard drive for free. I ended up ordering a dual core Xeon setup, but I actually got setup with a quad Core Xeon X3220. No mistake they said, they were just out of what I ordered so they gave me a quad core for the price of a dual core. And all of this happened in less than 4 hours. Yep, that's right. I went from on the phone with sales to having my brand new quad core for the price of a dual core with twice the RAM and HDD for free in under four hours. I was actually shocked. After being with GNAX so long, I had no idea that anything even under a 24 hour wait was possible (which it wasn't with GNAX btw), and they didn't hold my order because of being short on inventory like GNAX did - they just gave me a free upgrade with no delay!
With GNAX, I have never been able to be in such control of my server as I am now with Softlayer. With GNAX, lets say, I wanted to change or add reverse DNS for an IP, I would have to send a ticket and wait hours and hours and hours for them to do it. With Softlayer, I login to the portal, and click click type, click and it's done and live. All by myself! Their portal is the most powerful thing I have ever seen and it allows me to do and see everything.
Their support, I'm convinced, is second to none. I once had three days of downtime with GNAX because of a hardware problem (their hardware) they just couldn't fix. The motherboard has gone bad and I had to wait three days for them to find another identical motherboard to replace mine with. Apparently, they don't like to keep hardware on hand in case of emergency. In the mean time, I was faced with a lot of pissed off people who couldn't access the server for three days while all GNAX did was "we're looking, we're trying". Three days downtime is unacceptable, GNAX's support is just horrible. Phone support is essentially non-existent. When, on occasion, people pick up the phone, I'm simply told to submit a ticket and they'll get to it - when it's convenient for them. Support with Softlayer is drastically different, I can call support and pick their brains on technical problems for as long as I need. Recently, something went wrong when I was moving IP addresses around with my servers, and I was able to submit a ticket, call them, and they resolved it while on the phone with me. Some other small issues cropped up, and I replied to the ticket as it was non-urgent, and they had it fixed it about 20 mins. THAT people, is how support. Again, after being with GNAX for so long and having to wait hours, and sometimes days for support, having things fixed on the phone with me or via ticket in under 15 mins really caught me off guard.
Sales - part two.
Incredibly impressed with the sales and support I have seen so far, I recently ordered a second server. Again, I did this over the phone and was given an amazing deal - one not even on their site! In the end, it'll save me about $60/month on my second server. Pretty decent I say.
Other stuff.
They have a forum! That's not what's cool in itself, but it's cool that its integrated into my portal account. Now, GNAX has a forum too, but you first have to email GNAX and ask for their blessing to sign up there.
Another nifty thing about Softlayer is their developer API. Their API enables tons of cool things, like I can see my uptime and bandwidth usage from within WHMCS. With GNAX, I would have to go find which one of my logins for their seemingly hundreds of disintegrated services. Having everything being in one place and under one login with Softlayer.
Basically, if you need a dedicated server provider, choose Softlayer. Leaving GNAX (well, being forced out) and moving to Softlayer is the best thing that has ever happened to me an my company.
Alright, Ive been with them for a little over two months and I have been with them before. Their support is excellent, their servers' are excellent, their network is excellent, their portal is excellent, and not having to deal with Cogent directly is a joy.
I first singed on with them 11/9/08 till 12/29/08 everything went well I closed my account simply because I didn't need the server again.
My current server with them as of this post is $199.00/mth and I get the following
CPU : Xenon X3230 Quad Core @ 2.66 Ghz Ram : 4GB OS : Server Standard 2008 64 bit 1000 mbps 2 TB of bandwidth Washington, DC Data Center 2x 250GB SATA II 174.37.243.170
Having a server with them has been nothing short of amazing zero downtime caused by them and most anything a managed host will do they will do for you free. I was having issues with routes and simply asked them and within ten minutes they had changed it according to what I would prefer. I have had a DoS attack before that was pushing 800 mbps of traffic and they sent me an email and I opened a ticket and they blocked the attackers' addresses at my switch. Very quickly and not much damage was done. Overall I'm very pleased and I would recommend them to anyone.
Here is my review of Virpus after being with them for 1 month.
Uptime: 10/10
So far I have not experienced any outages and I am going to have to give them a 10 on that as I have seen many threads in the outages about them but it appears they solved that issue and I was never effected by any of those.
Support: 8/10
I will give the support a 8 as sometimes on off times it could take up to about 30 minutes for the first response which is great but then after that the responses tend to be around 2 hours or so. Overall though the support is great!
Price: 10/10
I signed up with there plan that was cPanel included and had double bandwidth and ram. I was thinking it was too good to be true and that the VPS was not going to be quality, but I am glad I was wrong!
Performance: 9/10
The performance of the server is overall great so far. I have had no issues as far as the server being anything but fast. I will have to commend them on having great hardware and not overselling there services like a lot of the VPS providers these days.
Overall: 9/10
I would highly recommend them as they have been a great provider overall and I hope that they keep up the good work in the future.
I wrote an initial setup experience review of downtown host including support w/ transferring my sites a few months ago. Now I am going to extend the review with reliability, speed and performance.
So far, the support and helpfulness has been the same. Rarely does support wait longer than 10 min to respond to questions. They are always responded with a great attitude.
Reliability of all my sites has been 100%. I have seen no downtime at all since I got my account. Truly fabulous. The only time a site has gone down was not their fault...it was my fault...for messing up the database they restored it within minutes after I sent a high priority technical support ticket too.
Speed and performance go hand in hand. Sites are quick and responsive. Just as responsive as a content management system on any dedicated in my opinion. Download speeds are always the same. Never does the download or upload speed fluctuate by more than 10 kbps up or down from the average (totally unlike dreamhost where it would fluctuate as much as 400-500 kbps depending on the day).
All scripts I have used have responded very quickly without any problems that I would encounter with dreamhost (like cut off scripts due to time it took the servers to run through them).
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've now been with Serveraxis for nearly 36 months and will make this fairly short and sweet - my experience with Serveraxis has been great. Uptime has been excellent with the vast majority of downtime coming from things such as a simple reboot for kernel upgrades. I think in those three years there have only been two cases of unscheduled downtime. Both times Serveraxis kept it's clients well informed and the downtime wasn't major - I believe due to hardware failure. There has been no unscheduled downtime for the past two years on my server, both of those cases were quite a while ago.
Their prices are very reasonable (and have even gone down once or twice) and the few times I've needed support they have been very responsive. They have also increased the amount of bandwidth and disk space multiple times at no additional cost to it's clients during the three years I have been with them.
On the whole, I think Serveraxis is phenomenal for users that just want an unmanaged VPS with rock-solid uptime and a great company behind them.
I wrote a review of Tzulo last month before that attack occurred and the thread was lost along with all the other data. So I am writing a review again as I feel they deserve this.
I rented a VPS Large package in March in 2008 through their reseller and a few months later I was shifted to Tzulo as the reseller changed.
Tzullo servers are really great. They are quad core, their customer service is really great. I do own dedicated servers from other companies and Tzulo customer service is the best among all the web hosting companies I have experienced. I have contacted them via their ticket system and crazy hours like midnight and have gotten a helpful reply from them within 5 - 30 minutes.
I run two dedicated gameservers from the VPS I bought from them and I have never had any problems with their hardware. The net connection is really good also because there is never any lag on behalf of the server, I know a person who connects to my gameserver from australia and he gets a latency of only 250. The VPS's are based in Chicago.
They are really cheap considering they are based in USA. I have never seen cheaper reliable hosts in USA. They even offer a $10 'novice' VPS for people so they can check and experience the servers.
They offer linux and windows including control panels like hypervm and virtuozzo. You can do free re-installs, restarts, repairs from the online control panel.
Recently I recommended them to my friend also and he bought the medium package from them and it got activated within minutes of his payment confirmation.
Overall, my experience with them has been the best and that is why I am going through and writing this review again, I highly recommend Tzulo to all of you if you are looking for a good quality cheap VPS.
my website is on digitallinx vps from abt 4 months. and in these 4 months i experienced 100% uptime. speed is pretty gud too. and most imp thing i liked abt them is their support that is great. they reply in timely manner no matter wat time of the day and they r really professionals whatever issue i had they always helped me. never heard no from them. i think space and bandwidth can every host provide but professional support is the most that we need. i ll stick to them as long as i could.
what can i say, you get what you pay for but i think this is expensive!
i fell to the trap of unmetered bandwith. its true, it was really freaking fast speed.
BUT, ram is limited. especially if you run cPanel. i advise people not to use it.
Tickets were answered very fast. usually within 2~5 minutes. even faster at times. downside: a bit expensive. even though unmetered bandwith, this is shared. also its tough to push much traffic because of the lack of ram. i think if you bought something with 1gig ram, you can find cheaper VPS.
also you are completely on your own with this VPS. nothing surprised i knew this going in. But then i discovered other services that provided managed VPS at even cheaper price! these were reputable companies too. Next time im just gonna go with managed service. wasted too much time compiling and learning how to do stuff.
I give : out of
I found lot of the reviews on here inaccurate. They are actually not bad.....but imo a bit expensive.
From the moment that I signed up with them to now they have been on top of everything. Right after I created the account it took about 15 minutes for my site to be transferred over from GeekStorage and up and running on their servers. They respond their tickets very quickly, most of the time in less than 10 minutes.
I have not had many issues with them; the only issue I can recall was when a bot posted some weird scripts on my site. Even though my site was the only one attacked Tyler was very quick to respond and even offered me one on one support via Messenger. The problem was resolved with a quick password change.
Not only do they provide excellent support but they keep in contact with their customers. They email me from time to time to see how things are going and if I need any additional help. Most importantly, their servers are blazing fast and by no means do they overcrowd them. I can run Wordpress and Invision Power Board with no hiccups.
If anyone is in need of some quality inexpensive shared hosting then I would defiantly give StableHost a try.
I have had a VPS with Level3Hosting for 1 month now and am happy to report that I am very happy with the VPS and the service and support. There was a couple of minor issues at first but these were quickly dealt with. The VPS is semi-managed and since I am quite new to the whole VPS thing I did have questions and concerns and Brian has always been fast to respond (where possible) and always been helpful and informative. Not all support questions were answered as fast as others but always easily within 24 hours and the higher priority ones answered sometimes within minutes. I had seen some negative comments about Level3Hosting here on WHT, as well as positive but I decided to go with what was advertised and so far am very glad that I did. Server uptime has been great (100% for me so far) and the VPS copes with what I have on it which is my own 4 websites and 4 radio ports all running 24/7 with no problems. I have searched for a cheaper deal that has everything I have now and no-one can come close, having said that, I purchased this VPS during the 50% off for life promotion so that explains a lot, however, even at full price it is still a good deal. So to summarise, my own personal experience of dealing with Level3Hosting has been a positive one and I hope that the service I get now is maintained and can continue for a long time as I will be a long term customer if it does.
This is a quick review of the VPS Provider [url] I will highlight four things: Support, Speed/Network, Sales/Setup, and Overall.
I have been hosted at [url]for 1 month now about, with my domain [url], we have 3 Dedicated for VPS hosting and a Hybrid VPS for sales, but I preferred a offsite provider for our main domain [url] So we went with GeekStorage! Support
Support has been excellent. Usually I have to request rDNS PTR but guess what, I didn't! It came all configured and everything. I've had two support tickets, one of which I've quickly resolved myself and the other one was fixed within a few hours. Overall the support is excellent and nothing is wrong, a few extra techs could do (this is a personal pet peeve of mine but it isn't a problem with most, actually it's not much of a problem with me as I only had 2 support requests.) Network and Speed
What can I say? They have their nodes at WebNX, a great provider! I get excellent pings, speeds, and my mail server etc. is nice and fast. I have 512MB guaranteed RAM but there are only 2 main sites on the VPS, using about 200-300MB of RAM (with cPanel/WHM). Uptime has been superior, I've gotten 100% Network and VPS Uptime! Not even a second I've seen the network go down, for any reason. Only time when it was down was when I accidently blocked myself via IPtables, had to use a proxy to get in SSH/WHM and unblock myself , but that's another story there..
Sales
Setup time was average. Took about 36-40 hours for my VPS to setup, a bit long, but they made sure it was running great, gave me status updates, and Jay did everything he could to make my VPS run faster and smoothly through the queue. I used the 'WHT50MORE' special and got a generous 50% off my 2 month prepayment .
Sales is also great. They have an excellent portal and everything. I'd say there are no problems with their billing. I haven't had a chance to open a sales ticket but I'm sure that there would be no problem.
The free control panel that comes with each GeekStorage VPS is perfect, I find that a great need aswell.
Overall
GeekStorage is a excellent, top-notch company. I'd give it 5+ stars, and reccomend it to ANYONE else who is looking for a stable & fast VPS provider. Don't hesitate: Go Geek! Verification for the MODs: Domain is [url] hosted via GeekStorage (they use dedicated servers/colo at WebNX)
We're coming up on around 7 or 8 months with a low-spec machine at CoreNetworks, and overall I'm pretty happy with the service. I picked it up as something cheap for my personal sites, but I've snuck some work stuff on there too. At the time of ordering, the specs of the machine I was given exceeded the specs they were offering (3.0ghz instead of 2.4ghz, if I'm not mistaken), it was provisioned quickly and the option to use KVMoIP and do your own install was great.
Sales were exceptionally helpful prior to ordering the machine, and support were fast and friendly every time I needed their help. The on-demand KVMoIP was setup fast on the one occasion I've needed it - ticket created 9:23AM, Chemito responded at 9:26 and had it hooked up and emailed me the details at 9:34. When I first configured the machine, my third IP address was unusable because something got goofed. I filed the ticket at 12:27PM, it was fixed and I had a response by 12:34PM. In fact if I average out all the tickets I've filed (which admittedly are mostly silly issues), the average resolution time is under ten minutes.
The network isn't bad, the pings are slightly elevated and there are periodic bouts of DoS which are dealt with quickly. The network status page is updated frequently with regards to these incidents, which makes me happy as I'm all about honesty when something stops working. I decided to go with the 3mbps unmetered, because I don't really use the server for much and at the time I ordered it overages were crazy expensive - they appear to have come down in price quite a bit.
The one-time upgrades for RAM and suchlike are great, it helps to keep the bottom-barrel monthly pricing with only a modest up-front cost. They also have an automated remote-reboot system in addition to the on-demand KVMoIP. The setup fees can be a little hard to swallow for the budget market, but on the whole it's completely worth it if you plan on staying any length of time.
A few reasons I got hosting with this company. I was having some issues with the support staff at hostpc.com I mean to me they just made me feel they did not care. So any way knowing how busy my site has gotten on hostpc I thought I needed vps. So came in and looked through the offers section and asked many questions to a lot of them that looked interesting and in my price range.
Mddhosting was the one that stuck out the most and every time I talked to support before I got service they really showed they cared about me and were honest and helpful. Much like the feeling I get with downtownhost and everity.
I went ahead and signed up for a vps with them and support iis still the same I mean good. They even helped me with my shoutcast needs which is actually above an beyond and wow have I had to contact them a lot of shoutcast issues which at this time are all fixed and none really had to do with my vps server. All the issues were either the bouncy radio software I was using or a dj messing things up.
the service has been great no down time that I know of and its fast.
This is why I added them to my great host list. Sites with them are: [url]and [url]
INITIAL CAVEAT: My site is not yet live yet so none of this review takes into account production loads. I am currently using the vps mostly for learning and development.
Website is [url] Yes I know it's under construction this is more of a side project/learning experience for me in the realm of server management/setting up and running a site through Drupal.
tl;dr 9/10 Much better then I expected for the small price I'm paying. I would highly recommend them.
Sales 10/10
I emailed Rick before signing up and I explained what I would be doing with the site and which level of serviced he recommended. We came to an agreement on there Mach 2 service. His response to this email was quick. Once I signed up setup was instant
Value 10/10 I have there Mach 2 service which for $12 a month (after a coupon I used) offers: 512 mb Ram guaranteed with 1 gig burst, equal cpu and plenty of disk space/bandwidth (honestly I'm not too concerned about those so I dont' know the exact figures of the top of my head)
Uptime 8/10
Had a few hiccups over the first 3-4 days with a total of about 3-4 hours downtime over 2 incidents but was kept informed the whole time and they regularly update the network status page in wmhs if something goes awry. Since then I've had 0 downtime.
Speed 8/10 Again during the first week I experienced some slow down doing various YUM updates but after they performed some work on it everything seems to be going quite fast. I'm EXTREMELY pleased with the download speeds I'm getting from home. I've used this as an intermediary for some video files that my friends and I are editing together and we're consistently getting 400k downloads everywhere from Ohio to Maine. Uploading is a little slower but at 100k it's probably limited by our home pipes. None of have access to a t1 to check.
Tech Support 7/10
I've put in 4-5 tickets and the response times have varied from a few minutes to a few hours. Nothing egregious and certainly better then I would expect from 12 bucks a month (I've got no illusions about you get what you pay for!) They have been very knowledgeable and never have I put in a ticket only to find out I had to explain as if to a child what I needed done (Yea I'm kinda bitter about this from other experiences, does it show )
Overall 9/10
Let me just say that I'm not sure if this is somethign standard among openvz/hypervm vps's but I am in love with the included backup and restore options along with being able to set up notifications if my services go down without having to figure out how to do it using monitoring daemons myself (nor would I know where to begin...)
They have a ton of os options and they load quite quickly if you need to reload (about 5-6 minutes) and I really love the ability to be able to do a quick (like 2 minutes) backup of your entire system once you have it the way you like. I've used this numerous times as inevitable I screw up something while playing around and with 3 clicks and 5 minutes I can have the system the way it was last time it worked. Then once I get everything working I can make the next incremental backup (again quickly) and move on. Again I cant say that this is unique to vpsspeed but it sure is awesome.
In short I would highly recommend Rick and his team if you are thinking about getting into the vps domain (for lack of a better word)
We've been with WebNX for about 2 months now, and we're loving it. We already rent 11 servers there and are looking to purchase another 10-20 in the near future!
Support/Sales
WebNX support is excellent, I must say. From the start their sales team has responded promptly (within a few hours) and almost always had a solution for my requests. We had (1) ticket opened in the support department and that was promptly handled in a few minutes.
I'd like to thank Dario and Chris who have helped me with my sales inquiries. I had a dedicated server purchased a few days ago and I needed rush setup, they gave me some options and I really loved the flexibility.
Hardware
Hardware is amazing. Fast, good quality, built to order. I like it. The thing about WebNX (as many others say), is that if you're only looking for one or two small Q6600's, they're not the provider for you. If you want a 32 core server with 20 hard drives, they can do that. Or if you want to buy in bulk, they can do that. When you follow those two "rules", they're one of the best providers in terms of bang for your buck.
Network
Network is top notch. They use lots of bandwidth providers and for the price you're getting, it's amazing how fast these servers are. We'll always be buying from WebNX for our Los Angeles needs. I'm sure if they expanded to Dallas, Chicago, even NYC they'd get a lot more business though! .
One thing I do wonder - do they use a BGP transit? Because whenever I traceroute my servers I only get connections though Cogent.
Overall, WebNX is amazing. We'll be with them for the months to come, for sure! They have my business and my future business.
