I was in the market for a new dedicated server after a couple of years with my previous provider. The previous provider did nothing wrong but they were no longer competitive when it came to CPU and memory.
I moved first to geekrack. And I left them after a week and a half as they never were able to get my rDNS records setup.
I found Universal Hosts on this forum and gave them a shot. I had asked for an operating system that they didn't offer normally (Debian 64 bit) and they said that they could do it. However, when my server was setup it was 32 bit Debian instead. They apologized and had Debian 64 bit setup less than 24 hours later.
When I asked them to get rDNS records setup it took a few hours but they were setup correctly and they worked.
Universal Hosts is also a BurstNet reseller but compared to my other attempt at using a BurstNet reseller they are fantastic. While the initial config was incorrect they worked quickly to fix it and were very professional about it.
So after two weeks - so far so good. Keep up the good work UniHosts!
I am running Apache2.2, PHP5.I have been running with virtual hosts on a Windows 7 environment fine for a couple of years successfully, but have just had to move to a Windows 8 environment.It looks like Apache and PHP have installed and are working fine, but my Virtual hosts are now not being recognised. From what I can tell, it is the Windows 8 hosts file that is having a problem, as it looks as though it is now just setup to Block websites.
If I make the host file just have the one line127.0.0.1 localhost entry, then the very first Virtual Host from my apache config file will come up, but the rest are not found.If I put the usual 127.0.0.1 mywebsite.name aliasname is appears as though my website works momentarily and then is blocked..
Recently I stumbled along a host on here with a good rep and that uses direct admin.
Because they were very nice on the live support I signed up to see what direct admin was like.
Its very diferent from cpanel. Some parts seem to be harder to use like the phpmyadmin requires the username and password to the database you created not the control panel username and password like cpanel. Although I guess that could be a good security feature just in case some one gets into the control panel they can not get into the phpmyadmin, then again if they are smart and were able to get into the control panel they could get into ftp and look what the username and password is on the config file for the script you are using.
The bandwidth meter seems to be better in direct admin although I think its acting up for me as its putting yesterdays bandwidth on todays. I was told by the host that it updates every 2 hours and at first it did but now its gone to every day. Oh and unlike cpanel this bandwidth meter includes bandwith used by the control panel.
Niether one from what I can tell counts sftp though at least for the hosts I have right now.
With all the web hosts out there people must be like "Which is best?" Well here is a review of some of the big names out there in web hosting.
GoDaddy.com:
GoDaddy’s web hosting packages come loaded with features. GoDaddy is proud of their world class data center and physical services, and reasonably so. GoDaddy actually owns their hosting facilities, which feature state of the art security and advanced backup technology for complete and competent network servers.
Each GoDaddy hosting plan comes with web site statistic tools to help you keep an eye on how your hosted page is performing. Setup is absolutely free, and includes access to the GoDaddy.com Hosting Connection, where you can interact with other GoDaddy users and find free applications to use on your web site.
Each GoDaddy hosting plan also comes with a variety of free software and credits to help you get the word out on your site. The Deluxe plan that we reviewed includes a $25 Google AdWord credit, a $50 Microsoft adCenter credit, and a $50 Facebook credit.
GoDaddy provides other tools as well for further adding function to your site. You can host forums on your GoDaddy website, start a blog, and show off your photos. And while GoDaddy doesn’t include a free shopping cart, they do have e-commerce solutions available, including merchant accounts and the Quick Shopping Cart. Customer Service:
GoDaddy has a variety of help and support options available, and they’re accessible all of the time. The online support forum and FAQs section are well organized and contain a wealth of knowledge for beginners and advanced users alike.
GoDaddy service representatives can also be contacted on the phone, or through email. GoDaddy is a large company with several users, so personal help would be expectedly slower than others. However, GoDaddy’s support team is quick to respond, and the expected response time for emails has significantly decreased since our last review. The 10 to 12 hour response time has been cut down to 1. Control Panel:
GoDaddy helps beginners easily set up their site, and includes additional tools for advanced developers to work with. GoDaddy also offers a variety of professional site building services and designs for additional fees. Regardless, all GoDaddy solutions support several programming languages. The deluxe plan we reviewed supports CGI (Python and Ruby), PHP, Perl, ASP, MySQL, ColdFusion, and FrontPage extensions.
Most functions within the Account Management tool are similar to other control panels. In addition, with GoDaddy.com you can perform account management tasks, email management, web security, database setup and management, and manage statistic tools. Summary:
GoDaddy is a worthy competitor and worthwhile web hosting service. They provide all the essentials and then some, complete with secure facilities. The setup process is straightforward, and GoDaddy has an option for all levels of management, from beginner to expert. Though not as complete as a couple of our other reviewed web hosting services, GoDaddy has what it takes, and is definitely a great option.
Article from here
HostGator:
Hostgator, founded in 2002 is one of top shared hosting companies, ranking consistently among the best by most of the review sites. What makes hostgator stand out from the crowd is their excellent support and customer friendliness. If you are not satisfied with the support, you could even get hostgator president Brent Oxley to personally take a look at your problem.
Hostgator offers linux hosting only(even though they are expected to start windows hosting in the near future). All their packages come with all the features needed for a serious website. Baby and Swamp packages allow unlimited domains(add on), which makes a lot of sense if you have multiple websites. They use cPanel, which is the best control panel around. You get Fantastico script installer which will install most of the popular open source scripts with few clicks.
They support PHP4 & 5, SSH, Cron jobs, Python, Ruby On Rails etc. Also, all the packages include enough POP3 accounts(20 for Hatchling and unlimited for others).
We started realtime testing of hostgator uptime on Feb 2008. The test is done on a site hosted with hostgator, using a third party uptime monitor service. Overall, hostgator had been the best performing host from all the hosts monitored. They provided consistently high uptime, month after month. There has never been a single case of site being down for more than 10 minutes at a stretch. Hostgator indeed lived up to their reputation.
They have three hosting packages starting from Hatchling ($6.95 pm) to Swamp ($14.95 pm). The price is reasonable for the features and space/bandwidth provided. Recently Hostgator increased the space and bandwidth to unimaginable levels. They also reduced the price of all plans, by introducing 24 and 34 month pre-payment options. The monthly payment now have a small set up charge and is costlier than 12 month rates. Our advice - don't get excited by the unlimited space and bandwidth. They do have limits on file numbers(inodes) and CPU usage to make sure that only reasonable sized accounts remains in the shared servers. But for any site with a reasonable traffic, hostgator plans are more than sufficient. You obviously can not expect a site with few million page views a month to run on a shared host, no matter what bandwidth they offer.
So much for 24 hour chat support at pdthosts.com. I waited 3 hours and still nobody answered my chat. I guess they stay online to appear available even though nobody is there to answer the chat.
I hate to give reviews before trying out the servers and all related issues such as support and network but what i have faced so far really pissed me off and left me with no choice but to write down my review.
They Confirmed all dedicated servers will be delivered 72-96 hours upon purchase.
First: I have ordered one of their dedicated server on the 4'th of July, i expected not to get any response due to the holiday.
Second: 7'th of July, still no reply to my ticket, another ticket opened and still no reply.
Third: 9'th of July...Finally a reply from their support telling that my server is finished but they need to install the modules i asked for. SO i expected an extra few hours to get my server.
Fourth: 10'th of July..Nothing so far, i have emailed them and complaining the delay and not having any response from their side, they replied and confirmed that i will get my server later today so i had to wait.
Fifth: 11'th of July ..NOTHING delivered, i opened another ticket asking for a refund but NOTHING so far...
it has been 7 days since i paid and received NOTHING but promises, they told me at the beginning that my problem is related to hardware failure but give me a break you are a hosting provider and should always have a replacement.
ANYWAY, i don't know what to expect when i get my server, hope what i have faced is just a delay no more BUT 7 Days really is a big time.
WHT has been a useful resource for me when looking for hosting, so I figure I'd contribute back. I am including every detail that I can remember from my interactions with uni-hosts. Hopefully this will help some people looking for VPS.
I signed up for uni-hosts Xen VPS (512 MB memory, 50 GB disk, 500GB bandwidth @ $32/mo) in late March. The server was set up to my satisfaction (just plain CentOS) in 30-40 hours, well within their quoted 24-72 hour setup time. I opened a low-priority RDNS ticket, which was closed in 60 minutes, and the DNS entries finished propagating in the next day or two, as expected.
The next day, I installed SELinux on my CentOS VPS since their installation didn't come with it. I forgot to relabel the filesystem before rebooting, so I locked myself out (/bin/bash wasn't labeled as a shell). It took uni-hosts 11h 15m to respond, which I think is pretty good because it was my fault anyways, I was only paying $32/mo, and fixing it required access to the console (since I broke SSH). The fix, which I provided them, was just two commands (touch /.autorelabel; reboot), which it seems they did run, but somehow they screwed up all the system binaries in the process. Almost any command would just freeze (yum, rpm, top, ...) no matter what parameters I gave them. They reinstalled the OS for me two hours later -- pretty quick. Later that day, after setting up SELinux again, I configured iptables. I accidentally applied the policy too soon, and dropped my SSH connection. I opened a ticket for them to run "/etc/init.d/iptables stop", which they did in a fairly prompt 70 minutes. This concluded the initial setup of my server.
Four days later, I noticed that the clock was wrong. They fixed this 8 hours later. (Why couldn't I set the date myself? Xen guests have their clocks pegged to the host clock by default, so date -s has no effect in the guest. Never having used Xen before, I didn't find out until later that you can echo something into /proc to unpeg the clock. Last I checked, their host clock is in the year 2003 again...)
Pretty good up to this point.
Three days after that (1 week after I signed up) there was an outage. I got a response to my ticket in 1 minute (!) telling me I'd get an update shortly. I don't know when the outage began, but it ended 35 minutes after I first noticed it, and when it came back up my VPS had been rebooted (bad -- I had some files open). Note that they claim 99.9% uptime -- that's 44 minutes of allowed downtime per month.
One day later, there was another outage. I don't know when it began because my VPS wasn't responding when I woke up that morning. I filed a ticket and received no response, not even information about what was going on, until the issue was resolved.
Uni-hosts was not responding to pings during all of that time; I received the first ping response 10h 54m after I noticed the outage.
The network was up most of the morning after the 11-hour outage, with some intermittent brief downtime. However, that afternoon, an 11h 29m outage ensued. Shortly after connectivity was restored, I received an email from them telling me where I could direct any credit requests (I did not ask for this; they offered voluntarily). I canceled service and got my refund in a prompt two days.
It might be helpful to note that they told me this was a "hard drive and network" issue. Even if multiple concurrent failures took down their RAID, it shouldn't take two days to get the server back up.
In summary, I feel like this is a you-get-what-you-pay-for host. They are pretty cheap compared to some of the other ones out there, and their hardware and infrastructure seem to show it. However, the impression that I get from the support staff is that they do try their best to satisfy the customer, though their expertise may be lacking in some areas. I have been impressed with their support staff and think that they did a good job, especially at their prices.
One word of caution -- they claim live chat and phone support, but those don't exist.
You can only open email tickets. Also, they claim 99.9% reliability but there isn't an SLA or other agreement, so there's no way of enforcing this. Caveat emptor, but they're not out to screw you or anything like that.
1. Uptime: They guarantee 99.9% uptime. The uptime was great till Feb(100%), but they've had a power failure in February...causing about 2 hours of downtime. However, I'm happy with that as well because they offered me $50 credit I expect they could have my server pulled down every month for 4 hours(so that i get a free server ...lol jk)
2. Support: There isn't a response guarantee. Sometimes "replies" are made within minute, sometimes it could take "much" longer. though, there are only 3 people for support as I can see, but the resolution time is EXCELLENT. They've a priority support, for reboots only, which is excellent when you're in hunt for a reboot. Though, I have my server with a remote reboot port, so I never needed anything else.
I'm not sure if they do this all the times, but they've installed few 3rd party scripts for me as well.
3. Hardware: Only 2 months to tell. But I never had anything with hardware, neither major nor minor.
4. Network: I was willing to get 1 Gbit port, but it is "very expensive". My suggestion is to lower the prices, or you won't be having any one with 1 Gbit port
The bad part....have your website updated...regularly. Even your website presently doesn't show up the latest deals you've been doing.
LiveChat and an Emergency phone number is a plus...Great work guys...Keep it up!
I hope I can have similar deal now you gave me a couple of months ago :p
I'm interested in creating a small website exposing the biggest overselling companies, and how their overselling practices are false marketing.
Simply put, I want to benchmark each host with exact tests for accuracy. Any idea how I can fairly test each host, e.g. benchmark?
After the tests have been performed, I will explain which are the worst hosts (e.g. the first to give me the boot due to some TOS clause, e.g. cpu usage), etc.
Also, would anyone like to help out with this project? I'll be putting some nice marketing into it.
This is not as much a complete and full review as some, but I would like to review my current host because they have been very good. As a small prelude, I have been a customer of burstnet a few times and generally got very frustrated with their billing and verification system. Sometimes I only need a server for a month or two then cancel it just as a temporary stop gap for some bandwidth or web space need. I don’t know why but every server I get with them seems to take just under three days to setup where as other companies I have been with achieve setup much, much faster. Don’t get me wrong I am a big fan of burst net for cheap bandwidth, and have voiced my opinion on this before on this forum. They are a good company overall especially for the price you pay.
I was searching for a burstnet reseller, one with a good billing system etc. Just so I didn’t have to deal with that terrible piece of rubbish they have. And I have been with my current host for a few months now. Obviously, knowing they are a reseller will put many people off, as they can go straight to the source. But in my experience, the support they provide (if its not something that requires the burstnet team) and the customer / billing interface available make it all worth while.
Like I said, not a complete review. You can make up your own mind about the burstnet service / network. But I like this reseller and I would recommend them to anyone.
I've been on VpsSpeed Mach 2 plan for just about a week. I must say this is my first experience with a vps and first dozen with linux. This has been a wonderful learning experience and one thing I must praise highly about them is that they have a ton of OS images. I started with a centos5 hiab and tried to harden it myself and failed miserably (I ended up having a cron job that kept executing over and over sending emails to an email that didn't exist which caused it to bounce to a default email which didnt' exist etc... shut that down after about 20 seconds ) So I ended up swapping to a hardend version of Cenos5 hiab and we're good to go!
Setup was instant and easy.
Download speeds have been snappy although I have had some slowdowns with data coming into the machine via yum although I think it may be the centos repository as my wgets have been decent.
I've put in 3 tickets, 1 was answered in 45 minutes, 1 in an hour and one in ~8 hours (I marked this one as low priority anyway...) overall for 10 odd dollars a month I couldn't be happier.
There has been a little downtime. Twice the server has been down once for about 3 hours and the second time is right now though they have a network issues page that is kept updated and it shouldnt' be down for long.
Not sure what else there is to go over as again I'm quite new to the vps arena.
I signed up for WebSpaceDepot's Master VPS plan on January 2nd of this year. I've reached the half month mark today, but after having problems with several VPS providers in the past, I think I've finally found my home for my websites and my customers' sites.
Therefore, I felt I had to post a review as I have nothing negative to say about them so far.
First Day: I found WebSpaceDepot's offer for a free upgrade to 250 GB of disk space on WHT. I saw that they had a phone number on their website, and so I called and spoke with Dave in sales. He is a very nice and knowledgeable guy. He was upfront with me that day and told me that the speeds would be kind of slow for a week or so until they partnered with another company for bandwidth. I didn't care too much about the speed as I had originally planned to get the VPS just to test it out and see whether they were a good provider. I ordered the VPS that night through their website, and it took them about ten hours or so to get me up and running because they were waiting for cPanel to finish installing on my VPS. The next day I tried out their support system to see how well they responded. When they first set up my account, I was not given access to the rebuild feature of HyperVM. I opened a ticket asking for access to this feature since I wanted to try out different OS templates (finally settled on CentOS 5), and they had given me access to rebuild in about 10 minutes. I then opened a ticket requesting that they configure Reverse DNS for me, and that was done in about twelve minutes. On the night of January 4th, I started getting very slow responsiveness from the VPS. I couldn't figure out what in the world was wrong, but after fiddling around a bit I noticed that the resolvers they were using (4.2.2.1 and 4.2.2.2) were responding slowly. I called them the next day and ended up getting connected with Dave again. He thought it was a bandwidth issue because the one week window he told me about during our first conversation had not ended yet. We then began talking about the resolvers, and I told him I thought that was the issue. They setup resolvers in their building (they own their own DC, by the way) dedicated to me, and now everything is flying along. I actually get access to 3 cores of the CPU, something I was not offered at other providers. The speed is excellent, and so is their Technical Support. I couldn't be happier at this point.
I would highly recommend WebSpaceDepot.com to others looking for an affordable VPS provider with great support by e-mail, ticket or by telephone. I hope to be back in three months or so with another positive review.
I signed up with connectswitch as I wanted a secondary VPS and the deal offered at the time was very good. After an initial problem with a DA licence (NOT connectswitch's fault) which I then cancelled direct admin, my VPS was set up. The server has been down once for a very short time, not enough to worry about and the problem was at the datacenter, I was compensated with credit which was pleasing and it went towards the next months payment. Some people have complained of slow responses to tickets, I have experienced this only once and for me, was not an issue. I have opened quite a few also with questions etc... The VPS is not managed as such but they are ALWAYS ready to help if you have an issue or questions. They have helped me with matters that they did not have to at all. My VPS was moved to a new node recently and the downtime was very minimal, a matter of minutes.
All in all I am very happy and have no plans to move. Score: Support 9/10, service 10/10, uptime 9/10. This is only my view based on my experiance with them but when looking for a VPS you should take a look and consider them.
We ordered VPSLAND.com a week ago. The setup was fast, the config was smooth, prices are great (1Gb RAM server for 30 bucks a month, 50% discount for the first month - wow!). We moved our website (nothing special, 15 pages + SQL-Express database)
But then ((
I got up in the morning and saw an alert from "siteuptime.com" that our website is down for 4 hours... I pinged - timeout. Interesting - the web panel said that the server is fine and running... I rebooted the server and opened a support ticket, and after 8 hours the answer was "we had a hardware problem on the host server resolved now".
In the next few days I got another morning alert. Guess what. The site is down for 8 HOURS. God knows haw many clients we've lost... Again - the server is showing up as "running" in the webpanel, but it is totally unreachable. The support ticket answer was "we've updated the Virtuozzo version and restarted the host, it should work fine now"
...ok... I started to look for alternatives. Found "kickassvps" (recommended here) and asked them a couple of presales questions. And while I was waiting for a response - the server was down a couple of times again... Even now, after I transferred my website (runs fine BTW) I want to login to VPSLAND server (to remove my databases and do some cleanup) and guess what? It is f####ng down! )
I figured I'm obviously not the most important person here, but I also figured that a review is a review - and it's just as good coming from me.
Two weeks in, not a very long time yet. I've got the deal of a lifetime though.
Server: Dell PowerEdge 860 1u Single Intel Xeon 3050 2.13GHz Dual Core (Conroe) 2GB DDR-2 250gb SATA 250gb SATA Windows 2003 Standard No Control Panel Free Raid Options 2000 GB Bandwidth
Price; How much do you think they sold this for? I got the actual machine with CentOS for 109.00$ a month, then I upgraded to Windows 2003 Standard for the price of Windows Web Edition cause they are nice =). So 15$/mo for Windows 2003 Standard, which the original price was 25$/mo. Add that onto the crazy discount I'm getting off the original box and it's a great deal.
Support; They've helped me with everything I needed. I have the tech's email/MSN address, so even though I have an Unmanaged plan, they tend to help me out anyway, knowing I'm new to all of this. I haven't needed MUCH support so I can't go into to much detail, but so far everything I needed; they helped me with.
System; So far, I'm using my dedicated to host a few Half-Life: Counter-strike servers. My servers are constant at at least 23 players most of the time. So far, I have five, 32 slot servers. All have been running perfectly as long as I don't mess with them to much.
Usually depending on the mod, but the average FPS is 300 per server. If you're not a gaming fan, 300 FPS is borderline great, right above good. Once again, system runs five 32 slot Counter-strike 1.6 servers flawlessly.
Uptime; Can't really say much about this as I've only had them for 2 weeks, but I guess I might as well say, so far, no downtime .
Network; I'm surprised as some told me to avoid North Carolinas data center, but I'm happy I join with them. Along with the cheap prices, I got a beautiful network that hasn't disappointed me since I have joined them.
Price: 10/10
Support: 10/10 (Remember, I have an unmanaged plan, so anything would've really got me to say 10/10.)
System: 8/10 -- I requested Raid after the Sales Tech informed me it was free. They planned to do it on the same time as my Reformat to windows, but they had no raid cables =(.
Uptime: 10/10 -- Had them for two weeks, no downtime =D. Network: 9/10 -- It could be better, but it's a lot better then I expected/was hoping for.
I honestly don't know what else to comment on. If you want me to comment on any other aspect of Caro.net please let me know and I will post a response. Thanks for reading. I plan on staying with Caro for as long as I possibly can.
I have been with KnownHost for just over 2 weeks now and am EXTREMELY happy with the services provided. I recommend them to anyone who cares about customer service/uptime. The basic VPS that I'm on has been powerful, no issues at all, and support is extremely quick. The reason I am writing this quick review is because I just submitted a support ticket at 1:40AM on a Sunday (Pacific time) and received a response at 1:55AM. When these guys say 24/7 support, they mean it.
I will try to do another review in a few months, but am extremely happy so far. Try them out if you've been searching for a VPS provider - you get what you pay for with KH.
Well I'm a week into my Entry level VPS with EpicVPS.
My VPS was deployed within about 30 minutes of ordering including LXAdmin. This was pretty darn fast and I have no qualms there.
Upon logging into my shell the first thing I did was run yum update -y, which updated a stack of packages. This leads me to believe that the image that Epic is using is a little older, but no big deal.
Here comes the first problem: upon updating, the 'udev' package got installed which really borked my /dev/ directory. I re-launched Apache and it barked about /dev/urandom being missing.
So I re-created it with MAKEDEV. This fixed Apache. Though then I logged out of my SSH session and back in to find my tty/pty's were missing (thanks udev!). I had to re-create these via OpenVZ's terminal. However, upon reboot of the server the whole /dev/ directory went wonky again (UDEV! GRR).
I finally removed the udev package (leaving all of it's dependencies on the server) to restore order to my /dev/ directory. I'm not entirely sure where the fault lay with that one.
Second problem: Upon hardening my install with apf/bfd I come to find my iptable modules are missing. I put in a support ticket which gets a response within an hour that they are looking into it. The following morning the modules got moved to my VPS and I could now harden my install.
My only other qualm is that sometimes I'll try and visit my webpage and it will be unresponsive and require a refresh to load the website. But mon.itor.us would lead me to believe there has been no down time and the latency from it's servers to my VPS have been extremely low. This may be my ISP at home, routing inbetween us or some other entity.
In short: I'm relatively happy thus far. The udev thing would be nice to get sorted out so next time that update comes down I won't be in the same situation. They should also figure out why their VPS images are deploying without those kernel modules as well.
So far I give them a . I still have another week to trial the service before I lose my ability to use their money back guarantee. But as long as the service remains in it's current condition I see no reason to need to use it.
I just wanted to take the time to mention how happy I am with wiredtree.
I have been with them for 6 weeks now. Their uptime is second to none I have not suffererd any downtime whatsoever.
Their support is phenomonal Tickets are answered within 15 minutes if not straight away, and are always cleared up straight away.
They are always professional, polite and courteous when contacting them.
I even recieved this email today:
Quote:
I just wanted to take the time to send you a quick email to make sure that everything is going well with your account here at WiredTree. If you ever need help with your server please do not hesitate to submit a support request through our client portal (https://grove.wiredtree.com). We have Systems Admins standing by to assist you any issues you might have with your server. If you have any non support related comments please feel free to let me know. Have a great week!
I was recently forced to swap VPS providers out of now where and while bouncing around these forums I found a killer deal from a company called The New York NOC in the offers section. Of course webhostingtalk.com can be a great place to find any hosting solution but at the same time I think everyone gets that knot in their stomach these days not knowing who is on the other end of the wire. I decided to try these guys after reading a few bad reviews and to be honest I can't be happier I did. Pro's:
Price point - With the special I received I truly came out like a villan. Uptime - Unbelievable, I actually found a host that keeps the computers running 24/7. I am not trying to sound arrogant with that statement but for most of us who depend on a live connection to make our bank accounts a little more cushioned this is critical. Like I said.....very impressed.
Information - Amazing, this company will even alert you to downtime and planned maintenance days in advance unlike so many other hosting providers that had come before.
What impressed me even more was the fact the NY NOC's planned maintenance took place during extremely early AM hours when the server load was at it's lowest demand (Thank You). I can't tell you how many host I have been with where planned maintenance takes place during business hours.......I can't believe they are doing it right..Thanks!
Server Performance - While I have 2 VPS boxes with this provider I also have dedicated servers. The speed off the VPS box tells me it is not oversold (at this point) and the box is configured right. This is no lie when I say this is one of the fastest VPS accounts I have EVER had. Very impressive!
Support - I have my own standards for when I think support tickets should be replied to and a time-frame by which I think any fixes should be accomplished or looked into. The support I have received thus far is well above my expectations with extremely knowledgeable support staff along with a staff that can provide information. =============================================================
Cons: Trust me when I say I have tried to come up with one but.....I can't. I have reviewed other hosting providers and typically I am pretty harsh when it comes to reviews. Obviously this company is doing something right. =============================================================
Other thoughts: Keep up the good work guys, everyone knows that one hosting provider can not be cookie cut for everyone (hence some of the bad reviews) but hell.....at least your solution works great for me. My sites seemed to bog down my last VPS from time to time while the VPS I am on now just yawns from the week load.
It's rare that I care enough about a company to give it praise. That's because, for the most part, I expect a service to work correctly and it doesn't deserve praise for working as I expected (and paid for).
Well, today, I break from my own philosophies. I was looking for a new VPS provider about two weeks ago because I felt like my sites were a bit sluggish and was also curious what the current opinion was on my then-current provider, Zone.net. I was a bit concerned at the fact that several people complained about lack of support (something I had noticed as well on my own account with them), so I started my journey on finding a new provider.
I bumped into FutureHosting's special offer on WHT's offers section and looked up reviews of the this place. Reviews were fairly sparse (surprising, considering the fairly good deal they offered and as I will see, the awesome service they provide) but all positive.
So while I would've loved to become a WiredTree or a Knownhost customer, I decided to take a gamble and get a better spec'd VPS for the same money.
I sign up very late night, get an email the next morning saying everything was all set up. Try to log-in. Nothing. Contact support...within minutes, they answer, finding out that there was a problem with that particular config of servers in that datacenter.
Immediately offer to move me to another datacenter (Dallas, Chicago, etc) at the same price even though the special offered was in Seattle.
Setup the Dallas VPS node, and I get stuff setup there. And then my site seemingly goes down. Contact support and again, within a few minutes, get a response detailing what is wrong (a rare bug which caused misrouting)...again, it was fixed in a reasonable fashion.
The next day, I get an e-mail from Vik Patel, their CEO! He apologized for the situation and assured me this was a very rare set of cisrumstances and offered me a great deal to compensate me for my troubles. I was impressed at the level of involvement of the management!
Bottom line: A night and day difference between Zone and FutureHosting support -- I used to be with dathorn.com on their reseller plans a long time ago, and I haven't seen support times like Dathorn's until I moved to futurehosting.
Powerful VPS's, reasonable prices. I think my site is much speedier on FH's servers.
Well almost 1 week, but since this forum has helped a lot with these kind of threads, I thought I would leave one for Caro as they amazed me.
I am of course in no way affiliated with them.
The story:
Friday 1 August 2008 almost noon time.
Saw this: [url]in the offers section which had an excellent offer on a dell xeon server for $109. Did some research about them here, all turned out good except for the crazy guy.
Added Mark (Later to become my sales agent with Caro). And asked him about his network and support times and hardware replacement policies. I was convinced and ordered a server.
Server was practically ordered Saturday also noon time.
I needed some special configurations for the server which were all done and the server was delivered after almost always staying in contact with support. Server was delivered on Sunday.
Apparently, these guys don't sleep. This is how it should be done. You pay for your server you get it.
Since then and I know the period is small to make any absolute judgments, but several things can be noted.
Support is always on call. Sunday or not. They just reply.
Connection is pretty darn good, no downtime no slow time no nothing. Just my website online just like I wanted to be.
Hence my grading chart for this very short startup period:
10/10 on delivery and deployment (including server hardware - it is a dell server worth almost 1k) 10/10 on the support 10/10 on connection
To me there is nothing that they could have done any better.
I would like to thank Caro and Mark Memmer for this pleasant experience. Very well appreciate and recommended.
I didn't want to wait any longer to write up a review of iWebFusion. Jacob took me on as a SellWHM refugee. So far I've had a great hosting experience with iWF - the VPS is fast, not one minute of downtime, and very helpful support.
I've got the Tiny plan. My original intention was to just use it as a playground, but if I can ever find the time, I'll be moving some real stuff over from my other VPS.
Not much need to go into any great detail here, and no reason to bore everyone. Just a really solid VPS at a great price. Jacob is a good guy, and his support staff is helpful and courteous.I'm reporting my URLs to the moderators.
Thought I might provide an alternative for the various multi-year reviews of the company and give a short term review.
See my initial message here:
[url]
for the hows and whys I chose ServInt.
I am a total newb when it comes to VPS's, having been on shared hosting for many years.
I had never heard of CNAME/MX records and was/am totally ignorant of *nix administration.
I ordered the Essential VPS and dove right in. Figured since I had root access, I could just establish my company's web site directory off the root via FTP and upload the web sites to the appropriate directory. BZT. Wrong. Can only use the httpdocs directory. That was my first ticket, responded to and solved in 5 minutes.
Next was changing name servers at 1&1, which was a giant PITA because of 1&1. Learned all about a Glue Domain, to make a very long story shorter, I had to establish subdomains at 1&1 and fix the IP address to point to the name servers I was going to establish on my ServInt VPS. What a convoluted process. Ticket opened and responded to in 20 minutes. As an addition to this ticket, after establishing MX records, I could not connect up to the SMTP server, though I could connect to the POP server. This turned out to be a setting in Plesk, I think to enable the use of Port 587, which my ISP requries for anti-spam. Problem solved in 20 minutes.
So, I went from scratch to having my company web site up and running with full email access in less than two hours. Pretty good migration as far as I'm concerned.
Haven't had a problems other than these so far, just climbing the learning curve learning some *nix admin duties. WHT has been a _tremendous_ resource in this regard.
Oh, and the speed and responsiveness of the site compared to 1&1's shared hosting was/is nothing short of phenomenal. No more lags, no more variable page loads, just consistantly fast data transmission, which was my number one priority.
In short, I could not be happier with my choice and look forward to a long business relationship with ServInt.
Thanks to all who actively participate here at WHT, your posts help more lurkers than you can ever imagine.
I noticed the lack of KickassVPS reviews, so I decided to try them out (they were nice enough to give me a free trial). The short time I was with them was surprisingly very good.
I didn't notice any downtime at all and the server was very fast, which was pleasing.
They didn't seem to have any trouble in that department (10/10 for uptime and speed).
I contacted support a total of 2 times; the first reply came 8 hours later but they went above and beyond what I asked. I asked for PHP + MySQL installed and they also installed PHPMyAdmin and provided me a test file to prove that they were all truly installed. My previous hosts didn't do this. I sent a request to install Ruby on Rails which was responded to in 9 hours, informing me that although they were new to Ruby on Rails, they would still install it and they wanted to confirm if I was ok with it. That's around when my trial ended. I'd give support a 8/10. It would be perfect if they responded in a more timely manner, but support was very, VERY friendly, helpful and professional. Keep in mind that I contacted support on Labor Day, so they might have been busy that day but still found time to respond to my support inquiries.
Overall, even though the support requests were a bit slow, I'd keep KickassVPS in mind when looking for a reliable Windows VPS provider. Personally, I think they live up to their name for those who aren't in a hurry or who can manage their own Windows servers. Although my trial was only for a week, from my experience I can say these guys seem to be trustworthy. Your server probably won't go down the minute you receive it and support won't leave you hanging for a prolonged period of time. These guys have been added to my list of good VPS providers whom I consider when buying a VPS.
Just in case you didn't know, their website is kickassvps.com
I have been with HostingPuppy for two weeks now, on a very basic reseller package. Although I have a reseller account, I only host one site that is not mine, so I'm writing this less from a reseller perspective, and more from a shared user perspective.
About two months ago, I began to examine smaller reseller packages. I had 3 sites of my own, and was working on a collaborative project here at work, that I knew would need to be hosted. As such, I figured a simple reseller account would fit the bill. After researching several companies, I decided to give HostingPuppy a try, figuring at the worst case, I was out the $30 I paid for the year.
Now, HostingPuppy is most famous for their "Buck-a-Gig" hosting. They can do this by limiting what hours they run support. Unlike a lot of other hosts, they are not a 24/7 operation, and only have a 1 hour guaranteed response time during regular support hours. I knew the sites I was doing would not require much support, so I was OK with that. I also have the option to upgrade my support to a 24/7 level for a monthly fee.
I signed up about an hour or so before their offices opened. My account was created in about 15 minutes from the time they opened for business. Once I received my information, I started uploading my site and changed my DNS information to point to their servers.
Since I am relatively new to the whole hosting thing, and the WHM panel was new to me, I fired off an e-mail to support asking some very basic questions in regards to having to domains point to the same site. My question was answered within an hour, where they not only offered the instructions, but offered to do the work for me.
My second question was about backups. On my other web-host, I had been using a cron job that would call a php script that would call the backup program and ftp the tar.gz file to my machine at home. I sent the script and asked if there would be any problems running it. Support quickly got back to me (in just a few minutes) stating that they did daily backups and I would not need to run this script, but if I did feel I still needed to, that the code was being reviewed and they would let me know. A few minutes later, I was told the code was fine, and if I had questions on creating a cron job to run, to let them know and they would be happy to assist.
My third question was in regards to account migration. I have an account on another host that I will eventually wish to move over. I had read on several posts that you can use the cpanel migration tool. Unfortunately, I do not have access to this tool. The support team stated they would be happy to move the site over for me, and I will eventually take them up on the offer once I get the other account straightened out.
I am using UniAlert and HostTracker. So far, I have experienced 100% uptime on all of my sites. All of my support tickets have been handled within their 1 hour time frame, two of the three in around 15 minutes or so.
Connection speed to my sites is nice and quick, and database driven pages work much better than they ever did at GoDaddy when I hosted there.
So far I have been very happy with Jon and HostingPuppy and can happily recommend them.
For the mods, I currently host the following on HP: [url] [url] [url]
Ordered: 2:02PM EST Paid: 2:04PM EST Login Details Received: 3:06PM EST SLA: 99.9% Package: Basic: 10 GB Disk Space 100 GB Bandwidth 128 MB Guaranteed Memory 256 MB Burstable Memory 1 IP Address Full Root Access CentOS 4 OpenVirtuozzo Based Unmanaged LxAdmin Free cPanel/DirectAdmin not available $10/mo | Free Setup minus 10% = $9.00/mo
Ticket Issue 1 ***************************** Opened a ticket asking for resolver nameservers/reverse-DNS entry ***************************** Opened: 3:29PM EST Responded/Resolved 3:38PM EST
Ticket Issue 2 ***************************** Opened a ticket regarding an issue with server speed. I was unable to get speeds about 250K/s and would fluctuate quite a bit. ***************************** Opened: 8:20PM EST 1st Response: 12:23AM EST (Ticket received, forwarding to network admin) 2nd Response: 5:07AM EST (Please check the issue again, should be fixed) My Response: 9:42AM EST (Nope, still slow) 3rd Response: 3:08PM EST (OK will have admin look again) My Response: 12:49AM EST (Any news?) 4th Response: 2:52AM EST (Problem found, switch issue, will be fixed ASAP) Global E-mail: 8:54PM EST (Switch needs to be reset, downtime expected) 5th Response: 2:56AM EST (Found which switch it was, swapping it out) 6th Response + Resolution 1:37AM EST
Ticket Issue 3 ***************************** Had trouble with install LXAdmin using HyperVM. ***************************** Opened: 10:02PM EST Responded/Resolved: 5:14AM EST (They installed it for me)
Benchmark 1
PHP Code:
============================================================== BYTE UNIX Benchmarks (Version 4.1-wht.1) System -- Linux server.911reborn.com 2.6.9-023stab037.3-smp #1 SMP Wed Dec 13 19:31:35 MSK 2006 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux /dev/simfs 10240000 509580 9730420 5% /
Start Benchmark Run: Sat Mar 17 03:01:46 MSK 2007 03:01:46 up 16 min, 0 users, load average: 0.10, 0.04, 0.01
End Benchmark Run: Sat Mar 17 03:12:35 MSK 2007 03:12:35 up 27 min, 0 users, load average: 5.93, 3.73, 1.88
Summary Good price, good service, good network. I was a bit upset by how long it took them to fix the switch issue though. The last few responses were too long apart. But when it was fixed, network was blazing. They run on pure Internap. Didn't have any downtime. And then benchmarks are pretty good for paying $10/month. However, I've found Unixbench doesn't weigh in RAM too much. But I still use the benchmarks to reference their CPU/Disk speed.
After my week was up, I took advantage of their 15-Day Money Back Guarantee and canceled my account. I'm now moving to another provider (will also provide a review soon). Still waiting to hear back from Amerihosting about my refund though, and I will post an update soon.
I decided to go with Future Hosting after the reviews I saw on WHT and it's been a while since I follow their reviews here but I did not need a VPS back then. Now I got over 30 websites each located at a different host, so I decided to transfer them to one single account and decided to go with VPS because reseller is small for us and we don't need a dedicated server yet.
First thing I did is look again for Future Hosting reviews which were very good and what made me take my decision very fast is the 95% off the first month. I signed up with them on october 31 2007. Few hours later I get the confirmation that my VPS is now setup and I get the login information. I had a plesk managed VPS. I logged in to plesk added one domain and I tried adding another but I got an error that I can't add more domains, so I directly open a ticket and tell them about it, and hey fixed it, no big deal.
I point my base domain to the VPS and decide to do some tests and make sure everything is working fine before transferring all the domains. I created then a hosting account for the base domain. First problem I face is I can't access webmail.mydomain.com, again I open a ticket, they fix it with adding a record for webmail.domain.com in DNS zone, now I don't know if this should be done automatically but the support there said I should do this for every domain I add. Now I can access the webmail and had some problems logging in which I fixed.
I tried to send and email, it worked just fine, then I try to receive and email but the emails kept bouncing back and not begin delivered, I open another support ticket and they tell me that there is a problem with qmail they will work on it. Last night I get an email that it's working fine, today I try sending emails and it's being bounced back from the server, this time the email reached the server but the server bounced it back.
Again I open a ticket and I am told that there's a problem with qmail. Few hours ago, I got an email from tech support telling me that they want to change the hostname from domain.com to subdomain.domain.com. It's the first time I face this problem,I always used mydomain.com as hostname but I am willing to do anything to make my VPS work properly, but this is not nice having a hostname as subdomain.domain.com. I asked them several times, that if they need to reload everything on my VPS to go ahead and proceed with it because I didn't transfer anything to it, I am just still testing, but they didn't reply to this request.
Although I am not mad at FH people because they've been trying to fix things for me since day one, and I am willing to stay with them at the moment, I mean these problem won't get me to the point to give up on FH, but it's also frustrating that in one week I am still having problems with my VPS.
What do you think, should they reload my VPS, should I ask for that or do I let them fix the problem, and should I accept that they use subdomain.domain.com instead of domain.com?
So far I will give 5 stars for FH support, let's hope I will give 5 stars for the server stability.
I currently have an Apple computer and am looking for a webhost. looked at hostgator but when i tried to view sample website builder i was unable because i have a mac. Are there any webhosts that fully support mac's?
1) There are 2 IPs in this file. I did not put them there. This is a dedicated machine. The IPs go to a Canadian hosting company. I am not in Canada and those are not my IPs.
2) Does my provider have the right to add IPs to this file without my consent?
3) I have already commented them out, of course, but I am concerned.
As some of you may know I have about 4 different webhosts.
the problem is thats to many and I want to maybe cut it down to 2 but not sure which 2 and thats my delema or jam.
Downtownhost is one of the 4 hosts and I have been with them for over 2 years now and its great and support it top notch. So would hate to leave them.
Everity is another one and they are great as well and very honest, which still impresses me today and I have not yet been with them a year but it will be this December. They were able to run my biggest site with out any issues and that was nice then again so was downtownhost able to well to a point until the space the site was using got to big for downtownhost which is why I got everity in the first place.
Hostsimplex is a new one I got to see what directadmin is like and wow direct admin is awesome and almost I want to move all my site to this host. They are also very nice/ friendly and support is also honest and gee a few times while opening up the live support for a question or a problem figiruing some thign out in direct admin I have gotten into long friendly convos with them. Kind of feel bad about that though as I would hate to take the support staff away from other customers. I do like also how they have free remote back up, which is nice but I still will make my own back ups locally just in case. Any way this host is still new for me so I am not sure how good or bad they are but so far its good.
The forth one is liquid webs as as of right now my main and largest site it on it. This hosting is not one I own but a friend/client. I am not even paying for it which is nice. How ever I have little to no support as I have to rely on my friend and he is not always on when I have an issue. Do to that this might be the first one I drop. Although it it rare that I have issues and I do not have to worry about the cpu ussage, bandwitdth, diskspace because he said I could use what ever i want. He also said the server has a 500gb hard drive and not even 10% is being used.
Any way thats the issue I am having so which do you think I should drop or should I just keep them all as I do have an active site on each one.
