last month i came here asking about a VPS provider to replace my shell provider that died, i was on a very tight budget and ended up with VPSLinks smallest package, Link-1, 2.5gb disk space, 100gb monthly bandwith, 64mb ram, 1 dedicated ip, all for $7.95 per month.
I signed up, the setup was done before i managed to get to the login panel (must have been instant). There i was presented with OS choices, i choose debian. 10 seconds later my VPS was online and ready for me to connect with SSH. Very good
Setup - 10/10
Installed all the stuff i need (My IRC server, my bouncer, and bitlbee gateway) this takes up about 60mb ram (few, just inside the limit) and all was well.
Networking is the only problem i have with VPSLink so far, there are odd lag spikes every now and again that last around 20 seconds, there was also just under an hours downtime this month. The administrator in vpslinks IRC channel had this to say.
[lylev] No, I cannot. I did just receive word from our network administrator that one of our racks main switches died, but instead of dropping connections, it created a routing loop, overloading the rest of the network. That one rack has been taken offline, so the rest of the network is back up, but some clients will still be down.
There is real room for improvement with networking, so i'm giving it 5/10.
Customer support was pretty nice, the representatives in the IRC channel are quick to reply with informative answers, links to pages with more information, they also have a large wiki with various configuration examples and tutorials. I can't give them 10/10 because i didn't really have to deal with the customer support that much, i only asked one or two questions, so i don't know how they'd be with more in depth questions. On that basis i give customer support 7/10.
So that really puts us at an overall rating of about 7/10, not bad at all really for $7.95/month.
I'll do another update at the 3 month mark, hope this is useful
I was going for 3 months...i'm sorry i just couldn't take it anymore.
So, 2 days ago i started getting insane lag spikes (2+ minutes.)
I opened a support ticket explaining i'd started getting these lag spikes, and could they do something about it.
They said there was a network issue and it would be fixed soon, so i figured no problem.
But, 24 hours later...the problem still persisted so i mailed them back again to inform them the problem is still persisting.
They asked me for a traceroute, which i provided.
They said they forwarded the issue to the admins.
24 hours later, still nothing new. So i email them back again.
They paste me the output of free -m, and tell me i'm out of RAM. total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 64 61 2 0 18 9 -/+ buffers/cache: 33 31 Swap: 127 0 127
As no doubt all of you can see, there is quite a bit of free ram there. Theres 9 being used for caching and 3 available, and i'm not using any swap at all. So not out of ram.
None the less just to proove a point, i restarted my server from the control panel, Logged into my server via SSH and started top. Then waited over a minute for top to load. I went and asked some of my buddies on IRC what could be causing the problem, so we all started poking around and eventually found the problem. mainpc (0.0.0.0) Mon Nov 3 18:00:40 2008 Keys: Help Display mode Restart statistics Order of fields quit Packets Pings Host Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev 1. 192.168.0.1 0.0% 58848 0.4 0.4 0.4 183.8 1.2 2. t.dsl.enta.net 0.0% 58848 26.1 24.4 22.2 559.5 30.5 3. gi4-1.telehouse-east3.dsl.enta.net 0.0% 58848 25.0 23.6 22.4 494.3 16.1 4. te5-2.telehouse-east.core.enta.net 0.0% 58848 26.9 24.0 22.4 637.9 22.9 5. linx.ge1-0.cr01.lhr01.mzima.net 0.0% 58848 34.8 24.4 22.8 502.5 16.8 6. eos1-0.cr01.lga02.mzima.net 0.0% 58847 111.3 100.1 98.6 554.2 16.7 7. xe1-0.cr01.lga01.mzima.net 0.1% 58847 100.5 100.2 98.5 622.9 16.4 8. eos3-2.cr01.ord01.mzima.net 0.0% 58847 133.1 118.8 116.8 642.4 16.6 9. eos1-22.cr02.sjc02.mzima.net 0.1% 58847 173.9 168.3 166.6 673.8 16.4 10. eos1-23.cr01.sea01.mzima.net 2.1% 58847 200.9 188.2 186.8 656.7 16.4 11. xe0-2.cr01.sea02.mzima.net 0.0% 58847 199.9 188.5 186.8 708.8 17.0 12. ge1-spry.cust.sea02.mzima.net 0.0% 58847 188.5 188.6 186.7 677.5 31.7 13. po1-core0-tuk.wa.spry.com 0.0% 58847 188.8 188.2 186.8 696.0 17.6 14. vps.cshadowrun.com 34.9% 58847 581.7 226.7 187.2 1393. 122.0
So, i mailed them back explaining that not only am i not out of memory, but the problem persists when i'm running the base operating system only (debian, 25mb ram usage), I then pointed out the obvious networking problem and added a bunch of results from my friends like the one above.
They again mail me back saying it's because i'm out of ram.
I start to realize this is a pointless endevour, but none the less mail them back explaining that processes take priority over the file system cache, and that there is plenty of free ram remaining, and just for extra insurance i added another traceroute like the one above.
They then mailed me back to tell me i am out of memory again, and that the game server i am running uses memory and bandwith depending on the amount of people that are logged on. And that the lag i'm experiancing is caused by the distance the packets from the UK travel to Seattle, WA, USA.
As we can see, they obviously don't know how to read a traceroute.
They also don't seem to be able to tell what is running on there servers, I've never ran a game server on this thing...i use it to host my IRCd and bouncer.
So at this time i realize i'm bashing my head against a brick wall, and move on. I was warned away from spry by you guys when i first signed up. You was right. VPSLink - Stay away.
This is my review of Spry shared hosting. This is a negative review
I bought a shared hosting account on Saturday when i noticed a problem. It said DNS Server reports a failure so i just though it was normal but i waited 72 hours and guess what it still does not work. They attempted to fix it and said it was fixed but did not even to bother to check my site to make sure it worked. The support is slow and they will not reply on Saturday or Sundays. The main con was the the broken DNS server. Just as a note accounts are hosted on a VPS not a server because in cpanel it says VPS Optimized. They did however refund me.
We concluded today our evaluation on Cameron Jones VPSLink and we are impressed with this product for developers and all people seeking for a cool VPS at cheap price!
VPSLink really rocks! This product is a virtualization based on Open VZ invented by SWSoft and VPSLink is running it's high performance ones in a monster server with SCSI raid in the Name Intelligence Inc Datacenter (Seattle, Washington). We ordered Link 4 and started it running two websites for test, setupped at command line at hostmenow.us and server.hostmenow.us. Then we launched 15 websites in 15 domain names and all of them The VPS we are using costs $39.95 monthly ($ 33.29 for annual contract), offers 20GB of space disk, 512MB RAM 3 IP, 500GB of premium bandwidth and equal share CPU from the referred server, a Dual Xeon. VPSLink provide users with a custom Server Control Panel that's allow customers do reload or change Operating System from a list with a lot of distros like Slack, Ubuntu, Gentoo, various Fedora Core, CentOs, OpenSuse 10 and two Debian. We evaluated CentOS 4.0, Debian Sarge 3.1 and Fedora Core 6 LAM, Fedora Core 7, the latest Ubuntu and more. CentOS, a free distribution based in Red Hat Enterprise, have some problems with yum but VPSLink have it's own mirror with all packages needed to install yum in CentOS (at ourt nest OS reload we installed a CentOS 4x that have not problems with yum - we installed mc, emacs, g++, flex, sendmail, proftpd atc, ISP Config (this one failed with php issues). Debian runs fine, in high level of security and you can update it by apt-get, but have problems with .gif due the patent issue and browser does not display .gif images stored in Debian environment if you does not recompile the appropriate package to get lzw enabled. We also installed Webmin in port 1000 of this Open VZ VPS and also Zervex Server CP (it is available there at only five bucks monthly). I also installed cPanel 11 + WHM (our own license) in this VPS running with template CentOS and the install has been performed fine, without only one problem.
cPanel WHM runs fine on Link 4. For those interested in know how various different distros runs in a VPS this VPSLink is in fact a school; for those interested in run a VPS that rocks like a physical server these ones are highly recommended IMHO. Note that you can reload or change your Linux Operating System in few minutes, you can reboot and stop your VPS by VPSLink CP that is very fine and intuitive! These guys accepts PayPal and have a technical forum where users help users and uptime is 100% including during VPS upgrades (but note please that your entire data is destroyed when you reinstall or replace your OS, then you must have a backup). It's cool and only one negative point we found: due poor CPU allowed by the equal share system build a tarball for /home hasconsumedd (all times we did it) above 1h30m (in another VPS we evaluated, unde VZPP and under Hyper VM this task have an ETA of 11 minutes, no more. VPSLink administrator has informed us through VPSLink Forum that this problem is due some customers running hard scripts for development tasks. The principal advantage of VPSLink over the rest is that it's VPS are really robust, solid and simply does not exist downtime there. Note that under Open VZ using UBC the correct memory available and used cannot be obtained with # free -m and it is necxessary to run this script:
beans=`cat /proc/user_beancounters | grep priv` max=`echo $beans | awk '{ print $4;}'` use=`echo $beans | awk '{ print $2;}'` let "per=$use*100/$max" let "mb=$use/256" let "mmb=$max/256" echo "privvmpages usage: $mb MB ($per% of $mmb)"
For our Link 4 we extracted the output shown below (with cPanel WHM 11 running):
root@64.79.209.184's password: Last login: Mon Jun 25 20:00:18 2007 from 189.24.88.81 [root@server ~]# beans=`cat /proc/user_beancounters | grep priv` [root@server ~]# max=`echo $beans | awk '{ print $4;}'` [root@server ~]# use=`echo $beans | awk '{ print $2;}'` [root@server ~]# let "per=$use*100/$max" [root@server ~]# let "mb=$use/256" [root@server ~]# let "mmb=$max/256" [root@server ~]# echo "privvmpages usage: $mb MB ($per% of $mmb)" privvmpages usage: 291 MB (62% of 464) [root@server ~]#
The complete and illustrated review on VPSLink is running in my personal blog with WHT 4.1 Unixbench output and more...
I am having issues with spy hosting. I signed up for a shared hosting account on Saturday the setup was fast but DNS will not resolve my domains. I get this error when doing a DNS Traversal
ns9.dnscloud.com [66.249.19.217][Broken DNS server: Reports a server failure]91ms
ns10.dnscloud.com [66.249.19.218][Broken DNS server: Reports a server failure]92ms
What is this?
I made a ticket and NO REPLY AS OF YET!
What is going on spy. Has spy gone bad i though they use to be legit?
We are at this time evaluating Link 4 from Spry Cameron Jones VPSLink, virtualization based on Open VZ running it's high performance ones in a monster server with SCSI raid in the Name Intelligence Inc Datacenter (Seattle, Washington). Currently we are running two websites for test, setupped at command line at hostmenow.us and server.hostmenow.us. The VPS we are using costs $39.95 monthly ($ 33.29 for annual contract), offers 20GB of space disk, 512MB RAM 3 IP, 500GB of premium bandwidth and equal share CPU from the referred server, a Dual Xeon. VPSLink provide users with a custom Server Control Panel that's allow customers do reload or change Operating System from a list with a lot of distros like Slack, Ubuntu, Gentoo, various Fedora Core, CentOs, OpenSuse 10 and two Debian. We evaluated CentOS 4.0, Debian Sarge 3.1 and now we are running Fedora Core 6. CentOS, a free distribution based in Red Hat Enterprise, have some problems with yum but VPSLink have it's own mirror with all packages needed to install yum in CentOS. Debian runs fine, in high level of security and you can update it by apt-get, but have problems with .gif due the patent issue and browser does not display .gif images stored in Debian environment if you does not recompile the appropriate package to get lzw enabled. We also installed Webmin in port 1000 of this Open VZ VPS and this week we will install Direct Admin (also Zervex Server CP is available there at only five bucks monthly). For those interested in know how various different distros runs in a VPS this VPSLink is in fact a school; for those interested in run a VPS that rocks like a physical server these ones are highly recommended IMHO. Note that you can reload or change your Linux Operating System in few minutes, you can reboot and stop your VPS by VPSLink CP that is very fine and intuitive! These guys accepts PayPal and have a technical forum where users help users and uptime is 100% including during VPS upgrades (but note please that your entire data is destroyed when you reinstall or replace your OS, then you must have a backup). It's cool.
I tried couple hosting providers before we came to empire-hosting. most of them were shared hosts and one was vps.
We use a 512MB ram vps with DirectAdmin to run our sites.
At empire-hosting for the firs time in my experience with hosts, I saw what is meaning of word "managed"!!! You don't need to know anything about your server. System administrator will think about all updates, fixes, problems instead of you. You just need to bring great site to your visitors, and that all.
Support is fast and helpful. There wasn't problem they couldn't solve. Dale who is admin there is really a great person. Guru admin .
For every downtime due to system upgrades mail was sent couple hours before it occurs.
the aren't the cheapest, but they aren't overselling and you get fast and reliable server for your sites.
Some of the other hosting companies I have tried are:
1&1 Virpus Godaddy
And another one I stayed with for 2 weeks and can not remember the name of it. I have tried other hosting companies before. So I do have something to compare Future Hosting to.
Before I signed up with future hosting I had a website running joomla with a bridged SMF forum and another site running MDPro and MDForum. MDPro is a cousin to Postnuke and MDForum is kinda like PHPBB. When I signed up with a hosting company, most of the time I got a VPS and 256 megs of memory - or what ever the company had in that range. For some reason the pages took 10 - 20 seconds to load on the joomla site. The MDPro site was a little faster, but not much. Even though I submitted several trouble tickets, it seemed that tech support could not figure out why the response times were so slow. The usual answer was my site was "high traffic" and that was why the pages were loading slow. I often wondered how 10 - 15 people on a webpage can be high traffic? I tried the joomla support forums, the smf support forums - I looked for help everywhere I could.
After getting no help from one hosting company, I signed up at another, and another, and another. I had almost given up on ever owning a website.
That is when I came to Webhosting talk and started doing some serious research and that is when I found Future Hosting.
When I first signed up with Future Hosting in March of 2007 I got their 256 mg VPS server to run my new VBulletin forum on. It was a new hosting company, a new forum and a new adventure.
After the first month I must say that I was impressed. I had just left the last hosting company because of server performance, so I was surprised when people actually started signing up on my forum and posting stuff. I was even more surprised when the server allowed more then 15 or 20 people on it at a time. And I was REALLY surprised when the pages loads in just a couple of seconds, instead of 10 - 20+ seconds.
A few months later it was time to upgrade to a new server. And then a couple of months later my site was moved to a new data center.
The last time I needed serious tech support was in November of 2007 - exactly a year ago. During that year the only little bumps that have happened were asking the tech support people to update MYSQL, or update PHP for me. A whole freaking year with no server problems. You just do not hear about stuff like that. But somehow the techs at Future Hosting keep these servers up and running 365/24/7.
In the last week of October 2008 my site started experiencing slow load times and connection issues. So I opened a support ticket. Tech support and I exchanged several messages back and forth over the following days. But this time things were a little "different" - the connection problems would come and go. By the time I opened a ticket, and tech support looked at the site, everything was normal. There were a couple of times the tech support person saw high memory usage, or high CPU usage, but it lasted for only a couple of minutes.
Finally, one of the support guys checked the apache server at the right time and found my site was under a small DDOS attack. The Apache server had around 1,000 active connections to it.
After the tech support people installed some security software, the sever is back to normal and everything is running great.
Currently I have the the Elite package with 768MB of memory and 40 gigs of hardrive space. On this server I run 8 websites.
One of my forums gets over 1.8 million page views a month, has over 332,000 post, gets 900 - 1,000 members visiting every 24 hours, 700 - 1,400 post every day and around 2,884 members visiting every 30 days.
My VBulletin forum - [url] My wifes VBulletin forum - [url] My wifes site opened a couple of months ago. Anyone interested in digital cameras - go sign up. Even with all of these sites and traffic, I still have around 500 megs of free memory and use just a fraction of the CPU.
It seems that most of the time when you read a review its negative. This is just the opposite, I am very satisfied with Future Hosting and highly recommend them to anyone looking for a serious hosting solution to real world needs.
Before I found Future Hosting I had almost given up on finding a good host. In fact, I was considering getting out of the website business all together. It seemed that no matter what host I tried, I would get the same results. Whether it was slow page loads, or terrible support - every company I tried seemed to be just alike. Until I read a review about Future Hosting here on webhosting talk.
Here I am 20 months after signing up with Future Hosting. And I am telling you, if your sick and tired of your host - dont live in misery, dont live with slow page loads, dont deal with poor tech support. Contact Future Hosting and get your website up and running like it should be.
Well I've decided to start up a pretty stable car community. So I searched the forums and found addictivehosting.com to be pretty good for my needs.
Well the first two months went pretty nicely but this month has been pretty spotty for me. They recently had some network problems causing the hosting to become unstable.
I submitted a ticket and recieved an answer fairly soon telling me about the problems and that they will be moving to softlayer. A few minutes later an email was dispatched saying that the move would be flawless causing minimal downtime. Well little to find out that something with the move caused my mysql databases to become currupt and I've lost all the data from that day and the DNS is still spotty for most of my users.
My earlier one month review of Geek Storage got deleted with the whole WHT-take over thing, and I figured it was about time to write a new review anyways.
GeekStorage has been a dream host for me. I have a developer package with them. I recently upgraded my account to unlimited domains, because I am slowly migrating all my domains and sites over to them.
I am paying ~$7 a month for a ton of features. I could actually get it cheaper, if I paid more in advance. Right now I'm paying quarterly, but after this next session I will most likely switch to yearly and get an even better rate. I'm getting 10GB storage, 250GB bandwith (the next upgrade would be $8/month for 25GB/500GB). I get unlimited domains, MySQL, PostGreSQL, blah blah blah. So it's feature rich, very affordable, and it's not overselling.
The features outweigh anything I've seen. The setup for PHP performance sticklers like me is incredible. The Litespeed web server is the way to go in my opinion. It has the ability to use apache modules, so that is great for easily modifying rewrite rules and whatnot with an .htaccess. Litespeed is so incredibly fast, I'll never settle for less again. Hopefully, as long as GeekStorage keeps up it's act I won't have to!
If you ever want an Apache or CGI module or anything of that nature, all you have to do is submit a ticket and they'll install it! I've never seen such a personal host where you can make requests like that.
GeekStorage also has PostgreSQL, a major selling point for me. However, nobody else on the server uses it. I say this because my only ticket so far was when I first joined GeekStorage and PhpPgAdmin (postgresql phpmyadmin equivalent) did not connect correctly. I put in a ticket and they fixed it right away.
Downtime? I haven't had any. I'm not sure how to track that, but I have some moderate volume niche sites that are constantly getting organic traffic. I have consistently made sales through these sites and have not noticed any drop-off. Everytime I go any of my sites hosted at GeekStorage, they load up quickly. I'm at ease of not having to worry about my sites going down.
Most of my sites are kinda greyhat, so I don't like to post them. So here's one you can use to confirm I have hosting with GeekStorage: [url]
So their website is: GeekStorage.com. If you want fast shared hosting, tons of features, lots of space and bandwith without overselling, and people who know what the *@)# they're doing, and all at an awesome price-- then I can recommend GeekStorage. They've been a class act so far
If you have any questions or something I didn't get to I'll try to keep an eye on this thread, otherwise you can PM me.
1. Great uptime. The only downtime I had was that weekend of July 20/21 when they got DDoSed. They stood behind their SLA and credited me with a full month of service without any hesitation or protest.
2. Great Servers. I use my hosting as a development and presentation environment for projects for clients and quality hosting is a must. I rarely see loads higher than 3.00 (it is a quad core server). Combine that with their litespeed webserver. I have never seen slow page loads.
3. Great Support. Tickets are almost always answered in just a few minutes. I have the pleasure of dealing with Karl (the owner) or one of his highly qualified techs, rather than some high school kid who can't tell a bit from a byte (who you often get at other hosts).
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 have a spry vps, and is great. But have a major problem with a directory script, that no-one can work out the cron error's ,the author or hosting company!
So I was thinking of moving to see if their might be a set up problem from the host? A resource, or a script that not running properly. But I've read the posting and from a whole spry has been great, and cheap, but no one is talking about them?
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 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.
