I've been very happy with Virpus since I joined. There was 1 issue that has plagued me since the beginning and that was that I was not receiving e-mails on my ISP e-mail, my main e-mail. Not to big of an issue except that I didn't get any news updates or know when my tickets were replied to, or even when I was past due on my bill. 3 tickets later and their solution was for me to use another e-mail address, which was kind of a pain for me since each of my e-mail addresses has a specific reason which only specific e-mail get sent there for organizational reasons.
First off I have to say the VPS I was using was top notch. It easily outperformed my LiquidWeb VPSs and quickly became my primary VPS instead of my backup like was intended. I took advantage of one of their specials a while back which was a 512MB RAM cPanel VPS for $19.50/month which is a steal since the cPanel license alone is $15/month!
So now to why this is probably my final review of this company. Communication is lacking greatly. It was good at first, but now it's non-existant.
Over the weekend all my sites went down and I had no idea why... because I never got the e-mail saying they were moving data centers (if it weren't for a small thread on WHT I would never have known). I also did not receive any updates on extending their ETA so yet again I had nothing to tell my clients. The only good thing was that I run a free hosting company (Host2x.com for reference) and I offer no uptime guarantee since it's a non-paid service.
Ok, so the sites are back online and everything is working nicely... well I recently hit the 70% mark on my disk space usage so time to start looking for an upgrade. I created a ticket on April 23rd asking if they would allow me to upgrade my plan to their biggest VPS plan and to my surprise I never got a reply. I would think that a billing ticket asking to upgrade to a plan that costs more without the transfer of the discount I'm receiving would be a welcome ticket for them to reply to, but I was incorrect in thinking this. So I ended up purchasing a dedicated server last night because I cannot wait to see if they will assist me with upgrading my account or not.
We have had a cheap server at Virpus Networks (virpus.com) for 3 months. Everything has been great.
Today at 1030AM CDT, the box suddenly went offline. We asked for a reboot via AIM and Help Desk Ticket and Ken stated he would drive to the facility and reboot it.
As of 210PM CDT, the box was still offline but Ken was on AIM. We asked him about it and he stated he had just received a SPAM complaint and that his carrier, LightEdge, nullrouted the IP as there policy is nullroute and then notify of the complaint.
When asked when Virpus received the SPAM complaint, Ken advised us he had received it earlier in the day but he did not have time to forward it on.
When asked how to go about getting the box put back online, mind you it was the 1st SPAM Complaint and we rectified it in our database within 5 minutes of receiving the ticket at 220 PM, he stated it was upto LightEdge and he has expressed his concerns of this policy but there was no response and he had no ETA for a fix.
Also, as a side note, Virpus Networks advertises ATT, QWest, XO, Cogent and Verizon however the only thing your able to get to unless your directly on the ATT, QWest, XO, Verizon network is Cogent.
Think twice about getting a VPS or Dedicated Server with Virpus.
I cannot wait to hear Kenneth Odem's response to this post as Im sure he'll be here to defend himself and say its all our fault for getting the 1 SPAM Complaint which I admit, getting a SPAM complaint against you is bad however the mannfer of suspending the account and then contactin the customer 4 hours later is absolutely rediculous.
When I first started hosting with Spunky everything went smooth as silk (as you can see by this thread: [url] and it was almost like a dream host, unfortunately it didn’t take long before the bubble burst with my site being down due to some DNS issue on their side which resulted in my site being down around 4 times… Mike offered to make it up to me by giving me a free month.
After a couple of other minor issues things were finally starting to look good when suddenly my site was offline again, I contacted support and they told me that they had changed the name servers and had sent emails out regarding this around 3 weeks back.. I never got these emails (but I did get billing emails), none the less I changed my name servers to the new ones… and that’s when I got a shock, after my domain again resolved… its showed me copy of my site that was nearly a month or so old! All my content was gone! Apparently they had also sent other emails (which I didn’t get) saying that once they shift name servers all the old sites would be deleted! In the beginning when I started hosting with Mike I asked him if Spunky did daily backups and was old yes, so I never kept a backup… and so I lost my whole site… weeks of work including writing multipage articles, test scripts, modifications etc.. all gone, like they never existed… except for some found on google’s cache.
Worst of all, all the links that I had from other sites to specific articles are now dead and even if I rebuild the site those links are still going to be dead because I don’t know all of the old links.
Now, reading this post you might say: “ Ah! He’s just bitter” and you would be damn right, I am bitter, angry, frustrated and a whole lot of other things as this could have been prevented from their side if they used a simple system that I thought of in 2 minutes..
Just like the link that you have to click on when you join a newsletter or a forum they could have sent out these notifications with a link having the customers number attached to it to show that the client had gotten the email.. if the link was clicked… they client got the email, if not, a simple cron job to check and resend emails that were not received would do the trick, if that too didn’t work… then maybe contact from tech/customer service *BEFORE* deleting someone’s website/s?
Spunky says they are very sorry and regret what has happened, but sorry and regret does not get back the weeks of work that went into a site, does it?
[WARNING: This may be a long review, reader discretion is advised.] If some of you have followed my other reviews on HostingZoom(HZ) posted on here, you might be wondering why are the # of months are not correct... it's actually do to my poor math skills haha.. but here it is, calculated correctly(I hope).
I've been an HZ customer for 36 months now. That must say quite a lot about HZ in itself and the fact that I come back here periodically to tell others about my experience at HZ. A little backgrounder for starters.
I've been with HZ since April 2005. I came to this very forum to read up on reviews and get recommendations. I narrowed down my search to HZ and Site5. At the time, 2 very formiddible hosts in the industry. Both touting blazing fast response time to tickets, superior-high quality support, excellent servers managed by the best. After getting feedback and contacting both hosts I made my decision to go with HZ. Their sales staff was particularly helpful and friendly. Quite prominentely I remember getting blazing fast replies from Kiet Duong(CEO of HZ) with detailed explanations to the questions I had as a n00b in the hosting industry(I feel quite dumb looking back at the questions I've asked). It was this personal helpfulness that I experienced that gave me the extra push to go with HZ added with the fact that they had live chat technical support.
Fast forward a year and a half. I totally patted myself on the back telling myself what a great choice I've made. It was this time I've seen the "Site5 Fiasco" unfold here on WHT. To such amazement I didn't understand how such a highly touted host could run into so many problems and just be bombarded with a barge of negativity. It was also at this point where the overselling went mad with Site5. I was just glad I wasn't any part of it.
I was happy over here at HZ. Stable server with little to no problems. The support I received through tickets were always blazing fast and amazingly helpful and personal.
Such notable technicians as Alex and Vlad who are still with HZ today made my stay at HZ a perfect one. Any problems I had were always delt with in the most professional manner. The server was very stable and I had little to no reason to complain about anything since all my websites were working beautifully. The times where I've used live chat was pleasantely helpful. No trouble getting a hold of a technician and having a personal 1-on-1 support session to get a quick problem resolved.
On a few occassions as well, I had special urgent requests and they were fulfilled greatfully. One was to get a new VPS plan purchased at their sister company ModVPS and get it setup during the weekend, which they don't normally do. Kiet took it upon himself to get my VPS up and running over the weekend. Absolutely wonderful gesture.
A second request was to have my site moved back to the original server I was on, when I moved to their 'failover service' simply because my experience with the 'failover service' was quite bluntly put, horrible. Kiet again took it upon himself to personally make sure my sites made it over safely. He worked over the wee hours of the night and had a technician, Alex I believe, follow up with me the next morning. Again, a very wonderful gesture on Kiet's part. This is what made me really tout HZ so much simply because of this service I received that was above and beyond what I felt I should have gotten.
Fast forward yet again in time. Now I start to experience minor hiccups here and there. 500 internal server error reports from my users. No biggie in my mind but then also at this time I seemed to have observed a pattern happening on the forums. The problems of other customers have began to become very vocal. Day after day, all I observe in the forum is posts about problems problems problems and support not being helpful. For me personally, support quality and response time definately took a hit.
Not a big one, it was still good by my standards, just not as good as it was before. I don't take much out of this, simply take it as growing pains.
Fast forward a little more to now. Nothing has changed. Customers are more and more vocal about problems. Some network outages occur with more frequency and in my honest opinion, were handled horribly. Horrible customer communication and notification about the status of the major event. [url]
Customers are more and more vocal about the horrible support service as well. Canned liked responses, unhelpful support, very slow responses and the increasing difficulty to get on live chat.
This is the point that began to worry me. My server was still more or less fine so I haven't had an excuse to use tech support so I could not put these claims to truth.
Customers also begin to now point out the increasing problem of load ont he servers.
This past month. I too have begun to feel the effects of this. Load has been an issue daily. My sites are inaccessible during the morning hours as the load hovers around 15+. Either that or my sites are just so incredibly slow that it doesn't even matter that they eventually load because more than likely the visitor would have left. ALL my sites have been taken a hit due to this inaccessiblilty. I loose some traffic becuase this vital part of the day, none of my sites are close to being function due to the speed.
I have contacted support and have gotten nothing that has been remotely useful. Also mentioning that the respones time has turned to hours for my tickets(6-9 hours if memory serves me correct, instead of 5-35 minutes like before). I've also had little luck connecting to a tech on live chat on the first attempt. The responses I've gotten from support seem more like excuses than anything. Alex did take it upon himself to reopen my ticket to check up on me(which I really appreciate) but it still doesn't change the fact that the problems have still been occuring. It has come to a point where I no longer think it's beneficial to stay any longer with HZ. So I may call it quits with them after 36 months unfortunately.
Nonetheless, I am greatful for the times where HZ has been helpful and had taken it upon itself to provide me with service above and beyond what I expect. But like the saying, all good things come to an end.
Hope you found this review intriguing and sorry for the lengthyness of it. I hope it's a great read!
I have posted an review earlier as well for 2 month : 2 month review
Let me summarize my experience so far,
Technical Support - 10/10 Really fab. even though I was on semi-managed plan, they never made me feel I was on a semi it always felt as if I was under complete management, they did every task I had asked them to do, which I didn't get on any other semi-managed host earlier.
I have no sort of complaints about their technical team, they tried to solve some problems which were due to the billing dept.
The minimum response for a ticket generally around 10-15mins and the completion with in an hr.
Billing Dept - This is some dept. that has kept me in wonder-land. Some times the replies were so pleasing and most other times the tickets are ignored. From, almost 2nd r 3rd month, the billing dept. tickets don't get regularly replied and used to bump the tickets in order to get a response to the query. Which I got some how, in a apologizing manner (no complaints for that :p)
Now, for the past 1 month we have been having some serious problems.
First, I had recd. some black-listed ip's when we joined virpus, we failed to check them (mistake on our end agreed 100%), which probably even they might not have been aware of.. As, we had a minor mis-understanding with godaddy during domain registration, my friend registered the domain using one of our partner address who resides in Singapore, where as the registration was done from India. Godaddy, assumed this was a spam registration and refunded the amount. So, we had to register the domain through another partner who resided in India. Godaddy was cool after we gave them the complete details, where they wanted some ID proof, and we provided them.
Our ip was on the black-list, we thought since our domain was spam-listed for a day, (until godaddy took it off) it made the hosts to assume the domain was black-listed, so we had manually submitted forms and proofs to most of the anti-spam agencies and mail providers, where they took the ban off the ip with in 15-20 days after we joined virpus.
Our domain was no longer under black-list, but ip was still under black-listed in some sites, such as rediff, it took more than 2 months to set the things straight at rediff, where we did some config added from the tech.dept. such as setting up spf record, and did a few tweaks here and there.
Even after making all these efforts, our ip was still under black-list of some ISP's. Our main domain (the domain which was under bl list earlier) loads well for every user, but our child domains where we have blogs and other activities do not load for lots of users. The ping results in the internet gives 100% but on their particular systems it gives no ping. Some times, the site loads wierdly such as,[url] might load but [url]might not load, and vice-versa, some times local ping fails but site loads, its all wierd and we found the reason to the problem to be ip after some minor confirmation from our end. We were losing our revenue of more than 60% just because of the failure of loading on the site, the tech. dept used to ask the ips which are facing prob to check if they are blocked, but its not possible to give ips of users who visit as guests and others, we have noted reports on other sites that our site wasn't loading for them. We still were able to give few ips for check and found them not-blocked on the ip. The sites are able to be viewed for all from proxy sites such as stage6.info but we can't ask each viewer to go to proxy site to view if they are unable to load, it will become ridiculous and we might lose our entire traffic some day.
We had shifted our domains temporarily to other vps where we noted none of the users had a single complaint, we were there for more than a week, which ensured the problem was not the domains but the ips, again after returning to the virpus hosts, we had created 3 tickets to sales/billing dept. to issue fresh ip's, got 0 reply and mailed to mr.Ken using : kenneth.odem@virpusnetworks.net got no reply after 48hrs.
We have to agreee, Earlier,mr.Ken was so helpful he helped us when we didn't have any funds to issue, since we had an dispute with an item where our payment was delayed by paypal. So, we had paid them almost 10 days later than the due date where mr.Ken was so helpful and saw to it our VPS could stay online despite the payments not been released.
In thanks, we had directly mailed our check we got from an ad-agency, which again made around 5-10 days in the payment, which made our balance stand in the positive note, we have our balance in the account for the past 3 months so that there are no dues left.
But, in the past 1 -2 months the replies have been disappointing.
We planned to leave virpus and join other host, where we burnt our hands, we looked for other reputed VPS and had a few in mind after our staff suggested few good organizations(don't prefer to name them here as it would be mis-leading).
Since, virpus wasn't ready to refund the amount in the credits we decided to continue with virpus atleast as a sideby host. Later, some how our members suggested we used virpus as a main host, so we wanted fresh ip's to get rid of the damn problem we are having but we have recd. no response for the past 1 week.
Now, lately after the maintenance our VPS was down for approx. 26-27hrs on april 25th Saturday, where our traffic is usually on the weekends. We lost the compelete traffic and revenue. When we asked if it come under credits, we got response as : This was the result of scheduled maintenance we cannot, it would not qualify under our SLA. (just giving the main result statment off the entire reply recd. from sales). Its some thing we would like to regret but for sure this isn't some issue, which could make us think to get to a new host.
The reply from the sales dept. has made our staff making funny betting, as one would win if we get a reply and other would if its not replied with in 48hrs, lately the first one is winning () due to lack of communication.
This might be our last month. Our next due date major amount would be taken from the credits, so a very little amount would exist in the account. We will stay with them until our amount with them is spent.
We had enjoyed really good with the tech. dept but the sales dept has been really poor in the recent past. I am forced to say this as even after mailing we haven't got response where, mr.Ken stated if our tickets were lost or some thing, mail to him but either didn't work so far.
Once, earlier when we requested for change of ips we were said some $7 or some thing would be charged for the swap, when we made other enquiries about it we didn't get a response till date
My tickets which lay un-responded: 203497 509467 385781
509467 and 385781 are double-post of the ticket, but got reply for none of the above tickets. Was expecting a reply for 1 atleast.
I was ready to pay excess charge for the new ips as there some mistake from my end in failure to check the ips before getting them but I wanted some concession as the major mistake was from their end while dispatching ips. I am not refusing to pay but I wanted the concession, got no reply and the above tickets are a proof of them.
Our staff online time and their live chat time don't tally, so we can't make any contact to them on live as well.
I am not sure if this is mis-understanding or what, but it has been a mixed experience for me. For sure, their sales crew have to be increased that's some suggestion I would strongly do.
I can recommend this host to any one for the tech. support they provide but can't guarantee them for the sales dept. replies based on my past/recent experiences.
Totally my site down for around ~30hrs including all the maintanence and other reasons, it could be a bit less but I am rounding it off, for sure its more than 28hrs
My over all rating: 7.5/10 Tech. Dept - 10/10 Sales/Billing Dept - 5/10
my site submitted for review via report feature I tried to give all my experience on virpus and I am not against any one for joining virpus nor have any fights with virpus team.
May be if we get response from sales we might still consider continuing with virpus but that stands low at the moment.
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 ordered a 256MB RAM VPS with cPanel on the 24th of May.
I got the VPS up and running to next day.
I logged in to the VPS WHM, noticing the server load was at 3.xx and 4.xx
I was shocked, as this VPS was brand new, so I contacted Ken, NO REPLY.
I also asked him about upgrading my RAM, NO REPLY.
It has now been 3 days, I requested a refund before I got past the 14 Day money back promise. They didnt reply, so I opened a PayPal dispute, still no response.
Im hoping Ken will see this thread at act upon my wishes and grant me a refund. As all I can see is him trying to ignore me untill the 14 day promise is gone. WHAT A CON!
Its my great Privilege to give them a excellent rating.
I ordered vps almost 2 and half months back after we had a poor run at WOC (not even for a month at them).
We had recd. so far fabulous support from their crew. The usual ticket reply time is awesome for an semi-managed vps.
Any reply with in 30mins and if provided proper information required as well they would do give the update and time note.
We didn't have any down time on our vps so far. The free back up facility for an semi-managed vps is really awesome. I was searching for a similar feature with lots of hosts but was unlucky. Just then came virpus to solve my every need.
Its just for a namesake they are semi-managed, I get support as if I get a complete managed support.
Till now no ticket on mine has been either ignored or nor delayed in response. The speed is great and better than our previous hosts
My final word is Virpus Rocks - www.virpus.com
As far as my experience in concerned I will look forward to this company for a very long relationship with them and try to get my friends tied up at this excellent host.
Its been really my pleasure to give this review on virpus. Once again thanks Virpus team for making my life so easy and simple online.
This review is completely based on our experience and not any hand written material I give them 10/10 from my heart.
Since all the talk lately about Virpus Networks here on the boards lately has been negative, I figured I would put a positive light on Virpus.
Price = 10/10 The price was one of the main things that drew me into Virpus. For $12.99 a month, I am getting 12 GB Disk Space, 300 GB of Bandwidth, 192MB Guaranteed RAM, 512 MB Burst RAM, and DirectAdmin. I would consider that a steal.
Uptime = 9.5/10 My VPS has rarely been down. If it has been, it is because of either: a) the recent 1.5 hour downtime for the migration or b) something I did to screw up my own VPS.
Support = 9/10 Whenever I have a question for the Virpus staff, I usually get a response within the hour. However, for the past few weeks, it has taken a bit longer than that, sometimes up to two days. However, I believe that is because of the recent migration.
Overall = 9.8/10 I am pretty happy with the services from Virpus Networks. I would definitely recommend them to anyone who is looking for affordable, reliable VPS hosting.
I've been hosting my personal sites with MonkeyWrench Hosting for around three years now (coming up in January I believe), and I figured I'd share my experiences with them!
I've gone through a few hosts in my time, and some of them have been pretty rough. After using paid hosts, a niche free host started up that I stayed with for around a year before they eventually closed down.
I switched to MonkeyWrench Hosting at that point as a place to host my sites and store my files, and I have to say that I've been impressed throughout the time I've been with them.
Uptime/speed: Fantastic! The sites have been perfectly reliable and speedy whenever I've gone to access them, and I haven't had any complaints from users. I did come across MySQL going down on one of the servers (I have two accounts for different purposes that are on seperate servers) in the past, but it was resolved quickly before I even needed to get help.
Support: I've used the support a few times, but not for anything critical since there's not been the need. However, everything that I have asked was answered promptly in a professional manner.
Pricing: Again, no complaints here. The pricing is pretty cheap, especially for the quality of service receieved. They aren't the cheapest on the Internet by any means, but you generally get what you pay for. I'm aware of what my realistic space/bandwidth needs are anyway, and I'd rather pick a host that clearly advertises what you'll receive over an 'unlimited' host.
All in all, MWH have been a fantastic choice and I couldn't have hoped for anything better.
So, thumbs up to Jonathan, and keep up the good work!
I'll report my domains for the moderators to check them out. =)
What seemed to be a good company quickly turned to nightmares. I purchased a couple domains. All went well. Then paypal emailed me saying they are high risk and wanted me to confirm I made the payment and service was given. So until I did the payment was held. They blame the held on me and threatened me to release it or they will cancel my account.
So they finally gave them the money and all was well. Well I did a stupid thing and decided to get a VPS from them, they have good deals so I thought, whats the worse that can happen. Well shortly after, I get a email saying because your payments are unreliable, we are waiting a week to setup your vps which is complete udder crap.
So I just said screw it and said give me a refund then and about 2 hours ago I try logging into my client center and my account is gone.
I am hoping one of them see this so we can get this worked out. In the mean time I opened disputes on all of the payments.
I just want to take the time and review Hivelocity. Boy oh boy, where to start. I am just so pleased with the customer support they offer and I don't even own a single product with them.
I currently own a server with another comapny and I am always looking at other options for cheaper prices, better services and etc.
I found Hivelocity through WHT and I took the time to start up a live chat which was answered quickly from Kevin. Kevin was very nice and welcoming. I was asking about discounts they could provide and etc. Kevin showed me their reseller program which seemed to be something I may be interested in. After a 15-20 minute chat with Kevin, he offered to add me on MSN if I ever wanted to chat which I thought was pretty nice.
After I got off live chat with Kevin, I decided to keep researching Hivelocity. I immediately signed up on Twitter (I never had a Twitter Account). I saw they had some awesome deals. They were offering an awesome deal today it looks like this:
"The next person to go to our site, open a live chat and say "I just got your TWEET" gets a Core2Duo 3.0Ghz e8400 for $5 the first month."
By time I even got onto Twitter, I noticed that this was already taken. I kept browsing their Twitter and hey what do you know, another great deal it followed like this: "The 1st $5 Core2Duo sold in about 20 seconds so lets do it again. The next person to open a live chat saying "Give me a $5 Server" gets it."
I decided I was going to be late as the last one sold in 20 seconds. Well, it turned out it did get sold but, I got into a Live Chat with David from Hivelocity.
David informed me that the server was sold and I was a bit too late. What do you know, more great discounts! He offered me the same server for $5 on the first month. I decided not to take advantage of the offer as I wouldn't be able to put much use to the offer. I will be moving to Hivelocity within the next 1-3 months.
Overall I am very pleased with the great offers they provide and the support is just amazing!
Based on the sales support and the deals they provide, I did a bit of a rating on Hivelocity.
Sales Support:5/5 Deals:5/5 Overall:5/5
Also, if you decide your interested in Hivelocity's awesome offers, I would follow them on Twitter! They are constantly updating their Twitter and offering great deals. Their Twitter deals are 100% and it's pretty awesome a company like Hivelocity offers products and support so great!
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.
I've got high end server from WholeSaleinternet.I've been with Wholesaleinternet for 4 months now and I am extremely happy with them.Got an awesome server for a cheap price, a Quad-Core Xeon 8 Processor (3.0GHZ), 32GB RAM, 100mbit port link. Support:
Sales support is slow but tech support is fast!
That you very much Aaron/Wholesaleinternet!, keep up the good work!
Sharktech is hit and miss. They are not professional or courteous at all. Everything is done THEIR way or the highway. You either love them or you hate them. It's just the way it is.
Anyone who is truly business-minded and has a grasp on how the real world works will not like them. Dealing with them will NOT be like dealing with a "real" company like the cable company or phone company, even IF you're paying Sharktech MORE per month than you pay for your utility bill.
If you're just looking for the cheapest option for your side-business that you don't really care about too much, and you can tolerate the occasional email from Sharktech that makes you go "WHOA!", then use them.
This is a follow-up to my original thread [url] regarding my client's experiences with HostWay.
I simply can't believe all of this, and I went through it.
The low points of the whole thing work out like this: In order to set up an SSL for my client's site, we needed a dedicated IP. If you do a traceroute on my client's URL, it resolves to someone else all together. Int he mean time, I tried to purchase an SSL through HostWay, and when they didn't respond in a week and a half, I e-mailed cancelling the order, and purchased a (thankfully) inexpensive SSL from GoDaddy. I got an e-mail back within hours from HW saying, literally, "We never processed your SSL order, so there's nothing to cancel. Let us know if there's anythig else we can do."
As I mentioned before, e-mail support seems to be handled off-shore, and it takes over a week for most answers. Phone support gets you, I found out, a service in Florida.
While the people I dealt with on the phone were always professional and polite, they literally could do almost nothing. I was told several times, "I have to e-mail someone in Chicago - no, I don't know who it is, all I have is an e-mail address."
Back to the SSL - seems HostWay already installed one on my client's site at some point - and it had nothing to do with my client. You could visit a secure version of the site, and it would tell you not to enter, as the cert didn't match the site.
My client and I both were on the phone with the Florida 800 number for hours at a time.
Average wait time to speak to someone was 30 minutes or so. I'm not carping about that part - but they were feeding us false information which was supposedly fed them from "Chicago." Specifically, I told them on the phone and via e-mail that the IP didn't resolve correctly, and that the old cert needed to be removed before a new one could go on (and only their SSL team can install certs, supposedly).
They told my client that the GoDaddy cert was causing them problems, and that it needed to be cancelled before they could install one of their GeoTrust certs. I nuked it - even though I knew better - and of course nothing was done. They lied to my client for several days, saying the new cert was installed (even though I knew it wasn't, and I told my client so, and showed them HW's tech was passing on false information).
This situation went on for almost two weeks. Finally, Monday night, my client got a supervisor based in British Columbia, Canada, who promised that he would walk "the tech admin" through fixing the problems that night. But that was only after my client threatened to pull his account.
Well, the IP is still screwed up, but they replaced the cert that night with one for which they charged my client an arm and a leg. The CC processing company is happy, so we let it ride, and they're now processing payments over the web.
If this is confusing, it's because I condensed many long days and nights into a few short paragraphs. Let's just say that HW didn't have their thinking caps on tight, because they committed to their preposterous stories to e-mails which we all received.
Later this year, at a conference to be held in Canada, a committee of nuclear power station operators will be discussing whether or not they should keep HW as the host of their site. Gee, I wonder what the consensus will be.
I have been doing my homework on windows ASP.NET shared hosting providers and have narrowed down my choice to discountASP & CrystalTech. I am now struggling with making the final decision and would appreciate any thoughts/input/comments/experience that you might have.
My requirements are: - ASP.NET 2.0 - SQL Server 2005 - SSL Certificate - Daily backups - Ability to backup SQL database in real-time - 20GB Bandwidth - 100MB Disk Space - 300MB SQL Disk Space
Site Description: Publish educational material. Users can navigate the site and see articles for free or login and see premium content with subscription. Currently getting 7500 views a day, 1500 visits and 25,000 hits.
Specific items of note: - discountASP runs apps in isolated application pool, CrystalTech does not - CrystalTech has phone support, discountASP does not - CrystalTech is $16.95/month, discountASP is $30/month - neither provide guaranteed uptime (compared to aspwebhosting.com which does for example - any others that guarantee uptime??)
Will a shared plan with one of these providers be adequate for my needs? If not, any other recommendations?
I ordered from them a little over a week ago the $10 package as a test to see if they would set it up and it seemed to run ok things that crashed i assume did so because of low ram (gameserver/ventserver)and from day 1 after realizing it didnt have enough ram i began using it as a free shell host for people to stay connected to irc (i had read the aup and tos before signing up and irc was not mentioned as against rules ANYWHERE) and they didnt allow making swap files (which is fine i guess) so I ordered another one only this time the supreme package and kept the other one as an irc host and then tried running the gameserver off the new one with 3gb of ram...it still didnt run properly so i figured ok ill just usethis one to run irc and other stuff as well..after 10 days the server suddenly drops ALL irc connections and i made a ticket and asked if I accidently firewalled it myself or if something they did affected it heres the response i got from my tickets
My Ticket
cant connect to hpyervm getting a mysql cannot connect error (copied and pasted its:"Could not connect to Mysql server... ") and all of the services using irc on the server dropped this morning for no apparent reason was it something someone did on the server or did you guys change something cause now it just times out any irc connection before connecting but the servers ping and respond to other stuff fine.
Two Minutes later:
We have restored the SQL server on our master node. Additionally due to some abuse issues, we have banned IRC ports. For the life of our company we have disallowed and banned IRC from being hosted, which is stated in our AUP, so you should not be hosting IRC of any type on our network in any case.
Me (a few were in between that and this but they were not related to waht i am posting really): Alright i submitted it and i reread the aup and even did a search ... irc is not mentioned ONCE in there let alone as not allowed....
they never responded to that but they did respond Them: We will get this processed within todays business day.
at the end which i am assuming was refering to my cancellation and request of money back under the 14 day garantuee. It is more than 24 hours later and they still have not showed where the aup says irc is not allowed and i have not recieved money back.
Result and conclusion: It is a scam company there 24/7 support chat is NEVER online even during the business hours they state and the company doesnt even read its own tos/aup.
for those who want to read the aup here it is
No Virpus Networks servers or networks may be used for:
- Email spamming - Warez, Hackz or Serialz sites. - Illegal content or activities - Any other type of high packet load or disruptive network traffic - Ask before you attempt something questionable, it will save us all a lot of trouble.
With so many downtime issues in the last 3 days and so much downtime, lack committment and quality , I requested a refund. ITs been 3 days since the request (Saturday-Sunday-Monday) all 3 days over now and no reply EXCEPT it has been forwarded to someone or will update you shortly (never happened!). I can accept the weekend excuse but the weekday excuse?!
I also have an RDNS ticket that wasnt' even resolved since 24/25th of May ...thats almost 2 weeks. I get the same was done (wasnt done), will update you (never got updated)...thing.
After the issues in network and attacks, they never even sent out the latest apology email to the clients (the last downtime or network issue). And all their outsourced techs say is "am looking in your issue and will update you"....
I tried calling the helplines, no one picks up. Live Chat isnt live chat since no one is online (except at a random time it seems). Tech support doesnt' exist ..it's just someone saying will update you shortly and then they probably email the DC (who clearly dont care about Virpus by doing nothing). SO its a fault of Virpus and the DC. Thats why their email (last one) talked about moving off the Datacenter.
Now I have lost 6 clients and lost over 200$ , which sadly Virpus being an LLC (Limited Liable Company) I can't really sue. Their 100% uptime or SLA is nothing but an insult to everyone. Support "was" great when you signup...It's like you get everything you want UNTIL after 2 weeks, when you're forgotten (or maybe in the time zone I live in support doesnt work at all or the un-qualified outsourced support kick in).
Anyhow, both ways I have begun moving most of my sites off this amazingly terrible vps host (I had tested them around 4 months back with similar results except for the network issues). Also I tried formating and reloading the VPS using Virtuozzo with them..It doesn't work. Basically Virpus is offering great deals but more about getting lots of clients bundled onto a single server. Theyve added tons of ram to the single server and set everyone on it, without really scanning into clients and realising that 1 attack means downtime for all the clients on the vps - server. It would be better to split them around on multiple host servers to decrease the attack.
Anyhow I am extremely upset with the support I got. They havent replied to my support tickets EXCEPT the usual will update which never got updated and gets forgotten.
Overall based on pricing I'd give them a 3/5 Based on Support 4/5 (for the first 10 days), after that (0/5) Quality of Company (0.2/5)
Its been a very bad loss for me and being in India, I dont think I would be able to do much about it (legally). They totally messed up with their datacenter (or vice versa) and they've left the upset clients without response and the happy clients...sleep through most of the issues or have been very lucky.
I really didnt' want to post here. But 3 days without a refund reply and 2 weeks with an RDNS no real update/ or apology on the lack of support there...is a huge turn off and has made me really frustrated. I hope Virpus realises their mistakes and begin spending more money on "Knowledgable Support/Staff" and also get ethical and moral before its too late. It's never too late to change, until change isn't even an option. I hope that Virpus will improve and change to the better...
I just got my new server they transferred me to up and running last night. I woke up this morning and it's down. I submitted a ticket about an hour ago and have not had a response. I also can't get to their own web site. Anyone else who uses virpus having problems this morning?
First off they did not setup my server for nearly 2 days. I bitched and was apologized about that. They said I would get 10% off my next month.
I proceed to get everything running and start setting up my domains and then blamo its gone! It was reset they said even though I did not have a remote switch. I asked them why they did that and they insisted it was me. Whatever. So I setup everything again and was getting horrible speeds for my photography site. The hell???? They promised me the world when I signed up with them. I also got to deal with "outsourced tech support" from india that was not helpful.
I finally get things running but its still a slow *** server and they try to tell me I needed to upgrade to a much faster plan and get a better processor and memory. I tell them screw that they are throttling my bandwidth. Like memory and processor are gonna make a difference for 3 websites 1 with forums and 1 for photography then my personal site.
Can you share with me about your experience with WBS as a provider? Including account management, support and of course quality of the network, Also I am interested whether they really have a good South America connectivity.
I have been using 1 and 1 web hosting for almost 3 months now. In that time my site has never been down. I use them to host my website but i use google App for my email server.
In the three months that i have been hosting with them i have only had to put in one ticket due to a mysql database issue. Which then turns out something that i have done.
I would recommend 1 and 1 to my friends and family.
Since I've been noticing a thread about how this company is a scam and a fraud and will take your money and run.... I wanted to post my review of them.
Super VPS #2 ($9.95) was bought on 11/21 at 5:42 PM. I received the VPS login information about 4 hours later.
I have this VPS for a VPN server that I run for my personal use. I have so far had 100% uptime and nothing has been wrong. Everything is working great.
I have sent in a number of ticket with things that I need to be enabled for the VPN to work. All of my tickets were responded to within a reasonable time limit. I say reasonable for the following reasons:
1) I used to work in the hosting business and it's almost impossible to give a hour resolution unless you have a big time staff
2) this VPS in UNMANAGED so I didn't expect support to be online waiting for my ticket Andy has been a great person and I truly thank you for everything you've done on my VPS for me.
The VPS has great connections to the internet. Although I ALWAYS prefer that Cogent be left out when I buy a server or VPS, this one came with it but most of my routes take Level 3 and Internap so I am perfectly fine with it. They also setup rDNS for me in a matter of minutes.
I have pushed 4GB so far and am not having any problems with any one else's VPS affecting mine.
So to sum it up:
Support = 8/10 (If you offered a guaranteed response in xx minutes that would be great)
Network = 9/10 (I prefer not to have Cogent since they send you all over the USA unlike other carriers)
Price = 10/10 (Find me a $10 VPS that offers all this on a stable NOT OVERSOLD node)
Uptime = 10/10 (So far so good!)
Overall Experience = 9/10
If you are looking at a VPS and just want to try this out, you really can't lose anything with this $10 plan. I would highly recommend The NY NOC.
Note to mods: I have submitted my IP and info through the ticket system.
Package offered to WHT: Unmanaged 128MB RAM 10GB Space 300GB Transfer HyperVM / LxAdmin Root Access 2 IP Addresses $9.95/mo US 10mbit/s (true)
I have been a customer of this provider for almost two months now. They have provided great support (especially concerning their response time). Uptime has been 99%+ as advertised - very reliable.
The package they offer above is one of the cheaptest I have found on these forums or on the net. Most others offer similar packages but only provide 1 IP and 150GB/mo transfer. If this company continues with well managed servers and customer support, I believe they will be well worth the investment a customer makes.
how much time to Activate a Vps im order one whit virpus in the morning Im pay the VPS but i don´'t have any message, I send 3 Tickets to sales and no response, and whit Support say i need to ask to sales.
