I've had a shared "Solarcluster 5 Lifetime" account with iMountain for a year, hosting low-traffic "community" sites, including shops, a blog, forums, CMSs, mailing lists and photo galleries. Here are my impressions so far. I've concentrated on things that are different from previous hosts I've used (mainly cheap cPanel shared hosting).
Summary
Pros: Very good support, fast servers, solar powered
Cons: Mediocre reliability, price, file permission issues, no forum
Pre-sales and pricing
I found iMountain here on WHT after searching for a host with a good reputation for support and reliability. I was initially impressed by the consistent fast loading of their demo Gallery site, and by their solar powered and "clustered" hosting. However, their prices (for 10 domains) were above my budget and they had problems connecting to Europe (see [url] [url],which put me off. I signed up after they fixed the bandwidth problem quickly, and I discovered there was a 50% discount offer, and a "lifetime" subscription option (both now withdrawn) which made their prices more competitive.
Migration
Moving my sites over to iMountain was not entirely trouble-free. They don't offer to do the migration for you and I didn't yet have SSH access at either end, so I had to download all the files and database contents from my old host and upload them again to iMountain by FTP. This took many hours, especially since my local ISP (Virgin) decided I was "abusing" my connection and silently throttled my upload speed to 128 kbit/s! Manually recreating all my databases and mail accounts took some time in the unfamiliar (and buggy) H-Sphere control panel, and some of my sites ended up offline or in maintenance mode for several days.
Support
Support quality is definitely one of iMountain's strong points. They claim all their support staff are Level 3 and up with 15+ years experience. It's all done by e-mail and can therefore be a bit slow (sometimes hours for a response), but they generally get to the root of every problem and work to find a workable solution, unlike other hosts I've experienced, where it can be a constant struggle just to get a problem acknowledged, let alone fixed. They're also pretty good at monitoring servers, which means it's worth waiting a while before raising a trouble ticket. There's no phone support, instant messaging or user forum though. There's a tiny knowledgebase, a blog and a ticketing system but they're barely used.
Speed
Generally, my sites have been much more responsive since moving to iMountain, and this is the main reason I would recommend them. I've only raised three "sites slow" tickets in the last year and they've all been fixed quickly. At previous hosts, applications that should load in seconds would regularly take minutes or time out completely. Indeed, iMountain proudly state "...we can handle load surges from Digg, SlashDot, etc. When your site is getting the hits of a lifetime, we're here to make sure your visitors get through...". So far I haven't tested this, though! Ping times from the UK are consistently about 180ms (monitored by [url].
Reliability
I've been monitoring one of my sites at 5 minute intervals for a year
[url]
and average uptime has been about 99.5%, which is about the same as my previous hosts. I'm a bit disappointed by this - I had hoped that by paying a bit more and moving to a more reputable host I would see some improvement in uptime. I'm still getting some website users urging me to move to a "more reliable" host.
Reliability is supposed to be one of the advantages of clustered hosting, but the "clustered" hosting that iMountain offers only means that the web server is separate from the database server, mail server etc., not that there are redundant servers that can take over if one of the servers in a cluster fails.
File permission issues
Once my sites were up and running, an annoying problem kept recurring - I would come back later and find some of them down or showing errors. It turns out this is due to iMountain running PHP as an Apache module, which means that files created by a PHP application when someone visits the site (such as cache or log files) can't subsequently be modified or removed by it. It's a well-known problem, and the solution here is to simply raise a support ticket every time such a PHP application is installed or moved to get it fixed (not sure exactly how, sorry). It's all a bit slow and inconvenient. It also affects updates - you have to overwrite the application in situ, instead of doing a clean installation and renaming it.
An alternative solution is to configure the entire site to "cgi mode", which can be done from the control panel. This solves all the file permission issues, but the big disadvantage for me is that it's no longer possible to override local PHP settings (even using a local php.ini or ini_set), which means register_globals is always ON and the timezone always PST, for example.
Certificates
I found that iMountain's security certificates for shared SSL, secure mail and FTP connections etc. are all self-signed, which means you get a warning popup whenever you try to access them - a showstopper for an e-commerce site. I haven't encountered this at previous hosts, and when I raised a ticket they said it would be too expensive to fix this on every server, but I could buy my own certificate and install it. I only needed it for one site and they were good enough to give me a free static IP for it, so I was happy with that, but be careful if you're planning to host lots of secure sites with them. For email access I've simply gone back to unencrypted connections.
E-Mail
Incoming mail is filtered with SpamAssassin and ClamAV and works pretty well. Outgoing mail is sometimes blacklisted though (e.g. by AOL and madasafish), which can be a pain - I've had to redirect some mail to users on these domains to go via googlemail.
There's no real support for mailing lists (but no silly limits either) so you will need to install something like phplist or Dada Mail if you need them. There was initially no support for mail "domain forwarding" (all mail for xxx@mydomain sent to xxx@mysynonymdomain) but they enabled it when I asked.
Control panel
The control panel is H-Sphere, which I have found quite capable but buggy. Obvious things like file uploads, moving directories and CHMOD sometimes don't work, and very strange things can happen if you try to move and rename things too quickly. Also the menu structure can be very obscure - CRON jobs are found under "FTP User", for example.
Backups
There's no real support for backups - users are expected to make their own. I found a script to do mySQL backups, but file backups are harder because large directories will time out if you try to zip them. The options seem to be FTP (slow and not very reliable) or rsync (needs SSH access and a unix box).
Solar power
The power supply is not 100% solar - they still connect to the grid, but they sell back almost as much power during the day as they buy at night, so they are still "greener" than most.
I’ve had a shared "Solarcluster 5 Lifetime" account with iMountain for a year, hosting low-traffic "community" sites, including shops, a blog, forums, CMSs, mailing lists and photo galleries. Here are my impressions so far. I’ve concentrated on things that are different from previous hosts I’ve used (mainly cheap cPanel shared hosting).
Summary Pros: Very good support, fast servers, solar powered Cons: Mediocre reliability, price, file permission issues, no forum
Pre-sales and pricing I found iMountain here on WHT after searching for a host with a good reputation for support and reliability. I was initially impressed by the consistent fast loading of their demo Gallery site, and by their solar powered and "clustered" hosting. However, their prices (for 10 domains) were above my budget and they had problems connecting to Europe (see http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=649322), which put me off. I signed up after they fixed the bandwidth problem quickly, and I discovered there was a 50% discount offer, and a "lifetime" subscription option (both now withdrawn) which made their prices more competitive.
Migration Moving my sites over to iMountain was not entirely trouble-free. They don’t offer to do the migration for you and I didn’t yet have SSH access at either end, so I had to download all the files and database contents from my old host and upload them again to iMountain by FTP. This took many hours, especially since my local ISP (Virgin) decided I was "abusing" my connection and silently throttled my upload speed to 128 kbit/s! Manually recreating all my databases and mail accounts took some time in the unfamiliar (and buggy) H-Sphere control panel, and some of my sites ended up offline or in maintenance mode for several days.
Support Support quality is definitely one of iMountain’s strong points. They claim all their support staff are Level 3 and up with 15+ years experience. It’s all done by e-mail and can therefore be a bit slow (sometimes hours for a response), but they generally get to the root of every problem and work to find a workable solution, unlike other hosts I’ve experienced, where it can be a constant struggle just to get a problem acknowledged, let alone fixed. They’re also pretty good at monitoring servers, which means it’s worth waiting a while before raising a trouble ticket. There’s no phone support, instant messaging or user forum though. There’s a tiny knowledgebase, a blog and a ticketing system but they’re barely used.
Speed Generally, my sites have been much more responsive since moving to iMountain, and this is the main reason I would recommend them. I’ve only raised three "sites slow" tickets in the last year and they’ve all been fixed quickly. At previous hosts, applications that should load in seconds would regularly take minutes or time out completely. Indeed, iMountain proudly state "…we can handle load surges from Digg, SlashDot, etc. When your site is getting the hits of a lifetime, we’re here to make sure your visitors get through…". So far I haven’t tested this, though! Ping times from the UK are consistently about 180ms (monitored by [url].
Reliability I’ve been monitoring one of my sites at 5 minute intervals for a year [url] and average uptime has been about 99.5%, which is about the same as my previous hosts. I’m a bit disappointed by this - I had hoped that by paying a bit more and moving to a more reputable host I would see some improvement in uptime. I’m still getting some website users urging me to move to a "more reliable" host.
Reliability is supposed to be one of the advantages of clustered hosting, but the "clustered" hosting that iMountain offers only means that the web server is separate from the database server, mail server etc., not that there are redundant servers that can take over if one of the servers in a cluster fails.
File permission issues Once my sites were up and running, an annoying problem kept recurring - I would come back later and find some of them down or showing errors. It turns out this is due to iMountain running PHP as an Apache module, which means that files created by a PHP application when someone visits the site (such as cache or log files) can’t subsequently be modified or removed by it. It’s a well-known problem, and the solution here is to simply raise a support ticket every time such a PHP application is installed or moved to get it fixed (not sure exactly how, sorry). It’s all a bit slow and inconvenient. It also affects updates - you have to overwrite the application in situ, instead of doing a clean installation and renaming it.
An alternative solution is to configure the entire site to "cgi mode", which can be done from the control panel. This solves all the file permission issues, but the big disadvantage for me is that it’s no longer possible to override local PHP settings (even using a local php.ini or ini_set), which means register_globals is always ON and the timezone always PST, for example.
Certificates I found that iMountain’s security certificates for shared SSL, secure mail and FTP connections etc. are all self-signed, which means you get a warning popup whenever you try to access them - a showstopper for an e-commerce site. I haven’t encountered this at previous hosts, and when I raised a ticket they said it would be too expensive to fix this on every server, but I could buy my own certificate and install it. I only needed it for one site and they were good enough to give me a free static IP for it, so I was happy with that, but be careful if you’re planning to host lots of secure sites with them. For email access I’ve simply gone back to unencrypted connections.
E-Mail Incoming mail is filtered with SpamAssassin and ClamAV and works pretty well. Outgoing mail is sometimes blacklisted though (e.g. by AOL and madasafish), which can be a pain - I’ve had to redirect some mail to users on these domains to go via googlemail.
There’s no real support for mailing lists (but no silly limits either) so you will need to install something like phplist or Dada Mail if you need them. There was initially no support for mail "domain forwarding" (all mail for xxx@mydomain sent to xxx@mysynonymdomain) but they enabled it when I asked.
Control panel The control panel is H-Sphere, which I have found quite capable but buggy. Obvious things like file uploads, moving directories and CHMOD sometimes don’t work, and very strange things can happen if you try to move and rename things too quickly. Also the menu structure can be very obscure - CRON jobs are found under "FTP User", for example.
Backups There’s no real support for backups - users are expected to make their own. I found a script to do mySQL backups, but file backups are harder because large directories will time out if you try to zip them. The options seem to be FTP (slow and not very reliable) or rsync (needs SSH access and a unix box).
Solar power The power supply is not 100% solar - they still connect to the grid, but they sell back almost as much power during the day as they buy at night, so they are still "greener" than most.
I have an account with iMountain since August 2007 and have nothing but good things to say about them.
First, when I signed up I used one of their coupons that were available back then and signed up for solarcluster3.
I also had time to test their VPS for a few months but got back to solarcluster, didn't had too much time to manage the VPS.
Uptime: in one year I had about 3 outages, two small ones and the bigger one that some of you know about when their MySQL cluster crashed (I got compensated for this). We all know downtime is inevitable and I'm very happy on how they managed the issue. Looking forward to another year with this kind of uptime. Over 99.9+ overall.
Support: they are very fast to reply and fix issues, take backups of your account or do some custom php settings / installs. I really feel they are holding my hand here.
I'm currently using 2.3GB of space and in some (good) months I use over 150GB transfer. Sometimes I have over 200 visitors online on my wordpress blogs. All sites load very fast, no load issues etc.
I only signed up to test them out (for 1 month, 1 year ago) but they are just too good and I feel very comfortable with them.
I have my main sites there so I'm looking forward for at least one more year with them.
If there's anything else you guys want to know, just ask
I am one month short of 2 years hosting with the guys at iMountain.com and I couldn't be happier.
My American Idol blog has made the steps from a shared account with them to their semi-dedicated to a single core dedicated to a brand spanking new dual core dedicated server in the past 23 months. Yes the new server is overkill 8 months out of the year but during American Idol I need all the server I can get. Last season saw 1500+ online at one time.
A huge thanks for the server move this past weekend. A fairly transparent move with minor issues that were sorted out quickly. awesome job
Uptime
has been great for me. hyperspin reports 99.87% uptime for my server. Can't complain about that at all considering most downtime recorded is actually server upgrades.
support
This is still imountain's strongest aspect IMO. Their support is very knowledgeable, fast and even will help with 3rd party scripts. The have helped me setup a couple of custom things, always answer my questions with personal responses, not canned messages and always get issues solved. they have been there all hours and have fixed or setup anything I have ever asked for.
They also have phone support which I have used once just to ask them about an issue real quick. For me email support is better.
price
very competitive for what you get. Fast servers, access to a huge house database server even on the cheapest shared accounts. You are not on oversold servers. (trust me, I am running Status2K on a shared account as well and the server load is almost always perfect). Not to mention their support team is worth every penny. I just had a support ticket in to setup email notification to me on any cronjobs and it took them less than 5 minutes to do it and respond. Absolutely amazing.
con's
HSPERE control panel which takes some getting used to. I have it mastered now but when I first signed up I was lost as hell.
what i would like to see
I would love to see a customer forum. At one point they said they were going to install one but at this point nothing has come of it.
Still would like to see support sign the names to support tickets so I know who is who. if the support ticket does have a name it is always imountain.com not the techs name
in closing my hosting experience with iMountain has been the best ever and it gets better and better all the time. If you are in need of great hosting with a good support team give them a try
well I have been with imountain now since 11/01/07 and they still are by far the best hosting company I have ever been with.
I started on a simple clustered shared plan, moved to their clustered semi-dedicated plan and now am on my own dedicated server (opteron 246 with 4GB of RAM). my server runs a wordpress blog that last wednesday night had 868 concurrent connections and ran as smooth as if there were only 10 concurrent connections. WP-Cache, xCache and memcache (huge server) are utilized as well as offloading images to steadyoffload.com
uptime
There were a couple of issues in the past but nothing major for me. The MYSQL outage didn't affect me as I wasn't on the house database server cluster that went down. there are the occasional issues for a few minutes here and there but nothing major at all.
Hyperspin show my uptime 99.891% since January (there was a large DDOS attack in there).
I can live with that considering I have failover in that if the imountain server goes offline a splash page from another hosting account(In UK) shows up within 3 minutes stating the server is offline and will be back up soon. When imountain comes back online within 3 minutes the splash page is gone and my blog shows again.
support
This is imountain's strongest aspect IMO. Their support is very knowledgeable, fast and even will help with 3rd party scripts. The have helped me setup a couple of custom things, always answer my questions with personal responses, not canned messages and always get issues solved.
They also have phone support which I have used once just to ask them about an issue real quick. For me email support is better.
price
I can't go into this topic much for certain reasons but their prices IMO are competitive.
con's
HSPERE control panel which takes some getting used to. I have it mastered now but when I first signed up I was lost as hell.
what i would like to see
I would love to see a customer forum. At one point they said they were going to install one but at this point nothing has come of it.
If they don't want to do a forum, I would like to see more updates on their blog when issues arise.
Still would like to see support sign the names to support tickets so I know who is who. if the support ticket does have a name it is always imountain.com not the techs name.
I never, ever thought that I would ever have to write an 18 month review of a webhost ... but here I am. That is because, quite simply; I have never stayed with a web hosting company before for over a year, until now.
Technically my 18 month anniversary is February 5th; but since I have been quite busy with other projects; I thought I would use the bit of free time that I do have right now to post the review. So here it is.
- - - - - -
THE GOOD: iMountain is still there (obviously). Their servers remain fast; and so does the network. There was the network outage in late October 2008; and the router failure a couple a week or two ago; but other than that things have been rock solid *knock on wood*. I am lucky to be on a fast server where people rarely; if ever; bog it down.
Also, Brandon and his crew continue to keep up a mostly top notch level of support.
They have been a bit slower than in the past to respond; but I suspect that is because they are getting busier and growing. It comes with the territory, I suppose.
THE BAD: Communication (as noted above) has been a tad worse than in the past. I am not 100% sure if that is their fault or not; but I wish that it could be improved, if possible. But I do appreciate the fact that we got a nice discount off of our next bill for the major network outage that happened in October 2008.
Feel free to move this post to another place, I couldn't find a place to put webhost reviews. Been running around and am just now getting to my review of them... Its been about 9 months since I got my account at imountain.com and they've been great. I'm always updated on any scheduled downtimes, and even unexpected downtimes (crashes/hardware failure etc.). There has been only one occasion where my site went down during the middle of the day, some user foolishly created a poor SQL statement and it dropped the server. This was fixed within 2 hours and we were back online.
My site only has ~50 users so its low load, other than that one time everyone is happy with it.
Imountain.com's support staff have been more than excellent, they've answered all my questions quickly and with detail. The only downside (for me) is that since I'm not on a VPS I don't have any shell access but its understandable for security reasons so its not a big deal and it was expected on my part.
I'm a fairly technical person, work about 95% of the time in a linux desktop and server environment and am used to having shell access to our servers to do maintenance so the web maintenance was a bit different but easy to use too. All together though, great prices, great service and great support staff. I think I'll be keeping my account at imountain.com and not moving.
Didn't write a review last month cause I didn't feel the need to, but I will this month.
Main reason being because I am going on vacation from June 1st to the 5th, and my payments are due on the 5th day of the month. So I call iMountain and Brandon picked up. He was happy to inform me that it would not be a problem if I paid a day or two late so that I could get back from my vacation and get settled first without having to go "omgz I need to feed iMountain!"
Also, I have had absolutely zero downtime in the past 2 months since the mySQL server cluster RAID fault. Now that I said that, they will have downtime. (Joking) Thank god I backup nightly. Anyway, the databases are MUCH faster now since they upgraded the cluster, no complaints there.
The support staff continue to be very helpful (as always), especially the night crew.
Don't usually email / call during the day unless it's to talk to Brandon. Must be since I'm a night owl.
I have been with iMountain.com for 8 months now and I wanted to give a quick followup on my progress with them.
Personally I can't say anything bad about these guys. They are truly a top notch operation on all levels. I started my busy American Idol blog out on a shared account and moved on to their managed luxury cluster in February and all I can say is wow. They propelled my blog through the entire season of Idol with little in the way of issues. Because of there service, help and expertise I was able to sustain 700 concurrent connections when David Cook was crowned the winner of season 7.
Uptime - there have been a couple of issues over the months, both of the big ones were discussed here but all outages were handled with great professionalism. Timely emails with updates were sent out and the problems were fixed with little downtime. The latest mysql outage didn't affect me since I have a dedicated mysql server. I did have a fairly serious DDoS attack over a period of 5 days that affected downtime but I was moved to a different server when all other options failed.
Support - These guys are fabulous. They have went above the call of duty at all hours of the day and night answering all of my requests for help. Believe me there have been a lot of support tickets. Mind you 99% of these were just for help on something and not really related to a problem with my hosting account that affected service. (Stating that so people don't think there is an issue with the hosting at iMountain)
Not to mention these guys are great at helping with 3rd party products. How many other support companies will attempt to help you with an issue with your wordpress or gallery install? None that I have ever had. I give them a huge thanks for all of that.
Price - You get what you pay for. iMountain may be a little more expensive with their shared and luxury clusters than some of those oversellers out there but you are getting a great service with these guys. Searching the forums will also find you some discounts you can apply to save a little money.
There is actually so much more I could say about these guys but I think from this review and the other ones floating around the forums that you get the idea that these guys mean business.
honestly I have tried various other hosting options in the past few Idol season from shared at surpass, dedicated at surpass and whatever you call mosso but I have found my home till the day my blog is taken offline. I truly won't be able to find anyone as dedicated to me and my blog as the fellows at iMountain. They take great pride in their service and for that I am truly thankful.
link is in my signature for verification that I am hosted on iMountain.
I forgot to write a 10 month review so here is my (almost) 11 month review.
GOOD: Support continues to be as fast as ever. I received a reply to one of my tickets the other day in under a minute. Must be a record. Also, the servers continue to fly along at lightning speed, as does their internet connection.
BAD: Only downtime since my last review occurred when their mySQL cluster server borked on June 1st and crashed. Other than that, mostly everything has been doing pretty good.
RECOMMENDATION: Solar power rules. Support is fast, efficient, and friendly. The servers are mostly reliable; but the hSphere panel can be a bit cumbersome for newcomers. Overall, I give iMountain a 9.9 / 10, or an A+ rating.
Next month I will write a better review as on August 5th will be my 1 year anniversary with them (a first with any host with me! )
I needed more control over my aplications (needed SSH, eaccelerator) and I upgraded from their Solar Cluster 3 to their 512RAM emeraldVPS.
Let me tell you the setup that these guys have rules in every way.
The only thing that runs on the VPS is Apache so you might have an idea that this may perform better in some aplications than most 1GB RAM dedicated servers that also run MySQL, mail and other services ...at a fraction of the price. MySQL, mail and dns runs on their clusters. I installed zend and eaccelerator, and now my busy Romanian blog (with wpcache) runs in 82MB RAM
I'm going to move 90% of my sites there, I have lots of space and resources to grow.
According to cpuinfo I also benefit from 8 of these:
CPU model name:
Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 865
The support guys have always been fair and square to me, they answered fast to all my questions (mostly less than 10 minutes), moved my sites on the VPS and told me what's good and what's not so good about their VPS (yes, they told me without asking them about the minor "inconvenience" I may have with the VPS before I bought it). I feel they are the kind of guys you would love going to parties and drinking beer with.
I recently changed providers after a short search, including input from this thread [url].
I opted to go with a semi-dedicated package from Iron Mountain ( www.imountain.com ). I was mostly impressed with their clustered solution and dedicated mySQL servers to host our increasingly busy Vbulletin forums. They also answered email inquires very quickly; another good sign, given the few comments I could find about them at WHT.
While I was intrigued about the solar-powered claim, I knew that many in our community would appreciate that aspect as well.
Ultimately, I wasn't quite convinced our forum issues were mainly related to CPU/memory resource use. So, I narrowed my search to providers that also claimed to have a good setup for SQL. These included Cartika Hosting and MediaLayer, among others (Thank you to all who responded with input and offers!). At that point, it came down to lowest price and iMountain's offer was also in the upper end of the price range supported by recent member donations. In case I was wrong about the CPU resources, at least this would at least allow some time to save for the dedicated solution that many recommended.
As it turns out, the CPU/memory resources were not the issue at all. It seems that our forum issues at the previous provider were primarily due to their SQL implementation.
In fact, they were going to generously allow us to continue on our $50/year plan for a while given that we weren't yet hogging resources. Nonetheless, the slowdowns and SQL errors continued until the last day. In any case, I can still recommend AddAction.net for anyone looking for a competitively priced basic hosting package if you don't have major SQL requirements. It was inexpensive, but I believe I got a lot more than I paid for.
Since the switch, the forums have been running great. No slowdowns, no freezes, no infinite waits to read/make a post, no flood of SQL error email messages. Most importantly, no user complaints so far. In addition, I've been told that we aren't even putting a scratch in our resource allocations in any area and there should be plenty of room for growth that has been doubling about every 6 months for the last few years.
The transfer was quick and the switchover had minimal downtime given that the new plan included a dedicated IP address for me to direct users of the forums during the DNS propagation. There were a couple minor issues during the switch, but their tech support team responded very quickly. They also helped setup a memcache for the forums and suggested some other tweaks to further improve performance.
Overall, I am very satisfied so far. I'll report again in a couple months when I have a better feel for downtime and more time for users to comment.
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. =)
This is a brief review of my experience with VT6 over the last year.
I have little to say, because it's "just worked". I've had to call upon their helpdesk twice in the last year. In both cases the response was timely and the matter resolved in a reasonable timeframe, both were matters beyond their control.
This is my first and last review of these guys. When I first colocated my server with them, they were still known as iHosting. The price was good, the support was excellent, and it was a friendly little place. I never experienced any down time to speak of, and when I needed something changed (like a reverse DNS entry), they took care of it almost straight away.
Of course, then a big mean company bought them. In(forbusiness).(nl|be). From day one I knew things could only go downhill from there on, and I was right. Every time they touched my server in the datacentre, it went offline. Even when they didn't have any business with my particular server. On three occasions they unplugged the power cable *WITHOUT PRIOR NOTIFICATION* so I couldn't do a clean shut down which resulted in a raid array rebuild. That in itself would almost be acceptable, but each time they didn't plug it back in properly.
Then on another three occasions they've messed up my connectivity by not handling the NIC with care. It's a sensitive little thing, and even though I've pointed it out to them time and time again, they keep messing up. Usually they've been kind enough to fix these problems, which they caused relatively quickly. However, it's happened again, and this time they're refusing to fix it for free. Needless to say, I'm not paying for something they broke, and I'm cancelling my account with them ASAP. They'd better not make a fuss about giving me back my server, or I won't be a happy camper.
As if unannounced shutdowns and unplugged cables aren't bad enough, I've also been paying for an APC connection/account for almost two years now. I still haven't received any actual login data that would in fact allow me to do a remote reboot. It's not like I haven't asked them .. I asked them at least every time the server went down, and about every other month as well. Each time my mail was either ignored, or I got some vague reply.
Oh, and about this latest downtime .. they told me they'd be rearranging things in the rack today. I asked them, yet again, to be careful with my server so it wouldn't go down for like a week again. That mail was nicely ignored. After almost a day of downtime, I told them I would be cancelling my account and that they'd better get my server back up ASAP. Their only reply was that that would cost me. After they guaranteed me there would be no more than 5 minutes of downtime while rearranging the rack. Right.
The hosting world has changed a good bit in those years I've been with them. I can now get a reseller account that gives me just as much freedom for less money with more support. And face it, support is what it's all about -- and theirs blows.
I wouldn't recommend this host to anyone, not even if they paid me. Not even if they were the last host on the planet. Never again.
I have had several accounts with Powweb for 5 years now and I thought I would write a brief review of them:
BEFORE
I originally went with Powweb 5 years ago based off of a referral from a friend. At the time, the “shared hosting environment” isn’t quite what it is today. For the first several years, I experienced trouble free hosting (for the most part) and truly felt as though I was “getting what I paid for.”
Powweb, back then, was a privately owned company based out of California ( I believe) and I usually got the impression that most of their employees truly cared about their customers and the quality of service they provided. What made them semi-unique at the time, was that they offered only a “one plan solution” (they didn’t offer multiple plan types) and the simplicity of their business model worked well for most.
Powweb was also unique in that they offered community forums which were pretty “open” and it truly allowed customers to discuss problems and issues with one another. A few years ago, they transitioned from private dedicated servers to a clustered environment and that did bring along some hard time, but they got it under control eventually. Overall, I was satisfied with the service.
NOW
A year or so ago Powweb was bought-out by Endurance. If you do not know anything about Endurance, they are a very large web-hosting company which has acquired several other large shared-hosts over the past few years.
Once Powweb was purchased by Endurance, the quality in service immediately decreased. Part of what Endurance does with most of their acquisitions is to assimilate them into their fold. This was a very shaky process and nearly everyone experience a large amount of downtime.
Additionally, Powweb is now plagued by horrible MySQL issues where the service is nearly completely useless. For the past year, Powweb has been either unable or unwilling to fix these issues. It can often take several minutes for even the most basic of queries to run. Any dynamic type of an application: forums, blogs, CMS, are usually rendered completely useless.
To make matters worse, Powweb continues to aggressively advertise these resource heavy applications and then ask for patience as they attempt to get their issues fixed. It has been about a year now, and still it is not resolved. Much of these issues come from the extreme overselling that Powweb does. Nearly every day, all websites (even static ones) come to a complete crawl.
Calling customer support is also a waste of your time. 95% of the time, you are met by a rude person who simply tells you “well, it seems to work for me” or that “we are aware of the problem” (at best). Opening support tickets is also usually not helpful. Tickets are often closed without any contact with the customer and it is very common for them to “give you the run-around.”
I have been told by support several times to keep an eye on the forums for updates on issues and whatnot. Then, if you go to the forums and attempt to get any information from there, you are told that ‘these are only user-helping user forums’ and that you can’t get any official help there, though customer support told you to go to that very place. Additionally, Powweb’s staff practices extreme censorship of the forum and it is common for negative remarks to be removed or posts completely deleted, many times without any acknowledgement of the act.
In addition to the MySQL issues, Powweb also experiences frequent “lock-ups,” CGI issues, email issues, dns issues, and so on and so forth. The list of problems that has occurred over the past year is literally too long to remember.
In conclusion, the Powweb of new is nothing like the Powweb of old. This new Powweb is controlled by an over-selling giant (Endurance) that is only concerned with the number of accounts as apposed to the quality of service. While certainly any business related site should not be in such an environment at all, I would even suggest that people looking for a host for hobby related purposes stay clear of powweb – it’s that bad.
One year has gone by since we bought our hosting plan at HostMySite (HMS) and I thought I'd post another review. You can read my previous review here (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=659594)
The Short Of It We have 2 IIS Coldfusion VPS (CF VPS+ plan). The first one we had was originally just a CF VPS (for developing) but we later changed it over to a CF VPS+ (more ram, more space, etc). This VPS is 1 year and 1 month old. Our production VPS which currently hosts our website is a healthy 1 year old. The reliability has been great and we never had any speed or performance issues.
We are very happy at HMS. We have had very little issues with the our VPSes and those issues are usually resolved very quickly. Anytime we needed support, it was overall always quick and helpful. We recommend HMS to anyone who needs a Windows VPS.
Security and Friends The SSL certificate we purchased from our previous host expired so we bought a new one via HMS. At first the order we placed was apparently processed by them but wasn't sent to the issuer for processing. We didn't find out until we sent a ticket in wondering about the status. They immediately processed it for us. Except for the fact that they processed it for 1 year when we bought it for 3. So another ticket flew across the internet and flew back to us just as quickly resolving the problem.
They asked if they wanted them to install it and we emphatically said yes. They installed the certificate and we were set. Or so we thought. We began having issues with our merchant account not being able to verify our SSL certificate. They forgot to add in the intermediate certificate so that third party processors can see verify it's legitimacy. This was resolved very quickly (faster than we expected) and we have not had issues with it since.
The One Thing The only thing we'd like to mention was an incident that occurred several months ago. One day, out of the apparently gray clouds, for some reason our site could not be connected to. After shaking our fists futilely at the weather gods, we sat down and tried to figure out what was wrong. By doing the basic diagnostics to make sure it wasn't us or our ISP we cursed the Lunar Goddess and contacted HMS to see what was up. They fixed it but didn't tell us what the issue was. Apologies in the form of cup cakes to the Moon was issued.
The next day, the same problem occurred or at least we thought and was told it was the same problem. We could not access our site. This time we did both live chat and started a ticket (for documentation, last time we just called). In the live chat they stated it was an issue with the node and not specific to our VPS and they were working on it. They said it was the same issue as yesterday.
This is where it starts getting dicey.
They also responded via the ticket that the firewall was blocking the ports and not the same issue as yesterday. Now considering only one person has access to the VPS (via RDC) to make changes and he did not log in to make any changes to the firewall (why would we?) that explanation didn't even seem plausible. And the ports blocked (pretty much everything except FTP) didn't make any sense. We went back and forth, with me explaining that after several months of not touching the firewall after setup, why would we inexplicable block ourselves out? Why would we even touch the firewall? Also that it can't be a coincidence with the node issues yesterday and they had already stated it was the same issue.
After a bit of going back and forth, they finally came to the conclusion that the patch they applied to fix the node issue made changes to the firewall which caused the subsequent issue. While this explanation didn't exactly seem completely kosher, we weren't going waste more time asking for a better explanation.
Now given that the total "downtime" of both issues was about 5 hours we thought we'd see how much of a resistance they will put up for the uptime guarantee. The first issue we pretty much knew wasn't going to get any attention because according to their TOS, they will only refund for time it was down when you posted a support ticket. Since we did this over the phone, there was no documentation to speak of when it went down and when it got fixed.
As for the second issue (which did have a ticket) they stated that since the VPS was technically up, the uptime guarantee did not apply even if the problem was caused by them (they didn't specifically say that but it was implied). While we didn't expect anything from it and didn't bother to pursue it, that response raised some eyebrows. While within their rights, it did seem a bit "whoa". They did apologize and were very polite and respectful. It was pretty much what we expected in terms of responses.
The Train Ride While the above issue may seem bad, it was a one-time event. These things can happen. We haven't had any uptime, access or server issues since that problem. Support is quick and helpful.
The site has been running fine for months with no downtime.
We are overall very happy with HMS and would recommend them to anyone who needs a Windows VPS.
I will try to share my experience with all of you regarding the company I rent my dedicated servers - Netdirekt.
I found out about them over an year ago when I needed to move to dedicated server. I decided to give them a try, since I was new in this area and since I am perfectionist in this job (making backup of backups of backups)I thought I don't have what to loose if they disappoint me. At least not much.
So over an year ago, I ordered my first server with them. It was Core2Duo server with 4GB of RAM, with a nice price. By the way, when I saw their 1996 website and their pricing, I was getting ready to get disappointed)
I didn't need much help in the beginning, the hardware and network were (are) top notch. Some months later, 4 if I remember correctly, I expanded my business and ordered a second server with them. So, I am really satisfied with their service.
Couple of experiences I got with them that I would like to share with you.
Once, the hard drive of one of my servers started fiving SMART errors so it needed to be changed. It was Sunday, 1AM, so I didn't expect much and it was the secondary (backup) drive so it wasn't THAT urgent to me. Anyway, I dropped them an e-mail requesting drive change. 15 minutes (yup, 15 minutes, Sunday, 1AM) later I got an e-mail back, their representative asking me am I ready for the hard drive replacement. I replied yes. I told him i shut off the server. 10 minutes later my server was back online, with new drive in it.
Later on, once they had 2 hours network outage and another time 1 hour power outage I think, that is in an year. My servers are checked by Pingdom so I believe their uptime.
Then I left them alone for some months, didn't bother them since I had no issues at all, until 2 weeks ago when I got my third server with them. I believe I have been the most boring client ever to them. 10 times maybe I asked IP transfer from one server to another, and they did that very fast and without making me feel uncomfortable by asking that from them over and over again.
So overall, I am very satisfied with their service. They don't do much (hardware and network only, no management), but I think they are perfect in what they do. Keep up the great work netdirekt, and you will keep me with you forever.
We've been a customer of Steadfast for a little over a year with a VPS plan. We had been using a dedicated server from another provider and we were looking to cut costs a bit since the server was very underutilized.
After researching here, we originally signed up on a low-end VPS plan and set up monitoring. Our goal was to monitor the server and service for a couple/few months prior to moving any services over to it; just to make sure the company and VPS would meet our needs.
After a several months of monitoring the server closely we decided to migrate from our ded server to the VPS at Steadfast. We haven't looked back since.
Our criteria for VPS at the time were:
1) Had to run Debian.
2) Reliability of service/provider.
--Uptime of the server itself
--Network reliability
--Redundancy
3) Customer support responsiveness.
4) Price.
Steadfast has exceeded our expectations in all areas. First off finding a host that supports Debian is not as easy as it should be.
(Note to VPS providers: This is a deal-breaker for us. If we can't use Debian then there's much less chance of us signing up for your services.)
Off the soapbox and back to Steadfast: The VPS is quick - with no I/O lag at all. It feels like a dedicated server. The service itself has been reliable and the network has also been responsive. (We monitor our servers from two separate geographical locations).
Further, we've opened more tickets than a 'normal' customer probably would, mostly just to find out what our options are for growth, backups, etc. The team (Karl and others) at Steadfast are very helpful. I don't have any specific recollection of opening a true tech support ticket but I'm sure I have. The fact that it doesn't stand out as remarkable indicates that it was answered quickly and with a personalized (non-generic) response.
We've grown since we started using the VPS and the upgrade process has been painless and quick. Maybe this is true of all VPS providers since all they need to do is allocate more resources, but either way, it's been painless and quick for us at Steadfast.
I have been with futurehosting since October 2007 and have had my ups and downs. see my history below:
October 2007: Signed up for both a vps in chicago and one in dallas datacenter. I used my chicago server for my primary hosting and my dallas server is used only for DNS failover for 2 websites. I am a small town host that hosts locally only so we have around 15 clients. Everything was working ok, but the chicago server just always seemed slow, ocasional load spikes throughout the day hitting the 5 or 6’s. So finally in May 2009 I posted on WHT to seek some help for why loads were so high and we came to the conclusion in that thread that it must be an overloaded server. So I shot off a ticket to futurehosting to move me to a different node and they did without any problems. Loads seemed to go way down after the move and my server was zippy fast again.
August 2009: My chicago server has been getting progressivly slower throughout the last 3 months and we are back to load spikes again. I finally give up with the load issue and just assume it is my problem.
September 11, 2009: Now I run into a problem with php handeling sessions and ask for help from futurehosting and have a problem with them lying to me. You can see the thread here. Jim at futurehosting is aware of this and apologized deeply. And they reprimanded the admin working on my case.
September 21, 2009: I migrated my chicago server to Wiredtree and still have my dallas server as my backup with futurehosting. Since moving to Wiredtree, all of my load issues have gone away and load sits around 0.25 average.
Please note that in all these cases I have opened tickets with futurehosting and worked with them through the problems.
Now, after I got my history out of the way, here is my review:
Value: 10/10
futurehosting is one of the best values around especially now with their 40% off for life and more ram. I, as an existing customer even submitted a ticket complaining how new customers get this and we as exhisting don’t and they gave me the discount.
Support: 7/10
I think the support of futurehosting is a little below of top tier. When you submit a ticket with futurehosting after 15 min you get a reply stating “we’re working on it”. Then sometimes after 30 min you get a reply “we’re escelating this to sysadmins”. And finally after 45 min the problem is fixed. Now keep in mind this is just one instance, but almos all receive a first ticket stating “we’re working on it” and then 15 min later it’s fixed. Now, I really don’t have much to compare to here other than wiredtree, and when you submit a ticket to them, 15 min later you get a response “fixed”. Now about the server admin lying directly to me when he couldn’t fix the problem. I realise this is a rare isolated instance, but still put a sour taste in my mouth.
Server Performance: 5/10
Performance was good at times bad at times and overall seemed slow at futurehosting. I think, but not sure that maybe they are overloading their servers…
Server Uptime: 10/10
Server was always up, and I mean always. Only around once or twice in two years was there a problem with DDOS on another server that caused routing problems in the datacenter to cause my server to be unreachable.
I hav enever had any problems with my server in dallas and it is always fast and zippy and never down. I have also never really submitted a ticket on my server in dallas because it is used so infrequently. We, however are leaving futurehosting and will be in process of moving our dallas server away from them soon.
Well, there you have it, my review of futurehosting after two years.
I've recently had some issues with a script I wrote and I contacted support about it. Three techs assisted me with it, but could not resolve it. I later found the problem was with my outputting text when there should be no output at all. I closed the ticket and thanked the techs for their work.
This is just one of the many examples I have of how they are willing to work with the customer, even if it is not their fault. They will do what it takes to keep the customer happy, except fixing the customers' code. Jedito and his team really strive at providing superb support for their customers.
I have a few domains hosted with them and also have pointed others to their services. I currently use two of their servers, one is production and the other is staging. They are quick to get services setup and ready to go, as well as providing quick support through their ticket system. Their live chat doesn't always reach people (when it says it is online), but they respond to tickets within a few hours, sometimes within a few minutes.
I have the Silver plan with them, and I think they recently changed the amount of disk space available from 7GB to 14GB because that's what I now have available. I did not know they were planning that, but it was a pleasant surprise when I logged in to cPanel.
I can't think of any problems I have had with Downtownhost in these two years of experience with them, though I have had problems with my scripts and code. If they make a mistake, they admit it and are quick to fix it. I might have had a little bit of downtime over a year ago, but I think the server went down briefly. The uptime has been superb and the services have been wonderful.
To anyone who is in search of a good web host, Downtownhost is the way to go for shared hosting. I have not tried their other services (well, I am using blogging on the staging server), so I do not know what they are like. I have been with my share of web hosts and I have not found one that is better than Downtownhost.
I have now been with PrecisionEffect.com for two years and have just paid for year number three. I have to say I have been very happy with the quality and service I have received. For my site I currently need over 7GB of storage space plus over 60GB of bandwidth a month. For me, the few extra dollars a month that I pay for a top quality host are well worth it. It is critical that the site loads quickly and has hardly any down time. I am currently using their failover-enabled server. From what I can tell my site has only been down a total of about an hour over the past two years. I don’t think you can beat that anywhere. I have never had that kind of uptime with any other host.
In the past I have been with web hosts that have put me on servers with 500 or more other hosted domains. PrecisionEffect.com currently has me on a server with only 200 domains (5 of which are mine). I believe not pushing their equipment to the max has been the main reason for the really good uptime.
If I ever do need support, Dave or Steve Garbus (both run PrecisionEffect.com) respond within minutes. Being a smaller size host, they know me and my site and are able to help me quickly. They are also able to help me customize the service I receive on the fly (Adding storage, domains, bandwidth to the plan).
I recommend PrecisionEffect.com to anyone looking for a long term top quality host with fast loading webpages (see their LiteSpeed plans) and excellent support. The couple of dollars extra you will pay for the service will be well worth it and save you in the long run.
I have been a WiredTree customer for about one year and I am very happy with their services. One of the top VPS providers available on the world, WiredTree runs its servers in its own datacenter and it is the real peace in mind company. On January 15th 2008 I've started a VPS 512 in WiredTree using a a WHT promo offer and encountered not only one problem with billing, hardware, software, support! I'm running 16 monster websites of my selected customers on this VPS under cPanel optimized for VPS release 4-R32603 - WHM 11.24.2 - X 3.9. OS: CENTOS 4.7 i686 on Virtuozzo. I've recently rebooted my VPS by command line (SSH) due a new app install exigence and this task was performed in few seconds without only one problem with cPanel!
I'm here to tell you my experience with steadcom.com shared hosting service. I have been them since 29 April 08 so thats not really 1 year but will be like in 2 weeks.
Speed - First I tell you the speed of my website, it's open fast (really fast for me actually)
Downtime - there is a couple of downtime and hardware/cpanel/diskspace error that make me can't use my website but not like every month and sometimes downtime is like 2-3 hours I can't open my website :/ and sometimes only when I open ticket they will check it and resolve my problem. Thats is not good enuf for me :/
Support - support is decent thats mean sometimes good (maybe when they online?) and sometimes is not. Sometimes support will answer my ticket after 2 -5 hours. :/ this guy Andrew neill is really a good support tech (very good I must say). I think he has work there since last year and other staff I know is Dimitri (CEO) and Grotman (sales?)
Price - This is the best part. They can be flexible If I use all my bandwidth they allow me to upgrade and when I don't need extra bandwidth they allow me to downgrade. Sometimes I pay $11 or $20 a/month depends on my bandwidth
So overall I rate them: Speed: 10/10 Downtime/Other error: 2/10 Support: 7/10 Price: 10/10
The sad part is starting next month I need to find a new host because this host don't work for me anymore because third party problem, otherwise this host is superb and I will still be with them.
I've been with Downtownhost for a little more than a year now, and figured I would share my experiences with others.
When I first signed up with Downtownhost, everything was great. Transferring my sites went super smooth: my server was very fast and support was amazing (got replies in under a minute!). Unfortunately, as time has gone on, I've seen a dramatic drop in server stability and support.
My first major issue with Downtownhost happened in March of this year, when my server was constantly being brought offline with DDoS attacks. I requested that they switch me to a different server, hopefully with less DDoS attacks. Downtownhost gave me a date and time when they would switch my account to a new server. That day and time went, with no word from anyone at Downtownhost. I sent an email to Downtownhost asking if my account had been moved, but apparently they had forgotten to switch me. Jorge was very quick to switch me once I asked to be moved again.
Everything was smooth on the new server until April, when it went down for periods of at least 6 hours or more on several different occasions (at least 3). These extremely long periods of downtime were very angering.
Everything has been fairly stable up until these last few weeks. I recently registered a new domain and went to add it to my cPanel account as an addon domain. Something screwed up within cPanel, so I was unable to add my new domain to cPanel. This issue took over 5 hours to even get a response from Downtownhost (which used to be very unusual). Eventually, the issue was resolved.
Now, my server is timing out several times per day, and my email has now stopped working.
On top of the increasingly longer support response times, nobody *ever* answers me on their live support feature, which is a big downside for me. I'm not sure what has caused this dramatic drop in quality from Downtownhost, but it's not looking like I will be renewing my contract with them
I must have raised around 60 to 70 tickets with them in last 1 year. 90% of the tickets the response time is less than 3 minutes. Sometimes they take around 5 minutes to reply.
But definitely i get back replies in less than 5 minutes all tickets new and pending.
It feels like they have a huge team which is always online waiting for tickets.
Recently i had problems in server on 31st December night 11pm Indian Time. I sent a ticket surprisingly their ticket reply came back in 2 minutes and again in next 3 minutes the second reply came that the server is again up.
Last week they helped me with one server which had few problems. They reinstalled the server for me and also transfered the accounts and checked each website. One of the website had issues de to mysqli extension not installed. They did it too and completed the entire job very professionally.
They also configured one of the servers for application hosting. The server surely has become 2x faster after Eurovps tuning work on the vps. They also called me on mobile to inform me.
I surely recommend eurovps for someone searching for premium and reliable hosting. one word of caution dont use bad language with them. The people manning the support team are no nonsense people and will not accept rude language. If you are good with them they will also be good with you.
If others also happy with eurovps support then please feel free to post it here.
All in all their servers are pretty fast due to quality hardware and support also very fast .. complete peace of mind for me with eurovps.
I've been meaning to post a review here cause I used this forum to choose my host over 2 years ago.
I had never paid for a host before and never ventured into doing much for a website but wanted a small personal low maintenance e-comm website. I wanted a low cost host most of all since I didn't think I'd get a big flood of customers, dotable worked pretty well for the first year or so. My only complaints with them were,
their abrasive renewal letters, it was like as soon as you got a notice to renew, you had 24 hours to do it. I'm a noob so I felt it was rude but whatever.
I also found the staff didn't seem to understand what I wanted when I submitted a ticket (all of twice a year) consisting of asking them where the virus scanner had gone. I used to have one and then it disappeared. It took 3 tickets and 1 year for Aussie Bob to understand that, I found it very frustrating.
I over all was happy, little downtime, only problem popping up occasionally was expired ssl but now that the company has changed over to new people I was determined to not mind. I didn't want to deal with a change since my website is nice and settled but in the last week I have submitted my first and now 2nd 911 tickets which took a good 12 HOURS to get a reply! I am not the type to use 911 tickets anyhow, I suspect others do so it's a big deal when I click the 911 button. This week I have submitted more overall tickets then I have in the rest of the 2 years I have been with them D: My website has never been so high maintenance! It's not only frustrating but as many of you know it makes you look BAD and you do loose business over it.
The customer service is the type that offers no information, it's like talking to someone where you ask "so did you like this movie" and they answer "yep...." you have to keep prompting the information or you will not get it at all. It is extremely frustrating. They also tend to answer only 1 problem per email.
I really wanted to keep on with dotable but after a long strength I will be looking for another host very soon.
I didn't love Aussie Bob but now I sure do miss him too bad.
Now I am off to research for a reliable host with low cost service for a low maintenance gal and her tiny osc website.
I'm not sure if I ever posted a staminus review before. I know I always meant to but anyway, here is my 3+ year review of staminus.net.
Prelude I started my hosting company in Aug 2005. It first started with a site I had that got pretty popular and I needed to get a dedicated server cause I was getting kicked off shared hosts and the ones I didn't get kicked off of were fly by night ops that quickly folded. So I get the box and all and start learning about linux and everything else. My first server was at rackmounted.com - a truly great bunch of people that helped me in every way and never lost patience with me. I will never forget the guys there.
The first few months I had enough site donations to pay for the server but I eventually spent more time experimenting and learning my linux desktop and server that I didn't update the site much no more. Then the donations came to an end. Then I started selling hosting under felosi-inc.net domain. I ended up getting enough clients to pay for the server and then some. By that time I was spending all my time on hosting related things that I pretty much abandoned the site. Now I was hosting full time.
I quickly found out that it was very hard to compete with regular hosters. The people I knew and myself always was having problems with ddos so I decided to specialize in ddos protected hosting. At first it worked out but eventually I had to leave rackmounted because they didn't have ddos protection. This is where my journey for a good network began.
The Journey for a Good Network The first ddos protected network I tried was sharktech, I was there around 5 months. The network outages, not so nice support staff, lack of any ddos stats and null routes instead of filtering made me leave there. Had I stayed I would have went out of business.
My second ddos protected network was awknet. Justin is good guy and all but he is the only one. I could never get no definite answer on how much he would filter for how long from him. It also seemed he had to manually add filters and such, the server stayed down until I could get ahold of him. There was a few fairly long network outages, one lasting 2-3 days if I'm not mistaken. After that and some other issues I decided to try another.
My third ddos protected network was gigeservers. I found out the first day it would not work as there was 80 mbits incoming syn to the server making it unresponsive. When asked they said they just rate limit the attack not filter it all and would not do anything to help me. So I left that server within a week.
My fourth ddos protected network was softlayer. This really didn't work out. Their sales people told me "oh yeah, ddos protection, cisco guard, ya ya" but I came to find out at that time they had to manually add the ips to the cisco guard and would only filter it for 24 hours. After a month or two of doing this I experienced downtime each time until the ip was added and I also had to haggle with their techs to get them to even add it. I asked to speak to a manager once and he told me their network was not for frequent ddos and if I continued as I was doing they would have to let me go.
My fifth ddos protected network was justedge which was no protection at all. Everything came through, he did refund me though and told me that he gave me the login for some firewall at first to mitigate the attacks. He never gave me any information for any firewall.
Home at Last I had dealt with staminus before as I had a friend who I helped manage his server there. At that time I didn't think staminus was any good as this was the time those low bandwidth dc++ syn attacks were prevalent and I got creamed. I actually went in IRC and argued with Matt for a while over this. Eventually I found out that the attacks that was creaming the server were only around 5-10 mbits, but they was still a b**ch to mess with.
I got a server at staminus, moved all my clients over there. When I seen their custom firewall and attack alerts I knew this was what I needed. Also another great feature of staminus is that any huge attack will be auto null routed instead of consuming the server. Every place I went to before I had the server consumed many times, At staminus this has never happened to this day!
And finally the loyal clients who had stuck with me through the journey was happy and I started to get more clients. There has been a few network outages but nothing worth leaving for. The protection is also the absolute best you can get for the money. The secureport protection is amazing as well at a fraction of the cost of other specialist services.
At first I thought since staminus was only Matt I would have pretty much the same situation as awknet where I had to wait until he came on, but Matt is truly a 24/7 on call person and now he has John there to help him - another great guy. But in reality you rarely ever have to contact support as everything on their end is usually good. Their support is great, fast and they have never lost patience with me. I cant put a number on the times I have put in emergency tickets saying the hardware is bad only for it to be something on my end
I just cant say enough good things about staminus, had it not been for me finally settling down at staminus I don't think I would have the business I have today. For ddos protected networks there is no better then staminus hands down.
Now my entire high risk operation is hosted at staminus and I don't plan on leaving ever. Thanks Matt for the awesome service, support and not losing patience with me, you are the best.
Very hard to believe that it has been 4.5 (Ordered our first server in January of 2004) years since I first turned up services with The Planet (ServerMatrix at the time) and still have equipment with them to this day.
Here's my quick breakdown....Support - Looking back at our ticket history, we've never opened a ton of tickets. When we needed assistance, they were always quick to assist us and provided prompt resolutions.
Network - Their network is top notch and I've yet to find another provider that's even close to The Planet. We still have some equipment that is on their legacy unmetered Cogent product (now on their premium network, since they dont have Cogent any longer) and we continuously are able to pull the 20m and normally, much much more. Their network has always been top notch.
Hardware - I've acknowledged over the years that The Planet, historically, had issues with replacing failed drives and reloading OS's in a timely fashion. We never experienced that, ever... nor have I seen a complaint about that in quite some time.
We've experienced a single hardware failure with The Planet and the failed item was replaced quickly and at a time we dictated, which was great.
Overall - Fantastic. One of things I've really come to love about The Planet is the dedication to their customer. To this day, I still get a phone call at the office, at the house and on my cell whenever anything goes haywire on one of my servers. I can't count on them to have my back when I'm not watching and I've come to rely on them to respond to and resolve issues before I am aware of them.
Although we have diversified where we place our hardware, we'll continue to partner with The Planet and continue to enjoy the excellent service we've become accustomed to.
