i know i put up a review a few months back about Volumedrive but i thought id put up antoher since ive now been with them longer and got more servers with them.
firstly i have 3 servers with volumedrive at the moment (may be 2 shortly undecided yet if i need the third.)
one is a celeron with 1gb ram and 120gb hd running windows 2003 basicly all its doing is streaming media.
second ones a very special deal i managed to get for a amd athlon x2 4200+ with 120gb disk, 2gb ram and ffew other bits and peices, using that for my main website and couple of vpses
third is a new one ive only had about a month, its a amd athlon 64 3400+ 1gb ram runing plesk using it for hosting some of my clients sites (moved from managemyservices whoes support is totally useless and very very cocky/offensive in my opinion - i highly do not recommend them)
all in all baring a few minor netowrk hiccups (burst provide VDs network loop so their is soem small downtimes) ive had no major isues at all and josh and team have gone above and beyond multiple times to help out - my newest server they managed to get turned around and setup in under 48hours as i needed it urgently.
i highly recommend VD and also feel free to email them as they are always willing to try and cut a deal
did not want to mix up my 2 reviews so posting separately for www.Volumedrive.com.
Being their client for about a month or more, using their services for my separate proxy hosting server.
Let me do the rating :
Support: 9/10 (dunno what happened but one of the reboot requests took some time, email issues, or some other isp issue)
Friendliness: 10/10 (Josh seems good enough guy and can handle some my demanding nature i think )
Hardware: 9/10 (well a week or 2 new server lost its Power Supply, so deducted 1, but hoping no other hardware failures occur, was replaced in 30 mins or so if i recall correctly and it was on weekend).
Network: 10/10 (so far no problems got some special setup with josh about bandwidth usage and port speeds, no network outages i noticed so far).
Ok after that some comments:
They can improve on maybe confirming what can be offered/ feasible for new server, beforehand . Example, i thought i would get a Hardware Firewall Protection as offered by Josh in initial pre-sale questions, but later i found out that due to Direct Admin that would not be possible, i am sure even in pre-sale discussion was mostly about getting DA. What would have pleased me was to cover it up they could have upgrade DA to Cpanel and tried to get the protection as promised at no extra cost. But i suppose that would have meant no profit and losses for them, so i did not pursue them regarding the same.
Oh one more thing , if only they had a price list for special servers or something on website that would have been great, if VD folks need help i can create a page or something for them, for different servers, after all i am by profession now a webmaster/designer/coder etc etc..
But don't let that alone dilute/corrupt your mind about VD, if they were bad trust me i would be the first one to let everyone know. Cause all good deeds bunny never forgets, and those who hurt bunny can never get away with it....
Over the last 5ish years we have had servers with ServerBeach, The Planet, Layeredtech, and now VolumeDrive. Over the years each has had its share of ups and downs but now almost all of our servers are with VD. First before I start let me say this, Josh and Jeff are two of the best guys that I have ever had the pleasure of doing business with. Each of them know when they get out here I owe them a beer and steak dinner on the strip.
Ordering. 7/10
This is one area that sometimes is a little out there, there website does not work at all for ordering or at least not when I tried last. However ordering is simple, send an email to info and say order this. Get back an email saying OK. Pretty simple. The only problem is pricing, sometimes it takes Josh a few days to get a price for the server, or a bill just shows up and I am like, ok well cool.
Server Pricing. 10/10
This has to be one area where VolumeDrive shines. The prices they offer are almost unbelievable but hey it is there business model not mine. I can vouch anytime anyplace that these servers are 10Mbit unmetered servers. I have had 5 download servers, currently 3 that almost run 10Mbit 24/7. Each servers avg monthly bandwidth usage is around 2500 GB’s +-300ish GB’s and I have never once gotten a bill or even a letter of “dude your sucking down all the bandwidth” nothing; and even better yet I get these download boxes for all of $50/month. I won’t even hint at the great prices I have for Dual processors Quad Core Xeons with 8GB’s RAID1 10k Drives with cPanel.
Old Network. 8/10
First off we all know about the XO/BurstNet turn on that well didn’t so I am not going to beat that horse anymore. The old network was to me “ok” nothing special, and nothing really bad either. I will say that there is less of a “snappiness” in server responses it always seemed to take an extra second for the pages to load or more so the server to respond to a request. At one time I had all 5 download servers on the old network and they all were pulling the bandwidth like it was water, and are shared servers were humming along. I was always able to pull 10Mbit when needed.
New Network. 8/10
The new network to me I have not seen that much difference in performance. I have 2 download servers on the new network and oddly enough the bandwidth usage has decreased and instead a solid green graph via mrtg, I have spikes and dips all over the place. The shared servers on the new network do see to answer faster, and feel much more zippy or snappy. Still able to get all the bandwidth and speeds they offer so no complaint there.
Support. 9/10
I personally don’t think Josh or Jeff sleep, have wives/girlfriends/kids/lives. J They must live and breathe at their DC’s as no matter when I send an support email in, it gets answered in like 5 – 15 minutes even at 11 my time PST and there in EST. I feel that for an unmanaged server provider these guys are amazing, I have asked them to do things that I even offer to pay them, and they do for free. I have had to have 2 servers reloaded, and both times the servers were offline in 15 minutes, the current hard drives, slaved and a new drive placed in the box. Allowing me to move anything and everything from the old hard drive. Now I have to put out a few negative items as well. Sometimes they just don’t know and we kick ideas back and forth, which is not a problem at all but it does show that they are humans and we can’t expect perfection. J I also have an open support ticket with then about inbound speeds for a week that is unresolved, but continued updates, so can’t yell about it at all. Reboots I almost forgot take anywhere between 2 – 15 minutes and the boxes are back online.
Server Delivery. 4/10
This is the one area of VolumeDrive that really needs worked on, and worked on badly. Of the 13 servers I have had 10 currently; I don’t think any of them have been online in less than 72 hours. My servers have been online from 4 – 14 days. If you need a server now, I am sorry Josh and Jeff, VolumeDrive is not the company you need. However email them first as I do know that they get shipments in all the time. Now another problem that I have had is they don’t always get the servers right. Twice now I have ordered boxes that have been delivered without cPanel installed. Minor oversight that I did not freak out and scream, but annoying nonetheless, my last box was well just off by a lot, enough that I did send a not so polite note demanding it is fixed. To which I will admit Jeff had it corrected/upgrade/formatted in about 20 minutes. Now to their defense I have 2 Dual Processor Quad Core Xeons with 8GB and RAID 1, which were online in about a week and setup perfectly. So my two most complex setups were perfect, but some of my basic boxes borked... Go figure.
Server Upgrades. 7/10
I have had a few servers upgrade with new parts, this process is pretty painless I send off an email saying I need such and such for server so and so, and its ordered no questions. That is where the lack of pain stops; from then on it is for us a bit of pain, as several times now I have had to check after a week of no upgrade if the parts were ordered. Then reschedule upgrade times with our customers, this is to say the least an embarrassment a few times as we are left with cake on our faces. Now a huge plus there upgrades are very inexpensive and I have yet to be charged for the upgrade itself.
Billing. 8/10
This two is an area that I personally think needs worked on as they only except PayPal which is not bad, but most of us have our credit/debt cards for a reason. Now a huge plus for at least us, is that every server that has been order is just that; ordered, setup, and online, then a bill is sent. I have never had to prepay for a server, ever. Same with all the upgrades. Now I know that Josh strives for customer service and support first, but sometimes are bills are behind, at least before the PayPal subscripts get setup. Last week I paid out about $600 in past bills because things were behind. Which is not a problem, but from a books point of view in two weeks the bills are coming out again. Again another point where VolumeDrive shines is during this billing mix up which some of it was our fault I am sure, I asked that someone call me because at $50 for some of these servers $600 is a few odd bills, to discuss this. No less than 3 minutes after that email was sent my phone rang, and it was Josh ready with details to go over everything, and after the phone call I received a detailed email of the conversation.
Overall. 7.6/10
Overall I am very happy with VolumeDrive, yes there has been some extended times on delivery that has made us look stupid but once online the services are strong and they just work. I can and will continue to use VolumeDrive for some time to come, the only reason we have another provider is for our higher bandwidth needs and dedicated 20 – 100 Mbit ports. Their prices are simply amazing, and once everything is online and working their service is awesome. Again I am a very happy customer and will continue to be a happy customer for the foreseeable future.
Tailor Made Servers - TMS - 1 Year and 8 Month Review - Highly Recommended!
Here's my long overdue review for Tailor Made Servers [url] and I'd like to urge everyone looking for a high quality unmanaged provider to take a few minutes to read this. I'm terrible at writing long posts, so I apologize if this review is a bit all over the place - it's just so hard to contain my excitement!
Technical Support [10/10]: First things first, TMS are an unmanaged provider so don't expect any hand holding if you run into some obscure software or operating system problems. That's not to say TMS wouldn't help you, I'm sure they would to some extent, but it should never be expected from an unmanaged provider.
We have a total of 57 tickets recorded with TMS since April of 2007. Ten of those tickets were high priority requests to either manually reboot a server or check the console. Three of those high priority tickets were false alarms, but the other seven tickets were all answered within a few minutes at the very most.
When I say the tickets were answered, I don't mean a canned reply of "We're looking into it!" then an hour later someone decides to start working on it and then another hour later it's finally resolved. If you submit a high priority ticket, it's given immediate attention and resolved as fast as humanly possible.
Manual reboots take on average 10 minutes, some have been performed in a couple of minutes while the longest we ever had to wait was about 15 minutes which is what they advertise. There have only been a couple of hardware issues, a failing NIC was recently replaced in under 15 minutes, a server died last month and a chassis swap was done in under 3 hours. Hard to find any faults here - the technical support
Its been a long time since I have been there with VolumeDrive and I think they do deserve a review here.
I started off with volumedrive in November with 1 server and the very next month got another one.
Their uptime has been amazing. I have rather enjoyed their really good uptime. Their prices are really cheap as compared to others but the services offered are really great.
Jeff and Josh make an amazing team and help you out all the time even tho their servers are unmanaged ones. They have great connectivity but the only problem is the BurstNET network they are on. I have had a few problems with BurstNET and that is the reason I am shifting out of VolumeDrive.
They are soon going to be moving to their own datacenter and services (I hope) would only improve then.
This is My Review for VD Server Service..its short because i had the Service only for Month..
In Short Words, it was Very Good Expirence, I had little Truble to Get the DNS to Work, I had Few times Down For Problem with the DA Panel.. But The Service Is Great and the Support is Quick and Helpful. Too Bad i had to Cancel Because i wanted to Gain More Expirence to how Run Server, so i decided to install Linux and Learn it befor Run a Server..But Sure when i come Back i well Sign up again with VD, The Price Very Good and The Server and Support very Good too. so why Not ..
I thought I could share my opinion on VolumeDrive after being with them for a few months. I always appreciated when I could find in-depth reviews from hosting companies when I was looking for one so I hope some peope will find this review useful.
First of all, here my plan with them:
Quote:
AMD Athlon64 3200+ 1 GB DDR2 Ram 120 GB SATA Hard Drive 3000 GB of bandwidth on 100MB port 2 IP addresses Ubuntu Server 8.04 Linux
This package costs me $49.95 per month.
It all started when I contacted them to have more information on their services and what they have to offer. They replied very quickly and sent me a document detailing every offer they have and how their plans work. It's a shame that all that information wasn't available on their website, they proposed roughly 3 different dedicated solutions on their order form when you can actually choose a bunch of other options. Anyway, I asked a few other questions (like if they could install Ubuntu even if it wasn't listed in the available OS, and they had no problem in doing this). Again, they replied quickly. I made my choice and as I made my first payment, my server was online 24 hours later, as stated in their e-mail.
Communication with Volumedrive's staff is always great, I've had an issue one time where my internet connection was realllllly slow. I e-mailed them and it took a few minutes before I received an answer to my e-mail with someone trying to find what was wrong. We exchanged a few e-mails trying to find what was the issue and the issue got resolved in no time. Aside from this problem, I've never had any network or hardware issue (still have a fresh new server though)
I also personnaly think that their prices are far superior to what other companies offer. Their plans are flexible and if I want a hardware upgrade for example I know I can just contact them and we'll work out the details.
The only downsides I can give them is that their website is missing a lot of information. When you are looking for a server you may not want to spend time contacting each company by e-mail to ask question and have more information, you rely on the website to give you a lot of details. Also, their invoice system is not so great. You receive an e-mail saying you need to pay them and they only accept paypal. When your payment is done, you don't receive any confirmation e-mail. It's not bothering me much for a 50$ server, but I'd want a more conventional billing system with automatic renewal if I had a big business going on with them.
All in all, I really like volumedrive! I'd recommend it for everybody looking for a low cost dedicated server, they're fast, professional and helpful. You just need to send them an e-mail to get the plan that works for you so tow thumbs up for Volumedrive!
I've been with Volumedrive for approximately a year and I have mostly a great experience with them. I currently have 1 server with them which is being used to mirror some patches for a popular MMORPG.Sales 10/10
I was trying to find out how much bandwidth was being provided by VD. The site looks professional but I didn't much information about the connection. I received a reply from Josh shortly after sending them an email, and received a list with the servers that were available along with the bandwidth information. It is unbelievable that 10Mbps is offered at such a low price.
To be honest I was a bit skeptical, so I decided to give them a try. I got a Celeron Conroe and paid a one time fee for the RAM.
The deployment took a while since they were out of stock, since it was nothing urgent I patiently waited.Network 8/10
The network is pretty good at VD, it wasn't all that great when my VD server was still at the BurstNET's location. I was glad to know that VD were now going to be operating out of BurstNET and noticed that they have a link with XO that doesn't seem to go through BurstNET. Outages on Burst's network usually meant my server would go offline, but since the XO peering I haven't had an outage along with Burst.
I did have some network problems recently after they replaced a switch, it seemed like a QoS profile was set and it took some time to fix (server speed was some way capped at 5Mbps). I am having a little network issue at the moment but I'm still trying to figure out (with the help of VD) whether it is something on my server's end instead.Support 10/10
It amazes me that I'm getting a personal level of support from either Josh or Jeff. I hope they are getting enough sleep to keep up with the work! I usually receive replies in few minutes to a max of a few hours (depending on the problem).
I had a hardware issue on around February (hard drive failing). The drive was replaced and my server was up and running by the next day. However this new hard drive seemed to be failing as well (guess a bad batch of them) and it was promptly replaced by a brand new 160GB (I had a 120GB drive) Hitachi.
Reboots are not bad either, ranging from 5 to approximately 20 minutes in my experience so far.Billing 10/10
The billing part is what worries me at providers, I once had my server offline at another provider because I hadn't received that month's invoice. So far no problems at VD, sometimes the usual invoice date passes but I was reassured that it would be sent eventually (and they are).Overall experience from above: 9.5/10Conclusions:
If you are looking for a server with a good level of support, and a bit tight on budget I'd strongly recommend VD. I hope they keep up with the service as they expand.Domain hosted: navarus.org
A few people have asked me to give feedback on my experience with VolumeDrive so I decided I will be posting a 3 part review on them:
Part 1 - initial impressions Part 2 - three month review Part 3 - one year review (hopefully)
------------- When I first got in contact with VD, contact was slow: about an email a day. It was very annoying to say the least. However when VD realized that I was genuinely interested in purchasing a server, and not just a window shopper, contact was more frequent and acceptable.
After looking around and comparing, I ended up ordering the following server from VD for a whopping $105 per month:
Well just at face value, I don't think anyone will argue with me when I say you cannot beat the price. Where else will you find that kind of server w/ full management for $105 a month?
In the ordering process there were a few forgivable annoyances: 1) VD does not have any sort of automated, order online system for their "good" deals. I had to order via email and manually pay from PayPal. I was, however, emailed an invoice confirming my purchase after I paid.
2) It took VD 2 hours to send me my order request after I said "I am ready to purchase". Now it was late at night, so they probably only had a skeleton staff on hand, so this is understandable; however this point is sort of related to the lack of an automated system point mentioned above.
So after I paid and all, I was told they were building me a new server and it would take 3 business days to arrive. I was bummed out upon hearing this but this was understandable and justifiable - if they don't have the parts on hand, they don't have the parts, no big deal. I did appreciate the fact that they were honest with me upfront instead of trying to con me into giving me a different server (like I have been hearing stories about with other hosts).
So I waited. I was told my server would be setup on Tuesday afternoon and it was. The actual time between order and setup was about 5 and a half days: 3 days for the parts to arrive + Saturday + Sunday + time to build the server.
On Tuesday I was informed that my server has a Q8200 instead of a Q6600. To me this was not a big deal so I didn't object but if you are going to order from VD and you want one specific CPU I would be very clear with them that you won't accept any alternative. What did make me chuckle, however, is the fact that I was told "I received a free upgrade" to Q8200. It made me chuckle because I don't consider it a "free upgrade" when I was offered a choice between the Q6600 and a Q8200 for the same price during the ordering process. However, as I already said, a Q6600 or Q8200 - it does not matter to me: both are very similar in performance anyway.
So since I got my server I have been busy setting it up so VD can secure it after I am finished migrating my website (which by the way they just did - I just got an email ).
During that time I have emailed VD a fair amount of times, sometimes asking for clarification and sometimes asking for assistance with a problem, and they have responded back in a more than acceptable time frame and manner.
The only one major problem I have had so far is that initially, and by initially I mean first ~12 hours, it seems the connection to my server was not all the best. Randomly pages would take a while to load; I was curious as to why this was happening so I did some pinging and saw packets were being lost sometimes. This problem seems to have been auto-corrected itself now and I am did email VD about it; hopefully if it happens again we can get it perma-fixed.
Final verdict: people say "you get what you pay for". I say "I got more than I paid for". Hope it continues this way.
I've signed up with Wiredtree for a Managed VPS 12 days ago.
I know it's not enough time to write a review. But I decided to write my first impression then keep you updated by writing a new review at the end of each month, so expect one at 12 February.
For now, these guys are simply the best I've tried.
They reply you in 15 minutes or less and if it took them more, 20 minutes or something, then be sure that they're investigating your problem. If you can't wait for 15 minutes, then go ahead and give them a call on their toll-free number and they'll be with you second by second. Their support wont just solve your problem, but they'll educate you telling you what caused the problem and how did they fix it.
I'm solicitous about security. But with these guys, I finally sleep peacefully knowing that my VPS is well secured.
I joined Limestonenetworks back in 2008 when it was a small company. At the time they offered the best price on the server I was looking for, so I took the plunge. The first 2 months were great, I enjoyed the stable network, and responses from the support team were fairly quick (1-2 hours response time). From there on it was all downhill, my servers were constantly down, and the support team took longer to answer my tickets. I didn't think this was a big problem, so I stayed with Limestonenetworks even though it was having problems with their network. Near December an incident occurred that really pushed me over the edge. My servers had been down for hours, so I opened a support ticket, and one of the agents replied and told me that the downtime was due to an upgrade in their network.
Again, I came to conclude that it could be far worst, so I stayed, one of the reasons was that I didn't want to switch my game servers over. It's important to keep in mind when you are running game servers, IPs play an important part because that's where you get your traffic. Near January the network upgrade at Limestonenetworks was still taking place which caused my bandwidth meter to stop working. This really scared me because I didn't want to get charged for overages due to the fact that my servers were receiving DDOS attacks, and I wouldn't know when to close the ports.
This incident actually turned out to be positive for me because even though I went over my bandwidth quota they didn't charge me for overages. I was very happy because this was like a late Christmas present, so now I was even more happy to give my money to Limestonenetworks. Now you might ask the question, how is this going downhill? Even though they didn't charge me for the overages, I still lost many clients who were angry at the fact that their game server were down.
In the end this network upgrade actually cost me 3 clients who were paying ~$60 per month. I let this slide because at this point I already had two servers with Limestonenetworks and I really didn't want to switch over due to the fact I would lose my IPs. The next month, February, was no different, I had more issues with Limestonenetworks. Starting of this month I was getting large DDOS attacks, which kept pushing my bandwidth over the quota, and I ended up paying close to $200 dollars just for bandwidth overages.
At this point they started to nickel and dime me for every single penny they could get of me. I don't know if they were having financial problems, or if it was due to another reason. Again in March I went over the quota, but at this time they told me that I had to pay per gigabyte which would result in a $500+ charge in bandwidth, and after talking with multiple agents, I was finally able to reach an agreement. They had changed a policy all of the sudden due to the fact that they knew I was a good customer and would keep paying for the overages.
The problem I had here was that I didn't mind upgrading to plan after I knew how much bandwidth was going to be used, since they don't offer any sort of DDOS protection, and game servers result in large DDOS attacks occasionally. I understand that Limestonenetworks was not at fault, but by making me pay per gigabyte was a bit harsh, since I had never been late on a payment, and had multiple servers. Try to remember that I stayed with this company even though I lost multiple clients because of their network outages, but they didn't care about this, all the care about is nickling and diming customers.
From that point on I have been living on the edge because I don't want to pay for an upgrade before hand due to the fact I don't know how much bandwidth my server will be using. Even if I upgrade to a different package it does not offer an insurance due to the fact that if I receieve a large DDOS than I orignally predicted, I would still end up paying per gigabyte.
This company has turned from having potential to just making their customers run away. Now the other problems I had with Limestonenetwork is the support they offer, which has been declining since I joined. The associates are very rude and don't really care about the customer's experience. I didn't include every problem I had with Limestonenetwork because it would make it a very long read.
Network - 10/10 Downtime - 5/10 Customer Service - 2/10 Overall Experience - 4/10 Would I recommend this company? NO, I urge everyone to stay away, unless they like to deal with problems on a daily basis.
Also from reading other topics on this forum, I personally believe that Limestonenetwork is overselling and their network can not handle the load.
This is my 1 month review on the company vt6 (vt6.co.uk). There is no doubt about it, they have the fastest reply times and most helpfull support. I started out on the basic plan and have just paid for the next one, i was upgraded allmost instantly but as i found it was no benfit to me i asked to downgrade and was again instantly downgraded and my money refunded.
As for the quality of the VPS, it is perfect. they dont cramm VPS's onto one server so each VPS runs smooth without any problems. Iv also had no downtime at all. Iv been with a few VPS's before this and none come close to pure quality and fantastic support that vt6 provide.
That is all for my one month review on this perfect company that i would deffinitly recommend to anyone seeking low cost quality VPS's (Or hosting that i assume will be exatcly the same)
I came to use Liquidweb thorugh a string of random REALLY bad luck. From "Managed" VPS that ended up not getting patched and fried due to a security exploit (PowerVPS) to a RAID failure, during a backup, causing total data loss and backup loss (RockMyWeb's VDNet). I was ready to pull my hair out. So I decided to kick out the bucks for a Liquid Web VPS Plan 2 (with a great price from a special found here). All I can say is it was a night and day difference.
The server is fast. Remote access to this VPS is a fast as my dedicated server in the office. I thought moving to cPanel was going to slow things down but this thing flies! Wow!
The service is fast. I call support and a person picks up the phone. No e-mail. No long hold times. I call, someone answers, no need to transfer to a higher tech, it's just fixed. Wow!
The one downfall. And it's only a downfall if it's not what you want. cPanel only. I'm a big DirectAdmin fan, but I'm learning my way around cPanel again.
Until I'm ready to do dedicated (I'm guessing it's coming in 2k8) this thing is awesome!
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
1x Web Hosting Talk for hooking me up with Liquidweb.
1x Web Hosting Talk Community for reviewing Liquidweb.
1x Liquidweb for the awesome service!
1x VDNet. It may sound strange but they did answer e-mails faster than anyone I had ever seen (multiple replies in under two mins). They had a great price, but bad luck drove me to change. I'm glad I did, but I wouldn't have a hard time recommending VDNet now that they fixed the problem that caused the loss of my server. (and they did give me a month free) They really did give good value for the price, and offer DirectAdmin which Liquidweb doesn't.
Anyone else care to share?
P.S.
I'm not a fan of emoticons, but I did it out of love for you guys. Feel free to hammer the server a bit and tell me how fast the pages load. They're pretty quick here in Costa Rica: CR Solutions Group Costa Rica Web Design.
I've been with Steadcom for a few months now, and I greatly their services. Such great deals have been offered to me. Each time I talk with the staff, I seem to want to use their services longer. I'm currently working with my own free hosting company and I entrust my uptime and reliability to Steadcom. I've had no problems with either of those aspects and it seems like their network is as fast as Google. If you find a better deal than this, it would be a miracle. I am working on obtaining up to six months with them for my next payment. I would fully recommend Steadcom and their services. I give it all of my reputation and respect as a business owner to acknowledge such outstanding services.
I have been with SoftLayer a month now, and this is my review of their company. I will start with my pre-sales experience, going into hardware, their network, server, portal, accounting/sales, and support .
[[[[[[[ PRE SALES ]]]]]]]
I started out looking for a new server by looking at some good dedicated hosts. I saw SoftLayer offered the new Nehalem series, so I went for it. Their sales team is excellent beyond all reasons -- the staff are personal and do NOT try to take your money; instead, they find the best-fit solution for you and work with you by calling you, showing you their specials, and talking to managers.
[[[[[[ HARDWARE ]]]]]]]
The Hardware at SL is top-notch. There's no problem with it, it's clearly stated in the portal what type of motherboard, HDs, RAM, etc are in the server and it's top-notch Supermicro hardware. I've never seen a problem with it, and I have seen the certificate of passing benchmarks as that is done on all SL servers by default.
Their provisioning system is excellent, I got my server in 2-3 hours at MAX. WOW! It is all inside the portal too; you can view the status (PE_BOOT, OS_RELOAD); it's clearly there and excellent. We finally got VIRTUOZZO (thanks natecarlson ) working with it too.
[[[[ SERVER ]]]]]
What can I say? This is the new Nehalem series. I think the deal I got was quite good, I brought several SL servers before I switched to this one, and it did take a while to get it down to this price (especially for SL quality, damn!) :
-Intel Dual Quad Core (2x) X5570 Nehalem 2.93GHZ w/ HT -12 x 300GB SAS 15K Seagate Cheetah HD's in RAID 10 -12GB DDR3 RAM (to start) -4000GB Monthly Bandwith -1GigE Port Speed -64 IP Addresses -Monitoring & Automated Reboot $1,100 a month -- which I think is good for this type of server.
It's blazing fast and 0 problems.
[[[[ NETWORK ]]]]
I started in their Dallas, TX datacenter with a Dual 5450, but decided to get a 2U server with SAS HD's. Sadly, they said they were out of stock in Dallas. They said they can get me an EXTRA DISCOUNT if I went to Washington DC. I live an hour or two from DC, so it was good for me. I debated, and talked to them, they said it was a great place and I went with their Washington D.C datacenter .
It's fast. Blazing fast. They have like 100GBPS connectivity -- with many backbone providers. I've never seen so many . I'm liking the nework speeds and it really is nice.
[[[[ PORTAL ]]]]
The best part. They have their 'manage.softlayer.com' and their mobile 'manage.softlayer.mobi' portals. They are excellent. I don't even need support, and when I do, it's there. I mean, I'm STILL exploring their portal system. It has so much stuff; "Instant cPanel Licenseing, Instant Firewall, Upgrades, IP's, OS reloads, Installs, Backups" -- I love it. It makes my life a lot easier and quiker. I've had a server with ThePlanet, HiVelocity, and more and SL portal blows them all away
[[[ SUPPORT ]]]
The support is great. In the times I need it, it's there. Within 15 minutes I get a response and usually in under an hour, a resolution. It's excellent in what they provide at an unmanaged rate, and the $3 tickets are great in my opinion for those quick issues that you just can't figure out. They even helped me with a bit of PHP help!
[[[ ACCOUNTING AND SALES ]]]
It's there any time I needed it. I got servers upgraded, downgraded, reclaimed, removed, created, OS reloaded, invoices adjusted, and it's there. They respond within 1 hour usually and it's great for a sales team. Personally it's awesome how they have excellent teams for support and sales! The reps are VERY nice and friendly too, and they offer some nice discounts .
[[[ OVERALL ]]]
I give SoftLayer a 10/10+. They are everything I expect from a provider (heck, they are better than most managed providers I've been with) and more. I urge you to try them out, they will try to fit your budget as good as you can do it.
I'd first like to follow up with my end at GNAX. I ended up going down to them on the 31st to pick up my colo server and get my refund. All went generally well, except for the "I'll be back in 5 mins" that took more than 30 mins for some sales/billing guy to get me my stuff. Signed some papers, and my money was refunded in full. In the end, a happy ending with GNAX.
Now, while all that was ongoing, I moved over to a dedicated server at Softlayer quick as I could because I knew with 100% certainty that Jeff would have my service terminated when I posted the chat log of him threatening me - a controversial decision I still stand by for what it's worth.
First, lets talk about sales with Softlayer. My God - I have never seen anything like this. With GNAX, sales would consist of me sending a ticket and waiting days, or it getting closed randomly, then having to wait more and more. A 48-hour max setup time with GNAX ended up being 5+ days and still no setup. Softlayer. I was doing Live Chat with an agent who was extremely helpful. Too move the process along quicker, I asked if I could call and speak with him, and sure enough, he game me a toll free number and I spoke with him through the entire ordering process. Not only was he extremely knowlegeable and helpful, but he also pointed me to a special I was unaware of where I got double the RAM and a second hard drive for free. I ended up ordering a dual core Xeon setup, but I actually got setup with a quad Core Xeon X3220. No mistake they said, they were just out of what I ordered so they gave me a quad core for the price of a dual core. And all of this happened in less than 4 hours. Yep, that's right. I went from on the phone with sales to having my brand new quad core for the price of a dual core with twice the RAM and HDD for free in under four hours. I was actually shocked. After being with GNAX so long, I had no idea that anything even under a 24 hour wait was possible (which it wasn't with GNAX btw), and they didn't hold my order because of being short on inventory like GNAX did - they just gave me a free upgrade with no delay!
With GNAX, I have never been able to be in such control of my server as I am now with Softlayer. With GNAX, lets say, I wanted to change or add reverse DNS for an IP, I would have to send a ticket and wait hours and hours and hours for them to do it. With Softlayer, I login to the portal, and click click type, click and it's done and live. All by myself! Their portal is the most powerful thing I have ever seen and it allows me to do and see everything.
Their support, I'm convinced, is second to none. I once had three days of downtime with GNAX because of a hardware problem (their hardware) they just couldn't fix. The motherboard has gone bad and I had to wait three days for them to find another identical motherboard to replace mine with. Apparently, they don't like to keep hardware on hand in case of emergency. In the mean time, I was faced with a lot of pissed off people who couldn't access the server for three days while all GNAX did was "we're looking, we're trying". Three days downtime is unacceptable, GNAX's support is just horrible. Phone support is essentially non-existent. When, on occasion, people pick up the phone, I'm simply told to submit a ticket and they'll get to it - when it's convenient for them. Support with Softlayer is drastically different, I can call support and pick their brains on technical problems for as long as I need. Recently, something went wrong when I was moving IP addresses around with my servers, and I was able to submit a ticket, call them, and they resolved it while on the phone with me. Some other small issues cropped up, and I replied to the ticket as it was non-urgent, and they had it fixed it about 20 mins. THAT people, is how support. Again, after being with GNAX for so long and having to wait hours, and sometimes days for support, having things fixed on the phone with me or via ticket in under 15 mins really caught me off guard.
Sales - part two.
Incredibly impressed with the sales and support I have seen so far, I recently ordered a second server. Again, I did this over the phone and was given an amazing deal - one not even on their site! In the end, it'll save me about $60/month on my second server. Pretty decent I say.
Other stuff.
They have a forum! That's not what's cool in itself, but it's cool that its integrated into my portal account. Now, GNAX has a forum too, but you first have to email GNAX and ask for their blessing to sign up there.
Another nifty thing about Softlayer is their developer API. Their API enables tons of cool things, like I can see my uptime and bandwidth usage from within WHMCS. With GNAX, I would have to go find which one of my logins for their seemingly hundreds of disintegrated services. Having everything being in one place and under one login with Softlayer.
Basically, if you need a dedicated server provider, choose Softlayer. Leaving GNAX (well, being forced out) and moving to Softlayer is the best thing that has ever happened to me an my company.
Alright, Ive been with them for a little over two months and I have been with them before. Their support is excellent, their servers' are excellent, their network is excellent, their portal is excellent, and not having to deal with Cogent directly is a joy.
I first singed on with them 11/9/08 till 12/29/08 everything went well I closed my account simply because I didn't need the server again.
My current server with them as of this post is $199.00/mth and I get the following
CPU : Xenon X3230 Quad Core @ 2.66 Ghz Ram : 4GB OS : Server Standard 2008 64 bit 1000 mbps 2 TB of bandwidth Washington, DC Data Center 2x 250GB SATA II 174.37.243.170
Having a server with them has been nothing short of amazing zero downtime caused by them and most anything a managed host will do they will do for you free. I was having issues with routes and simply asked them and within ten minutes they had changed it according to what I would prefer. I have had a DoS attack before that was pushing 800 mbps of traffic and they sent me an email and I opened a ticket and they blocked the attackers' addresses at my switch. Very quickly and not much damage was done. Overall I'm very pleased and I would recommend them to anyone.
Here is my review of Virpus after being with them for 1 month.
Uptime: 10/10
So far I have not experienced any outages and I am going to have to give them a 10 on that as I have seen many threads in the outages about them but it appears they solved that issue and I was never effected by any of those.
Support: 8/10
I will give the support a 8 as sometimes on off times it could take up to about 30 minutes for the first response which is great but then after that the responses tend to be around 2 hours or so. Overall though the support is great!
Price: 10/10
I signed up with there plan that was cPanel included and had double bandwidth and ram. I was thinking it was too good to be true and that the VPS was not going to be quality, but I am glad I was wrong!
Performance: 9/10
The performance of the server is overall great so far. I have had no issues as far as the server being anything but fast. I will have to commend them on having great hardware and not overselling there services like a lot of the VPS providers these days.
Overall: 9/10
I would highly recommend them as they have been a great provider overall and I hope that they keep up the good work in the future.
I wrote an initial setup experience review of downtown host including support w/ transferring my sites a few months ago. Now I am going to extend the review with reliability, speed and performance.
So far, the support and helpfulness has been the same. Rarely does support wait longer than 10 min to respond to questions. They are always responded with a great attitude.
Reliability of all my sites has been 100%. I have seen no downtime at all since I got my account. Truly fabulous. The only time a site has gone down was not their fault...it was my fault...for messing up the database they restored it within minutes after I sent a high priority technical support ticket too.
Speed and performance go hand in hand. Sites are quick and responsive. Just as responsive as a content management system on any dedicated in my opinion. Download speeds are always the same. Never does the download or upload speed fluctuate by more than 10 kbps up or down from the average (totally unlike dreamhost where it would fluctuate as much as 400-500 kbps depending on the day).
All scripts I have used have responded very quickly without any problems that I would encounter with dreamhost (like cut off scripts due to time it took the servers to run through them).
Man, it seems just like yesterday that I initially signed up for a VPS from SolarVPS, but the truth is, I have been with them for just over 6 months now.
What can I say about SolarVPS besides that they completely rock! Not to mention Douglas, but we won't go there
The Network
The network at SolarVPS is nothing short of amazing. I get lightning fast speeds and rock solid performance no matter the time of day. I have not experienced even one network hiccup in the 6 months that I have been with SolarVPS. I constantly get compliments from people about how fast the network really is.
The Hardware
SolarVPS uses nothing less than the best hardware. The VPS node that my VPS is located on has Dual Quad Xeons and performance is amazing. They do not overload their servers and use SLM parameteres with Virtuozzo instead of the old school UBC. I know that I can use all of my resources without battling with other VPS instances on the node.
The Support
Solar's support is by far outstanding. I have never had to wait for extended periods of time to get an answer to even the most complex questions. I can rest assured that no matter the time of day, or night, there will always be a Solar rep there to answer even the stupidest of questions, in a very timely manner. Unlike some hosts that I have used, Solar's support understands my questions and gets them taken care of instead of giving nonsense responses to try and buy time to get the job done.
The Overall Experience
The overall experience at SolarVPS is awesome. I know that I can trust my online business in their hands. SolarVPS is highly recommended to anyone who needs rock solid performance with extreme reliability.
Support - 10/10 Network - 10/10 Hardware - 10/10 The Staff - 10/10
Just a warning... Watch out for that Douglas character that mans their live chat.
I've now been with Serveraxis for nearly 36 months and will make this fairly short and sweet - my experience with Serveraxis has been great. Uptime has been excellent with the vast majority of downtime coming from things such as a simple reboot for kernel upgrades. I think in those three years there have only been two cases of unscheduled downtime. Both times Serveraxis kept it's clients well informed and the downtime wasn't major - I believe due to hardware failure. There has been no unscheduled downtime for the past two years on my server, both of those cases were quite a while ago.
Their prices are very reasonable (and have even gone down once or twice) and the few times I've needed support they have been very responsive. They have also increased the amount of bandwidth and disk space multiple times at no additional cost to it's clients during the three years I have been with them.
On the whole, I think Serveraxis is phenomenal for users that just want an unmanaged VPS with rock-solid uptime and a great company behind them.
I wrote a review of Tzulo last month before that attack occurred and the thread was lost along with all the other data. So I am writing a review again as I feel they deserve this.
I rented a VPS Large package in March in 2008 through their reseller and a few months later I was shifted to Tzulo as the reseller changed.
Tzullo servers are really great. They are quad core, their customer service is really great. I do own dedicated servers from other companies and Tzulo customer service is the best among all the web hosting companies I have experienced. I have contacted them via their ticket system and crazy hours like midnight and have gotten a helpful reply from them within 5 - 30 minutes.
I run two dedicated gameservers from the VPS I bought from them and I have never had any problems with their hardware. The net connection is really good also because there is never any lag on behalf of the server, I know a person who connects to my gameserver from australia and he gets a latency of only 250. The VPS's are based in Chicago.
They are really cheap considering they are based in USA. I have never seen cheaper reliable hosts in USA. They even offer a $10 'novice' VPS for people so they can check and experience the servers.
They offer linux and windows including control panels like hypervm and virtuozzo. You can do free re-installs, restarts, repairs from the online control panel.
Recently I recommended them to my friend also and he bought the medium package from them and it got activated within minutes of his payment confirmation.
Overall, my experience with them has been the best and that is why I am going through and writing this review again, I highly recommend Tzulo to all of you if you are looking for a good quality cheap VPS.
my website is on digitallinx vps from abt 4 months. and in these 4 months i experienced 100% uptime. speed is pretty gud too. and most imp thing i liked abt them is their support that is great. they reply in timely manner no matter wat time of the day and they r really professionals whatever issue i had they always helped me. never heard no from them. i think space and bandwidth can every host provide but professional support is the most that we need. i ll stick to them as long as i could.
what can i say, you get what you pay for but i think this is expensive!
i fell to the trap of unmetered bandwith. its true, it was really freaking fast speed.
BUT, ram is limited. especially if you run cPanel. i advise people not to use it.
Tickets were answered very fast. usually within 2~5 minutes. even faster at times. downside: a bit expensive. even though unmetered bandwith, this is shared. also its tough to push much traffic because of the lack of ram. i think if you bought something with 1gig ram, you can find cheaper VPS.
also you are completely on your own with this VPS. nothing surprised i knew this going in. But then i discovered other services that provided managed VPS at even cheaper price! these were reputable companies too. Next time im just gonna go with managed service. wasted too much time compiling and learning how to do stuff.
I give : out of
I found lot of the reviews on here inaccurate. They are actually not bad.....but imo a bit expensive.
From the moment that I signed up with them to now they have been on top of everything. Right after I created the account it took about 15 minutes for my site to be transferred over from GeekStorage and up and running on their servers. They respond their tickets very quickly, most of the time in less than 10 minutes.
I have not had many issues with them; the only issue I can recall was when a bot posted some weird scripts on my site. Even though my site was the only one attacked Tyler was very quick to respond and even offered me one on one support via Messenger. The problem was resolved with a quick password change.
Not only do they provide excellent support but they keep in contact with their customers. They email me from time to time to see how things are going and if I need any additional help. Most importantly, their servers are blazing fast and by no means do they overcrowd them. I can run Wordpress and Invision Power Board with no hiccups.
If anyone is in need of some quality inexpensive shared hosting then I would defiantly give StableHost a try.
I have had a VPS with Level3Hosting for 1 month now and am happy to report that I am very happy with the VPS and the service and support. There was a couple of minor issues at first but these were quickly dealt with. The VPS is semi-managed and since I am quite new to the whole VPS thing I did have questions and concerns and Brian has always been fast to respond (where possible) and always been helpful and informative. Not all support questions were answered as fast as others but always easily within 24 hours and the higher priority ones answered sometimes within minutes. I had seen some negative comments about Level3Hosting here on WHT, as well as positive but I decided to go with what was advertised and so far am very glad that I did. Server uptime has been great (100% for me so far) and the VPS copes with what I have on it which is my own 4 websites and 4 radio ports all running 24/7 with no problems. I have searched for a cheaper deal that has everything I have now and no-one can come close, having said that, I purchased this VPS during the 50% off for life promotion so that explains a lot, however, even at full price it is still a good deal. So to summarise, my own personal experience of dealing with Level3Hosting has been a positive one and I hope that the service I get now is maintained and can continue for a long time as I will be a long term customer if it does.
This is a quick review of the VPS Provider [url] I will highlight four things: Support, Speed/Network, Sales/Setup, and Overall.
I have been hosted at [url]for 1 month now about, with my domain [url], we have 3 Dedicated for VPS hosting and a Hybrid VPS for sales, but I preferred a offsite provider for our main domain [url] So we went with GeekStorage! Support
Support has been excellent. Usually I have to request rDNS PTR but guess what, I didn't! It came all configured and everything. I've had two support tickets, one of which I've quickly resolved myself and the other one was fixed within a few hours. Overall the support is excellent and nothing is wrong, a few extra techs could do (this is a personal pet peeve of mine but it isn't a problem with most, actually it's not much of a problem with me as I only had 2 support requests.) Network and Speed
What can I say? They have their nodes at WebNX, a great provider! I get excellent pings, speeds, and my mail server etc. is nice and fast. I have 512MB guaranteed RAM but there are only 2 main sites on the VPS, using about 200-300MB of RAM (with cPanel/WHM). Uptime has been superior, I've gotten 100% Network and VPS Uptime! Not even a second I've seen the network go down, for any reason. Only time when it was down was when I accidently blocked myself via IPtables, had to use a proxy to get in SSH/WHM and unblock myself , but that's another story there..
Sales
Setup time was average. Took about 36-40 hours for my VPS to setup, a bit long, but they made sure it was running great, gave me status updates, and Jay did everything he could to make my VPS run faster and smoothly through the queue. I used the 'WHT50MORE' special and got a generous 50% off my 2 month prepayment .
Sales is also great. They have an excellent portal and everything. I'd say there are no problems with their billing. I haven't had a chance to open a sales ticket but I'm sure that there would be no problem.
The free control panel that comes with each GeekStorage VPS is perfect, I find that a great need aswell.
Overall
GeekStorage is a excellent, top-notch company. I'd give it 5+ stars, and reccomend it to ANYONE else who is looking for a stable & fast VPS provider. Don't hesitate: Go Geek! Verification for the MODs: Domain is [url] hosted via GeekStorage (they use dedicated servers/colo at WebNX)
We're coming up on around 7 or 8 months with a low-spec machine at CoreNetworks, and overall I'm pretty happy with the service. I picked it up as something cheap for my personal sites, but I've snuck some work stuff on there too. At the time of ordering, the specs of the machine I was given exceeded the specs they were offering (3.0ghz instead of 2.4ghz, if I'm not mistaken), it was provisioned quickly and the option to use KVMoIP and do your own install was great.
Sales were exceptionally helpful prior to ordering the machine, and support were fast and friendly every time I needed their help. The on-demand KVMoIP was setup fast on the one occasion I've needed it - ticket created 9:23AM, Chemito responded at 9:26 and had it hooked up and emailed me the details at 9:34. When I first configured the machine, my third IP address was unusable because something got goofed. I filed the ticket at 12:27PM, it was fixed and I had a response by 12:34PM. In fact if I average out all the tickets I've filed (which admittedly are mostly silly issues), the average resolution time is under ten minutes.
The network isn't bad, the pings are slightly elevated and there are periodic bouts of DoS which are dealt with quickly. The network status page is updated frequently with regards to these incidents, which makes me happy as I'm all about honesty when something stops working. I decided to go with the 3mbps unmetered, because I don't really use the server for much and at the time I ordered it overages were crazy expensive - they appear to have come down in price quite a bit.
The one-time upgrades for RAM and suchlike are great, it helps to keep the bottom-barrel monthly pricing with only a modest up-front cost. They also have an automated remote-reboot system in addition to the on-demand KVMoIP. The setup fees can be a little hard to swallow for the budget market, but on the whole it's completely worth it if you plan on staying any length of time.
