Www.AFreeWebHost.com - First Impression
Aug 17, 2008
When you visit www.afreewebhost.com , you don't see an ugly portal with to many links, advertisements, etc... You get a nice...HTML website. That's right, no ASP, no PHP, but a simpel, but very good looking, HTML website.
Is it a bad thing? Yes and no. "Yes" because it has "founded and owned by one person" written all over it and "no" because my experiences with small or "one-man" companies have been much better then with companies with many employies.
Free Web Hosting
The free hosting offer looks good. Even though they require advertisements on your free site, the free hosting is not going to bring in any cash. 1GB webspace with 20GB traffic. That's more then enough for 90% of all websites on this planet. And a 468x60 or 120x600 banner and a textlink don't bother anyone. Most site-owners use Adsense or something simular to cover the montly costs anyways.
I do not own a free hosting account. But from the looks of it I think that both free and payed services offer the same features and support. The company is able to do that because they also make money with site-/banner-designs. The little bit of money that they might loose with free hosting can easely be covered by a few design-assignments.
Pro Web Hosting
You don't see it very often. A company that offers monthly prices and gives a discount for 3 months. Most companies only offer yearly sign-ups and some of them give a 14-30 day money-back guarantee. But if you are not aware of everything you "agree" to when you sign up for a year and/or when you do not have a valid reason for asking your money back, you will not get it back.
4$/month for 5GB with 100GB traffic or 3$/month for the same deal when you sign up for 3 months. Personally, I think those prices are very realistic. The best deal is to go for 3 months offcourse. And the more expensive packages have the same "GB for the buck" value.
The most expensive package will cost you 22$ for 50GB webspace with ONLY 500GB traffic.
Yes, I say ONLY, because for that amount of money there are better deals out there. Don't get me rong, I still think this is a realistic price.
But, and there is a bug BUT, I do not beleave that people go for the most expensive package without any experience with the company. The people that do pay 22$ for 50GB with 500GB traffic are the ones that started off with something small that has grown to something bigger, people that are satisfied with the features an the support that they've had for some time.
Nice offer, but are they honest?CPanel -> Yep, it's there.
Fantastico -> Yep, it's there.
No Ads Required -> Offcourse.
Daily Backups -> Yep, tested and working.
99.9% Uptime Guaranteed -> Only time will tell.
24x7 Support -> It's more like 12x7 Support, wich is 100% acceptable in my book.
Everything else that is listed on the webiste is there and it all works 100%. The company has not modified the CPanel features in any way, wich is understandable, but there are features that I miss. Features that I have encountered before ( don't ask me for names because I don't remember them ).
For example, it's possible to backup every single file on your webspace in one huge compressed file but it's not possible to backup the content of just one folder, one add-on domain. So if I want to backup a small website like my clansite, I have to backup all the other megabytes/gigabytes that are on my webspace. All other sites and files that are not even remotely related to my simpel clansite.
AFreeWebHhost.com is up-to-date and offers Fantastico De Luxe 2.10.4 r17
This is the latest stable release of Fantastico. Even though many scripts are not up-to-date, it's basicly "the best you can get" at the moment when it comes to auto-installers. For those of you who don't know, Fantastico allows you to install PHPBB, SMF, PHP-Nuke and many other platforms without any knowledge. All you need to know is how to click a link
How about the service?
So far, so good. Because I had to wait about 24 hours before I could actually use and view my webspace, the company gave me 25GB extra traffic and an extra month for free. Now that's what I call good service! ( maybe the company knew about my Servage.net review )
After sending many emails back and forth I was able to view my testpage. And even though I did not contact the company about any other issues, a day or two after our last contact they contacted me once again, just to see if everything was working ok.
When I made my first backup I got the message that it got saved in the "home" directory. I wasn't able to find my backup so I contacted support. Within 12 hours I got a reply.
Some of you might feel like 11-12 hours is to long, but I rather wait 11-12 hours for a decent, friendly, HUMAN email with usefull information instead of getting a "human-robot"-hybrid reply with noth enough information.
Uptime?
Uptime can be checked on [url]. This is the parked domain on my webspace. For my websites I use addon-domains.
Speed?
Download this file to test the speed: [url]
I have the "Pro Webhosting - Starter Package".
Visit www.tgow.info to check how fast pages load.
Would you recommend this host based on your first impression?
I sure would.
All the features are working just fine, the speed is not "superb" but good enough and the support so far is great.
My rating based on my first impression: 8/10.
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Mar 20, 2009
I know most of you are not at all aware of what afreewebhost.com is , even i was not aware before a month or so but now i am aware and i also whant to make all of you aware of that
Guys, its my advice to you all please dont at all think of switching to this server its the worst , even worse then the worst, i have experienced it and i dontt want yu all to face the same experience.
It just have only one staff member which comes only for 30 to 40 min a day, facilites providedby them are worst moreover they can go off at any time without notification.
So its my advice to you all dont at all think of it..
There is only one user on the site and now that to is gone, you wont find any thing about the site on net or any site reviewing about the free hosts.
Owner have taken 2-3 domains because he knows how good rated his site his, he changes the domain name whenever something like this happens.
So guys plz dont at all go for this its really the worst, if you want proofs, kindly contact me i will show you.
Moreover see how they are revieling there users info , idont think any company would have done that in any circumstances.
Guys, its my advice to you all please dont at all think of switching to this server its the worst , even worse then the worst, i have experienced it and i dontt want yu all to face the same experience.
I know after my posts admin will try his best to prove me wrong can give any statements but as a freind its my advice to you dont fall in his trap , i am trying my best to get his domain blacklisted so that no one falls in hist trap any more.
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Sep 5, 2007
I started hosting with ModVPS on March 14, 2007. My VPS was setup quickly and had everything I needed to transfer my clients over pretty seamlessly. They did a swell job there. This is a VPS we were using primarily for some shared hosting clients and a reseller or two.
Over the past 5+ months I've submitted numerous support inquiries, all of which I feel were tended to in an acceptable amount of time. Their personnel were always friendly and seemed knowledgeable.
Apropos the performance of the server, well, in the beginning it was great. Over time however, the speed and reliability progressively deteriorated. It has recently come to a point that the VPS is almost unusable. I attribute some of this to our growth. Currently, we only have about 10% of our disk allowance available. Obviously it's time to move on. This is where things start getting pretty sketchy.
For the past 3 months I've been receiving automatic notification emails of services failing. I'm not talking about 2 or 3, or even 5 to 10, I'm talking more like 15-20 per day. Granted, there are couple of notifications regarding a suspended account or disk space warnings but the lion's share of these (~90%+) are failed services emails. I submitted several tickets on this to no avail. Take a look at the attachments to see only some of the emails.
I started off having a positive opinion of modVPS. I quickly learned however that once you make them aware of your interest in leaving, regardless of how legitimate or impersonal the reason, you suddenly become a second-class customer. Their ability to make prompt responses suddenly ceases to be. Huh? That's odd.
As it is, all of my data is being held hostage by the sub-par VPS it's hosted on. The VPS has become so unresponsive that it's impossible to migrate any of the data. My new provider sent me this message:
Quote:
I have some bad news. We have been working on your source server for the last hour or so, and it has been extremely unresponsive. We tried shutting down various services such as Apache, etc but your load won't go below 3 or 4 -- which is really bad. All disk operations are taking a very long time. For example, to edit a file 'vi' requires 60-seconds just for the file to load up and be viewable.
We cannot continue migrating your account, you need to contact your provider and have them double your disk space. Right now you are using 90% of your disk space, so 10% of free space is not enough for us to backup all of your accounts and then transfer them over. We already tried doing a cPanel -> cPanel migration and that failed a few times because the accounts are just too large and the source server is too slow.
Theres not much here we can do I'm afraid, you'll have to contact your provider and ask them to double the disk space and also ask if they can move you on a less crowded node, because it's apparent that your server is extremely slow yet major services are not even running.
So I contacted modVPS with the request to temporarily increase my disk space to allow me to transfer my data.
The excuse was:
Quote:
please note that the main node is now performing a raid intialization which is a resource intensive process and will be affecting the server's and there by VPS' performance. Once it is over, every thing will function fine. Also it is not possible to double the disk space of you VPS. You can go for a plan upgradation, if needed.
Quote:
RAID initialization is being run in the server for the last 3 days. Also it is not possible for us to increase the VPS quota. Any way I am forwarding this ticket to our CS department and they will confirm this.
To sum this up, modVPS made a very good first impression and managed to keep me in their good graces for most of my time hosting with them. The failed services emails weren't a huge deal and we didn't notice much of a performance/uptime hit because of them. The services must've rebooted pretty quickly. It does go to show there was definitely a problem the modVPS SAs were ignoring. It's when they decided I was no longer worth the trouble that my perspective on them changed. It was a noticeable change in tone and responsiveness and what's worse, they've been of very little help with my transition to my new provider.
This post isn't me dragging modVPS through the mud. This is me sharing my experience with them as a host and hoping for 2 things: 1) they decide to facilitate this transfer and salvage the good impression they once had and 2.) to enlighten any potential customers considering them. I don't think this is an unfair review but then again, I'm the one writing it so I'm not impartial enough to make that assessment.
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Jul 15, 2008
let me first clarify that they have been a VERY good host for me for the past 18 months... if you are ready to discount one VERY bad month.
The last month saw 4 outages on my server... HUGE ones.. each time the server was down for at least a day... the last one for 3 days.. after which i contacted them and asked why was the site down (i was outstation and did not know the status till i came back...)
They replied, there was an accident at the DC and If i had a backup they would happily restore it.
This was thorough unprofessionalism... one of your DC had such accident that you could not even recover data and you dont bother to tell the customer till he himself asks?
my bad luck was that i had already paid them in advance for the following month... BEFORE DUE DATE OF JULY 7th...
the server was offline since June 26th.. i asked for a refund for JULY since i was not using their services anymore and more than that i was really annoyed at the way they handled the issue.
Well.. they are yet to reply to the ticket where i asked for refund.. yea yea its been 20 days almost..
And what do i find now? the ticket was closed yesterday :-|
Have i lost my money? Just wanted to warn others about them...
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Oct 28, 2007
I was on shared hosting with Site5 and found the level of service declining the cheaper their shared hosting plans got. My site was down more often than I wanted, so I canceled my plan and went with VPSLink.
I signed up for the Link-2 plan for a few months just to feel it out and see if I could get a Debian server up and running from the command line. After signing up I was in my VPS in less than 30 minutes. Much quicker than I expected!
Following some tutorials I was able to have a lighttpd, PHP5, MySQL server installed and running in a little over an hour. I had a site up right away ! I'm used to FreeBSD, so Debian's apt-get is very simple to use. I used VPSLink DNS and it was easy to set up. To keep the load off the server I transferred my domain email over to Google Apps. I've spent more time tweaking the configuration and I'm happy with the result so far. VPSLink is much faster than my old Site5 shared hosting. That could be due to the VPSLink server sitting in Seattle while I'm in Vancouver BC, but I kind of doubt it.
My initial impression of VPSLink after a couple of weeks is positive. The price is right, the performance is good and it's no frills VPS. I like to have full control over the server and I'm glad I just took the leap away from shared hosting. For the prices they offer it's worth trying.
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Nov 10, 2008
I finally decided to go with vectorlevel after my last topic and researching some more and I'm completely amazed by how seamless the process was. I signed up on nov 5th and got my account information in a few minutes. Now I'm pretty knowledgeable about all the new technology stuff such as computers and tvs, but I'm pretty much a newbie in web hosting. I have always wanted to start a personal blog but had no idea what I needed with domains and hosting. Vectorlevel assisted me with getting my own domain (woot) and showed me how to install wordpress with "Installatron" which was pretty cool. My blog loads very quickly almost just like any of those big company websites like google.
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