the hostorian (& his reviews!) » Virtual Private Server hosting

Nethosting

Hostorian — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 14:11:47 +0000

Nethosting Web Hosting Ratings

Seems to be a good web host overall, would be worth a try
Click here to visit Nethosting’s official website

Summary

NetHosting is a company that specializes in the hosting your websites, without offering the suite of applications available at other larger sites. Their primary business is through dedicated and virtual hosting, giving the power of the site’s operation completely to the customer. Servers are completely upgradable to your specifications allowing you to build the server you need.

Quick Facts About NetHosting

NetHosting was been in operation since 1994, based out of Orem,UT.
Hosting Services: Dedicated ($99.00/month and up), Virtual Private Server ($24.95 per month and up), Virtual Hosting ($7.95/month and up)
Phone: 888-534-4678

Products and Services by Nethosting

NetHosting is a different company from the other hosting sites out there in that they focus on dedicated server accounts. They give the customer the power to setup their server in the way they would like them to be, whether that is the hard drive size or the memory available or the operating system. For the Mark I v2 dedicated service, the starting package comes with 1 GB of RAM, 500 GB of hard drive space, an Intel 1.8 Ghz processor, and your choice of CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, or Windows as an operating system. You can upgrade the memory up to 8 GB, hard drive up to a terabyte, but the processor is not upgradable.

The Virtual Private Server is a cheaper alternative to the dedicated solution, but has limitations with the service it can provide. The VPS 128 comes with 128 MB of RAM, 5 GB of space, CentOS, and only 50 GB of data transfer. These options are only upgradable by purchasing a higher tiered plan, which nearly double in price.

The Virtual Hosting offers 10 GB of space, 100 GB of transfer, and gives you the ability to host an unlimited amount of domain names. The options to add applications to this service are extremely limited. They only offer support for adding WordPress, MediaWiki, OsCommerce, CubeCart, PHPBB, and PHPShop. The service is not amateur friendly.

Hostorian’s Review of Nethosting

Nethosting’s Performance

NetHosting offers a 100% guarantee for uptime through redundant systems. You can get your money back for any services that you have paid for but have not used yet (if pre-paying for the year), but there are no 30 day money-back guarantees.

Nethosting’s Features

Features are extremely limited for the virtual hosting plans. Apart from what is mentioned above, they do offer full POP3 email support, the ability to host an unlimited number of email accounts and setup IMAP accounts. They do support all the major scripting languages, and offer unlimited number of FTP accounts.

Support and Customer Care by Nethosting

Support for NetHosting has a few options available: there is live 24/7 chat, phone support, and an email ticket system. There are a limited amount of FAQs and articles mainly about setting up your server, but no articles about setting up WordPress, for example.

Pros

Offers great choices to customize your server to get your website operational right away.
Affordable hosting plans for small to mid-size businesses.
24/7 support is available through different channels

Cons

Very limited options in adding applications easily to your virtual servers.
Not enough actual customer reviews available to backup NetHosting’s claims.

Actual Customer Reviews for Nethosting

“Nethosting is a great company to work with. Their service is top of the line and my website has never been down. Pricing is good, give them a call and they will always work with you on the price. Used them for almost 2 years now and I’ve never had a problem” - John

“The pricing looks excellent. Sadly, we are based in the UK, so the exchange rate with the dollar is making it more expensive than it would usually be. Also, there are often time of day issues with support between here and the US, and also some speed and congestion issues during busy trans-atlantic periods.” - Terry, Conveyancing Manager, UK

“It’s one thing to experience an instance of exceptional quality of service and out-of-this-world customer satisfaction when doing business with a company; it’s another to experience this with the unmatched dedication and consistency that is Nethosting. That is why I’ve done business with them for over thirteen years. They are more than a vendor; they are my technology partner.” - J. Pedroza, owner, Strüdelhosen Design

Verdict of this Nethosting Review

It is extremely difficult to accurately gauge what NetHosting brings to the table because there are no easily accessible reviews available online. With other hosting companies, it is easy to find relatively accurate accounts of the user experience, whether it is good or bad, and be able to compare NetHosting’s claims to the actual experience.

NetHosting claims to have 100% uptime with their services, and offer stellar support through chat, email, and by the phone. Without the user experience, there is no way to verify this information. I can say that they offer a variety of options when setting up your server, and the virtual hosting plans are comparable to other sites, except for the lack of a full suite of applications to install. NetHosting only offers eight different applications to easily install. On other hosting sites, there are eight different applications in the blogging section alone. This is the one major drawback towards NetHosting for people who are just beginning to setup a website. For professionals who are comfortable working within a file manager to upload and install their software, it will not be a major concern.

For professionals who are looking for a place to set up their website, NetHosting appears to be a good option for them. The prices are reasonable, the options to upgrade the server is powerful, and there is support around the clock available to you. I do advise you to look at their policies posted on the website to make sure you are comfortable with their terms before you build your website.

NetHosting is definitely worth a look, and based on the few customer reviews that are available they do seem to be a good web hosting company for dedicated servers and virtual servers hosting.

Click here to visit Nethosting’s official website.

Jumpline Web Hosting

Hostorian — Fri, 14 May 2010 11:57:20 +0000

Summary:

Jumpline web hosting has two great offers apart from their regular offers – a two year FREE shared web hosting account (click here) and a six months FREE VPS hosting account (click here). (These offers are not available on their regular pages.)

The company was founded in 1997 and has been providing reliable web hosting services to several thousands of customers since then.

Quick Facts About Jumpline:

Number of domains hosted: Over 100,000
Services: Domain name registration, shared hosting, VPS hosting, bare metal hosting, dedicated server hosting, managed server hosting, and even custom hosting solutions for you
Location: Columbus, Ohio (USA)
Guarantees: 30-day money back guarantee, 100% uptime, under 4-hour support ticket resolution, daily backups
Contact information: Call 1-800-651-2028 (toll free), or 00+1+614-859-1170 (international), or visit their contact page

Products and Services By Jumpline Web Hosting:

Domain registration (at $9.95), Shared hosting (starting at $7.95/month), Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting (starting at $27.95/month), Bare Metal Hosting (starting at $59.95/month), Dedicated Server hosting (starting at $99.95/month), and even custom hosting solutions.

They also have a two year FREE shared web hosting account (click here) and a six months FREE VPS hosting account available (click here). These offers are not available through their regular website and you need to click the above links to see them.

Hostorian’s Jumpline Review:

Jumpline’s Performance

Jumpline has a really impressive infrastructure to boast of. They have multiple Tier 1 providers for bandwidth and IP services, providing reliable connectivity and round the clock monitoring. They take all these providers and blend them into a single handoff thereby providing a superior performance.

They have a 100% uptime service level agreement (SLA), which is possible due to their advanced physical and logical network architecture, six-carrier blend and fault tolerant cores. Factor in redundant cores, redundant power, and daily backups, and what you get is a state of the art high performance data center, virtually guaranteeing that your site is never down.

They get an excellent rating for performance and uptime.

Features of Jumpline web hosting

Jumpline web hosting doesn’t really offer a rich feature set. Most of their products and services are a bit expensive compared to other web hosts, and the feature set they offer is really lackluster in comparison. They don’t even offer a free domain with their shared hosting account, which most hosting providers do these days.

They do let you choose your control panel though (cPanel or Parallels Plesk Panel), and you can switch from one control panel to another and vice versa as you wish.

Jumpline’s Support and Customer Care

Their customer support is simply fantastic, according to most people who have reported about it on the Internet. They have a US based call center, which means no more struggling with foreign accents and timely resolution of issues. An in-house customer support facility also means problems can get sorted out quicker than if it was outsourced to a third world country in a different time zone than the rest of their staff. They claim a 1-hour average time for support ticket resolutions and 24/7/365 customer support.

All in all, great customer support! They do lack online chat support though, which is a must if you want to ask quick questions before you decide upon a particular web host.

Pros

In-house customer support staff (US based), so you don’t have to deal with call centers in third world countries with accents you don’t understand.
Great customer support with awesome resolution times. They respond to your emails within a couple hours at the most.
Extremely good performance and reliable hosting
Great prices for dedicated and VPS hosting.
If you want to experience their level and quality of service, you can give them a try before committing. Click here to get a shared hosting account for free (two years!), and click here to get a VPS account for free (six months).

Cons

Their shared hosting plans are a little expensive compared to other shared web hosting providers, but when you consider the high speed connectivity and almost 100% uptime, it may be worth it for your business. Besides, they do offer a free two year shared hosting plan for you to check them out.
You need to install the applications yourself. But this is easily taken care of by their robust and extensive documentation for everything. And if you need more help, you can always reach their customer support staff 24×7.
They don’t offer a lot of features and limited amount of bandwidth and disk space compared to other web hosts.

Actual Customer Feedback About Jumpline Web Hosting:

Terrible customer service. Always playing the blame game and never taking responsibility for their service issues. I’d recommend staying far, far away from this company. – sp ( sibyl2(at)yahoo(dot)com )

I have been a customer of Jumpline.com for about 9 years. I have seen other companies come and offer better deals but one thing has kept me a loyal customer to them, a 800 number that I can call and get someone. I am a reseller through them and have over 30 websites. I am extremely satisfied with Jumpline.com service, support and applications. The only thing that i wish they offered is the ability to host my own server. I HIGHLY recommend them. – Alexander ( ah5890 at aol dot com )

They are the best free hosting server you can get (like a dedicated server at no cost). They do not charge you, but you need to add the credit card number. – Anonymous

These guys have incredible up time and great customer support – Chad Brosious

Verdict Of This Jumpline Web Hosting Review:

Although Jumpline web hosting does seem a little expensive and lacking in features, they more than make up for it by offering two free years of shared web hosting and six free months of VPS hosting. A great customer service, 100% uptime SLA, and redundant power supply, redundant cores, high speed connectivity and their attention to a lot of small details make this a web host that can be trusted to host your website.

Verdict: It’s OK to host your website with Jumpline web hosting.

Click here to get a shared hosting account for free with Jumpline (two years!)
Click here to get a VPS account for free with Jumpline (six months).

Cheap VPS Web Hosting

Hostorian — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 00:21:45 +0000

Jumpline offers six months FREE VPS hosting. Check them out!

Cheap VPS web hosting is the perfect solution for anyone who needs more than what a shared hosting package has to offer, but still does not need the additional resources of an entire dedicated server. VPS or virtual private server is when a single server is divided into several virtual servers which allows multiple websites to run simultaneously. Cheap VPS web hosting is considered to have the advantages of a dedicated server, because each user has the sense of working with a dedicated server, while also getting the advantage of shared hosting, which is that several webmasters share resources to reduce the overall cost. There are several other advantages that makes cheap VPS web hosting a great option.

Control

VPS hosting gives every user the ability to have complete autonomy over the administrative tools which includes the graphical interface, command line, and support services. This makes working on a VPS very similar to using a dedicated server.

Resource Flexibility

A VPS gives users the chance to completely control the flexibility and availability of a range of resources. This means that every user can have their requirements met at all times.

Increased Security

VPS allows you to avoid the increased security risks that are associated with shared hosting. This means that users can feel more comfortable with a high level of security for every individual website. The two biggest threats that VPS can help avoid are denial of service attacks as well as unauthorized access.

Migration and Updates

Cheap VPS web hosting allows webmasters to easily migrate from one physical server to another. This is because of the control over server configuration. The same is true when looking at the ease of upgrading applications and platforms at any time.

Installation Freedom

Since every person on a virtual private server has their own separate chunk of hosting space, they can use whatever operating system they want. They can also add any additional applications and software tools that they may need. This allows for much more freedom than a shared server because the webmasters are not reliant what the server administrator adds to the server. Cheap VPS hosting has proven to be the perfect compromise of shared hosting and dedicated hosting. Users still leverage the power of numbers to take down the price, but also get the added benefits of having a dedicated server such as flexibility, control, and security.

Jumpline offers six months FREE VPS hosting. Check them out!

Apollo Hosting – Consumer complaints and comments, facts, and company profile

Hostorian — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:19:12 +0000

Summary

Apollo Hosting hosts over 165,000 domains since 1999. They provide reliable and affordable website hosting services for business, ecommerce, reseller and personal use with all the tools you need for a successful website.

Website: Click here to go to the official Apollo Hosting website

Quick Facts

Number of domains hosted: 165,000
Services: Business hosting (starting at $6.96/month), Personal hosting (starting at $6.96/month), Windows hosting (starting at $13.96/month), and Dedicated hosting (starting at $99.95/month)
Location: Austin, Texas (USA)
Guarantees: 30-day money back guarantee, 99.9% uptime guarantee, price freeze guarantee (for dedicated server hosting)
Contact information: Call 1-877-525-HOST (4678), or visit their contact page.

Click here to go to the official Apollo Hosting website

Products & Services

Business Hosting: Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting, Shared web hosting – Linux, Shared web hosting – Windows, Dedicated hosting – Linux, Dedicated hosting – Windows, Reseller hosting

Click here to go to the official Apollo Hosting website

Hostorian’s Review

Performance

Several customers of Apollo Hosting have posted their reviews of their service. Most of them have reported negatively about their performance, uptime, etc. People report that their servers are frequently down, and at least one person has reported their site being down for a whole day. Another person reported their site being down at least once every week.

I wonder how many people take advantage of their 99.99% uptime guarantee, and if they don’t, why not.

Site speeds are also reported to be on the slow side. All in all Apollo Hosting does not score high on performance.

Features

Apollo Hosting offers a wide variety of features to cater to every need, budget and technical requirement. If you want any additional features not included in one of their core packages, you can always pay a bit extra to get them. This lets you totally customize the feature set if you want.

However, other web hosting companies offer more disk storage, more bandwidth/data transfer, and more domains on a single account.

Support and Customer Care

Their technical support is based out of their headquarters in Austin, Texas, and is completely in-house. This means no more struggling with foreign accents or trying to get your point across to someone with English as a second language.

In addition to this, Apollo Hosting provides a lot of options to help you with your support issues. There is a pre-sales FAQ, a collection of quick start guides, knowledgebase articles, video tutorials, online manuals, forums, help desk, live chat, and phone support to assist you in every way they can.

Their contact number and a live chat button are available from every page on their site, making it easy to get in touch with them, should you have any issues.

All that said, it is really difficult to get a meaningful response from them, especially if you run into a challenging technical problem. The live chat support personnel will usually ask you to get a support ticket, which makes you wonder why they are there in the first place.

The fact that their telephone support is not outsourced is both an advantage and disadvantage in that though you are spared the trauma of struggling through foreign accents of non-native speakers, they can only afford to employ a limited number of support people, causing long wait periods for telephone support.

On the bright side, their manuals, tutorials, and articles are really good, and if you are not afraid of getting your hands dirty managing your sites yourself, Apollo Hosting can be a very good choice for you.

Cons

A lot of features are offered at an extra price, and are not included in the package price. These prices are all clearly mentioned though, both on the package details page and the plan comparisons pages, so you will have a clear idea of what you would be paying before you purchase their services. Also, extra cost usually means they will spend additional resources to make sure everything runs smoothly, which is ultimately more important for a business than a few dollars per month. In addition, this pricing scheme means that those who don’t need the extra feature can pay less.
Their prices are slightly higher than other hosting companies. But this also means better hardware, better network and server performance, and better support, so it’s all worth it, if you think about it.
Customer support is not as good as some of the other hosting firms.

Click here to go to the official Apollo Hosting website

Actual Customer Feedback

The Live Chat Tech Support is awesome and the low cost and great service is why I have been their customer for over 2 years. Apollo’s web hosting needs little web knowledge for upkeep. If I can maintain a website, anyone can! Thanks Apollo! – Dawna Avery, visualtestaments.com

I eventually tried 3 other providers before stumbling on Apollo. Email is extremely important in my business as our employees are all over the world and being up and running all the time is critical. I can not say enough good things about Apollo. They are always on call and always ready to help. Their network is one of the best. What they are doing is right on track. With a very in depth understanding of the industry and what is critical, I can truthfully say, they are doing a fantastic job. Customer service is one of the most critical areas for a company, and they know what they are doing. My business’ success depends on the website and email, and I feel that I am in good hands with Apollo. – Chris Atkins, linguasmex.com

I had previously been jumping from one hosting company to another, in search of the perfect host. I have now had my two websites with Apollohosting for about 2 years, and I am perfectly happy with their services – the main reason for choosing Apollohosting was that they have [a premium email filter] which blocks 99.9% of all spam and virus suspect emails on their server, and I don’t have to deal with them. Considering that I get around 700 spam messages per email address a day, this is a big load off my back, and my computer! But I also must say that the fact that I have not noticed any downtime of my websites at all, and they run smoothly, is also very valuable. When initially setting up my accounts, the help staff were always very helpful and kind, and since then I have not had to contact them once. I am here to stay! – Mimi Sidwell, jxranch.com

I am a long time Apollo Customer, Apollo Reseller, web developer and entrepreneur.

Apollo Hosting is there when you need them, late night, early morning, holidays, whenever. Apollo is there and that is nice and that’s why I’m still using them after 6 years. – Jeff Miller, closingvideos.com

Click here to go to the official Apollo Hosting website

Verdict of This Review

Apollo Hosting does seem to be offering a wide array of services to cater to every need and budget, but it would have been better if they could focus on improving their pricing model, customer support, and performance of their servers in terms of speed and reliability.

Not recommended, unless maybe you are in Austin, Texas, and are looking for a local hosting provider.

Rating:

Click here to go to the official Apollo Hosting website