GreenGeeks is a well established web hosting company, founded back in 2008. Their headquarters is in Agoura Hills, CA and they offer shared, reseller, VPS, and dedicated hosting solutions. They have three different datacenter locations to choose from: Chicago, IL, Montreal, CA, and Amsterdam, NL. Last summer I decided to give GreenGeeks a try. Just like with InMotion Hosting and a few other web hosts I’ve used before, GreenGeeks verifies all orders. “You may receive a call or e-mail requesting further verification.” I immediately received an automated email stating:

“Thank you for your purchase and for choosing GreenGeeks as your web hosting provider. We have received your order and is now in the process of being activated. In an effort to ensure we do not process fraudulent orders, we verify all orders that fail our internal checks. Those orders which pass our internal checks will get activated instantly without telephone verification.”

40 minutes after signing up I received my account details from GreenGeeks without requiring any verification on my end.

Like many web hosting companies today, GreenGeeks claims to be “green web hosting”. They can call themselves an eco-friendly host because they do match all the energy that they use by purchases 3 times that amount in wind energy credits.

Promo Pricing

GreenGeeks has very attractive prices for the initial hosting term: $2.49/month for the Lite plan (which is what I signed up for), $4.95/month for the Pro plan, and $8.95/month for the Premium plan. Say you sign up for three years, you can get a really great deal and not have to worry for quite a long time. The problem is after your initial hosting term is up the renewal price is significantly higher. Unfortunately this is common practice in the web hosting world. The way I’ve come to play it after all these years, is if after the initial term with a web host I’m extremely happy with them, I’ll usually stick around and pay the higher renewal price. If things are running great and there hasn’t been any problems it’s most likely worth another go. If not, it’s quite simple and easy…I backup, pack up, and move on to a different web hosting company.

Support Experience

After my hosting account was setup, I logged in to cPanel to upload my full cPanel backup from my previous hosting account to my home directory. I received the error message: “Maximum file size allowed for upload: 100 MB”. So I decided to open up a support ticket to test out their response time and see what they suggest I do to proceed. Five minutes later I received a reply. I was impressed because this was on a Saturday night. They told me to upload the backup by FTP. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that…probably because it was late on a Saturday night ;) I let them know when I uploaded the full cPanel backup and they had the backup fully restored on my new hosting account within 50 minutes. I’m very impressed with the speed and action of GreenGeek’s support around the midnight hour on a Saturday night.

Uptime Stats – Impressive

There has only been 32 minutes of downtime in the entire first year of using GreenGeeks!

August 2020 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2020 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2020 — 99.98% Uptime (7 minutes of downtime)
November 2020 — 100% Uptime (0 of downtime)
December 2020 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2021 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2021 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2021 — 99.96% Uptime (15 minutes of downtime)
April 2021 — 99.99% Uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
May 2021 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2021 — 99.99% Uptime (6 minutes of downtime)
July 2021 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2021 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2021 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2021 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2021 — 100% Uptime (0 of downtime)
December 2021 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2022 — 99.97% Uptime (9 minutes of downtime)
February 2022 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2022 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2022 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2022 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)

Speed Test Results

I’m on the GreenGeeks Lite plan at their Chicago, IL location. Zero complaints on loading times well under a second.

Final Verdict

GreenGeeks has held up extremely well in the past year I’ve been using them. My brief support experience was positive and their response time was fast. Their uptime has been stellar with only 32 minutes of downtime for the entire year and the loading speeds have been solid too. GreenGeeks has turned out to be another web host I’d recommend.

Permalink: GreenGeeks Review © 2013-2015 Review Hell All Rights Reserved.

GeekStorage was founded in 2007 by Jay Higdon and Matthew Eli. I’ve been on a shared plan with them since November 2015. They also provide reseller hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated servers. With 10 years under their belts in this business GeekStorage has remained a small company but they have also continuously upgraded to newer/better hardware throughout. In the two years that I’ve been with them all in all things have gone smoothly.

Offering "Unlimited Hosting" Plans Now

GeekStorage recently decided to offer "unlimited hosting" plans along with their older "limited hosting" plans. I like that they still offer the older plans too. Many other web hosts have added unlimited plans in recent years and kept their original plans (e.g. MDDHosting, StableHost, HawkHost).

The fact that they do list the limits of the unlimited plans is good, regardless of the contradiction of the term unlimited.

The original shared hosting plan I signed up for in November 2015 was called "Basic Hosting" and it was setup on the Goliath server. In March 2016 I was migrated to an improved server called Poseidon and the plan I'm on now is called PX-1.

It has plenty of resources allocated. In fact, it's better than the resource limits on the newer unlimited plans (see resources from my cPanel below).

Speed Test Results

I got decent loading speeds from San Jose, California on the Pingdom Speed Test. The Poseidon shared server I'm on is located in Chicago, IL.

San Jose Pingdom Speed Test — Load time: 1 Second

Support

Not much to report on here. I've only submitted one low priority ticket requesting to change the primary domain on my hosting account which Matthew took care of in a timely manner. GeekStorage will post announcements if there's any interruptions to service or unplanned maintenance https://www.geekstorage.com/blog/index.php/service-announcements/

Uptime Stats

Tracking was setup after email notification of migration.

March 2016 - 99.85% Uptime (68 minutes of downtime) - My hosting account was migrated to a new shared server with pure SSD storage. They also increased my storage and bandwidth allotments for free. I received an email notification a week before the migration on 2/29/2016 (Subject: Your GeekStorage Shared Hosting: Enhancements & Migration).
April 2016 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2016 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2016 - 99.79% Uptime (90 minutes of downtime)
July 2016 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2016 - 99.93% Uptime (31 minutes of downtime)
September 2016 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2016 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2016 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2016 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2017 - 99.99% Uptime (2 minutes of downtime)
March 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2017 - 99.99% Uptime (1 minute of downtime)
May 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2017 - 99.98% Uptime (7 minutes of downtime)
July 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2017 - 99.72% Uptime (126 minutes of downtime) - Power outage occurrence at upstream provider on October 4th.
November 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2018 - 99.99% Uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
April 2018 - 99.975% Uptime (11 minutes of downtime)
May 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2018 - 99.99% Uptime (1 minute of downtime)
January 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2019 - 99.97% Uptime (14 minutes of downtime)
October 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2019 - 99.99% Uptime (1 minute of downtime)
January 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2020 - 99.99% Uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
March 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2020 - 99.99% Uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
June 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)

Final Verdict

Other than a few downtimes here and there, plus the announced migration of my hosting account to a new server that went smoothly, my two years with GeekStorage has been mostly uneventful. This generally is a good thing when it comes to web hosting. I'm not that surprised since they have mostly positive feedback on WebHostingTalk. I'm going to renew my hosting plan once again at the end of the month. I'll update this space if anything changes and I'd say give GeekStorage a go if you have been considering them.

Permalink: GeekStorage Review © 2013-2015 Review Hell All Rights Reserved.

3/21/2022 Update – MightWeb is Closing 

I was sad to receive the email below. Thank you for the years of hosting service!

There is no easy way to say this and I never thought I would have to. It’s with a heavy heart that MightWeb is closing down.

Everybody has been through the unimageable the last couple of years. With that I’ve personally gone through a lot of personal and professional loss. I have no choice but to close down.

Please make sure you get your most recent backup As Soon As Possible. When you secure new hosting please move ASAP. FIRST get backups off our systems and download it to a safe place.

Once the servers get turned off, we’ll have no way to recover the data.

You should look at moving your domains away from us ASAP as well. You’ll need to generate the EPP code. You can access the domain panel without our WHMCS by going to them directly: NetEarthOne Login Panel: https://mw738554.myorderbox.com/

For the last time…

MightWeb is a small web hosting company that was founded by Marcus Frolander in January of 2015. I’ve been on a Starter package since May of 2016. In August of 2016 MightWeb merged with ImbaHost and went from being a one-man operation to a team of at least five. Some things that have really stood out for me with MightWeb are their transparency and high standards for quality of service.

Since I’ve been using MightWeb, my hosting account has been through two server migrations. I was originally on the s103-carrier server and then was moved to the s104-carrier server, both in Carrier-1 facility in Dallas, TX (migration was completed on 1-27-2017 with zero downtime). I’m currently on s101-cdc603 server in their new location at the NCDC603 facility in Chicago, Illinois (server migration completed on 06-25-2017 with no issues).

On top of always informing customers of any planned maintenance well in advance, MightWeb also sends out “Reason for Outage” emails whenever there has been any unplanned downtime/issues. Sometimes the details are outlined in an PDF attachment, here’s an example from 2-20-17. The client area shows the current status of servers, any past incidents that have been resolved, as well as any future scheduled maintenance (https://mightweb.net/status/). They also send out newsletters usually on a monthly basis with reflections/insights, recent improvements that have been made, and highlights of any upcoming changes.

Speed Testing – Fast Load Time

As mentioned above, I’m currently on a server located in Chicago, IL. Here’s a speed test from the Pingdom Dallas, TX location. Less than a second (963 milliseconds) load time for a 2.1 MB homepage is fast.

Dallas Pingdom Speed Test — Load time: 963 milliseconds

Hosting Plans

MightWeb provides shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS (Linux and Windows), and dedicated servers. The shared hosting “Starter package” I’m on allows for hosting 2 websites and 1 MySQL database. I found it odd at signup that this plan offers an add-on domain but no option for an additional MySQL database. I debated between the Starter and Advanced packages but ended up opting for the Starter plan despite the useless add-on domain since I don’t have any static sites and just considered it a single domain plan.

Uptime Reporting

There were some long instances of downtime last year that were mostly due to planned maintenance. MightWeb ended up issuing a refund for a full year of service in September because of not meeting their uptime standards. More recently their uptime has been significantly better.

June 2016 – 99.95% Uptime (20 minutes of downtime) Psychz NOC confirms a datacenter-wide network outage on June 17.
July 2016 – 99.48% Uptime (234 minutes of downtime) Network Hardware Maintenance — code & configuration updates/changes to cabinet switches on July 6.
August 2016 – 99.96% Uptime (17 minutes of downtime)
September 2016 – 99.56% Uptime (190 minutes of downtime) 3 hours down on the 12th and full year’s refund was provided (more details on this down below).
October 2016 – 99.99% Uptime (6 minutes of downtime)
November 2016 – 99.52% Uptime (206 minutes of downtime) Server maintenance to increase disk capacity and I/O speeds of the server on November 10th.
December 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2017 – 99.57% Uptime (172 minutes of downtime) The upstream provider null-routed the main shared IP address of the server on February 20th. Null-routing should have not occurred in the first place.
March 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2017 – 99.91% Uptime (41 minutes of downtime)
June 2017 – 99.99% Uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
July 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2017 – 99.72% Uptime (127 minutes of downtime) Network experienced re-occurring packet loss.
November 2017 – 99.95% Uptime (23 minutes of downtime)
December 2017 – 99.96% Uptime (16 minutes of downtime)
January 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2018 – 99.95% Uptime (21 minutes of downtime)
April 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2018 – 99.88% Uptime (54 minutes of downtime)
August 2018 – 99.82% Uptime (77 minutes of downtime)
September 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2018 – 99.99% Uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
December 2018 – 99.99% Uptime (1 minute of downtime)
January 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2020 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2020 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2020 – 99.96% Uptime (18 minutes of downtime)
April 2020 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2020 – 99.93% Uptime (33 minutes of downtime)
June 2020 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2020 – 99.86% Uptime (59 minutes of downtime)
August 2020 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2020 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2020 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2020 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2020 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2021 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2021 – 99.98% Uptime (9 minutes of downtime)
March 2021 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2021 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2021 – 99.99% Uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
June 2021 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2021 – 99.93% Uptime (33 minutes of downtime)
August 2021 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2021 – 99.4% Uptime (256 minutes of downtime)
October 2021 – 99.94% Uptime (25 minutes of downtime)
November 2021 – 99.9% Uptime (47 minutes of downtime)
December 2021 – 99.93% Uptime (32 minutes of downtime)

On September 12th, 2016 after 3 hours of downtime that day the owner Marcus issued a full refund for a year of service.

Marcus: We are getting in touch with you as we’ve unfortunately noticed that we’ve failed to maintain our uptime guarantee for the past three months. We strive to maintain a high level of service, but a chain of unfortunate events have resulted in our network not being as stable as it normally is.

As a result of this, and as a result of your uptime not being up to par with what we expect from ourselves, we are hereby issuing a full refund of your services. Your services will remain active of course – so see this as our way of apologizing for the recent issues. Rest assured that we are working diligently to resolve them.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know!

I felt that a full year’s refund wasn’t called for…

Me: I really appreciate the refund, thank you. I would like to go over the statement “we’ve failed to maintain our uptime guarantee for the past three months”.

From my records I had less than 20 minutes of downtime in August.

The downtime in July (around 4 hours) was on July 6th which I believe was related to planned maintenance on a switch.

September (around 3 hours).

At the most two months of hosting account credits for July ($2.59) and Sept ($2.59) would have been sufficient enough for your uptime guarantee. Thank you for going well above and beyond any SLA but if you’d like to do the hosting account credits instead please let me know.

I hope the network issues are resolved moving forward and thanks again.

Marcus’s reply…

Marcus: Our monitoring (SrvTrack) measured a server-wide uptime of 99.86% during August as a total. Granted we have it set fairly strict where it generally accounts for downtime on the second consecutive connection failure – but I’d still dare to say the uptime was less than our guaranteed 99.9%.

As for the other two occasions – whilst one was planned, the total downtime for these two events are in my book enough to warrant a proper refund. That is especially considering that they were in such a short proximity to one another. As I mentioned – we set high standards for what we should provide both in terms of support and uptime. When we fail either, it only makes sense that you are properly credited for it.

There is no need to deposit anything in terms of account credit – simply consider this my (and our) sincere apology for failing to hold up to our guarantees. I assure you we’re working out solutions in co-ordination with the data center to get back on track, and prevent these issues.

Final Verdict

In the year and some change that I’ve been a customer of MightWeb it is clear to me that they won’t settle for anything but perfection. If things don’t go as intended they own up and provide open and transparent communication with their customers with well thought out procedural actions to fix any issues with prevention in mind. The times where things have gone awry they have disclosed in full detail what caused any failure whether on their end or by providers they have entrusted within their infrastructure. The founder of MightWeb, Marcus, truly cares about the satisfaction of customers. If you are looking for an honest web hosting provider with top notch performance and proficient and friendly support MightWeb is definitely worth your consideration.

Permalink: MightWeb Review © 2013-2015 Review Hell All Rights Reserved.

VeeroTech has been around since 2010 and offers shared, reseller and VPS hosting. They are based out of Raleigh, North Carolina and have had three different names through the years. Their original name was VopaHost, then in late-2012 it was changed to LiquiLayer, and finally they have been VeeroTech ever since mid-2013. They have a very solid reputation in web hosting/webmaster circles and after waiting way too long I finally signed up with Veerotech in late November 2015 (SSD Starter Plan). This was originally to host a Woocommerce site that never ended up being launched. Nevertheless, I installed the SSL certificate in cPanel and did some work setting up the site. I found that the speed was good and I tracked it’s uptime. I also ended up putting an add-on domain with a WordPress blog up months later and have been tracking its uptime as well.

Shared Hosting Plans

I opted for the SSD Starter plan which comes with 25GB storage and 2GB RAM. The next step up (SSD Business plan) reminds me of a semi-dedicated hosting plan although it’s not labeled as such. The SSD Business plan not only doubles the allotted amount of storage to 50GB but also doubles the RAM from 2GB to 4GB.

Support Staff – Fast and Knowledgeable

I’ve only opened two support tickets and both were replied to by the same support team member (Mark). His response time was impressive and I was satisfied with his replies.

The first ticket I had trouble trying to install a Let’s Encrypt SSL for an add-on domain so I submitted a ticket with the error message I got in cPanel. I received an initial reply within 9 minutes followed by some back and forth with all responses from support within minutes. Ultimately after 40 minutes (8 replies back and forth) Mark just ended up installing the Let’s Encrypt SSL for me.

For the second ticket I had received a downtime notification email and noticed some MySQL issues on the rl09 server. Mark replied 17 minutes later explaining that there was a mySQL process that had to be restarted and was inaccessible for a few moments.

Me: Hello, Just wanted to let you know that there’s been some MySQL issues on rl09 server today just in case you are unaware.
Mark: Hello, This has already been resolved as of 15-20 mins ago. There was a mySQL process that had to be restarted and was inaccessible for a few moments.
Mark
VeeroTech Systems Account Management & Technical Support

Uptime Stats

There have been a few months with uptime missing the “99.9% guarantee”. I know some of the downtime was due to maintenance and routing issues with Level 3.

December 2015 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2016 – 99.99% Uptime (6 minutes of downtime)
February 2016 – 99.94% Uptime (22 minutes of downtime)
March 2016 – 99.96% Uptime (16 minutes of downtime)
April 2016 – 99.83% Uptime (72 minutes of downtime)
May 2016 – 99.9% Uptime (45 minutes of downtime) – Maintenance notice about upgrading to DDOS filtering systems on May 1st and mySQL process had to be restarted May 26th.
June 2016 – 99.97% Uptime (6 minutes of downtime)
July 2016 – 99.86% Uptime (61 minutes of downtime)
August 2016 – 99.98% Uptime (7 minutes of downtime)
September 2016 – 99.91% Uptime (39 minutes of downtime) – Unable to connect because of routing issue with Level3.
October 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
Updated on 04/23/2017 to report uptime for the months of November – March shown below.
November 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2016 – 99.91% Uptime (38 minutes of downtime)
January 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2017 – 99.86% Uptime (56 minutes of downtime) – Network outage / router and switch failure.
March 2017 – 99.99% Uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
Updated on 08/24/2017 to report uptime for the months of April – July shown below.
April 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2017 – 99.98% Uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
August 2017 – 99.98% Uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
September 2017 – 99.91% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2017 – 99.93% Uptime (30 minutes of downtime)
November 2017 – 99.99% Uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
December 2017 – 99.67% Uptime (142 minutes of downtime) – Scheduled maintenance for critical systems upgrades (power & network).
January 2018 – 99.97% Uptime (10 minutes of downtime)
February 2018 – 99.99% Uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
March 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2018 – 99.98% Uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
May 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2018 – 99.95% Uptime (22 minutes of downtime)
July 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2018 – 99.85% Uptime (65 minutes of downtime)
September 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2019 – 99.99% Uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
February 2019 – 99.99% Uptime (1 minute of downtime)
March 2019 – 99.99% Uptime (2 minute of downtime)
April 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minute of downtime)
May 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minute of downtime)
June 2019 – 99.97% Uptime (12 minutes of downtime)
July 2019 – 99.99% Uptime (2 minutes of downtime)
August 2019 – 99.99% Uptime (2 minutes of downtime)
September 2019 – 99.99% Uptime (2 minutes of downtime)
October 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2019 – 99.93% Uptime (30 minutes of downtime)
December 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2020 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2020 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2020 – 99.98% Uptime (6 minutes of downtime)
April 2020 – 99.99% Uptime (2 minutes of downtime)
May 2020 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2020 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2020 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2020 – 99.99% Uptime (3 minutes of downtime)

Speed Testing Results

Loading speeds are fast! I’m on the VeeroTech rl09 shared server which is located in Raleigh, NC.

NYC Pingdom Speed Test — Load time: 463 milliseconds

Dallas Pingdom Speed Test — Load time: 720 milliseconds

Final Verdict

In using VeeroTech for almost a full year now I have found them to be well worth the price. Their loading speeds are fast and my interactions with staff have been great. I’m going to be renewing my plan at the end of November for another year and I’m confident that the quality of their hosting and responsiveness of the staff will persist through my second year with them.

Permalink: VeeroTech Review © 2013-2015 Review Hell All Rights Reserved.

Squidix is based out of Indianapolis, Indiana and they started providing web hosting services back in 2010. I signed up for a 10GB shared hosting plan with Squidix in July of 2015. They also offer reseller hosting, semi-dedicated hosting, virtual private servers, and dedicated server as well as web design and development services. Right from the start I was impressed with Squidix because I requested a full cPanel backup to be restored on my new account and 5 minutes later it was done! Since then in the year I’ve been with them I haven’t faced any problems except for some downtime in late December when Linode (datacenter where my hosting account is) was facing DDoS attacks. There’s more on that further down the page. Overall Squidix has been a great web host that I continue to trust.

Speed Testing – Fast

I’m on a shared hosting plan located in Dallas, TX (Linode datacenter). Squidix also uses QuadraNet’s datacenter in Dallas,TX.

Dallas Pingdom Speed Test — Load time: 758 milliseconds

New York City Pingdom Speed Test — Load time: 1.05 seconds

Uptime Reports

Aside from DDoS attacks on Linode in December 2015 which resulted in 100+ minutes of downtime spread over Christmas week, my downtime records show only 26 minutes of downtime in the year I’ve been using Squidix.

August 2015 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2015 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2015 – 99.957% Uptime (19 minutes of downtime)
November 2015 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2015 – 99.69% Uptime (142 minutes of downtime) Downtime due to scheduled maintenance which required a server reboot to apply necessary updates on December 15th (5 minutes of downtime) and the DDoS attacks Christmas week (137 minutes of downtime).
January 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2016 – 99.995% Uptime (2 minutes of downtime)
April 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2016 –  99.82% Uptime (82 minutes of downtime)
August 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2016 – 99.97% Uptime (12 minutes of downtime) Scheduled system reboot to apply critical security updates
October 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2016 – 99.81% Uptime (83 minutes of downtime)
December 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2017 – 99.86% Uptime (59 minutes of downtime) Some downtime due to routine scheduled maintenance in response to a critical Xen security advisory
May 2017 – 99.97% Uptime (12 minutes of downtime)
June 2017 – 99.74% Uptime (111 minutes of downtime) 84 minutes of this month’s downtime was due to scheduled maintenance in the early AM hours of June 17th.
July 2017 – 99.98% Uptime (7 minutes of downtime)
August 2017 – 99.95% Uptime (23 minutes of downtime)
September 2017 – 99.78% Uptime (96 minutes of downtime) Notified almost a month in advanced on August 26th about the planned maintenance on September 20th.
October 2017 – 99.99% Uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
November 2017 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2017 – 99.97% Uptime (13 minutes of downtime)
January 2018 – 99.99% Uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
February 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2018 – 99.86% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2018 – 99.43% Uptime (245 minutes of downtime)
June 2018 – 99.72% Uptime (121 minutes of downtime)
July 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2018 – 99.95% Uptime (23 minutes of downtime)
September 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2018 – 99.99% Uptime (2 minutes of downtime)
November 2018 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2018 – 99.82% Uptime (77 minutes of downtime)
January 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2019 – 98.58% Uptime (613 minutes of downtime)
April 2019 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2019 – 99.99% Uptime (2 minutes of downtime)

Outstanding Support

Squidix has fast and knowledgeable support. Tickets are answered in minutes, not hours. As I said early, my initial cPanel account migration request was completed within 5 minutes and by the owner. Looking back on my support ticket history when I experienced the downtime Christmas week, I received a response within 3 minutes, and another response from the owner 20 minutes after that.

Me 12/29/2015 11:10
Hello,
I was wondering if you could look into what’s been causing downtime for me this morning. Below is recent downtime I have logged.
Thank you for your time and help.
12/29/15 – 10:13am – 17 minutes downtime
12/29/15 – 9:20am – 47 minutes downtime
12/29/15 – 8:38am – 16 minutes downtime
12/28/15 – 2:48am – 11 minutes downtime
12/26/15 – 11:42am – 9 minutes downtime
12/25/15 – 2:58pm – 37 minutes downtime

Staff Reply 12/29/2015 11:13

One of our service providers/data centers were facing connective issues and their engineers have fully restored it.
The servers are back online and your websites are loading fine now. We regret for the inconvenience caused.

Staff Reply 12/29/2015 11:33

Your site is at a server at Linode’s Dallas datacenter, they are experiencing a DDoS at the moment and working to mitigate it. Everything appears to be operational at the moment.
http://status.linode.com

Here are the status pages for the Linode Dallas connectivity issues on the days I experienced downtime in December: 12/25/15, 12/26/15, 12/28/15, and 12/29/15.

There was one scheduled maintenance to apply security updates to the server on December 15th that resulted in 5 minutes of downtime at 2:04AM for which I was notified about by email three days before hand.

Final Verdict

My invoice is due in 5 days on the 28th of July and I will be renewing for another year. Their pricing is reasonable considering what you get: fast loading speed; overall no issues with uptime (minus the December DDoS attack); and a dedicated and responsive staff. Over the past year of using Squidix I can say they are a reliable web host and I definitely recommend them.

Permalink: Squidix Review © 2013-2015 Review Hell All Rights Reserved.

HostWithLove began providing shared and reseller web hosting services back in 2012. Today customers can choose from 9 different server locations spread out all over the world. It’s been just over a year since I signed up with HostWithLove and I have been happy enough with them to renew my S1 shared hosting plan for another year.

Speed Test Results – Orlando Server Location

My hosting account is on a server located in Orlando, Florida in HostDime’s data center. The Pingdom speed test results from Dallas, TX are below (1.11 seconds). I was initially on the Orlando01 server but was migrated to their Orlando02 server back in October (without any downtime).

HostWithLove keeps on adding new servers locations. They currently have servers located in 9 different data centers, across 4 continents:

1. Chicago, Illinois (QuadraNET)
2. Dallas, Texas (QuadraNET)
3. Orlando, Florida (DimeNOC)
4. Los Angeles, California (DimeNOC)
5. Sao Paulo, Brazil (DimeNOC)
6. London, United Kingdom (DimeNOC)
7. Amsterdam, Netherlands (DimeNOC)
8. New Delhi, India (DimeNOC)
9. Wan Chai, Hong Kong (DimeNOC)

Tech Support Experience

HostWithLove’s support has been pleasant and thorough. Initial support response times haven’t been super fast but they aren’t extremely slow either. I’ve had 3 technical support tickets and when they replied back they answered fully and ultimately ended up getting to the bottom of any problems.

10/04/15 Ticket
Jansen created a ticket to inform me that my account was successfully migrated from the Orlando01 server to the Orlando02 server.

11/05/15 Ticket
Me (21:28): I’m sure you are on it but just wondering if there’s a problem with orlando02? Unable to connect.
Me (21:30): Never mind…down for around 10 minutes but it’s back up now.
Trevor (23:33): Apologies about that, we had to do a quick server reboot to revive a kernel panic. We had KernelCare installed which should have settled that but somehow it didn’t install the latest updates as it should, we have reinstalled it which should resolve the issue. Should you have further questions or concerns, please feel free to update this ticket.

01/26/16 Ticket
Me (19:13): What’s happening with orlando02? I’m getting a 500 Internal Service Error trying cPanel.
Trevor (20:19): We are currently looking into this, please standby for further updates.
Trevor (20:35): The error is now resolved. It seems to be due to some excess files on a particular partition, we are looking into why this is happening and will revert shortly so you are kept updated on the cause and remedy actions.

So the problem is solved and I can sleep without worry. The next morning I received an update from Trevor.

Trevor (08:56): Sorry for the delay on this. After investigating, it appears the issue might be related to a cPanel update that was filling up the partition. We are performing some adjustments from our end to prevent this from occurring again. Sorry for any inconvenience caused last night!

It turns out this was the cause and they ended up needing to do some preventive maintenance on Orlando02 a few days later which did the trick.

Monthly Uptime Numbers

Overall there has been very little downtime each month. The only exception was in January when there were problems from an automated cPanel update.

April 2015 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2015 — 99.98% Uptime (10 minutes of downtime)
June 2015 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2015 — 99.99% Uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
August 2015 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2015 — 99.98% Uptime (7 minutes of downtime)
October 2015 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime) Migrated from Orlando01 server to Orlando02 server.
November 2015 — 99.95% Uptime (9 minutes of downtime)
December 2015 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2016 — 99.87% Uptime (59 minutes of downtime) Automated cPanel update issues & emergency reboot Orlando02 server – Jan 30th.
February 2016 — 99.98% Uptime (10 minutes of downtime)
March 2016 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2016 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2016 — 99.98% Uptime (10 minutes of downtime)
June 2016 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2016 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2016 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2016 — 99.91% Uptime (37 minutes of downtime)
October 2016 — 99.96% Uptime (16 minutes of downtime)
November 2016 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2016 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2017 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2017 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2017 — 99.98% Uptime (6 minutes of downtime)
April 2017 — 99.97% Uptime (12 minutes of downtime)
May 2017 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2017 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2017 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2017 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2017 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2017 — 99.99% Uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
November 2017 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2017 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2018 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2018 — 99.87% Uptime (56 minutes of downtime)
March 2018 — 99.90% Uptime (43 minutes of downtime)
April 2018 — 99.98% Uptime (8 minutes of downtime)
May 2018 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2018 — 99.98% Uptime (7 minutes of downtime)
July 2018 — 99.98% Uptime (8 minutes of downtime)
August 2018 — 99.99% Uptime (6 minutes of downtime)
September 2018 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2018 — 99.98% Uptime (11 minutes of downtime)
November 2018 — 99.92% Uptime (35 minutes of downtime)
December 2018 — 99.88% Uptime (50 minutes of downtime)
January 2019 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2019 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2019 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2019 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2019 — 99.95% Uptime (20 minutes of downtime)
June 2019 — 96.76% Uptime (1399 minutes of downtime) – A power outage corrupted databases on the ORLANDO02 server. Repair operations required MySQL service to do a full mysqldump and databases were not accessible during it.
July 2019 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2019 — 97.72% Uptime (986 minutes of downtime) – During UPS maintenance at the datacenter ORLANDO02 there were database corruptions. Repair operations failed and they had to restore MySQL data from the most recent backup. While nearing completion of the MySQL databases restore, there was an issue with the file system. To avoid further inconvenience, we are also working on deployment of a new server to restore data onto in case the issue with the original server couldn’t be resolved.
September 2019 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2019 — 99.94% Uptime (28 minutes of downtime)
November 2019 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2019 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2020 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2020 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2020 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2020 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2020 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2020 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2020 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2020 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2020 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2020 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2020 — 99.63% Uptime (159 minutes of downtime) – MIA02 server Saturday night scheduled maintenance (drive replacement)
December 2020 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2021 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2021 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2021 — 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)

Final Verdict

HostWithLove has been a great hosting company so far and I now know why they are so well spoken of on WebHostingTalk. I noticed HostWithLove increased their prices slightly since I signed up last year but they are still reasonably priced. The only negative thing I’ve ever heard about them is that their support can take longer sometimes, which is definitely something to strive for improving. From my small number of tech support tickets I have to agree that initial responses aren’t as quick as with other providers. However, the quality of their responses are not at all lacking, which is important. It’s better to get a helpful in-depth response than receiving an immediate empty response just to acknowledge the existence of your ticket with no resolution, followed later by a canned response that goes something like, “We are having significant delays at this time due to a large number of customer service inquires. I want to assure you that we are diligently working on finding a resolution to your problems.” Thankfully HostWithLove doesn’t shoot out empty replies that leave you hanging like that. After all they have to live up to their name and be a host with love.

Permalink: HostWithLove Review © 2013-2015 Review Hell All Rights Reserved.

NOTE: BulwarkHost was sold to Radium Hosting in 2017.

BulwarkHost started out offering shared hosting plans in 2013 and added reseller hosting plans in early 2015. Back when I started using them they weren’t that well known outside of web hosting/webmaster forums. Since then I’ve noticed them being mentioned more and more, so word about BulwarkHost has been getting out.

I’ve been using their shared hosting “Starter Plan” for nine months and enough time has passed where I can say that their hosting operation is worth recommending. When my account is up for renewal in February 2016, I might request to be downgraded to their “Lite Plan” because I’m currently only using 245 MB out of 2 GB of space on the “Starter Plan”.

Originally the “Lite Plan” only allowed for 500 MB space and 1 website but they upgraded all of their hosting plans a couple months after I signed up (and once again since this review was first published). The “Lite Plan” now has 31 GB space, 15025 GB bandwidth, unlimited10 addon domains, emails, and databases for $4.75/month versus the “Starter Plan”, having 52 GB space, 250100 GB bandwidth, and unlimited addon domains, emails, and databases for $6.50/month. There’s no sense in paying more money for resources that I don’t require.

Great Speed Testing

I’m on BulwarkHost’s Odin server located in Los Angeles. The speed test results from Dallas, TX are below (1.05 seconds). They added a second server location option in Buffalo, NY this past August, but discontinued offering it 3 months later due to network performance issues. They have plans to add a different East coast USA location as well as an European location sometime in 2016.

Uptime Results

There has been minimal downtime each month and no major outages (updated May network issues).

February 2015 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2015 – 99.99% Uptime (1 minutes of downtime)
April 2015 – 99.99% Uptime (6 minutes of downtime) Scheduled maintenance – MariaDB upgrade
May 2015 – 99.98% Uptime (9 minutes of downtime)
June 2015 – 99.99% Uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
July 2015 – 99.98% Uptime (8 minutes of downtime)
August 2015 – 99.93% Uptime (31 minutes of downtime)
September 2015 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2015 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2015 – 99.95% Uptime (20 minutes of downtime)
December 2015 – 99.94% Uptime (27 minutes of downtime) LA network was under DDoS attack – Dec 4th
Updated June 1st 2016: Added uptime stats from January 2016 through May 2016. Some big downtime in May due to networking issues in LA.
January 2016 – 99.9% Uptime (45 minutes of downtime) Scheduled maintenance – core & distribution switches
February 2016 – 100% Uptime (12 minutes of downtime)
March 2016 – 99.97% Uptime (56 minutes of downtime)
April 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2016 – 97.99% Uptime (14 hours and 57 minutes of downtime) LA networking issues…bug in Juniper software release on the Core QFX switches.

June 2016 – 99.98% Uptime (9 minutes of downtime)
July 2016 – 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2016 – 99.995% Uptime (2 minutes of downtime)
September 2016 – 99.9% Uptime (40 minutes of downtime)
October 2016 – 99.986% Uptime (6 minutes of downtime)
November 2016 – 99.87% Uptime (57 minutes of downtime)
December 2016 – 99.79% Uptime (90 minutes of downtime)
January 2017 – 99.83% Uptime (73 minutes of downtime)

Solid Support Team

I’ve only opened up one support ticket so far. My uptime tracker sent me a downtime notification so I checked and I couldn’t connect to my site. I asked if there was anything going on, but honestly I only opened a ticket to see how they’d respond. I ended up being able to reach my site minutes after I created the ticket but BulwarkHost’s response was to go beyond what most web hosts would do. A lot of web hosts would simply say that we see no problem on our end and since you’re able to connect again, that’s great, and have a nice day. Instead they told me they were going to investigate and see if they could find the reason for the downtime. They got back to me and discovered that there was a problem with one of the server’s backup processes which had been causing services to be inaccessible for a small number customers and that measures were implemented to ensure it wouldn’t happen again. So far I’ve interacted with three people from BulwarkHost (Keith, Tim, and Aaron) and they are all friendly and very knowledgeable.

My hosting account on the Odin server was migrated to a new server in October. The migration went smoothly and is a great example of how hosting account migrations should be handled. There were a few email notifications sent out before the migration and they did real-time updates during the migration on Twitter as well.

• The initial email was on September 8th, announcing the plan to migrate accounts on the Odin server with a great set of frequently asked questions. The date of the migration was still to be determined but the plan was for sometime in October.
• The second email was on September 16th with the Odin server upgrade schedule, off-peak times (Saturday, October 3, 2015 1:30am – 7:30am EST).
• The third email was sent out before the start of the migration stating what backup time frame they were going to be using (backups from October 2, 2015 at around 9:00 PM EST) and that if you made changes to your site after that time to contact them and they would retrieve a newer backup to be restored on the new server.
• I received the final email about an hour after the migrations began saying that my account was successfully migrated to the new server.

Final Verdict

Over the nine months I’ve been using BulwarkHost I’ve experienced minimal to zero downtime each month. Their staff is friendly and knowledgeable and the price is certainly right for the premium pure SSD hosting they provide. Keep an eye on this hosting company because if they stay on this track as they grow as a company they have the potential to become a more popular and respected player in the web hosting world.

UPDATE: On September 30th 2017 I received an email notifying me that BulwarkHost was sold to Radium Hosting.

BulwarkHost account moved to Radium Hosting

Welcome to Radium Hosting!

Hello, my name is Mark Coyne and I’d like to be the first to welcome you to Radium Hosting. I’m thrilled that Juan Vega of BulwarkHost has chosen my company to provide secure, reliable hosting for many years to come.

BulwarkHost will no longer be providing hosting services, so we worked with Juan to make the transition a simple, hands off experience for you.

I’d like to give you some background on Radium Hosting and how I got started. I’ve been involved with web development for over 20 years and luckily one of my projects was a success. It was a forum that became popular almost immediately after launch. While the forum was growing, I was helping friends, family build and host websites. As the forum grew, I was asked to leave almost every major hosting company due to “overutilization of resources”. I did some research and moved to the best datacenter available – SoftLayer. Soon after, I sold the forum and didn’t want to lose my new clients or the awesome SoftLayer hardware, so in 2009 I started Radium Hosting, LLC.

Our hosting environment is built on the latest generation Intel Xeon Multi-Core processors and high-speed redundant solid-state disk drives. The network is built from best-in-class networking infrastructure, hardware, and software with exceptional bandwidth and connectivity for the highest speed and reliability. It really can’t be beat.

We will be managing your current hosting environment moving forward, but if you’re interested in migrating over to our infrastructure, please let us know.

We’re excited to be your new hosting company. If you have any questions or concerns about Radium Hosting, feel free to open a support ticket and we’ll do our best to answer your questions. The Radium Client Area is located at: https://clients.radiumhosting.com/

Thanks,
Mark Coyne

Permalink: BulwarkHost Review © 2013-2015 Review Hell All Rights Reserved.

HawkHost is a Canadian web hosting company that started out in 2004 providing shared hosting plans. Ten plus years later they now offer reseller, semi-dedicated, and virtual private servers. They also have five different server locations: Dallas, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and Singapore. I’ve been using HawkHost’s shared hosting for over three years now (since April 2012) so this review is over due. I like that they are upfront about resources on their shared plans (1 CPU Core, 1GB Memory, 5MB/sec/IO, 100 Processes, 20 concurrent connections, and 25 MySQL Connections) and having 5 different server locations to choose from is a plus. HawkHost has reasonable prices and the quality of their service is worth well more than the low rates they charge.

Responsive Support

I've opened up a handful of support tickets over the years and HawkHost has always been fast, courteous, and  knowledgeable with their replies.

• April 2012: Restore cPanel backups to new hosting accounts.
• August 2012: Contacted them about server being down. It was a large DDoS attack on the shared IP so they changed it and was resolved quickly.
• May 2013: Contacted them about downtime. Discovered I was hitting CPU and process limits on my vBulletin forum. I figured out the cause and it was all good after that.
• July 2013: PHP version issue/question - resolved with 3 replies from staff in about an hour.
• October 2013: Slow loading on a WordPress site - discovered I was hitting resource limits and throttling was the cause of the slowness. I was getting hundreds of hits/minute from one IP address to xmlrpc.php so blocked the IP address and disabled xmlrpc.php since I didn't use it for remote posting to WordPress. Resolved with 2 replies from staff in about an hour.

Since that last ticket I haven't used their support in almost two years. HawkHost has a nice server status system setup (http://www.hawkhoststatus.com/) so if there's maintenance, unscheduled downtime, or a problem I've checked there first to see what's up. Overall they are on the ball and quick to resolve things.

Speed Test Result

Here's a Pingdom speed test result (1.08 seconds - not bad at all) for one of my sites hosted on a HawkHost Washington, DC server.

Great Uptime on Average

March 2015 - 99.98% Uptime (7 minutes of downtime)
April 2015 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2015 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2015 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2015 - 99.72% Uptime (125 minutes of downtime)

August 2015 through September 2016 - *14 Months of 100% Uptime!* (0 minutes of downtime)

October 2016 - 99.97% Uptime (13 minutes of downtime)
November 2016 - 99.99% Uptime (1 minutes of downtime)
December 2016 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2017 - 99.96% Uptime (15 minutes of downtime)
July 2017 - 99.91% Uptime (37 minutes of downtime)
August 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2017 - 99.82% Uptime (78 minutes of downtime)
December 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2018 - 99.61% Uptime (169 minutes of downtime) - My hosting account was migrated from wdc005 (Washington DC) to the new nyc005 (New York City) server on 1/25/18. Four days after the migration for a couple of hours there was issues with MySQL database access.
February 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2018 - 99.998% Uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
June 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2018 - 99.80% Uptime (90 minutes of downtime)
October 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2018 - 99.05% Uptime (412 minutes of downtime) - Scheduled maintenance to expand existing network and datacenter infrastructure to allow for continued growth and expansion in New York City location.
December 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2019 - 99.99% Uptime (1 minutes of downtime)
April 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2019 - 99.57% Uptime (184 minutes of downtime)
July 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2019 - 99.99% Uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
September 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2019 - 99.99% Uptime (2 minutes of downtime)
January 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2020- 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
September 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
October 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2020 - 99.96% Uptime (15 minutes of downtime)
January 2021 - 99.99% Uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
February 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2021- 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
May 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
June 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
July 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
August 2021 - 99.99% Uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
September 2021 - 99.98% Uptime (8 minutes of downtime)
October 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
November 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
December 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
January 2022 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
February 2022 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
March 2022- 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
April 2022 - 99.99% Uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
May 2022 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)

I don't have any uptime monitoring data prior to February 2015, but I do remember experiencing at least a few notably bad months with downtime like this July in years past. Overall though, HawkHost has great uptime and when there are problems they are on it fast.

Final Verdict

HawkHost has a great reputation because they are reliable and have consistently grown and improved over the years. In my experience there hasn't been any big problems and HawkHost's small team of 15 or so employees are very devoted and knowledgeable. I've stayed with them for over 3 years now and will keep on renewing if they remain on this track. For the quality of service you get their prices are very affordable. Like it or not, as apart of their marketing strategy they seem to always have recurring coupons available to lower their prices even more.

Permalink: HawkHost Review © 2013-2015 Review Hell All Rights Reserved.

I’d been following InMotion Hosting and their sister company WebHostingHub long before I signed up for a plan with InMotion Hosting. From everything I read or heard about them they seemed like they were a really well run company, but for whatever reason, I was hesitant to give them a try. Probably because they are considered to be one of the big guys, but that turned out not to be a negative in their case. They are a large company with a dedicated staff that knows what they are doing.

InMotion Hosting Signup Process

InMotion Hosting needs to do account verification with a phone call before you can access your new hosting account. A lot of companies do this these days and while it is a bit of a hassle, I do understand the need to cut down on fraudulent accounts. If you are in hurry to get a website up like I was, you don’t need to wait for them to call you, just give them a call right after you finish signing up online and they will take care of it right away.

After verifying a few things, I remember that there was a bit of an attempt by their representative to try and introduce some up-sells to me. Since I knew what I needed and didn’t need anything this didn’t last very long. Come to think of it, pretty much every business will try to see if there is anything else that you might need when you are wrapping up a phone call. Maybe I jumped to the “up-sell” conclusion and all she really was trying to do was to see if there was anything else she could help me with. So if a 5 or so minute phone conversation is a deal breaker for you then choose a host that doesn’t have a telephone account verification process. But honestly, if that’s the only downer I say let this verification/setup step slide.

Promotional Pricing & Monthly Term…

InMotion’s business class hosting costs more than your average shared hosting. They don’t have coupons but do have promotional pricing on the initial invoice (shown below). The first two plans (Launch and Power) have limits on the number of domains, email accounts, and MySQL databases. I have their Launch Business Class plan which only allows for hosting 2 websites and 2 MySQL databases. If you need to host more sites the Power plan allows for 6 websites, and the Pro plan allows for “unlimited” websites. The only plan that has the option for a monthly or 6 months contract is the Pro plan, but they shouldn’t even offer a monthly option because it has a $40 setup fee! InMotion Hosting does have a 90 day money back guarantee period. After the 90 days they will provide a pro-rated refund for any months left on your contract if you need to cancel. This made paying yearly acceptable to me.

Their sister company WebHostingHub offers shared hosting that costs a bit less. They use the same datacenters so it’s the same network backbone and as of July 2015 they use the same servers/hardware as InMotion Hosting (with pure SSD). WebHostingHub only provides shared plans, where as InMotion has shared, reseller, VPS, and dedicated hosting. Which would be better if you are looking for a shared hosting plan now, with the option to upgrade to a VPS if/when your site(s) get big enough to require one.

Support Department

I don’t have anything major to report on their support department because most things I can handle doing myself. One request I made was to have something modified in ssl.conf and they explained to me that this wasn’t possible because it would affect all the accounts on the shared server I was on. I don’t know why I didn’t realize this at the time, but they didn’t make me feel like a fool for asking. Other than that I haven’t required their help besides my initial account setup.

Very Good Uptime

Overall uptime on their East coast datacenter has been very good. I recommend choosing their East coast server location because the west coast datacenter has had issues lately. Most months uptime has been well above 99.9% (some random minutes of downtime here and there on my uptime monitoring). There have been a couple instances of downtime due to server issues or scheduled maintenance. One thing that always makes me angry is when a host doesn’t notify me in advance about any major changes/maintenance to a server I’m on. InMotion Hosting does send out notifications for scheduled maintenance.

• April 2015 – 99.93% uptime (32 minutes of downtime)
• May 2015 – 99.63% uptime (163 minutes of downtime)
  *Scheduled maintenance was the cause of May downtime increase.

  We are currently performing scheduled maintenance on our East Coast Data Center. Downtime is expected to vary but not exceed 180 minutes.

• June 2015 – 99.96% uptime (17 minutes of downtime)
• July 2015 – 99.995% uptime (2 minutes of downtime)
• August 2015 – 99.97% uptime (13 minutes of downtime)
• September 2015 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• October 2015 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• November 2015 – 99.993% uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
• December 2015 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• January 2016 – 99.98% uptime (8 minutes of downtime)
• February 2016 – 99.997% uptime (1 minutes of downtime)
• March 2016 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• April 2016 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• May 2016 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• June 2016 – 99.965% uptime (15 minutes of downtime)
• July 2016 – 99.97% uptime (13 minutes of downtime)
• August 2016 – 99.993% uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
• September 2016 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• October 2016 – 99.98% uptime (7 minutes of downtime)
• November 2016 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• December 2016 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• January 2017 – 99.98% uptime (9 minutes of downtime)
• February 2017 – 99.997% uptime (1 minutes of downtime)
• March 2017 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• April 2017 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• May 2017 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• June 2017 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• July 2017 – 99.993% uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
• August 2017 – 99.96% uptime (19 minutes of downtime)
• September 2017 – 99.993% uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
• October 2017 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• November 2017 – 99.99% uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
• December 2017 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• January 2018 – 99.93% uptime (30 minutes of downtime)
• February 2018 – 99.998% uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
• March 2018 – 99.996% uptime (6 minutes of downtime)
• April 2018 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• May 2018 – 99.975% uptime (11 minutes of downtime)
• June 2018 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• July 2018 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• August 2018 – 99.93% uptime (32 minutes of downtime)
• September 2018 – 99.98% uptime (10 minutes of downtime)
• October 2018 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• November 2018 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• December 2018 – 99.99% uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
• January 2019 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• February 2019 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• March 2019 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• April 2019 – 99.99% uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
• May 2019 – 99.99% uptime (2 minutes of downtime)
• June 2019 – 99.89% uptime (47 minutes of downtime)
• July 2019 – 99.99% uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
• August 2019 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• September 2019 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• October 2019 – 99.99% uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
• November 2019 – 99.77% uptime (99 minutes of downtime)
• December 2019 – 99.93% uptime (31 minutes of downtime)
• January 2020 – 99.99% uptime (6 minutes of downtime)
• February 2020 – 99.96% uptime (16 minutes of downtime)
• March 2020 – 99.99% uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
• April 2020 – 99.86% uptime (62 minutes of downtime)
• May 2020 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• June 2020 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• July 2020 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• August 2020 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• September 2020 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• October 2020 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• November 2020 – 99.99% uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
• December 2020 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• January 2021 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• February 2021 – 99.91% uptime (40 minutes of downtime)
• March 2021 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• April 2021 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• May 2021 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• June 2021 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• July 2021 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• August 2021 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• September 2021 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• October 2021 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• November 2021 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• December 2021 – 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)

Impressive Speed Testing

As you can see below, my WordPress site hosted on an InMotion Hosting server located in Virginia (East coast datacenter option) loads very fast. I’ve posted Pingdom speed tests from three different locations: NY, Texas, and California. InMotion also has a West coast datacenter option in Los Angeles.

New York City Pingdom Test

Dallas, Texas Pingdom Test

San Jose, California Pingdom Test

Final Verdict

InMotion Hosting is one of the big guys in the hosting world. Usually I have found this to be a negative more than a positive. However in InMotion’s case they are one of the good big guys. You pretty much have to pre-pay for at least a year of hosting on their shared hosting plans. However, they do pro-rated refunds after the 90 day money-back guarantee period, which does make signing up for a yearly contract tolerable. Loading speed is very good and they have an in-house solid staff that overall knows what they are doing. If you are looking for a hosting provider that has been in the business for a long time that hasn’t been sold to EIG and most likely never will be, definitely consider using InMotion Hosting.

Permalink: InMotion Hosting Review © 2013-2015 Review Hell All Rights Reserved.

A2 Hosting is based out of Michigan and has been in the web hosting business since 2003. I started using A2 Hosting in March 2014. A hefty WordPress site wasn’t loading very well on my DowntownHost plan and after reading some recommendations about A2 Hosting’s performance and speed, I opted for their Prime+SDD shared hosting account (which is now called Swift). It turns out that I made a great decision and here’s why…

Fast Loading Speed - "High Speed Hosting" Claim

I decided to enabled their "A2 Optimized WordPress" plugin which basically auto configures your WordPress site to increase performance and security. I'm quite familiar with optimizing WordPress and I have to say they did a pretty great job putting this pre-configured package of plugins and settings together. Maybe some more seasoned WordPress users might not opt to use it, but I dig it so far. It was a time saver and it works.

I was a bit skeptical of A2 Hosting's "High Speed Hosting" claim. However, I was pleasantly surprised with how well things loaded on their servers. Overall I've been very happy with the time it takes for my site to load with A2 Hosting.

Here's a Pingdom speed test result of my site hosted on a A2 Hosting server located in Michigan. They also have server locations in Arizona, Amsterdam, and Singapore.

Site on A2 Hosting (Datacenter in Southfield, Michigan)

A2 Hosting definitely meets my speed requirements with a 1.06 second load time for a 825.9kB homepage.

In order to properly evaluate speed, I put the same site on my Downtownhost plan again. Server location in Chicago, Illinois (close to Michigan).

Site on DowntownHost (Datacenter in Chicago, Illinois)

As you can see the site took more than twice as long to load.
A2 Hosting: 1.06s Load Time
DowntownHost: 2.63s Load Time

A2 Hosting has a new shared hosting plan they created late last year called Turbo. It costs twice as much as what I'm paying for my Swift plan, but A2 claims up to 20x faster page loading speeds with the Turbo plan. I'm satisfied with the speed on my current plan but I might try out Turbo for future projects. With the Turbo plan they put fewer users on each server and double the memory, which means more resources per user. They also use something called "SwiftCache Site Accelerator" on this plan (explained below).

Great Uptime Overall

Overall my A2 Hosting plan's uptime has been fantastic. The only bad month was in October when I had a total of 57 minutes of downtime in one week due to a massive denial of service (DoS) attack on their networks. The downtime was not all at once, but several small blocks over the week. No other downtime was recorded for the rest of that month. Here's a screenshot of some of their Twitter feed from that week regarding the DoS attack.

I was impressed with how they handled the attacks and how they kept their customers in the loop throughout it all. The downtime really was minimal, especially when you consider what they were up against. Many customers (including me) expressed their support for A2 on social media that week.

In looking back at the past four months, their uptime has been overall above the 99.9% standard, except for that one week in October 2014:

• October 2014 - 99.87% Uptime (57 minutes of downtime)
• November 2014 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• December 2014 - 99.96% Uptime (19 minutes of downtime)
• January 2015 - 99.97% Uptime (14 minutes of downtime)
• February 2015 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• March 2015 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• April 2015 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• May 2015 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• June 2015 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• July 2015 - 99.94% Uptime (29 minutes of downtime)
• August 2015 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• September 2015 - 99.99% Uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
• October 2015 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• November 2015 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
  
• December 2015 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
  
• January 2016 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
  
• February 2016 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• March 2016 - 99.98% Uptime (9 minutes of downtime)
• April 2016 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• May 2016 - 99.98% Uptime (8 minutes of downtime)
• June 2016 - 99.99% Uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
• July 2016 - 99.99% Uptime (1 minutes of downtime)
• August 2016 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• September 2016 - 99.92% Uptime (35 minutes of downtime)
• October 2016 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• November 2016 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
  
• December 2016 - 99.84% Uptime (71 minutes of downtime) DNS resolving issues
  
• January 2017 - 99.99% Uptime (4 minutes of downtime)
  
• February 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• March 2017 - 99.98% Uptime (6 minutes of downtime)
• April 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• May 2017 - 99.69% Uptime (134 minutes of downtime)
• June 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• July 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• August 2017 - 99.76% Uptime (106 minutes of downtime) Hit with several large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
• September 2017 - 99.97% Uptime (13 minutes of downtime)
• October 2017 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• November 2017 - 99.84% Uptime (68 minutes of downtime) DNS issues across the network
• December 2017 - 99.96% Uptime (19 minutes of downtime)
• January 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• February 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• March 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• April 2018 - 99.6% Uptime (170 minutes of downtime) Datacenter power issues
• May 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• June 2018 - 99.97% Uptime (14 minutes of downtime) Scheduled maintenance
• July 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• August 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• September 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• October 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• November 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• December 2018 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• January 2019 - 99.99% Uptime (2 minutes of downtime)
• February 2019 - 99.99% Uptime (2 minutes of downtime)
• March 2019 - 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• April 2019 - 99.95% uptime (23 minutes of downtime)
• May 2019 - 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• June 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• July 2019 - 99.76% Uptime (105 minutes of downtime)
• August 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• September 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• October 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• November 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• December 2019 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• January 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• February 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• March 2020 - 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• April 2020 - 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• May 2020 - 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• June 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• July 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• August 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• September 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• October 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• November 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• December 2020 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• January 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• February 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• March 2021 - 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• April 2021 - 99.98% uptime (7 minutes of downtime)
• May 2021 - 99.99% uptime (3 minutes of downtime)
• June 2021 - 99.99% Uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
• July 2021 - 99.98% Uptime (9 minutes of downtime)
• August 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• September 2021 - 99.99% Uptime (5 minutes of downtime)
• October 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• November 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• December 2021 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• January 2022 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• February 2022 - 100% Uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• March 2022 - 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• April 2022 - 100% uptime (0 minutes of downtime)
• May 2022 - 99.95% uptime (23 minutes of downtime)

My Brief Support Experience

The only time I have used A2 Hosting's support was to have them create a php.ini file so I could enable fopen.

allow_url_fopen = On

I just checked my support ticket history and it shows that I opened a ticket for this at 9:29 PM on a Saturday and they completed my request at 12:08 AM Sunday. Not bad for a Saturday night, low priority support ticket.

I haven't needed their help with anything else except this single non-urgent request on a Saturday night, so I can't say how much more or less responsive they would be Monday - Friday. A2 Hosting does have a live chat system as well, but I usually prefer to open tickets for most support related tasks. The brief ticket conversations I had were friendly and they knew what they were doing, so for now I'm giving A2 Hosting's support my full recommendation. I'll post any updates to my assessment here as my time hosting with them goes by.

Final Verdict

A2 Hosting has been a fantastic web hosting company to use so far (I've been with them since March 2014). Their performance and loading speed make them a great web hosting choice. I haven't had any problems on their end where I've needed the support department (only a non-critical account modification I requested). Overall their uptime has been well above their guaranteed 99.9%. There was one exception, last October where they were being hit by a massive DoS attack. Even with all that mess thrown at them they still managed to only have minutes, not hours, of downtime spread out over the week that they were being attacked. They handled the crisis extremely well, with minimal impact on their clients.

I feel like I'm in good hands with A2 Hosting and I'm confident that things will remain that way for a long time to come. What it really comes down to is they are among the most reliable web hosting companies I've used thus far. Which is why I've recommended A2 Hosting so many times.

Permalink: A2 Hosting Review © 2013-2015 Review Hell All Rights Reserved.