Since Surpasshosting has been a hot topic on WHT earlier I think I should submit a review on what I have experienced with them.

I have been with Surpasshosting.com since aprox. April 2003. At that time I had a reseller account located at NAC. Now they have their own datacenter, DimeNOC, and since March 2004 I have had a dedicated server in their datacenter. I now have 2 dedicated servers and so far I'm quite happy. I'll brake the review into network, support and billing.

First off, Surpasshosting is a wholly owned subsidiary company of DimeNoc/Hostdime. A lot of people seem to be confused about this, but as far as I can see this is more or less one company. One doing budget hosting, the other one providing a bit more support at a higher price. I dont know for how long Surpasshosting has been in business, but HostDime has been in business since December 2001 - according to their websites.

Network
The network is based on a UUNET DS-3, XO Communications DS3 and a TimeWarner OC-48. For me the network has always perfomed very well. I have had very fast downloads and low pings from Europe - actually better than Liquidweb and The Planet. This can of course just be my routing that gives Surpass the advantage. Their network seems to be quite robust. They have had some outages for a couple of minutes at a time, but so far I have had no big problems. Their datacenter is located in Orlando, Florida and during one of the hurricanes this year the datacenter lost power and the generators did not kick in. This caused a 6-8 hour downtime, but during the rest of the hurricanes (4?) their service stayed up and had no outages. You can't really blame them for the hurricanes, and I'm satisfied with how they informed their customers.

When I had the reseller account at NAC I had some problems. NAC was blocking several IP ranges that my customers where using. This caused problems for a time, but support sorted this out after a couple of supporttickets. This was NACs fault, not theirs.

Read more about the datacenter here :
http://www.surmunity.com/showthread.php?t=3410

Support
They use an online ticket system, Kayeko I think, which is robust and works. Their support desk site is on another network and has been available even when network outages has occured. Usually a ticket is answered within 30 mins - 1 hours by 3rd level support. These guys often don't have that much experience, but they do server reboots and simple troubleshooting. If they can't manage the problems your ticket will be sendt to admins or second level support. Admins fix everything, but expect 2-4 hours from the ticket is forwarded. Secondlevel support answer quick and fix most issues.

Support has always been friendly and responds to tickets professionally. I have submitted quite a few tickets and my issues and questions has always been answered.

Surpasshosting doesn't offer any kind of telephone support, and they don't have a phonenumber listed. Their "owner" HostDime does have a telephonenumber listed on their site, but I have never called it and don't know if they will be able to reboot Surpassservers. I guess they will since they are more or less the same company. Hostdime also has live AIM support which has helped me a few times with my Surpassserver, even though Surpass doesn't do livechat support.

Billing
Their prices are very good. No doubt. So far the billing has been more or less smooth. They use 2checkout as merchants and the monthly payments are always being perfomed correctly. I have only had one issues with the billing. When I had a reseller plan at them and did an upgrade I was billied twice. I had to send 2 or 3 tickets to billing before this was sorted out. This is the only billing issue I've had with them, and it really wasn't a problem at all.

Misc.
Here on WHT there has been a few posts about Surpass deleting threads in the forum. So far this might be mor or less true. I have seen some threads being deleted, but I really don't blame them. They usaully close tickets and ask people to send them a billing/support ticket if they have problems/issues. If people want real reviews and comments from some companies customers they should check forums like this.

I did also have some problems getting my server upgraded a couple of months ago. The billing appartment did not answer my upgrade requests in a timely manner. I had to place several tickets to get the server upgraded and from the first mail to the server was upgraded took a week.

Conclusion
So far I've been with surpass in 1 and a half year. I'm a satisfied customer taking in account what I'm paying. The servers have been stable, their network good and the support fast. I could wish for more live support and a phonenumber to call if there is an emergency - but the price is low and for the price I'm paying I can't be nothing but satisfied.

My first WHT review.. Hope you enjoy!

You can't blame them for the hurricanes, but you can blame them for the generators not kicking in and being located in an area with a high occurance of hurricanes.

Originally posted by KarlZimmer
You can't blame them for the hurricanes, but you can blame them for the generators not kicking in and being located in an area with a high occurance of hurricanes.

I can't agree more.

I do not know wether they did loose power during any of the other hurricanes, but if they did (as I would believe - since most of Florida was blacked out) the generators worked.

They obviously need to test their generators more often :)

Originally posted by xmats
I do not know wether they did loose power during any of the other hurricanes, but if they did (as I would believe - since most of Florida was blacked out) the generators worked.

They did lose power and the generators failed to kick in, resulting in sites being down for multiple hours.

i was with surpass, there support wasnt that good and the server died every other day and was always slow.

I read a reason for outage post regarding SagoNet's power failure during a hurricane, and was impressed both by the level of detail and lack of ******** in their announcement. Further, they stated what they are doing to prevent future reocurrances of such a generator failure. This says several things to me. First, SagoNet has invested substantial capital in redundant power systems, but could not forsee a fuel supply pipe (?) being damaged by the storm. Second, they took responsibility and did not simply blame the weather and move on without making improvements. Third, that if they'd known this was coming, they would obviously have invested additional capital in diverse gensets (?) before the event.

What was the hostdime announcement like?

Originally posted by xmats
The network is based on a UUNET DS-3, XO Communications DS3 and a TimeWarner OC-48.
Quite honestly, I find that difficult to believe. No one with a clue buys transit circuits of DS3 and OC48 speed for the same operation like that. That may be another case of a vendor claiming to have OC48 transit circuits, but really, their vendor has an OC48 optical transport ring installed in their building or suite. I obviously do not work for dimehost, and do not have direct knowledge; though.

Originally posted by jsw6
Second, they took responsibility and did not simply blame the weather and move on without making improvements. Third, that if they'd known this was coming, they would obviously have invested additional capital in diverse gensets (?) before the event.

The Surpass/HostDime announcement turned out to be one where they were saying that staff members were risking their lives by visiting the data center during the storm. I never recall seeing a time where Surpass or HostDime took responsibility for any sort of downtime. It was always something elses fault.

There was plenty of warning for the storm, so they really should have looked into critical things such as power generators. Servers generally like to have power when they attempt to run.

To kind of hide the fact that they were at fault for the downtime, they would post threads on their forum saying how you should wish for the safety of their staff as they brave the storm to travel to the data center to ensure that the servers stay online. They made themselves out to be heros to hide the fact that they were actually at fault for something. Very unprofessional.

I have had some great experiences with the company in the past, and have given them multiple tries since I liked a couple members of staff. Unfortunately, the same old things (poor network/server performance especially) kept being an issue.

I really think they might have jumped into the whole "own your own data center" thing a little too soon.

Originally posted by miakeru
They did lose power and the generators failed to kick in, resulting in sites being down for multiple hours.

Yes, as stated in my review they did, but during the REST of the hurricanes - aprox. 4 hit Florida - they did not loose power even though most of Florida was out of power. Their generators obviously did work.

The first downtime was 6-8 hours I guess. It was quite bad and they should have tested their generators prior to the hurricane arrivel.

Hi. I have been with surpasshosting for approx 1.5 years now. And i have been very happy with the service so far. They have helped me out pretty much every time i have had a problem. Even if it was just my fault or my site who messed up things. :) I have talked a lot to the people working there. And they are all very nice people who try to help the best they can. My experiences with support has been almost perfect.

Okay, The downtime during the hurricane wasn't exactly a happy time for me. But it got fixed at least. And as Xmats says. No downtime during the rest of the hurricanes.

And. As earlier stated. Their datacenter is pretty new. You can't expect evrything to go perfect all the time. Not even a established datacenter can guarantee evrything to run smoothly all the time. I guess pretty much evryone has experienced some kind of problem like this at a time of the DC's life?

Maybe it was just a small problem. And it seems like they sorted it out after that 1st hurricane. I don't mind them not giving me the full details of what they did to improve things as long as things actually improve.

And as for downtime. I have had almost perfect uptime on the server i am on. The only couple of times i have had troubles was when one of my sites, (which i have fixed now) had some bad code in it and ate all of the CPU. But it got resolved pretty quickly..

So all in all..
Thumbs up for Surpass! :)

I agree with you Ehaanaes
There has been small glitches with the new DC, but I've had the same type of glitches with Liquidweb, ThePlanet and other providers I've tried over the past few years.

So far surpasshosting.com has served me very well and I'll recommend them for a cheap dedicated server or shared.

:agree: :agree:

Two thumbs up based on my experience!

Ok folks it is time to get out your Ritilin!!! Have bottle will travel, I can not believe all the people still harping on the Hurricanes, isn't hurricane season over? maybe not quite yet.

Charly was the only one of the four that caused any downtime and this was back in August.


This was in fact the last time I personally had any downtime, I saw someone critisizing Surpass for their choice of location of Florida as it is more prone to Hurricanes, this is like blaming the World Trade Center for their choice of New York. This person was from Chicago and
I guess nothing could go wrong there but the Sears Tower.

Hosting should be your choice, what makes it bad is when people have their vendettas against a host for whatever reason. This makes it so much more difficult for the consumer to make a choice. What makes this bad is the anonymity of the internet. Most likely IMO it is some 13 year old that has all these issues because it is like they spent their life saving / allowance for hosting and had a problem. A business person would cut their losses and move on not just hiccup over and over again.


Surpass has been reliable for me and I have not submitted any trouble tickets with them since July. I have not received anything free from them nor have I asked for anything free when they offered a free month.

In the end the choice you make for hosting should be yours to make from honest and intelligent reasons. It is hard because their are companies that do their own ratings which is misleading. I suggest to anyone looking for a new host is to do their homework and not make a split second decision.

Check out Surpass/Wild West/ Host Dime/ Whatever for a week visit their sites, check out load times, dns timing, etc If they meet your criteria go with them but please stay away from biased opinions based on a temper tantrum

Just as a extra note.
Bought a SSL-certificate today.
Was stupid. Couldn't install it.
Asked one of the surpass' staff.
15 minutes later it was installed and evrything worked like a charm. :D

(And still does.. ;) )

My dedicated is with Hostdime and it did NOT go down during the hurricane. Only a few servers were affected that I know of.

Ed

I have been with Surpass for about 6 months and have really been quite satisfied. My only concern was by going to a dedicated server they did not have exactly what I wanted. I emailed them and they offered exactly what I requested at a great price. So they are flexible and will work with you.
Support has been great...in 6 months only one issue that disappointed me a little but overall, if I were starting all over gain it would be with Surpass. I have over 40 sites on a server with them and during the hurricanes, I had not one complaint about downtime. Pretty amazing really, I expected much worse.