Change
04-05-2002, 11:25 AM
Hi,
About 2 weeks ago I posted a request here:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=41725
I was not going to resell anything, but I needed a reseller account to give some space to friends, mostly people who voluntarily work together with me on my main site: http://www.f1universe.com. This also means I was not going to make a profit and therefore not able to spend too much money, but since my main site gets about 25k pageviews a month and is growing, I did want a good package.. not the cheapest and not the most expensive one.
Below I will share my experiences during my hunt for a good reseller package (related to my requirements), where I've narrowed it down to three choices: ukname (http://www.ukname.net/), voxtreme (http://www.voxtreme.com/) and hostculture (http://www.hostculture.com/). All these hosts were kind enough to give me a test account to see if my current setup would work on their servers and if I would be satisfied with the offer. Please keep in mind that everything I say is said from my own, subjective perspective.
First of all, the good points:
- HostCulture:
* Their support was very friendly and responsive, both in emails and on their forum.
* Everything was setup quickly after the IP's were received (2 days).
- Voxtreme:
* Extremely fast support, very friendly people and they seemed to be very knowledgeable. They imported all my .sql dumps for me.
* Good support forum with equal response times.
* I liked their WHM setup a lot because it was not necessary to create packages, it was very easy to create a custom package per domain (incl. unlimited diskspace + bandwidth, which I wanted for one of my own sites - I'll just upgrade or pay for overages if necessary).
* Because of a communication/email problem at the beginning of the trial period, they extended the trial period.
* They have offered all the help I would need for transferring my sites from my current host to them.
* Page loading times were extremely fast.
- UKName:
* Extremely fast support, very friendly people. David spent a lot of time with me on ICQ, he's a great guy and running his company in a very fine way. I was very impressed with him.
* UKName did not have Cpanel yet when I was approached by them. Because I really wanted Cpanel and more customers asked for it, they've gone to great lengths to provide me with a trial account with Cpanel as fast as possible. Again I was very impressed with the speed and their care for customers.
* I liked their advanced options like: daily backups on a secure server in another physical location and the option to send an emergency email and get a phone call within 15 minutes, wherever you are in the world.
* Their servers had an uptime of 100% in the past 3 months, are fast PIII's and page loading times were extremely fast.
* Downtime policy is amazing. Below 99% uptime means next month free. Also for other problems they have a credit system in place, which shows they will have a very stable service.
* Been around for a couple of years.
Then the 'bad' points. I have to say 'bad' because it wasn't really bad at all. All hosts were very good, possibly the best hosts I've ever had (before I've used 9netave, netnation, superb, hostex and now site5).
- HostCulture:
* Compared to Voxtreme and UKName, their support was slower (but still fast, usually replies within a few hours).
* Using PerlDesk for support. Although I liked this in the beginning, in the end I changed my mind. What I didn't like was the fact that I needed to check a page and reload it all the time to see if there was a reply. Email would have been better.
* Compared to Voxtreme and UKName, their page load times were slightly slower (but again, still fast).
* Young company. The FAQ page showed 'blah blah blah': a dummy text. This was only removed after a second complaint (after mine). Plus PerlDesk was not completely visible when opened in the (default) iframe: the highly needed 'submit' button was missing. This made it a little harder to find trust for the long term.
* Diskspace set in WHM, so it was hard to create packages, for example when you want to oversell.
- Voxtreme:
* The inquiry sent to sales@voxtreme.com was lost, probably because of the problems they were having with VDI at the time.
* Email communication lost. At first they pointed their finger at my current host or my ISP, but after extensive research by me, Site5 and themselves, we found out I made a domain in WHM with the same name as my email address. This meant Voxtreme sent the emails internally, while my domain was not transferred yet. I'm not sure if this is a misconfiguration on their side, but from then on we've been using my ISP's email address and communication was fine and dandy again.
* Downtime problems but no downtime policy. VDI network was down for a while and the NAC network as well (DDoS attacks). My account is on a NAC server however and I know NAC is a very good datacenter, so I trust this was just a coincidence.
* Relatively young company, which probably needs to learn a few more things (downtime policy, server security, that sort of things).
* Website doesn't look attractive, which would normally turn me off.
- UKName:
* Learning WHM/Cpanel setup while I got my trial account. I'm sure they will get the hang of this soon though, it was not a big problem for me.
* One of my .sql dumps couldn't be imported, while exactly the same dump was imported without any problems on the HC & Voxtreme servers. It took about a day before it worked.
* By far the most expensive package of all.
Then it was time to make a decision. It was an extremely tough one, especially because ALL of these hosts were better than I've ever experienced. Two of the three stood out though: UKName and Voxtreme. My choice was between them.
If I had been a reseller, I would have gone for UKName without a doubt. They offer the best reliabilty and support package by far. However, because I do not make any money with any of the sites yet, because I am not reselling, and because I do not have much money to spend at the moment, Voxtreme was looking very attractive as well. Especially because the prices I was looking at were 50% lower for Voxtreme, and over a year that is quite a lot of money for me.
That is why Voxtreme and UKName were equal to me, but I chose Voxtreme with the main reason: money. I do expect that I might run into more problems (without crediting) at Voxtreme and that the server performance will be slightly less good, but I will have to take that for granted. If I ever start reselling or will ever need to leave Voxtreme, UKName will be the first host I will turn to, probably without looking at competitors (unless things change at UKName or competition changes dramatically, which I do not expect to happen in the next year).
I hope this post will be of value for both people looking for reseller packages as for hosts who are always looking for feedback.
Change.
About 2 weeks ago I posted a request here:
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=41725
I was not going to resell anything, but I needed a reseller account to give some space to friends, mostly people who voluntarily work together with me on my main site: http://www.f1universe.com. This also means I was not going to make a profit and therefore not able to spend too much money, but since my main site gets about 25k pageviews a month and is growing, I did want a good package.. not the cheapest and not the most expensive one.
Below I will share my experiences during my hunt for a good reseller package (related to my requirements), where I've narrowed it down to three choices: ukname (http://www.ukname.net/), voxtreme (http://www.voxtreme.com/) and hostculture (http://www.hostculture.com/). All these hosts were kind enough to give me a test account to see if my current setup would work on their servers and if I would be satisfied with the offer. Please keep in mind that everything I say is said from my own, subjective perspective.
First of all, the good points:
- HostCulture:
* Their support was very friendly and responsive, both in emails and on their forum.
* Everything was setup quickly after the IP's were received (2 days).
- Voxtreme:
* Extremely fast support, very friendly people and they seemed to be very knowledgeable. They imported all my .sql dumps for me.
* Good support forum with equal response times.
* I liked their WHM setup a lot because it was not necessary to create packages, it was very easy to create a custom package per domain (incl. unlimited diskspace + bandwidth, which I wanted for one of my own sites - I'll just upgrade or pay for overages if necessary).
* Because of a communication/email problem at the beginning of the trial period, they extended the trial period.
* They have offered all the help I would need for transferring my sites from my current host to them.
* Page loading times were extremely fast.
- UKName:
* Extremely fast support, very friendly people. David spent a lot of time with me on ICQ, he's a great guy and running his company in a very fine way. I was very impressed with him.
* UKName did not have Cpanel yet when I was approached by them. Because I really wanted Cpanel and more customers asked for it, they've gone to great lengths to provide me with a trial account with Cpanel as fast as possible. Again I was very impressed with the speed and their care for customers.
* I liked their advanced options like: daily backups on a secure server in another physical location and the option to send an emergency email and get a phone call within 15 minutes, wherever you are in the world.
* Their servers had an uptime of 100% in the past 3 months, are fast PIII's and page loading times were extremely fast.
* Downtime policy is amazing. Below 99% uptime means next month free. Also for other problems they have a credit system in place, which shows they will have a very stable service.
* Been around for a couple of years.
Then the 'bad' points. I have to say 'bad' because it wasn't really bad at all. All hosts were very good, possibly the best hosts I've ever had (before I've used 9netave, netnation, superb, hostex and now site5).
- HostCulture:
* Compared to Voxtreme and UKName, their support was slower (but still fast, usually replies within a few hours).
* Using PerlDesk for support. Although I liked this in the beginning, in the end I changed my mind. What I didn't like was the fact that I needed to check a page and reload it all the time to see if there was a reply. Email would have been better.
* Compared to Voxtreme and UKName, their page load times were slightly slower (but again, still fast).
* Young company. The FAQ page showed 'blah blah blah': a dummy text. This was only removed after a second complaint (after mine). Plus PerlDesk was not completely visible when opened in the (default) iframe: the highly needed 'submit' button was missing. This made it a little harder to find trust for the long term.
* Diskspace set in WHM, so it was hard to create packages, for example when you want to oversell.
- Voxtreme:
* The inquiry sent to sales@voxtreme.com was lost, probably because of the problems they were having with VDI at the time.
* Email communication lost. At first they pointed their finger at my current host or my ISP, but after extensive research by me, Site5 and themselves, we found out I made a domain in WHM with the same name as my email address. This meant Voxtreme sent the emails internally, while my domain was not transferred yet. I'm not sure if this is a misconfiguration on their side, but from then on we've been using my ISP's email address and communication was fine and dandy again.
* Downtime problems but no downtime policy. VDI network was down for a while and the NAC network as well (DDoS attacks). My account is on a NAC server however and I know NAC is a very good datacenter, so I trust this was just a coincidence.
* Relatively young company, which probably needs to learn a few more things (downtime policy, server security, that sort of things).
* Website doesn't look attractive, which would normally turn me off.
- UKName:
* Learning WHM/Cpanel setup while I got my trial account. I'm sure they will get the hang of this soon though, it was not a big problem for me.
* One of my .sql dumps couldn't be imported, while exactly the same dump was imported without any problems on the HC & Voxtreme servers. It took about a day before it worked.
* By far the most expensive package of all.
Then it was time to make a decision. It was an extremely tough one, especially because ALL of these hosts were better than I've ever experienced. Two of the three stood out though: UKName and Voxtreme. My choice was between them.
If I had been a reseller, I would have gone for UKName without a doubt. They offer the best reliabilty and support package by far. However, because I do not make any money with any of the sites yet, because I am not reselling, and because I do not have much money to spend at the moment, Voxtreme was looking very attractive as well. Especially because the prices I was looking at were 50% lower for Voxtreme, and over a year that is quite a lot of money for me.
That is why Voxtreme and UKName were equal to me, but I chose Voxtreme with the main reason: money. I do expect that I might run into more problems (without crediting) at Voxtreme and that the server performance will be slightly less good, but I will have to take that for granted. If I ever start reselling or will ever need to leave Voxtreme, UKName will be the first host I will turn to, probably without looking at competitors (unless things change at UKName or competition changes dramatically, which I do not expect to happen in the next year).
I hope this post will be of value for both people looking for reseller packages as for hosts who are always looking for feedback.
Change.