KGIII
05-26-2006, 01:09 PM
His Story or, History:
I have been with AllReseller (http://www.allreseller.com) since the middle of February and have been impressed with them enough to feel comfortable recommending their services to other people.
I found them mid-way through the search… I figured that their prices were too low and that they’d be unable to provide the support level that I wanted or that they had inferior services.
I suppose the story really should start here.
Back about a year ago I was with another company and they moved me from one server to another and suddenly my MySQL databases were limited in size (without notice) and the owner tried to charge me additional fees for these “overages” except, well, I was well within the amount of disk space that I’d ordered. Changing the terms and conditions is something I can live with, changing the price is not. To compound the issue even further the overages were caused by a search script that we'd never used but came pre-installed on the server.
I then began the long process that I’ll go into some detail about for you here.
Realizing that if I couldn't trust them then I wouldn’t want to remain on their server any longer than I absolutely had to and so I started compiling a list. This was in August of 2005. By the end of September of that same year I had a sizable list that probably included every reputable company and quite a few disreputable ones as well. There were, simply, hundreds of companies on the list.
I then set about watching them and quietly lurking here and there in various forums for a few weeks.
Actually the story probably should start here. In 1998 I was involved in the business but only offered the hosting locally. It was a fairly decent side income and it was a fairly lucrative market then. In 2002 a company took off with hardware, client’s data, money, and… Well… They took off with everything. I was able to refund them all and the business closed because I simply wasn’t willing to go through that again.
I am now fortunate enough to be in a position where I’m reasonably financially free enough to do nothing all day which, as you’ll see, is a bit of important information.
In the process of looking I kept finding reseller accounts and I figured that it would be a good idea to ensure that I had plenty of space for my sites and that I had room to grow. So I added reseller accounts to the list of accounts to consider and my original list was blossomed up over 500 different URLs in the “Research Hosting” folder.
At first I broke the list down based on operating system that was being offered. I realized that I really wanted to host on Linux so all the Windows plans got removed. There weren’t that many that were just offering Windows though so the list was still far too large to work with. So each day I picked about ten companies and wrote them an initial pre-sales email and picked the top three from each of those. In some cases I wouldn’t even get 3 acceptable responses, the responses would come three days later, would be written in very poor English, or would be cut and paste responses that often didn’t answer the question. To keep it entertaining I made sure to ask them all vastly different questions and never to ask anything that was already covered properly on their site
During this time I’d find some of the companies simply were the same company, they’d have slow response times at the site, etc. Those companies just got tossed out. One site had for some reason decided that visiting with Opera in the referrer field sent me to a page that told me to get a real browser and tried to use a referral link for Firefox. Needless to say, they didn’t make the cut.
This went on and on and I had the list down to about 35 businesses middle of December probably. Of those companies maybe a dozen really sparked my interest and provided value but the list was still up around 20 when I made the next cut. I grabbed a monitoring account.
It was not easy as there were some decent companies in that list. At this time I wasn’t considering price or even space. To me it was about support and reliability but, more importantly it was about honesty.
Wouldn’t you know it? When they got the “What’s your average uptime for the past month?” question that list was suddenly a lot shorter. It was at about this time that I saw an offering from AllReseller, prior to this they weren’t on the list, and I really liked what I saw. I decided to put them through the paces and found that I still really liked them. I asked about uptime, I hadn’t had the chance to monitor them. The response was that it was actually a sore point with that particular person and they gave me a link where I could see their uptime.
I asked about limits for SQL connections and got a response about how there wasn’t any hard or fast rule and that if there was ever a problem that they’d work with me to try and fix it as opposed to just booting me off the server. Since then I know that this is true and that they do actually try to keep things running well without having to boot people.
I asked if they had a demo account so that I could see what I’d be working with and the response was that they didn’t but to hold on for a second and they’d make me one which they did.
And then there were three…
I sent them all additional pre-sales questions using yet another free email account and found that the response time from AllReseller was actually mid-pack but still fast enough to satisfy my needs and, seeing as I figured I’d do a little bit of reselling, should also be fast enough to suit the needs of my clients. (This was probably the most fun stage because I drank quite a bit and rooted hard to find some of the most site specific and difficult questions that I could think of at the time. It was good fun.)
I then asked a very specific question – from the original email account. It was basically like this, “If I opt to host with your company can I work with just one specific support person unless it is of an emergency nature?” That’s a lot to ask actually and only one came back with an acceptable answer.
Yet I was still stuck at three companies and sometimes a fourth would catch my eye. Sobering up I started to then look at the three companies and realized that I’d gone through quite a bit of work so I should probably at least look to see which provided the best value for my money.
With that I’d also realized that I was confident with my choices and the only reason that I’d be willing to (and this is something that I think everyone who’s considering entering the business should think about) go into the hosting business at all was because I could afford to lose the money and I can sustain the business at a loss for as long as I need to. I’m in a unique position, one where I’m able to take the money and apply the money and I’m positioned at a point where the money earned isn’t providing me with anything that I need. For that, and that reason alone, I made the final choice to pre-pay for the entire year. Next year, regardless of profit, I’ll pre-pay again, and again, and again… For as long as that business is open and the service and support levels remain where they are today I will remain with them unless I outgrow them. It’s actually not that much more expensive for this then I’d have had to pay at some of the more realistic priced hosting deals for the traffic and space I use on my personal accounts.
Anyhow… All of that was well and good but didn’t actually give me any sense of reliability nor did I think it would be justified reviewing simply based on my reasons, methods, or findings so I waited to give a review until I had more information.
The Review:
For those needing to see sites then any of the two links in my signature will take you to a site hosted there.
Current uptime is nothing to brag about. In 110 days it has been down 9 hours and the uptime is at 99.59% which, to me, is “good enough.” You can see the information here:
http://host-tracker.com/uptime-statistics/98833
My findings (based on a scale of 0 to 5):
• Uptime: 4
• Service: 4.8
• Support: 4.9
• Features: 4.5
• Speed: 4.5
• Value: 4.8
Total score: 27.5
Average: 4.6
Disclosure: Keep in mind that my rating of other hosts would have to be considered, I think the highest rating I could give any other company I’ve been with (except Netfirms) somewhere around a 2.0 with 2.5 being average good hosting company.
Uptime: The uptime really should be higher. Generally the reason for the downtime often seems to be due to the network or someone’s abusing the server and while those accounts do eventually get suspended there’s the time-frame where they’re either doing so or trying to help them fix the problem.
Service: Service is fantastic. Things are, for the most part, well maintained for a shared environment. I couldn’t really ask for it to be much better but the issues that are also creating downtime did result in a loss of points there.
Support: I’d have given the company a 5 on that but I don’t believe anyone is perfect and I’m sure they have flaws. So far it’s been a consistent polite while informal banter between the tech I’ve chosen and I. I’ve HAD to contact them once and it turns out that the contact was late – they were already on the problem and dealing with the offending script. Any other contact has been simple requests for additional information. Generally I hold all those types of contacts until I have a chunk of questions all saved up and I ask in one email. Additionally I never contact support for outages that are shorter than an hour as I know that chances are high that they are already aware of the problem and my sending them emails isn’t going to help them fix it any faster. The one time when I had had to contact them was when the server was back up but, oddly, MySQL wasn’t working and it’s not like it is H-Sphere and clustered.
Features: The list of features is long and good but, well, not entirely up to par with what I could have had included with other companies. They give you a bunch of expensive templates that are what most people seem to like but I find to be pretty ugly in all honesty. You do get billing and account management scripts but, frankly, they’re trash. On the other hand you get all sorts of other things that are pretty much standard. They don’t have less than the majority but they don’t exceed the industry averages by much.
They added RvSiteBuilder to all new accounts - right after I joined. They went ahead and gave it to us though. All I had to do was ask and they did so though I do believe they were planning on doing so already.
Speed: Unfortunately I’m on narrowband but I’ve been able to go to places where broadband (the bottom of the mountain has it and there are no WildBlue installers in my area yet – a good thing is, also, that broadband is available at the bottom of the mountain should a client need moving or something it’s just a matter of bringing a laptop down to my folk’s house) is available and the site is speedy and download times were acceptable. There aren’t any large downloads available on the site otherwise I’d invite you to download and test. The server itself is generally pretty snappy. Page loads are quick, SQL databases tend to be responsive, and the server load is normally pretty good. Sometimes it runs a bit higher than it should – but most of the time it looks like this:
“Server Uptime: 7 days 17 hours 45 minutes | Average Load: 0.58, 0.87, 0.83”
(Source: phpBB’s Server Uptime mod as displayed right this minute)
I’ve seen it higher than that but those accounts generally get disabled. ;)
Value: There are a lot of companies out there who will offer you huge amounts of space and bandwidth for pennies and it is unfair to compare realistic pricing and this feature set against those types of offerings so it’s not really easy to rate the value if you’re looking for a million GB or unlimited stuff. However, when you compare them with realistic options it does actually look like the price is too low – in fact I believe they’re offering it for a far lesser value than it is truly worth. The disk space and bandwidth is a generous offering while still being in the range of realistic. It is, simply put, a fantastic value for the price. If you look at their largest reseller package and then see the yearly price you will find that it’s actually fantastic though I don’t recommend that most folks buy yearly.
Negatives: There is only one major negative aspect that wasn’t covered above and it’s from a contact with sales. Prior to making my order I contacted sales to ask if they had any plans on offering their packages at a discount in the near future. If they’d said yes then I would have waited as they’d offered some good sized discounts in the past that really would add up when you’re buying a large package. The responded with a statement about how they would not be offering any sales in the near future and that the price was already acceptable. A few days after making my order I see a post in another forum where they’re offering a 10% off sale. I’m going to assume it was a mis-communication and not a deliberate dishonesty but the lack of communication within the sales office resulted in me remembering it enough to post it here and me considering it important enough to post here.
Short downtime happens fairly often, every few days, but very seldom for long. The figure is well within the acceptable range by my standards. You can actually click around and get quite a bit of information at the link provided for uptime monitoring. I really don’t consider that low enough or bad enough to include it as a negative aspect that needs to be covered here but it seems likely that other people will think that the five nines is achievable for pennies will want to know about that and will consider it a negative.
Final Notes: It’s a good idea to review the company if you’re in the market for hosting of any type. Their dedicated, reseller, and shared packages are all well priced and the level of support is exceptional at the price level. For a shared environment, I must add, the stability is certainly far in excess of what I’m accustomed to and if my results above look lower than they should then consider that 2.5 would be the average GOOD company as the comparison and ranking doesn’t take into account the low-end providers, kiddy hosts, nor the scammers.
I have not seen a 5.0 at this point in my life. This company ranks up there with the likes of Pair and Netfirms and if you’re looking to host then I’d certainly recommend that you give them due consideration and add them to your shortlist.
KGIII
I have been with AllReseller (http://www.allreseller.com) since the middle of February and have been impressed with them enough to feel comfortable recommending their services to other people.
I found them mid-way through the search… I figured that their prices were too low and that they’d be unable to provide the support level that I wanted or that they had inferior services.
I suppose the story really should start here.
Back about a year ago I was with another company and they moved me from one server to another and suddenly my MySQL databases were limited in size (without notice) and the owner tried to charge me additional fees for these “overages” except, well, I was well within the amount of disk space that I’d ordered. Changing the terms and conditions is something I can live with, changing the price is not. To compound the issue even further the overages were caused by a search script that we'd never used but came pre-installed on the server.
I then began the long process that I’ll go into some detail about for you here.
Realizing that if I couldn't trust them then I wouldn’t want to remain on their server any longer than I absolutely had to and so I started compiling a list. This was in August of 2005. By the end of September of that same year I had a sizable list that probably included every reputable company and quite a few disreputable ones as well. There were, simply, hundreds of companies on the list.
I then set about watching them and quietly lurking here and there in various forums for a few weeks.
Actually the story probably should start here. In 1998 I was involved in the business but only offered the hosting locally. It was a fairly decent side income and it was a fairly lucrative market then. In 2002 a company took off with hardware, client’s data, money, and… Well… They took off with everything. I was able to refund them all and the business closed because I simply wasn’t willing to go through that again.
I am now fortunate enough to be in a position where I’m reasonably financially free enough to do nothing all day which, as you’ll see, is a bit of important information.
In the process of looking I kept finding reseller accounts and I figured that it would be a good idea to ensure that I had plenty of space for my sites and that I had room to grow. So I added reseller accounts to the list of accounts to consider and my original list was blossomed up over 500 different URLs in the “Research Hosting” folder.
At first I broke the list down based on operating system that was being offered. I realized that I really wanted to host on Linux so all the Windows plans got removed. There weren’t that many that were just offering Windows though so the list was still far too large to work with. So each day I picked about ten companies and wrote them an initial pre-sales email and picked the top three from each of those. In some cases I wouldn’t even get 3 acceptable responses, the responses would come three days later, would be written in very poor English, or would be cut and paste responses that often didn’t answer the question. To keep it entertaining I made sure to ask them all vastly different questions and never to ask anything that was already covered properly on their site
During this time I’d find some of the companies simply were the same company, they’d have slow response times at the site, etc. Those companies just got tossed out. One site had for some reason decided that visiting with Opera in the referrer field sent me to a page that told me to get a real browser and tried to use a referral link for Firefox. Needless to say, they didn’t make the cut.
This went on and on and I had the list down to about 35 businesses middle of December probably. Of those companies maybe a dozen really sparked my interest and provided value but the list was still up around 20 when I made the next cut. I grabbed a monitoring account.
It was not easy as there were some decent companies in that list. At this time I wasn’t considering price or even space. To me it was about support and reliability but, more importantly it was about honesty.
Wouldn’t you know it? When they got the “What’s your average uptime for the past month?” question that list was suddenly a lot shorter. It was at about this time that I saw an offering from AllReseller, prior to this they weren’t on the list, and I really liked what I saw. I decided to put them through the paces and found that I still really liked them. I asked about uptime, I hadn’t had the chance to monitor them. The response was that it was actually a sore point with that particular person and they gave me a link where I could see their uptime.
I asked about limits for SQL connections and got a response about how there wasn’t any hard or fast rule and that if there was ever a problem that they’d work with me to try and fix it as opposed to just booting me off the server. Since then I know that this is true and that they do actually try to keep things running well without having to boot people.
I asked if they had a demo account so that I could see what I’d be working with and the response was that they didn’t but to hold on for a second and they’d make me one which they did.
And then there were three…
I sent them all additional pre-sales questions using yet another free email account and found that the response time from AllReseller was actually mid-pack but still fast enough to satisfy my needs and, seeing as I figured I’d do a little bit of reselling, should also be fast enough to suit the needs of my clients. (This was probably the most fun stage because I drank quite a bit and rooted hard to find some of the most site specific and difficult questions that I could think of at the time. It was good fun.)
I then asked a very specific question – from the original email account. It was basically like this, “If I opt to host with your company can I work with just one specific support person unless it is of an emergency nature?” That’s a lot to ask actually and only one came back with an acceptable answer.
Yet I was still stuck at three companies and sometimes a fourth would catch my eye. Sobering up I started to then look at the three companies and realized that I’d gone through quite a bit of work so I should probably at least look to see which provided the best value for my money.
With that I’d also realized that I was confident with my choices and the only reason that I’d be willing to (and this is something that I think everyone who’s considering entering the business should think about) go into the hosting business at all was because I could afford to lose the money and I can sustain the business at a loss for as long as I need to. I’m in a unique position, one where I’m able to take the money and apply the money and I’m positioned at a point where the money earned isn’t providing me with anything that I need. For that, and that reason alone, I made the final choice to pre-pay for the entire year. Next year, regardless of profit, I’ll pre-pay again, and again, and again… For as long as that business is open and the service and support levels remain where they are today I will remain with them unless I outgrow them. It’s actually not that much more expensive for this then I’d have had to pay at some of the more realistic priced hosting deals for the traffic and space I use on my personal accounts.
Anyhow… All of that was well and good but didn’t actually give me any sense of reliability nor did I think it would be justified reviewing simply based on my reasons, methods, or findings so I waited to give a review until I had more information.
The Review:
For those needing to see sites then any of the two links in my signature will take you to a site hosted there.
Current uptime is nothing to brag about. In 110 days it has been down 9 hours and the uptime is at 99.59% which, to me, is “good enough.” You can see the information here:
http://host-tracker.com/uptime-statistics/98833
My findings (based on a scale of 0 to 5):
• Uptime: 4
• Service: 4.8
• Support: 4.9
• Features: 4.5
• Speed: 4.5
• Value: 4.8
Total score: 27.5
Average: 4.6
Disclosure: Keep in mind that my rating of other hosts would have to be considered, I think the highest rating I could give any other company I’ve been with (except Netfirms) somewhere around a 2.0 with 2.5 being average good hosting company.
Uptime: The uptime really should be higher. Generally the reason for the downtime often seems to be due to the network or someone’s abusing the server and while those accounts do eventually get suspended there’s the time-frame where they’re either doing so or trying to help them fix the problem.
Service: Service is fantastic. Things are, for the most part, well maintained for a shared environment. I couldn’t really ask for it to be much better but the issues that are also creating downtime did result in a loss of points there.
Support: I’d have given the company a 5 on that but I don’t believe anyone is perfect and I’m sure they have flaws. So far it’s been a consistent polite while informal banter between the tech I’ve chosen and I. I’ve HAD to contact them once and it turns out that the contact was late – they were already on the problem and dealing with the offending script. Any other contact has been simple requests for additional information. Generally I hold all those types of contacts until I have a chunk of questions all saved up and I ask in one email. Additionally I never contact support for outages that are shorter than an hour as I know that chances are high that they are already aware of the problem and my sending them emails isn’t going to help them fix it any faster. The one time when I had had to contact them was when the server was back up but, oddly, MySQL wasn’t working and it’s not like it is H-Sphere and clustered.
Features: The list of features is long and good but, well, not entirely up to par with what I could have had included with other companies. They give you a bunch of expensive templates that are what most people seem to like but I find to be pretty ugly in all honesty. You do get billing and account management scripts but, frankly, they’re trash. On the other hand you get all sorts of other things that are pretty much standard. They don’t have less than the majority but they don’t exceed the industry averages by much.
They added RvSiteBuilder to all new accounts - right after I joined. They went ahead and gave it to us though. All I had to do was ask and they did so though I do believe they were planning on doing so already.
Speed: Unfortunately I’m on narrowband but I’ve been able to go to places where broadband (the bottom of the mountain has it and there are no WildBlue installers in my area yet – a good thing is, also, that broadband is available at the bottom of the mountain should a client need moving or something it’s just a matter of bringing a laptop down to my folk’s house) is available and the site is speedy and download times were acceptable. There aren’t any large downloads available on the site otherwise I’d invite you to download and test. The server itself is generally pretty snappy. Page loads are quick, SQL databases tend to be responsive, and the server load is normally pretty good. Sometimes it runs a bit higher than it should – but most of the time it looks like this:
“Server Uptime: 7 days 17 hours 45 minutes | Average Load: 0.58, 0.87, 0.83”
(Source: phpBB’s Server Uptime mod as displayed right this minute)
I’ve seen it higher than that but those accounts generally get disabled. ;)
Value: There are a lot of companies out there who will offer you huge amounts of space and bandwidth for pennies and it is unfair to compare realistic pricing and this feature set against those types of offerings so it’s not really easy to rate the value if you’re looking for a million GB or unlimited stuff. However, when you compare them with realistic options it does actually look like the price is too low – in fact I believe they’re offering it for a far lesser value than it is truly worth. The disk space and bandwidth is a generous offering while still being in the range of realistic. It is, simply put, a fantastic value for the price. If you look at their largest reseller package and then see the yearly price you will find that it’s actually fantastic though I don’t recommend that most folks buy yearly.
Negatives: There is only one major negative aspect that wasn’t covered above and it’s from a contact with sales. Prior to making my order I contacted sales to ask if they had any plans on offering their packages at a discount in the near future. If they’d said yes then I would have waited as they’d offered some good sized discounts in the past that really would add up when you’re buying a large package. The responded with a statement about how they would not be offering any sales in the near future and that the price was already acceptable. A few days after making my order I see a post in another forum where they’re offering a 10% off sale. I’m going to assume it was a mis-communication and not a deliberate dishonesty but the lack of communication within the sales office resulted in me remembering it enough to post it here and me considering it important enough to post here.
Short downtime happens fairly often, every few days, but very seldom for long. The figure is well within the acceptable range by my standards. You can actually click around and get quite a bit of information at the link provided for uptime monitoring. I really don’t consider that low enough or bad enough to include it as a negative aspect that needs to be covered here but it seems likely that other people will think that the five nines is achievable for pennies will want to know about that and will consider it a negative.
Final Notes: It’s a good idea to review the company if you’re in the market for hosting of any type. Their dedicated, reseller, and shared packages are all well priced and the level of support is exceptional at the price level. For a shared environment, I must add, the stability is certainly far in excess of what I’m accustomed to and if my results above look lower than they should then consider that 2.5 would be the average GOOD company as the comparison and ranking doesn’t take into account the low-end providers, kiddy hosts, nor the scammers.
I have not seen a 5.0 at this point in my life. This company ranks up there with the likes of Pair and Netfirms and if you’re looking to host then I’d certainly recommend that you give them due consideration and add them to your shortlist.
KGIII