After quickly becoming unhappy with two other reseller hosts, I did a good bit of research and landed with Blurstorm.

The specs of the plan I purchased:

Disk Space: 4gb
Bandwidth: 30gb
All the standard stuff, cPanel, WHM, Fantastico, etc
Cost: 12.95/mo

This suits my needs well and seems to be a reasonable price compared to a few of the other resellers I tried before.

On with the review -

Reliability - 7 out of 10

This has been one of the major concerns for me. I've recently contacted support because the uptime and response time of my site (especially on the POP side) has been somewhat wishy-washy. I use the Unialert service to track uptime in 5 minute intervals and the stats come back as follows:

Uptime:
HTTP: 99.17%
POP3: 98.40%

Response Time:
HTTP: 133.42ms
POP3: 12.16ms

Up until the past week/week and a half I have been at 100%-99.9% uptime, which as you know - is fantastic.

Service - 10/10

The Blurstorm crew has been great in this regard. They were kind enough to (completely) transfer my sites for me. I had no issues with jumping right in and everything (e-mail addys, files, sql stuff, subdomains, etc) being 100% perfectly in-tact. Nice.

I have contacted support several times thereafter and have always received a quick, polite and helpful response. Nice work on this one!

Value - 8/10
Paying a bit more for this than 'budget resellers', I have to take a couple of ticks off for the reliability issues. I host family sites through this service and e-mail is where the majority of the traffic is. I'm not familiar enough with how POP3 works in that, if the server is down. Ie - I am unsure if the e-mails just bounce or come through again when the server comes back online.

Aside from that, the support has been excellent and for the resources I receive, I do feel as though I am getting a good portion of what I am paying for.

Overall : 8 out of 10.

I would still recommend Blurstorm to those looking for a quality reseller and I do hope the reliability issues are an isolated incident.

an afternote -

i received a nice, informative response to my support ticket. it looks like the problem is solved and performance will increase further. :)

Hi,

Glad you see your doing ok with your current host. Thanks for posting a detailed review, definitely check back with us in the future again on how you're doing with them.

Uptime: HTTP: 99.17% isn't very good but since you mentioned it's getting better to 99.9% then I'm sure they're doing whatever they can to address the issues on the server.

Cheers

anyone else had experience with Blurstorm?

Yes, I've had plenty of experience with Blurstorm since I am the one who started it. The problem db09 mentioned above as I recall was do to one power-user causing substantial load on one of our servers with an intense perlscript file. It was very interesting to figure out where the problem was coming from. But we solved it and our stats will soon prove this.

Thanks for the nice feedback. We strive hard to keep our customers happy.

^he's not blowing smoke.

my last occurance of downtime, oddly enough, was 9/16/2006.

kudos, blurstorm!

just a lil update:

things are still great with the BS folks. support is very, very helpful and friendly, uptime is back to 99.9% and they are constantly working on making things even better!

i can't recommend blurstorm enough if you're looking for a reliable, high quality reseller!

Update again..

I'm coming up on my 6 month anniversary and Blurstorm has still been awesome. I had actually considered switching hosts and after a few days on the other host.. their support and network just didn't compare to B.S.

Eli and company have been a joy to work with (not to mention excellent in retention), uptime is great and support is amazingly fast.

My plan is 12.95 per month and I get every penny's worth.

Dave

i thought i would mention, as well, that the uptime difficulty i was having early on has been corrected and then some.

my pop3 uptime for January was 99.5% and web is at 99.86%

can't recommend these guys enough!!!

as much as i hate to say it, i'm becoming unhappy with blurstorm.

after being assured several times that things would improve, the pop3 server has consistently been up and down since i started with them in august. it's never completely stabilized (see attached for recent results). i am losing e-mails and receiving them long, long after they were initially sent.

in addition to that - my cpanels do not update bandwidth use (on the left column or in the bandwidth section) and have not (at least on their own without a manual push from support) for the past two months.

support has also become increasingly slower. when i first began with BS back in august, i got resolutions to my problems within an hour.. now it's taking 2,3,4+ hours to get a first response and in most situations, not a resolution (that takes a few more hours) to my questions.

also, one of the sites i host is consistently unable to access his site via www.domain.com, only domain.com. at first i thought the problem was just my isp (roadrunner) but it seems, per my client, to be occurring across several isp's and it is making my them extremely unhappy.

to be completely honest, eli cut me a deal the last time i became iffy on BS, but it is becoming more than i can bear. despite the fact that they have put their sites on powerful (dual cpu) servers, the load spikes severely somewhat frequently and load-times (especially on php-fueled programs and my cpanel) suffer as a result.

i am seriously considering moving the sites i have hosted under them to another reseller account and cancelling.

db09 I have an idea of who you are by your alias and I will tell you that no other customer has complained about mail. I have several checks on the server you are on. I've actually had very happy cusotmers with 'calibur'.

Note:
As we speak (and I'm sure db09 will vouch for this later) I am attempting to call him as I believe he is being blocked by the firewall which can easily be fixed.

eli did in-fact call me and it seems like, hopefully, the issues will be resolved once and for all.

he went so far as to re-load the http service to hopefully resolve the www/vs/domain.com issue and is moving me to a different machine to hopefully resolve the mail and stats problems.

to eat crow, eli's come through once again to do everything he can to get these issues resolved.

props, it looks like once again, to BS.

eli did in-fact call me and it seems like, hopefully, the issues will be resolved once and for all.Looks like you know who you have to contact when more difficult problems arise.

support has also become increasingly slower. when i first began with BS back in august, i got resolutions to my problems within an hour.. now it's taking 2,3,4+ hours to get a first response and in most situations, not a resolution (that takes a few more hours) to my questions.Others would be quite happy to regularly hear back from their host within a couple of hours. Although if you've noticed a downward trend in responsiveness, I can see how you might get worried. We all easily get accustomed to certain levels of service.

props, it looks like once again, to BS.Nice to see you change the mood from sad to gladness. :)