Leaving aside things like managed services and control panels.
How would you rate the following hosts in terms of speeds and uptimes (Just plain performance)

Rackspace, vdi, alabanza , vdi , and dialtone,

Rate from rank1 to rank5, You can add other hosts here bcos i dont know of any other good and famous host.

Rgds
Manish Kapadia
Bombay-india

Manish,

For uptime go to:
http://netcraft.com

For speed go to:
http://tracert.com
http://samspade.org

Make sure for the speed you check from different parts of the world or where a majority of your customers are going to be coming from.

This way you will see actual results instead of opinions which may be slighted. :)

Couple of comments --

As far as 'uptime' from netcraft goes, that only tells you the uptime on the website of the provider. Whether it's a useful metric or not, I'll leave to you, but I wouldn't lend much weight to it. I suspect it's easily forged, and it certainly doesn't tell you the whole story. Take a look at http://www.microsoft.com. This is a perfect example of the 'load balancer' effect. Basically, you'll note samples are all over the place. From the graph, I can derive that there are _many_ servers back there, and thus, I have no real clue what the 'availability' of the site has been over the period of time shown. I can only determine the uptime of the individual servers that got sampled.

A comment about traceroute as a speed diagnostic tool -- it's a very bad one. Traceroute is designed to show _where_ a problem is once one is detected. It doesn't really do much for detecting, because it can and will give you many false positives. For speed and packet loss, you should do an 'extended ping' over a fairly long period of time. An extended ping over a period of a day or two is much better than using traceroute, as you will be able to see the minimum/maximum/average round trip times, as well as packet loss as a percentage.

Another thing you should do is determine whether your market is global or local -- most Indian companies I've seen are mostly local, so they should try to put a special emphasis on pinging from ISPs that are in India, preferably multiple major ones with multiple major backbones exiting India.

Also, I would actually take into the account of the opinions of people here, just realize that they're observed from _their_ position. Maybe a lot of their clients are in the UK, which would probably have a far different network map to the various datacenters than India. Try to put more weight to people located closer to your target clients.

Very correct , Doing pings and traceroutes from here is better,

But if possible i would still like your comments based on your experience over the months. 90% of my clients are here in India, Some in Uk and Few in Us.

Also i have seen sometmes that the main isp sites appear faster than the websites hosted with them.

I am not looking for something very precise but kind of whom would you place your bets on.

Regards,

Manish Kapadia
Bombay-India

Well, they haven't rated any yet...

On speed, reliability, and support...

After being with alabanza, we moved to VDI because we lost all the above, and got charged about double for the added trouble.

We have been having nothing but good server stability with vdi. ping and traces run about the same as what alabanza has changed to.. often faster.

Their support is fairly good, but as with all I have heard of, can stand some improvement. Uptime, fine. Had a bit of downtime due to backbone work, and new in house routing, but no major down times, just small intermittent ones, but they seem to be gone for the last few weeks. So, the work must be done.

Overall, I would give VDI a solid 4 to 4.5 , but as the control panel team keeps improving the software, it will move closer to a 5.

Alabanza... I rate them at a 2. They have proven to be un caring about their dedicated customers, slowed their routers, and support is still poor according to the posts around here.

dialtone ... I rate them at a 3.7
I have heard a lot of good about them, but their control panel is of much much lower quality than the cpanel at vdi. It was my deciding factor, and it was not a simple decision between these two.

Look for more info from a dialtone customer.. I decided not to go with them when selecting between them and VDI. All seemed to pan out about the same, except the fully customizable control panel that vdi has. That made the choice for us.

Happy hosting,

Tim L