We were with Liquid Web for four years from 11/2006 to 11/2010. Overall I would rate their customer service and management a good 7 of 10... maybe even an 8 when we first started with them. I think they have developed into one of the larger less personable companies, and it has caused their service to drop a little over the last year or so. It use to be that I would get the same few guys on my tickets for the first couple of years. Then it started being someone new on every ticket... forwarding it to someone else that was new. There were several recent occasions where I had to telephone and demand speaking to a supervisor before very serious issues were rectified. We had a lot of tickets for various reasons, and probably a few too many that could have and should have been prevented. There are a few threads floating around that go into a bit more detail with the specific issues we were experiencing. The bottom line is they could not deliver what we needed in personal management, security and performance. We also needed someone who understands vBulletin and would get involved with optimizing a server to work well with vB. I need to be doing other things besides constantly worrying about a server all the time.
We started looking around and we looked for a couple of months before we finally decided on IOFlood. I appreciated the special attention that Gabe gave my concerns... along with the solutions he offered, which were gracious.
As previously mentioned... we are running our home theater forum on the server. Here are the specs...
- Supermicro Motherboard w/ IPMI
- Supermicro 4 bay Hotswap Case / PSU
- Xeon X3460 CPU
- 2 x WD RE3 1TB HDD in RAID 1 for /home file system
- 2 x 32GB Intel X-25E SLC SSD in RAID 1 for databases
- 16GB DDR3 ECC RAM
- cPanel/WHM
- 200GB RAID 1 R1Soft Off-Server Backup
- 1Gbps Private Port
- 2000GB Tier 1 Bandwidth
- 24/7 Proactive Monitoring
- 24/7 Tech Support
- Fully Managed
The migration was extremely painless and flowed really well with minimal downtime.
You can check out the site and get a good feel for the server and how it works with vB 3.8
I also have another vB version 4.1 forum running as well. A much smaller forum that is semi-private... only a few hundred members. There are also 15 other websites hosted on the server... all with relatively light traffic.
We have had absolutely zero issues with the performance of the sites and forums. It is a breath of fresh air to not be constantly running into performance issues on the forums. I am online nearly all day long 5-6 days per week... I am talking 12-14 hours daily. I hear every burp and sneeze the server makes, so there is not much that gets by me. I really really like the consistent solid performance we are getting right now. We did have some minor email issues initially, but nothing that was not easily taken care of in a professionally prompt manner. I mentioned the pricing is fabulous... you will definitely like it.
Gabe and the team have been personable and first class from the beginning. They offer real management beyond what other companies offer and have delivered. I highly recommend you checking them out. I don't think you will be disappointed.