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  1. #1

    HostVenom ~1-year review (Comparative)

    Whenever I get a new server, I tend to screw around with it for awhile as a learning experience, refining my software stack (see signature). As such, my server with HostVenom only saw solid use beginning around August, though I have had the server for a year now.

    Context

    I do self-managed, only. VPS or physical server. I have no first-hand knowledge of HostVenom's or nearly any other company's relative skill at managing actual servers. That is my job, as far as I am concerned. : )

    While Ubiquity, Hivelocity, and HostVenom are the only companies I have rented physical servers from, I have had VPSes with many more. So while these three are the ones being compared, they are not the total extent of my experience.

    At Hostvenom I host some small static websites, as well as my two major forums. They get about half a million page views per day between them, and over ten million php requests daily (AJAX chat).

    The Excellent

    Price 5/5: Especially when going over the deals here or talking to Brandon directly. I don't like to bleat about this too much - I want to see him succeed and hope he is doing well.

    First-Level Skill 5/5: About what you should expect from a younger company - any less and I would be worried. I have never had an interaction with a HostVenom employee where I had the remotest reason to question their skill at their job. This is not to say they are free from mistakes (ahem), but they were resolved quickly and with no argument when identified.

    Network 4/5: A few more dropped packets than Hivelocity, but still very solid. Have had one outage during my time with them - a router went bad, they claimed it was down for only four minutes. Only one of my members was able to reconnect within that window, most took about fifteen. Nonetheless, it has not been repeated, and none of the random issues that plagued my time at Ubiquity have repeated themselves. SteadFast's network in general lives up to its name. Their network is slightly slower than my previous host's to most of the country, though the northeast US and Europe are faster. The lack of extended disruption makes the slightly slower speed rather moot.

    IPv6 4/5: No fuss, straight up /64 allocation. They weren't able to setup PTR records at the time, but Brandon says it will be possible next month. SteadFast's IPv6 network appears to be on par with its IPv4 network, speedwise. I still think reserving a /56 for a single customer (though not necessarily allocating) is a better idea, but time will tell on that.

    Resolution Times 5/5: About on par with Hivelocity for issues requiring physical interaction with the server. Not bad at all.

    Security 4/5: They really should stick IPMI behind a VPN. Would be a 3/5, but at least they never needlessly asked for root. So they get a gold star for that. I do hope they will get around to putting IPMI behind a VPN, though : /

    IP Reputation 4/5: I have not had reason to test this nearly as much as I have with Hivelocity. One of the IP blocks I have with HostVenom appears to be in a golden range, the other looks like its range could use some cleanup work. This is a difficult thing to properly judge at a glance, though, so take it with a grain of salt.

    Response Times 3/5: Often, replies were made after they resolved the issue - so I had no idea when they received and acknowledged my ticket. Still, the resolution was generally fast enough that this was not hair-raising. Since this all covered initial issues, and there have been no issues since, this might have been resolved over the past several months. Cutting a bit of slack here as I have this problem a lot with newer hosts, and it (usually) gets resolved over time.

    Billing System: The biggest flaw is somewhat difficult to rate, which would be the billing/management software they use (HostBill). There's not too much wrong with it per se, but I think they would benefit from starting to look at developing some custom solutions (or at least customizing their current one). While they are smaller, I think they would benefit a good deal by polishing it a bit.

    Conclusion

    Ticket acknowledgement time aside, HostVenom is an excellent company to deal with, and probably has the highest 'bang for buck' ratio in Chicago at this point.

    You would certainly have a hard time doing better, for hosting anywhere in the US.

  2. #2
    Thanks for the review! We are always working on improving our services and appreciate your feedback!
    HostVenom LLC | Premium Services | Chicago, IL
    Colocation | Dedicated Servers | KVM VPS | Custom Configurations
    Brandon M. | brandon @ hostvenom . com

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