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  1. #1

    ServerPoint shared hosting, too good to be ture?

    Hi everyone,


    I have been researching for a shared host for my joomla site for a few days. It is a new site so I don’t know how I can estimate the traffic now. I am thinking of going for a host with realistic and professional service for a price of around $20/month but also has a potential of upgrading to a good quality VPS or dedicated if the site grows. I have used dreamhost before for testing purpose and it has not been statisfatory so I am not so keen on the oversellers. I have narrowed down my list to about 10 hosts now and serverpoint is the one that interested me a lot from the beginning because of their reviews on WHT, their package and the information they provide on their website(well established, they promise they won’t oversell, uptime guarantee, good equipment etc). They currently offer a shared package which Is $8.46/month if you pay 12months for 350G of space and 350G transfer. I sounds very attractive but It kind of worries me a bit because I wonder how they can provide this service without overselling. I am also worried if I would exhaust the resources before even reaching the limit because joomla is quite resource consuming. So I decided to talk to their sales on live chat to ask in details.


    I started off asking the sale person how they manage to provide this package without overselling. He said “Our shared hosting servers have terrabytes of space..and thats why it is not difficult to manage such space for an account.” I asked them if they guarantee they don’t oversell, they said yes. Then I asked if there is any resource limit such as cpu, ram and database queries and he said ” Our shared hosting severs are quad core xeon servers with terrabytes of space, and we have a saparate server to handle databases and have 2 saparate servers to host the email to decrease the load on our hosting servers” but I am still concerned if joomla site will consume too much resource to lead to problems.

    Then I asked them” I am really interested in your service but I have dealt with oversellers like dreamhost before and it has not been very pleasant so I am really looking for some more realistic and professional services. it just worries me a bit that you give such a huge amount of space and bandwidth for this price and I am not sure if my site willl exhaust the resouces before even reaching the limit. I have a joomla site and my site is hugely database driven and a forum as well so I am slightly concerned about the cpu, ram and database usage.” He just answered “We are not low cost and low service, webhost provider. we provide best service to our customers
    . you will not face any problem with us.”

    As for the uptime, he said “99.999999% uptime guarantee”. I am not sure if the sales person is just simply typing 9s after the dot or he really means it.

    A lot of assurance there, but I am still not fully convinced, I asked them if he can give me a rough idea how many people will be sharing the server if I go for their Complete plan. (I don’t know if he can really give me that information but I just want to see how he will reply). The sale person is probably a bit annoyed and said “As I already told you we have a saprate and very powerful server to handle the databases, also we dont handle Email on the same servers which we use for hosting, that way our servers never have much load. Also we have recently add a new and more powerfull server in our shared hosting servers and also we dont host much number of sites on a single server, to avoid the load problems” No direct answer, so I pushed a bit more” ok, it sounds good but can you give me a rough number of how many sites will be on one server?” then he replied” This is somewhat confidential information, We dont have access to it”. It may be the truth(I am not familiar with the web hosting industry so I don’t know if it is confidential or not). I certainly understand all business have confidential information but the fact that he tried to evade my question and only gave me this answer when pushed to the last resort makes it sound more like a excuse.

    Lastly, the support, he promised “We always reply to tickets max. within 15min”.



    I was hoping to solve some of my concerns by talking to a sales person from serverpoint but it kind of adds a bit more doubts. I am still not sure if they can really deliver as they promised. The 350G space and bandwidth spells overselling to me but their reputation of their dedicated servers is good as seen on WHT. Can I trust his words for it or am I being over cautious and paranoid? I do have other in mind as well but I haven’t contact them yet.


    Pair
    Superbhosting
    Liquid web
    steadfast
    Knownhost
    downtownhost
    hostnine
    Hostpc
    Fluid hosting

    I am still relatively new to this so I would really love to hear all of your opinions and other suggestion regarding the hosts above. I would really appreciate it.

    Thank you very much for taking the time to read my story. I hope I didn’t bore you all.


    Thank you.

    Jennifer

  2. #2
    Jennifer,

    It looks like you've really done your homework in terms of hosts, and you are completely correct to be weary of them. There is no way someone can offer 350GB of space without oversellling at a $8.49 price point -- thats a flat out lie right there. Even if they had 10 terrabytes of space, they could only fit about 30 customers on there without overselling.

    Also, the 99.999999% uptime, well 99.9% offers 40 mins of downtime per month, 99.99% offers under 5 minutes of downtime per month. So 99.99999% offers almost 0 downtime per month -- which is physically impossible unless they cluster across datacenters, and at a $8.49 price point you can probably guess they don't.

    Good luck with your search for hosting! Be sure to read reviews on each host you consider.
    ReliableSite.Net LLC - Offering Enterprise Grade Dedicated Servers Since 2006 [New York City metro / Miami, FL / Los Angeles, CA]
    Customers are our #1 priority - Read Our Reviews
    Need epic pricing on 1G and 10G unmetered? We have amazing deals and a 10 minute setup time! Click here to view incredible deals.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Jan 2003
    Location
    Texas, where else?
    Posts
    1,571

    Cool

    A web host magazine had a good article about the "nines" lately 99.999 is only a few seconds, not even long enough for automatic routers and fail over switches to react and bring things back on another node of a cluster. It's all advertising with anything past 3 nines (99.9) since 4 nines 99.99 is only a matter of a few minutes as stated above. So unless you are a major enterprise site with many servers and a whale of a system (i.e. Google, Yahoo or such there will be a bit of downtime, even PayPal & eBay have their brief moments) the long list of "9's" which is practically 100% is impossible. Servers break as do switches, routers and even fiber providers to the datacenters.
    The above also explains the "price point" impossibility so no need repeating that.
    New Idea Hosting NO Overselling-Business-Grade, Shared Only! New-In House Design Team.
    High Speed & Uptime; , DIY Pro-Site Builder-Daily Backups-Custom Plans, All Dual Xeon Quad Intel servers w/ ECC DDR3 RAM SCSI RAID minimums.
    We Concentrate on Shared Hosting ...doing one thing and doing it VERY well

  4. #4
    Hi Jennifer,


    Quote Originally Posted by Jennifer_e View Post
    Hi everyone,


    I have been researching for a shared host for my joomla site for a few days. It is a new site so I don’t know how I can estimate the traffic now. I am thinking of going for a host with realistic and professional service for a price of around $20/month but also has a potential of upgrading to a good quality VPS or dedicated if the site grows. I have used dreamhost before for testing purpose and it has not been statisfatory so I am not so keen on the oversellers.
    I don't think you should worry about "oversellers". Your local phonecompany are oversellers, the roads we drive on are "oversold" etc etc.

    But enough of that... Of the ones you mention I've had the best experience (in a shared environment) with Steadfast. They usually respond to your support ticket within 10 minutes, also.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Apr 2001
    Location
    Paradise
    Posts
    12,052
    Hello Jennifer

    Actually, how much space and bandwidth do you need? I always suggest the same thing, but do not get tempted for those huge numbers if you're not really going to try to use them, or if you're going to try to use them, then, get a dedicated server
    Shared Web Hosting - Reseller Hosting - Semi-Dedicated Servers - SolusVM/XEN VPS
    LiteSpeed Powered - R1Soft Continuous Data Protection - 24/7 Chat/Email/Helpdesk Support
    Cpanel/WHM - Softaculous - R1soft Backup - Litespeed - Cloudlinux -Site Builder- SSH support - Account Migration
    DowntownHost LLC - In Business since 2001- West/Center/East USA - Netherlands - Singapore

  6. #6
    Also, remember that even with low bandwidth your site can use a lot of resources at the provider (CPU time), which can make you get "booted" because of "abuse of their resources" - even if you use like 1% of your allocated bandwidth quota.

  7. #7
    It doesnt really matter if the web host guarantees 99.9(9)% uptime, that shouldnt worry you, that is only a marketing thing .
    Ofcourse if you are goying to ask someone from their staff they will say they can provide that, and that may be true, maybe not with all their servers, and if you are unsatisfied with their uptime just ask for a credit back as stated by their Uptime SLA, or simply move on if your site can't support x minutes of downtime. It's really a matter of luck because every web host has his "bad" servers, and downtime will occur to some of them no matter what.
    The only difference is how they handle the issues and how fast considering the gravity of the situation

    My 2 cents

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Apr 2007
    Posts
    209

    Thumbs up

    hi jennifer,

    Welcome to WHT.

    a fine piece of research.

    your thread was big....... but not boring.

    dont fret everythin will turn out to fine as your requirements are very genuine.

    all most all the host(s) will be able to cope up with your requirements.

  9. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by darkstorm View Post
    It doesnt really matter if the web host guarantees 99.9(9)% uptime, that shouldnt worry you, that is only a marketing thing .
    Ofcourse if you are goying to ask someone from their staff they will say they can provide that, and that may be true, maybe not with all their servers, and if you are unsatisfied with their uptime just ask for a credit back as stated by their Uptime SLA, or simply move on if your site can't support x minutes of downtime. It's really a matter of luck because every web host has his "bad" servers, and downtime will occur to some of them no matter what.
    The only difference is how they handle the issues and how fast considering the gravity of the situation

    My 2 cents
    Agreed. The downtime SLA rarely means anything. If you read their terms, it's often "partial credit for partial downtime." So it usually amounts to a penny or two for every hour you're actually down.

    It's much more important to look for a host that doesn't promise "99.99999%" downtime, but has a serious SLA. That gives the host much more incentive to do everything they can to keep their servers up and running.

    Also keep in mind that hosts that are housed in say... Rackspace's datacenter are probably going to have better network uptime than in mystery data center X.

  10. #10
    Thank you all very much for your comments. I really appreciate it.

    I don't think I need 350G at the moment at least. My worry, as some of you also mentioned, is the resource that my Joomla might consume. I asked them about cpu usage, database and ram but they didn't give me any straight answer, just told me their servers are huge and so on. It just feels to me they only promise big words but I am not sure if there is any value in their words.

    I agree that the 99.99999% is purely marketing. I am really more interested in them keeping the server up than getting my few cents back for the downtime. Serverpoint's website said they only have 10mins of downtime a year but after the sales chat, I don't know if I trust their words.

    I also contacted knownhost yesterday. They seem very helpful and truthful at the same time. They never evade my question and even suggested I start from the lowest plan first since mine is a new site and upgrade if I need more space and bandwidth. When I asked them if they own their datacenter and network, they answered"We do not own the data center our servers are located at. We do own all our hardware." I am glad they tell me the truth so it gives me a sense of trust there. They are also very upfront with the resource restriction(<25% and <90secs cpu). Their uptime also seems good on hyperspin, which I can see for myself. The only thing is that they are relatively young, established from 2005 if I am not wrong with the information. I am not sure if they can sustain this kind of service when it grows bigger.

    Pair and liquid web seem more established. Pair told me I can install joomla but I need an advanced account($17.95/mon+$30 setup) or above. I will contact others and see how it goes.

    Well, I guess there is a risk in any host. Fingers crossed, hopefully I can find a right one.

    Btw, Illustrious, how do I know if the host's datacenter is in a reputable datacenter than some mystery place. Thanks.

    Thanks to all of you again and any more suggestions are very welcomed.

    Jennifer

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Nov 2001
    Posts
    5,383
    Nice and refreshing to see a person that understands what is possible and what is not for a price point of under $10/mth

    I have some small faith in webhosting customers
    Clustered Hosting With Continuous Data Protection (CDP)
    http://www.solidinternet.com
    8 Years of hosting excellence!

  12. #12
    That is some great work you did. I can not foresee a way they could not be overselling to actually host those services and still profit.

  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by darkstorm View Post
    It doesnt really matter if the web host guarantees 99.9(9)% uptime, that shouldnt worry you, that is only a marketing thing .
    And not to mention that SLA credits aren't applied to scheduled service windows.

  14. #14
    Hi all,

    I'd like to comment a bit about our service. It is unfortunate that many other hosting companies make possible customers weary of other companies.

    With that said, we've been around for almost 10 years, and unlike most other hosting companies, we really are different.

    Let me first start with some of the points of the original poster and then some of the replies:

    - yes, our servers are over powered. That is true. The last one we built had 8 cpu cores, and comparing it to our old machines with only two cpus, those are never overloaded. The new ones shouldn't be either. Can one single application take down such a powerful server? Yes. It can. Have we managed big loads of web sites being digged and slashdotted, yes. The only one that had an application in it was WordPRess, but because he was using wp-cache, the two cpu server handled it fine. We also don't use Apache, which is the #1 cause of loads taking down a machine. You can read more about how we optimize our service here:
    http://www.serverpoint.com/english/f...elopment.phtml


    - "overselling". Our space is expandable. And yes, every company, in every telecom/internet industry, oversells. For example, your gmail or yahoo account has 1-2GBs of space for email. Does gmail have (number of subscribers X 2GBs of space) in hard drive space, no. They add space as needed. Same with the minutes on your cell phone, on your home phone, etc. I can assure you, if you use up 350GBs of space, you will get 350GBs of space on our servers.

    - Dreamhost, I understand your concerns. We read their daily problems blog every week.

    - Resource limitations, yes. If we didn't do that, then any customer on the server could bring down everyone else. That's for the protection of every customer. Any host that doesn't do that will have a lot of downtime.

    - Database driven, yes, we use separate mysql servers for customers. And all of them are quad xeons or higher. None are loaded at all.

    - Bandwidth, we got way too much of it and we love seeing big bandwidth graphs Use it all. For extra information, we own premianet.com. We are our own Internet provider.

    - Uptime guarantee. Go through our news section on our web site. Our servers are taken down for kernel replacement, on average, twice a year. And they boot back up in 2 minutes. That's the only server downtime we've had in the last few years. And we actually have a fully built spare server on-site and ready at all times. If a server's hardware fail, all we do is move the hard drives to the spare one, boot it up, and those customers on that server are back on business. We've only had to do that *once* in 9 years. We also do a periodic replacement of all hosting servers every 2-3 years.

    - As for number of customers per server, we don't have a specific number. If we see a server at around 20% usage, we stop putting customers in it. It could be 100 wordpress sites, or 1,000 simple HTML only customers. There is no need to specify a number, other than marketing purposes. We guarantee none of our server's load will make your site feel "slow".

    - Quality of our servers: way too good. These are not generic machines. All our shared hosting servers are made by Supermicro, with RAID, dual power supplies, etc. Same exact machines we use for VPS and our Colossus line of dedicated servers, used by some big names here in our facility.


    I understand that a lot of tricks are used by other companies and they don't deliver. Their servers are underpowered, cheap, old, etc.

    When customers ask us what sets us apart, our answer is:

    This company is ran by geeks, not cash hungry investors looking to squeeze a penny out of everything. We love to play with big servers, even if they cost more than what our competitors do and we make slightly less money.

    RSNET-John: it's not a lie. IF she uses up that much space, she will get it. No, it's not physically impossible. Our servers might be down for a period of 5-10 minutes *per year*. That is about 5 nines.

    DDT: like yahoo, google, our network is fully redundant, and we actually own every piece of hardware. I can unplug a core switch right now, and all customers will notice is a 5-10 second hiccup. You don't have to be a big name to be able to afford a pair of $60K Foundry Bigiron RX switches. Between our core switches and three Netiron MLX routers, we spent almost $200K last year.

    ServerPoint is not a small company. We are actually aplushosting.com (no, NOT aplus.net). We've been around for almost 10 years now.

    I hope that helps out a bit with your decision. Everything you read on our web site is truthful.

    As for the person you chated with, yes, it is true they don't have all that information. We don't dedicate resources to a sales department. If you ask them a technical question, they'll answer it right away.

    All of the staff here are actually tech people since we don't follow that "huge sales department" business strategy. Most of our customers actually come to us via word of mouth and they usually already know about our service.

    ok that was longer than I wanted to write. But I hope it is informative.

    To the posters that say such things we promise are lies and impossible, not every company has bad service.

    Feel free to ask any questions Jennifer.


  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by serverpoint View Post
    <snip>
    - Dreamhost, I understand your concerns. We read their daily problems blog every week.
    <snip>
    You had to take a swing at them?!

    But hey, I'm glad that you made the phone-company analogy - you put it down eloquently, Jennifer.

    (How come no-one has replied to this thread? )

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