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  1. #1

    RackSpace SiteCloud vs tsohost vs cloudweb?

    Hi,
    I am using RackSpace's Sitecloud service and more than happy with the Server Performance and support. It's only the pricing which is forcing me to make a switch.

    I don't want Servers actually. I need something managed by the experts as SiteCloud service. So who are the SiteCloud competition here?

    tsohost.co.uk: I am inclined towards them as well as cloudweb. But I actually want service exactly similar to SiteCloud from Rackspace at some nominal price.

    My only requirement is if 20,000 users visits my site at the same time, my site should not be slow for any of them. Of course the hosting company can charge me for over usage of resources. That's it.

    Appreciate if the REAL Competitors of SiteCloud just put their company name and I will try to dig it out furhter myself.

    Thanx in advance.
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  2. #2
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    I was evaluating these different providers late last year and settled with TSOHost (I assume you're talking about their clustered hosting!)

    A few reasons being:

    1) Low starting price
    2) A small, UK business which I know (or hope) will care a bit more about my business
    3) The fact that their servers are in the UK

    So far, around 5-6 months in, everything has been good. The only downtime has been this month when there was some power issue at the datacenter, a lot of other providers were down because of this too. I wasn't entirely happy with the situation but I got over it and claimed against the SLA for one months free credit.. I felt a bit bad about doing that (I don't normally claim on SLA's if a provider has been good to me) since they provide such good service but at the end of the day the SLA is there for a reason and business is business.

    I haven't got much to say, everything has been brilliant, servers are speedy and everything.

    Regarding scaling, their system is built for this but you may want to contact them for clarification regarding bursts. My purpose of using this kind of provider is just to take out any sort of dedicating renting or management aspect, I want to scale with them slowly and over time, hopefully being able to stay on their clustered system for a very long time (paying extra of course as we scale up). The only time I plan on hopping off the clustered system is if any of my sites are receiving exceptionally high traffic (think Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook!! lol)... I hope they won't have a problem with that but only time will tell, so far I'm only on the default £20 / month plan.

    A few issues which don't reflect the actual core service:

    - Their website is pretty old looking, don't be put off by it.
    - Their control panel is pretty ugly, you'll have to get over this for their good service
    - Lacking certain features, improvements & an API for their control panel... if you look through their forums then you will see that various things have been promised for the future of the control panel, though I'm yet to see any of these control panel improvements. However, this does mean that they are concentrating on providing a good service and the control panel as it is has all of the main features you need anyway for now.

    In contrast to the above, some interesting positives:

    - SSH is available for all which is very important, then again most hosts these days will provide SSH.
    - You can deploy Windows or Linux sites on the cluster from the same place, I only use PHP/MySQL etc so I'm a Linux guy but that seems pretty cool to me.
    - They now have a separate static file serving system to serve up images, CSS, Javascript which is nice. I had some issues with this earlier this year and they put me onto a new system in development which cut static file request times further by half I think.. anyway, it's all good

    I have a concern over their "24 hour" support however. Whilst I do actually seem to receive a response pretty quick any time of day or night, it always seems to be from the same two people... the same two people who post in the forums. Kinda worries me if this business is being pretty much ran by just these two people but hey, if that is the case, they've managed it pretty well so far! I'm just worried how two people actually manage tickets 7 days a week, that would be 12 hours each, every day none stop, never mind the other aspects of running this business. I'm guessing that there MUST be other people behind the scenes for a business doing so well with an innovative product such as this, but if I'm honest, I've never heard another name mentioned - just Darren & Adam.

    I'm a developer who's tired of looking after my own servers, having moved all low traffic sites and a couple of sites in development to TSOHost I've been very happy. I have a medium traffic site to move over at some point but wish to optimize it first before placing it into a shared environment to save getting in trouble or having to pay more than needs be paid.

    If another similar service came along and I liked the look of it then I'd sign up and give it a go, however for now TSOHost seems the one for me. I would have given Rackspace's Cloud Sites a go except for I don't like all their marketing crap, the pre-sales live chat people were useless and there was no UK based implementation (server location) at the time.

    Sorry for the essay, might as well count this as my mini review of TSOHost too. I hope it helps you in making your decision, I didn't find a whole lot of information on TSOHost's clustered system specifically when researching them. Any specific questions, just ask, I'll be happy to answer! Good luck!
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  3. #3
    @ST-MIKE: Many thanks for your detailed review. You are right, I am interested in clustered hosting actually.

    - Website really looks like there's only a couple of friends sitting behind and running the business and never care about the design or beauty. If It wasn't for the reviews on WHT, I won't be revisting on the website.
    - Been into their forums and alarmed by the Power Failure occurred on 17th March. But it seems it was the first incident happened there.
    - Yeah, two persons only. That was what alarming me too. However responses to my emails were real quick and to the dot.
    - The burst thing really need some clarification. Thanks for pointing. Let me contact them and dig out how this can effect.

    You are advertising tsohost in your signature as well, does this mean you also belong them or is it just that you care for them
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  4. #4
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    No problem.

    Nope, sorry for the confusion, I'm nothing to do with them other than being a satisfied customer I don't provide any hosting services myself or work for a hosting business so my signature is free space to give back to good providers who deserve the business, funnily enough the two businesses I'm advertising are both actually quite small, even more so why they need their happy customers to advertise their good service

    I've considered asking them about the two person thing before via support tickets but didn't want to bother them about it since everything has been great so far.

    They will probably pick up on this thread and enlighten us on the subject of who works @ TSOHost. I wouldn't mind if they said the business was being operated by two people alone since they seem to be managing... but I'd just worry as to how they're handling things properly and what happens if one of them is ill one day or something. There really must be someone else there working behind the scenes but only time will tell. If they don't already have other staff working with them then it can't be far off from them employing somebody new because they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves.

    Seriously though they seem to know exactly what they are doing despite the poor web designs, so after you've got the answers to anything specific that you need to know, I'd give them a go. I can't compare them to any similar service however because I've not actually used this specific kind of service until TSOHost, they're the ones I chose to go with and I've been happy.

    Oh yeah, I've just remembered another similar service for you to check out: http://catn.com/ - I found these guys earlier this year and whilst their service looks pretty damn cool, nice features and nice design etc, I found that the way they've gone about it is a bit confusing. Sign up and see that for yourself though, this service may be suitable for you. I didn't get to the stage of actually hosting any site there so can't comment on service or support. I signed up, had a fiddle in their control panel then cancelled.

    EDIT: TSOHost has apparently been in business for some years so whatever is going on with the staff count, it's working - customers seem to be happy from the reviews etc I found before signing up, too bad there isn't very many good reviews. The important thing is that there aren't any bad reviews People who are happy don't tend to leave reviews, people who are unhappy start leaving bad reviews all over the place... so this is a good sign.
    Last edited by DevMonkey; 03-26-2011 at 07:49 AM.
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  5. #5
    Thanks for the explanation. I have seen this catn thing but they only support php 5.3 and my application does not yet support this version, so out of question. I need php 5.2 actually.
    I am impressed with cloudweb as well but unfortunately they do not provide this clustered shared hosting service else I would have gone with Jason. But I think there must be some real competition for the service like Sitecloud, isn't it? Until now I could find only these two services. What are other competition, I would atleast want to take a look at them before signing up with tsohost.
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  6. #6
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    Quote Originally Posted by shikary View Post
    Thanks for the explanation. I have seen this catn thing but they only support php 5.3 and my application does not yet support this version, so out of question. I need php 5.2 actually.
    I am impressed with cloudweb as well but unfortunately they do not provide this clustered shared hosting service else I would have gone with Jason. But I think there must be some real competition for the service like Sitecloud, isn't it? Until now I could find only these two services. What are other competition, I would atleast want to take a look at them before signing up with tsohost.
    Sitecloud does not do Clustered shared hosting. They tried, but their technology failed miserably and they do not even offer it anymore.

    Keep an eye on Birdhosting as they are going to go public with it soon I think, and their rates will not be $150/mo entry level like Rackspace and that is going to be a cPanel clustered shared hosting platform. Very cool stuff.
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  7. #7
    Thanks Jason. But what do you call SiteCloud service, if it's not the Clustered Shared Hosting? Is it cloud shared?
    Is there any ETA for birdhosting new service or should I contact them for that?
    Any other good service already in the hosting market? No matter if the price is little high until it's under 100 USD.
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  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by shikary View Post
    Thanks Jason. But what do you call SiteCloud service, if it's not the Clustered Shared Hosting? Is it cloud shared?
    Is there any ETA for birdhosting new service or should I contact them for that?
    Any other good service already in the hosting market? No matter if the price is little high until it's under 100 USD.
    I'm not normally one to bash any other provider, but we have had so many customers come to us that previously used them I know their story all to well.. so much that I even signed up for a plan myself to know this first hand before the whole thing came to a grinding halt.

    Well, before they stopped offering it they do basically the same thing we do, although their service was "unlimited" except for the fact they forced many customers to upgrade to VPS because they used too much resources. Originally, their service launched as a Clustered cloud based shared hosting solution like Rackspace Cloud Sites, however they were never able to actually achieve what they intended and their Clustering failed. So, they dropped it entirely and put the shared hosting customers on Green Geeks, and Sitecloud now is just Cloud VPS hosting.

    For Birdhosting you would want to ask them directly as I am not sure on their ETA. I think they may have a private BETA though that may be worth asking them about?
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  9. #9
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    Appreciate the feedback with respect to the website - it was first designed in 2008 so is due a complete re-design.

    Our system is most similar to Rackspace CloudSites, with a few differences (we have SSH access on a per site basis). We also allow a full range of SSL certificates (I believe you're limited to certain certificate roots on with RS).

    We have lots of exciting features planned and are actively expanding our team of developers and sysadmins - the problem is finding good people (even in this economy) is very difficult.
    Last edited by dazmanultra; 03-28-2011 at 05:16 AM.
    Darren Lingham - Stablepoint Hosting
    Stablepoint - Cloud Web Hosting without compromise
    We provide industry-leading cPanel™ web hosting in 80+ global cities.
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  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by dazmanultra View Post

    Our system is most similar to Rackspace CloudSites, with a few differences (we have SSH access on a per site basis). We also allow a full range of SSL certificates (I believe you're limited to certain certificate roots on with RS).

    We have lots of exciting features planned and are actively expanding our team of developers and sysadmins - the problem is finding good people (even in this economy) is very difficult.
    Thank you for being here. There's only one thing which is pinching in my mind your forums are way too slow to respond. If you are offering a service which can speed up my website, why not yours

    Can you please explain this EXCITING FEATURES planned? As I am told that birdhosting is also coming into this business, so I would like a comparison first.

    Many thanks in advance.
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  11. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by shikary View Post
    Thank you for being here. There's only one thing which is pinching in my mind your forums are way too slow to respond. If you are offering a service which can speed up my website, why not yours
    I'm really surprised the forums are slow for you - where are you located, and how slow is it loading for you? I've just done a quick test on Pingdom's system (http://tools.pingdom.com/?url=http:/....tsohost.co.uk) and the average time for a page load that I can recreate is around 700ms. A trace route from your computer/location would also be helpful, if you can provide one - just PM or email it (so as not to derail the thread) and I'm sure we can pinpoint where a potential issue may lie.

    Essentially our major improvements and refinements to our service are focussed on speed and efficiency. For instance, PHP opcode caching is normally not possible in a shared environment, we are looking be able to make this available. We also have 'skinning' features planned allowing resellers to change the look and add a logo to their customers' interfaces.
    Darren Lingham - Stablepoint Hosting
    Stablepoint - Cloud Web Hosting without compromise
    We provide industry-leading cPanel™ web hosting in 80+ global cities.
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  12. #12
    Email Sent to you. I was actually talking about inner pages of the forums. But that's probably a problem at my pc only, I just checked on a friend's pc and the speed was fine.
    I am already convinced to go with tsohost.co.uk and will update here once spend some time with them.
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  13. #13
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    Good choice (Y) You won't be sorry

    EDIT: Still worried that concerns over staff numbers (looking on the surface to be two people) were overlooked
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  14. #14

    Thumbs down

    I have very bad experience with sitecloud. I paid for the service, they took the money and i have nothing. After 3 days i realized that I had been rejected. I knew it from the chat with a supporter. They did not send any e-mail.
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  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by mestr View Post
    I have very bad experience with sitecloud. I paid for the service, they took the money and i have nothing. After 3 days i realized that I had been rejected. I knew it from the chat with a supporter. They did not send any e-mail.
    That seems to be a very unfortunate thing, but all I know from sitecloud is that they really support. Their team is very well educated with the systems and they even try to help for beyond their limits. Never had any issue with the support. However, they just closed their billing department on weekends, so you don't get support on weekend for billing queries, which, for me, is no problem at all.
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  16. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by mestr View Post
    I have very bad experience with sitecloud. I paid for the service, they took the money and i have nothing. After 3 days i realized that I had been rejected. I knew it from the chat with a supporter. They did not send any e-mail.
    Presumably since they have now told you that you've been rejected from their service for whatever reason, a refund has been issued and is on its way to you - in which case what's the issue? If they don't want your business then that's up to them, if you're a legit customer then more fool them
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  17. #17
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    Having two staff is not necessarily a problem from a technical perspective. If the architecture is well designed, as they claim, it should be high availability and designed to fail in place so the business owners will not be running around like headless chickens, break fixing things. Switching faulty hard drives and such tasks is commonly outsourced to remote hands, either belonging to the DC or another hosting company with onsite staff. You can kind of think of these as additional staff.

    A good control panel and documentation should mitigate the vast majority of support tickets, but maybe they have someone junior answering the very basic questions who you have simply not encountered.
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  18. #18
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    * SiteCloud does not force you to do so

    Quote Originally Posted by CloudWeb View Post
    I'm not normally one to bash any other provider, but we have had so many customers come to us that previously used them I know their story all to well.. so much that I even signed up for a plan myself to know this first hand before the whole thing came to a grinding halt.

    Well, before they stopped offering it they do basically the same thing we do, although their service was "unlimited" except for the fact they forced many customers to upgrade to VPS because they used too much resources. Originally, their service launched as a Clustered cloud based shared hosting solution like Rackspace Cloud Sites, however they were never able to actually achieve what they intended and their Clustering failed. So, they dropped it entirely and put the shared hosting customers on Green Geeks, and Sitecloud now is just Cloud VPS hosting.
    Hi, sorry to interfere with this thread, I'm new here on WHT but I have been reading A LOT on this forum as this was helpful enough to help me find my VPS hosting provider. I have and is also a current customer of SiteCloud aka Green Geeks.

    I love the service and yes, they say that everything is unlimited (disk space / bandwidth), the reason why I signed up here on WHT is to DEFEND my current shared provider because I don't think that it's fair enough that I let CloudWeb to bash around.

    For the record, I've been with SiteCloud for almost a year already, I signed up when they still had 3 plans on a shared cloud environment, since then I never had to upgrade. I am a programmer and a designer, and I test and do a lot of web hosting related task just because it's part of my job to do so.

    SiteCloud has always been responsive and has always worked for me, I've been using a lot of disk space (800mb ++) and bandwith (normally, the minimum is 4gb + each month), but they never said anything about upgrading stuffs.

    I admit that there had been a couple of down times as they had moved from AWS EC2 to Single Hop, had caused me a lot of downtime during that time, I even complained abt it as I'm a paying customer and want to get what my money's worth, and as quite nice reply, they gave me free 3 months of hosting credit as they believed that it was an error on their part.

    The bottom line is, they do not tell you to upgrade because if they did, I could have stopped using their service as it's a little pricey, but then they didn't, so I'm not letting CloudWeb to do the bashing here, I'm a happy customer and if you don't wanna believe me, you can visit and ping my site to verify http://rgenzon.com

    Thanks.

    PS: The reason why I bothered to sign up on WHT, is because of this.
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  19. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by rgenzon View Post
    you can visit and ping my site to verify http://rgenzon.com
    Not working as I write this
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  20. #20
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    Playing with DNS

    Quote Originally Posted by anon-e-mouse View Post
    Not working as I write this
    Sorry, been trying to play with DNS via NameCheap Please try http://tapsilogan.com
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  21. #21
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    Quote Originally Posted by rgenzon View Post
    Hi, sorry to interfere with this thread, I'm new here on WHT but I have been reading A LOT on this forum as this was helpful enough to help me find my VPS hosting provider. I have and is also a current customer of SiteCloud aka Green Geeks.

    I love the service and yes, they say that everything is unlimited (disk space / bandwidth), the reason why I signed up here on WHT is to DEFEND my current shared provider because I don't think that it's fair enough that I let CloudWeb to bash around.

    For the record, I've been with SiteCloud for almost a year already, I signed up when they still had 3 plans on a shared cloud environment, since then I never had to upgrade. I am a programmer and a designer, and I test and do a lot of web hosting related task just because it's part of my job to do so.

    SiteCloud has always been responsive and has always worked for me, I've been using a lot of disk space (800mb ++) and bandwith (normally, the minimum is 4gb + each month), but they never said anything about upgrading stuffs.

    I admit that there had been a couple of down times as they had moved from AWS EC2 to Single Hop, had caused me a lot of downtime during that time, I even complained abt it as I'm a paying customer and want to get what my money's worth, and as quite nice reply, they gave me free 3 months of hosting credit as they believed that it was an error on their part.

    The bottom line is, they do not tell you to upgrade because if they did, I could have stopped using their service as it's a little pricey, but then they didn't, so I'm not letting CloudWeb to do the bashing here, I'm a happy customer and if you don't wanna believe me, you can visit and ping my site to verify http://rgenzon.com

    Thanks.

    PS: The reason why I bothered to sign up on WHT, is because of this.
    Hello and welcome to WHT. It is nice to have you here, and thank you for your opinions. They are always valued.

    Now, 800MB of storage and 4GB of bandwidth is not something that is going to get you flagged for an "unlimited" provider. That is actually low usage for a ~$5/mo service, so you are right you will not get told to upgrade for such a low amount of usage. If so, then I would be very concerned. Thank you for posting your actual usage numbers to clarify things.

    Your rgenzon.com domain is actually pointing to Linode, not SingleHop. Did you know it's actually being hosted with them and not SingleHop?
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  22. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by CloudWeb View Post
    Your rgenzon.com domain is actually pointing to Linode, not SingleHop. Did you know it's actually being hosted with them and not SingleHop?
    If you read above:
    Quote Originally Posted by rgenzon View Post
    Sorry, been trying to play with DNS via NameCheap Please try http://tapsilogan.com
    I have a VPS node with Linode. Just trying out how to get things work on a command line environment, I'm totally enjoying it, just trying to play with DNS so I've used Linode's nameserver, nothing to worry abt, thanks.

    It might be, but I don't know, I had been with a shared hosting provider before (i prefer to not tell the name, as I'm not in any point using their services anymore), that kicked me off as I've used somewhere like 2gb of bw. Even suspended my acct. Woah!

    Thanks for the welcome. Just wanted to clarify that Sitecloud had never, on my part, had asked me to do certain upgrades, so far, things are really doing great. And the minimum bandwidth that I consume if 4gb, it's minimum, not the total, or average.
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  23. #23
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    Yes I did see the point about DNS.. but web and Email services for rgenzon.com are also pointing to Linode which is why I was confused when you said you were only talking about DNS but yet everything was pointing to Linode. No problem though.

    Where the problem normally comes into play with "unlimited" hosts is far beyond the 800mb storage, or even 5GB of transfers. We commonly see posting here saying their problems occur even as low as 20GB of transfers, and 2GB of storage space. For your requirements you'll find providers guaranteeing more space and bandwidth at the same price.

    It's an all too common debate, and consumer like unlimited because they don't want to be bothered with thinking about it but yet the downfalls almost always result in frustration and time spent far beyond that saved by choosing unlimited to begin with.

    It's a proactive vs reactive approach.

    Anyways, glad to hear there's at least 1 happy customer of Sitecloud.
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  24. #24
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    Ha, yeah, Linode has this pre-configured feature wherein you don't have to enter anything for mail, ftp, etc. Sorry bout that!

    Heh, I've looked on your site like almost a year ago (would have signed up with you guys), but the UNLIMITED marketing scheme definitely worked out on me so I tried SiteCloud.

    But I really like the service that you guys offer and had found great reviews abt your services, kudos to that.

    Though planning ahead, I'm looking forward to host my websites on a VPS server so that's part the reason on why I signed up for Linode, as I don't want to see myself get complaints from clients that it's slow or something or somehow limiting them, I believe that VPS is a way for me to let my clients grow and support them by giving them the best and cost effective solutions that I can offer them
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  25. #25
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    Yes.. VPS (and Cloud Servers, very similar thing) is the next step towards growth and independence with hosting. It is a private hosting environment so you can grow with less constraints, customize your hosting environment, and still very cost effective.

    Things can still slow down, but you will have direct control over that as you can upgrade your VPS when you reach your resource limitations. You also do not need to worry about account suspensions for "overuse" as long as your provider is truly dedicating your resources to you as your usage will not risk damaging other clients so there would be no need to suspend.
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