Well I've been with VolumeDrive for a little over 5 months and I'm scaling back a few things. I'm about to begin migrating what I've got there over to KnownHost. Before I do, I wanted to take a moment to share my experience with VolumeDrive for anyone considering doing business with them.
First, let me share with you something that I feel is necessary to avoid the idea that I don't care about the quality of my hosting services. I do not have a lot of clients, I have no clients who would be offended by tiny outages, and none of them stand to lose a dime over any outages. If I had a client with more needs, they would NOT be on our VolumeDrive server.
Uptime
Our server was setup on May 8 of this year. Since then we've had one notable outage. It was out for about 2 hours. I'll try to edit this later to add more of my complete uptime, I just need to get the data from Platinum Server Management. Since the first one, I've not witnessed an outage lasting more than 5 minutes, and every time it was network related. Off the top of my head I'd say I may have seen one of these each month.
Performance
My idea of good performance is simple. The websites need to load and they need to load fast. It always exceeded my expectations. For my own peace of mind I designed a terribly heavy website which I loaded a copy of on what I would call the Walmart of hosting companies, and our VolumeDrive server always loaded it faster (using Load Impact). The hardware was always overkill for what I do, so I feel out of place commenting on it's performance. I will, however, say that I never had a complaint and the hardware has given me zero problems.
Customer Service
To me, this shares importance with uptime and performance. If I don't like you, you're not getting my business. I need to know that we're going to work well together. From day one VolumeDrive has been extremely friendly to me. Sometimes their e-mails would be so direct and simple you could compare them to the famous Steve Jobs e-mails that people seem to love. They never beat around the bush, they always did what they could to accommodate me.
Now, here's the thing. I don't want to say that they are under staffed, but they sure aren't over staffed. I always got the sense that they had a very heavy workload. I knew they were a budget provider, so I provided them with the patience that I felt was appropriate for the price. They always got back to me within 6 hours, often 2-3. They did things that fall under "managed" when I'm clearly paying for unmanaged, and I couldn't make them charge me for it, even though I asked them to. I never asked for more than I needed, I never treated them like I was paying their mortgage, and I always made sure to thank them for their time.
Bottom line is that VolumeDrive is an incredible company, and if you go in with your expectations set in line with the price, you will be impressed and they will exceed your expectations. Don't go in with $200/m expectations on a $40/m server. They're good guys and I know I'll be sending a lot of business their way as long as they keep doing what they're doing.
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