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  1. #1

    Unixy 1 month review

    I moved to Unixy about 5 weeks ago, mostly because of ongoing concerns about redundancy and a self-maintained "datacenter" at my previous provider. This wasn't a major factor as a smaller website when I started there, but in almost 5 years it has grown quite a bit and I have since become more concerned. Overall reliability wasn't bad, at 99.7% last year, but a few major issues with absolutely no communication during long outages had concerned me over the years.

    I have a medium-large vBulletin 3 forum with solid traffic. It transfers about 4-5 GB a day or so and can have over a few hundred concurrent database connections at peak times. The database size is almost 2GB.

    Migration 9/10: I had a number of problems over the first few weeks that Unixy support patiently resolved one-by-one as I sent in support tickets. I guess this is to be expected with a farily big forum that is using an older version and a number of third party plugins. That's also the main reason I narrowed down my choices to include Unixy, as their fully managed support (including third party apps) has been highly praised here. The main problem was an incompatibility issue with their Varnish accelerator. I ended up having to Google some of the error messages to find that it was apparently a known bug at which point they switched me to another accelerator (nginx) then ultimately to a newer version of Varnish that resolved the problems.

    Support 8/10: It has been very good, taking care of the major issues in a reasonable time. I admit I was spoiled by excellent support from my old provider that usually had nearly immediate response followed up by detailed explanations. In that they put up with all my tickets during the move has been great. I do wish they had a support phone number or forum, though, which is why I didn't rate it 9/10.

    Performance 9/10: I didn't have significant performance issues at the old provider, but Google analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and my Hyperspin monitoring service all report a modest improvement in response time at Unixy. Most members feel it is a slight improvement as well. My previous provider's setup was apparently an older dedicated system for the webserver and a "very high performance" shared (but small # of clients) semi-dedicated clustered server for SQL. The new system at Unixy is a hybrid/VDS system based on the Quattro+ dedicated plan.

    Uptime 8/10: I had a few downtimes, one lasting almost 5 hours and a couple more lasting almost an hour various smaller ones for server resets and updates and such. Uptime was 98.5% for the first three weeks after the move, according to my monitoring service. Normally that might warrant a lower rating, but to be fair, it has been much better (99.85%) in the last 2 weeks or so now that the migration issues are mostly resolved. I expect it to be much better from here out and I attribute any issues to the move and ongoing optimization, rather than than with Unixy hardware or network. My one complaint is that 24/7 monitoring was not included with my fully managed plan. I had to pay an extra $5 a month for their proactive monitoring package such that I didn't have to report server outages manually to have them resolved. That was a factor in the 5 hour downtime. Had I known the VDS plan wasn't monitored, I would have paid the extra up front since it wasn't a big increase in cost.

    Cost 9/10: Unixy was among the least expensive for the handful of higher-end providers I considered. The price was about the same as I was paying at my previous host factoring in a special WHT offer they had going. I also considered Liquidweb, WiredTree, URLJet, Cartika and a couple others. All were more expensive for similar fully managed setups usually much more expensive. While I was also very impressed with URLJet, a much lower powered VPS server there was more expensive and a VDS system with similar specs as Unixy was at least double the cost.

    Joe 10/10: Getting quick pre-sales responses that answer your specific questions is always a big plus. Actually, most of the companies I contacted this time were quite good, but Joe was among the best.

    Overall, 9/10: A very good review and I expect that if I do a 6 or 12 month review it will be even better, considering their service so far and that most of the migration issues are now resolved.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jun 2003
    Location
    Oklahoma City, OK
    Posts
    2,116
    Very good review that will help others looking for hosting please keep us updated.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Nov 2010
    Location
    /etc/profile
    Posts
    1,526
    this is really a detailed review pal. Thank you

  4. #4
    As an update, I continued to have some minor ongoing issues for a couple weeks after my review was posted. At that point, Unixy identified some issue on their server/cluster and moved me to a different one. My website has been running extremely well since then, with hyperspin reporting 99.993% uptime. Performance continues to be good.

    Even with the added costs of 24/7 monitoring and a control panel, the price is still competitive, in my opinion.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Feb 2008
    Location
    Houston, Texas, USA
    Posts
    3,262
    Quote Originally Posted by CarSafety View Post
    My website has been running extremely well since then, with hyperspin reporting 99.993% uptime. Performance continues to be good.

    Even with the added costs of 24/7 monitoring and a control panel, the price is still competitive, in my opinion.

    Thank you for the update . I'm glad you're pleased with the service. Needless to say we're always working hard to continue improving your experience.

    Cheers
    Joe / UNIXy
    Last edited by UNIXy; 04-18-2012 at 03:04 PM.
    UNIXy - Fully Managed Servers and Clusters - Established in 2006
    Server Management - Unlimited Servers. Unlimited Requests. One Plan!
    cPanel Varnish Plugin -- Seamless SSL Caching (Let's Encrypt, AutoSSL, etc)
    Slow Site or Server? Unable to handle traffic? Same day performance fix: joe@unixy

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