I have read countless reviews here at WebHostingTalk, and reviews like these have helped me to make my purchasing decisions so many times in the past. So I figured I would finally write a review. Basically this review is in two parts -- my first impressions at InnoHosting and why I have begun to migrate some accounts away from EZPZ Hosting.

Let me just say: I'm not an easy client to deal with. I have very high standards (I have gone so far as to tell Rameen of a typo that had been in his signature). I've opened a lot of support tickets with both InnoHosting and EZPZHosting, but I always remain professional and courteous. I also pay my bills on time (if not early).

Without further ado, let's get started with my personal web hosting story. I'm doing my best not to go too hard on either web host -- but I'll let you know that I'm a detail oriented person and I pick up on most everything

Why I'm Leaving EZPZ Hosting

Let me tell you right now. EZPZ Hosting is a great provider, and a few of my buddies run their businesses off of reseller accounts over there. Dan has created a value for money that is absolutely irresistible and [can be] quite profitable.

A Diatribe on End User Support

What I really need is good end user support. Although I'm capable of providing support to my own clients, I really prefer to leave it to those who are better at it. I'm a people person -- so I like to work on marketing my web hosting business. And I like to leave support to the guys who know how to do it best.

Unfortunately, with EZPZ hosting, their end user support is practically not there. When I started with them, they had good end user support. It would be answered in a reasonable amount of time. Over the past 4 weeks, the end user support service has degraded completely. Say goodbye to 2-4 hour response times, and make way for 8-24 hour response times, if you're lucky enough to get a response. Several times I have inquired about a ticket that they hadn't answered, only to hear that it had been lost in a flood of spam tickets or that the ticket had been ignored mistakenly. For someone who was looking to be able to ignore support, this made me nervous and not want to rest my business on their back.

What really upsets me about EZPZHosting is that they de-prioritize end user support tickets. Nowhere on their website does it mention this. Their website does, however, say "Average Ticket Response Time: 8 Minutes". This led me into thinking that end user support tickets would be dealt with as quickly as normal helpdesk tickets. Unfortunately, this isn't the case.

My suggestion to EZPZHosting is to adopt a solution similar to InnoHosting's -- use a centralized helpdesk with a WHMCS integration package. Although EZPZHosting's solution is easier to set up, it doesn't work as well.

I've written a TON about end user support for now, so I'm just going to leave it at that. End user support is essential (especially for how heavily EZPZ advertises it); the fact however is that it doesn't always work and when it does it is slow.

Uptime

Throughout my time at EZPZHosting, I found the uptime to be satisfactory. Never below 99.7%. Once it dropped below 99.9%. I subsequently requested SLA credit, and a free month was quickly added to my account.

Not a lot to talk about here except one nuance to their terms of service. This upsets me a little bit. If the uptime drops below 99.9% due to a DDoS attack, this is exempt from the free month. Although I understand that a DDoS attack is not the direct fault of EZPZHosting, they could just quickly put their server behind a DDoS firewall. Hopefully they own a few since they manage around 30 different servers.

Server Management

I've experienced a few hiccups in the server loads at EZPZHosting because of some little cPanel/CloudLinux software issues (e.g. a reseller having 100 sub-accounts and generating a backup for each account simultaneously, thereby degrading server performance). I think that particular issue has happened a few times. Dan was able to get the server back performing regularly within an hour or so. The loads of the servers throughout the day, compared to InnoHosting and an account I had at SkyNetHosting, are a bit higher. However, I believe EZPZHosting uses higher spec'ed servers than InnoHosting and SkyNet.

We had an issue where the server was running out of disk space. I believe that this was entirely the fault of EZPZHosting having poor capacity planning. But they fixed it and there were never any major problems.

Support

With support at EZPZHosting, I've found it depends entirely on the person that you're working with. The best technicians are probably Dan (owner) and Alex. Jamie and Erik are both helpful. In my experience, Justin wasn't quite a great technician but he knew his stuff (I haven't worked with him recently, perhaps he was taken off ticket duty?)

Value for Money
EZPZHosting gets InnoHosting on this one. It's a great value. You get unlimited free SSL certificates, CloudLinux, LiteSpeed web server, and master reseller access. The master reseller access is such a valuable add-on, I never would have realized this though. The disk allotment is also quite fair. With InnoHosting, I feel a bit crammed, even on the "Enterprise" 20 GB plan.

The bottom line: EZPZHosting is a good hosting provider. Don't rely on them for end user support, however. It just so happens that end user support was very important to me and it was a deal breaker. However, I really like EZPZHosting and do hope for them to improve the end user support situation. I still have an account with them.

What would really be great is if in 6 months from now I would be able to update this review and say "EZPZ has made a turnaround in end user support. They have an awesome new system; spam's not an issue, and I feel confident putting my clients there". Unfortunately, that's just not the case at this point. EZPZ gets 4/5 stars.

InnoHosting First Impressions

End User Support
InnoHosting end user support isn't quite as easy as EZPZHosting's end user support is to get set up. But I'm sure you will find it is worthwhile. I have limited experience with InnoHosting end user support, so I'd like to paste in a test ticket that I submitted.

===========================================
Client 12/28/2013 22:12
Hi,

I am concerned that my IP address has been blocked by your hosting server.

Can you please confirm that the IP address <<snipped>> is not blocked?

Thanks
===========================================

===========================================
Staff 12/28/2013 22:27
Hello,

Yes, i can confirmed that the IP address <<snipped>> is not blocked in the server.

Regards,
Mike
===========================================

Wow. An end user support ticket answered in 15 minutes, with a reply that at least makes partial sense. It's unfortunate that Mike didn't read what he wrote, however. I feel like this is definitely a fluke given the quality & speed of support that I've received from InnoHosting.

What I appreciate most about this is that, yes, the initial response was rushed. But without any intervention from me (or, upon contacting InnoHosting, they mentioned that there was no management intervention either), Mike followed up to his initial reply:

===========================================
Staff 12/28/2013 at 02:32
HI There,

The given IP is not found to be blocked by the server firewall nor any previous instances of block was detected for the IP. While checking with the domain name which was found in the records, I see that the domain to be showing up "Internal Server Error".

The error was being generated due to the htaccess entries that was sitting there. If you want to have the magic quotes turned off a php.ini file needs to be created with the setting/desired value set there.

Let me know if you want us to get this set for you and any other customizations that is required here. I have commented out the entries such that the site loads for now.

Regards,
Mike
===========================================

I’d like the reader to take notice to the fact that the original ticket didn’t even ask about the PHP.ini settings. Mike went ahead and fixed this for us, which is exemplary. Mike has gone above and beyond here. Color me impressed

I had an issue getting the end user support templates set up in WHMCS because they hadn't been updated in some time. I was ready for Chris to tell me that they don't provide support for this, and end user support is provided as a "as is" value added service. Nope. Chris wrote an updated template. And he had all the updated templates provided in under 72 hours.

Server Management
I haven't had a lot of experience with their server management, but I did have a hiccup when they were running the migration. For some reason, they excluded my client area from the migration. This was resolved in around 80 minutes by John.

There was another small issue when the account was created for the first time. The reseller account didn't have proper access permissions to create sub-accounts. Mike had this one resolved in just 16 minutes.

Support
Although I've had faster replies from EZPZHosting, I feel better with my business at InnoHosting. InnoHosting has a lot of different technicians, and every technician is a level 3 technician. This is really nice, since you won't be waiting in escalation queues.

With EZPZ, if my issue was complex, I would usually have to wait for Dan to come online (which could take a while). With InnoHosting, I feel like the whole operation is a lot less dependent on the owners (who I believe are Rameen and Chris)—meaning that if I have an issue, it can be sorted by anyone else at the company and not necessarily them. With EZPZ, it seems like Dan is really the only problem solver.

Uptime
I have only had this account for a few days, so we'll have to see how the uptime is. InnoHosting has a very solid track record for uptime. Their terms of service doesn't have the strange DDoS exception that I mentioned about EZPZHosting.

Value for Money
InnoHosting is a good value for the money, albeit a bit more expensive than EZPZHosting. I just have a few minor grumbles about InnoHosting. I would like to see InnoHosting have unlimited free SSL certificates, CloudLinux, and bigger storage space on the plans. 5,000 MB-20,000 MB disk space just isn't quite enough these days--disk space is cheap.

The bottom line: If your hosting brand is "higher end", InnoHosting is the right option for you. They're established and they deliver (I'd recommend reading other InnoHosting reviews... I've only been with them for about 48 hours). I feel confident with my business under the management of InnoHosting, and it seems so far like a great match. Thus far, they’d get 4.75/5 stars.

For me, what makes a web hosting company isn’t the amount of problems that come up. Every web host is going to have problems. It’s about how the problems are solved. If the same problems repeat, that means something. But when problems come up and they’re sorted with little to no intervention from me — that’s when I’ve found a web host that I want to deal with. And InnoHosting appears to be that web host.