9 month review of hostdime.

Blapto · #1 09-25-2005, 06:45 AM

I've been with Hostdime since about the 20th of December.
Starting from the beginning:
I needed a dedicated server to host an rsync server, mail server, some other magic. I e-mailed them with the traditional "if I buy today, will you give me a deal?" and they gave me $10/month off straight away.
Going through my support tickets over the 9 months:
My first ticket was about the TOS, IRC servers (public servers are not allowed on Hostdime due to DoS), copyright issues, etc.
I recieved a full and detailed reply within 11 minutes.

I then had a major issue, my server went down for 24 hours while I was on holiday. I opened a support ticket, and they replaced a bad network cable within 2 hours. I suppose that was partially my fault for not having a good monitoring system in place...

I then had an issue with Apache not starting. At the time I was out of the office, so I sent a ticket in from my mobile. Within 50 minutes they had diagnosed a fault in the httpd.conf, fixed it, and booted Apache.

My support ticket after that was regarding a significant amount (>6%) of dropped packets. I recieved a reply in 7 minutes saying they were having routing issues and would have them sorted in 30 minutes. IIRC, they were sorted in about 5 minutes instead.

The next support ticket was about not being able to get into cPanel. Not a huge priority, I could get into WHM to create accounts, and the servers were still working. This one took 2:30 before they got back to me to say it was working, apparently it was an issue in the cPanel config files. Not a simple problem to diagnose, I'm sure.

I then sent in a presales question regarding upgrading my server (which I haven't done, I'm fine with my current hardware). They responded with a pretty good deal within 14 minutes.

About a month ago I noticed that my openwall linux kernel was out of date. I e-mailed them asking if they would be so kind as to upgrade it for me (again, on holiday

) and they did it within 55 minutes.

All in all, these guys provide what are essentially managed servers for a price not much greater than some of the budget suppliers out there.

I've had about 24:10 of unscheduled downtime due to their network over a period of 9 months, that would be as low as 2:10 if I had installed the monitoring system I have in place now.

I have installed a shell script to ping a server in New York that has 99.96% uptime (according to their nagios install). I get failure messages for about 30 minutes/month, so that's > 99.9% uptime, and some of those are due to their server being down as well. The downtimes are never more than 5 consecutive minutes.

All in all, their service is of excellent quality and prompt (the kernel upgrade request was put in at 0700 Hostdime local time, the longer downtime ticket was put in at 0600 Hostdime time) , their network has a very low amount of downtime, and their prices are reasonable.

I would have no qualms recommending Hostdime to anybody on this forum. Their bandwidth is also of top quality, I have had >75KBps down on my 10Mbps connection from other East coast data centres, which I understand is about the limit of 10Mbps cards due to data correction and such.

If you have any questions, post them in this thread and I'll try to answer them as best I can.

Martin Lee.

premium20 · #2 09-25-2005, 08:10 AM

Seems like you forgot to mention, can you inform us on any one domain you have with hostdime dedicated server?

Blapto · #3 09-25-2005, 08:15 AM

Yeah, why not.
I'll post a friends image site, feel free to buy photos off him!
www.millerphotography.co.uk

I think I'll go and boost his bandwidth allowance for this month...

flyingkites · #4 10-01-2005, 09:56 PM

I am thinking of using them. I am worried about the whole dedicated server thing. Managed does not sounded like managed but more administered. As in they do what you say.

I want managed as in managed. So in addition to giving them money and loading my sites, what else would I have to do on a daily basis to keep everything running and what would I need to add to do that. (I read a post saying hsphere was better than cpanel and I'd need to load more software to amke up for that)

MTSpace at WHT · #5 10-02-2005, 07:27 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by flyingkites
I am thinking of using them. I am worried about the whole dedicated server thing. Managed does not sounded like managed but more administered. As in they do what you say.

I want managed as in managed. So in addition to giving them money and loading my sites, what else would I have to do on a daily basis to keep everything running and what would I need to add to do that. (I read a post saying hsphere was better than cpanel and I'd need to load more software to amke up for that)

This is getting a bit off topic, but if you want a fully managed server, this isn't what you're looking for. These people are just good enough to do things if you ask for it, but they don't class themselves as a managed provider.

Some examples of good managed providers I have experience with would be ServInt (www.servint.net), FastServers (www.fastservers.com) and RackSpace (www.rackspace.com). All much more expensive than unmanaged as you'll see, but that's truely managed, they simply do things as and when they need doing.

Alternatively, you could get an unmanaged provider and try a provider like AcuNett (www.acunett.com) or Rack911 (www.rack911.com) for management services. Both of these provide cheaper and still pretty good service.

Blapto · #6 10-19-2005, 04:46 PM

BTW, I meant 750KBps, not 75.

snapya · #7 10-20-2005, 04:53 AM

Hay i am with hostdime as well trust me they are great

neb1211 · #8 10-20-2005, 01:08 PM

I have a shared hosting account at host dime for one of my sites and a backup support site and they have always been good to me. I have had very minimal downtime and their response times are usually pretty fast.

I am definatly thinking about getting a server from host dime as soon as my business grows large enough to warrant a dedicated server.

The site I have hosted on hostdime is maximumcpu.net