Hello WHT. Its approaching 3 months since we started doing business with RazorBlue.com in their New York, Hudson datacenter. I felt the need to submit a honest review of our experiences with their service. Well here goes.
Background:
At the beginning of October of last year, I was sent out a mission to find one quality provider that my partner could trust as we expanded our business, Game Hosting into New York. I went through just about every provider, looking for 2 things. Quality of network(Lower Latency, and Great Throughput) and Support to be there when we had issues. I can honestly say that I wasn't sure who to use, and New York is definitely a tough market. I recall talking to Fluidhosting, Digital Providers, Toqen, Thorn, and a few others. While many met my needs, the prices were astronomical for the majority. Since at that time this was a new location for us, we had a budget like most projects. Razorblue was my ultimate choice based on the fast response from Dan Kitchen, who I later found out to be the President.
Price: 10/10
Lets face it, we can always start at cost. However, Razorblue was able to achieve a few mbps with 1u of space and windows web for just under $200 at the time. This was right where I needed to be then. Even still, after expanding today and adding many mbps later as well as machines, are pricing is still affordable and Dan seems to try his hardest to be flexible. I like that the space+power, bandwith, and licenses are broken down into different categories.
Network: 9/10
I was impressed by the fact that they had several carriers in what I considered to be a lower price range when we started with them. Additionally, I truly valued having the peace of mind of redundant Cisco networks. They're network has always been a steady 22 ms away from our Chicago Boxes. They did experience a slight fiber issue, however this was fixed promptly. Instead of waiting for new fiber to be ran, they switched over to a diverse uplink which gave us little or no downtime. This was very impressive in my book, and they still obided their 100% Uptime SLA and credited us appropriately. At this time I also found out that they have one of the lowest SLA's in the industry, 5% of your monthly bill back for every 15 minutes of downtime. For me, this says something in itself for their uptime and confidence in their product.
Support: 10/10
When I needed something, I always found them to be there. Whether it be a simple server not responding after a reboot(even though we have a reboot port) or a server needing to be reloaded, my tickets were responded to promptly and professionally. In the few times that a customer had a less than optimal route, Dan and his staff attended to fix the route, or in some cases when local New York ISP's were suffering from a fiber cut, they even re-routed traffic. For me, this kind of service deserves to be recognized. Even though we colocate, and our machines our unmanaged, they did not hesitate to provide support to sys admin questions. Shouts go out to Dan, Chris, Nigel, and the rest of the staff. I appreciate you guys working your butts off.
Thats it for now. We're planning to expand further with RazorBlue in New York, so I'll let you folks know how that goes. Judging from past experience, I think the addition of more machines and bandwith should be ideal. I plan to submit similar reviews for other DC's we're utilizing throughout the US. Mods, if you would like verification of my company hosting with Razorblue, please kindly pm me or provide a link. We run Game Servers, therefore we don't currently host domains with RazorBlue, but I'd be happy to provide an IP off the forums.
If anyone has questions on my experiences, I'll be happy to answer questions.
Jordan
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