Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Reseller Hosting : Review of AxisHOST

[Glowball]

I have been with AxisHOST for six months and I thought a review was in order. When I have been looking for hosts in the past, the reviews here have been very helpful. Hopefully this helps someone.

I am a Web Developer and one of my clients has had a dedicated server with AxisHOST since April of 2003. I've been the support contact for my client, and I have worked with AxisHOST whenever they have questions or issues. The one thing that really stands out is the phenomenal uptime. My client uses AlertSite to monitor uptime, and there are rarely any hiccups and never any extended downtime. I have many clients using AlertSite and this one server at AxisHOST is the leader of the pack for uptime numbers by leaps and bounds. Over the years, the support has been quick and very attentive, as well.

I am a small reseller, myself. I was with AffordableHOST back when the owners of AxisHOST also owned it. If you've followed the history of AffordableHOST you know that they were sold to another company that promptly ran it practically into the ground. I went from a very happy, long term AffordableHOST customer to one who needed a new host. I went to Bliksem Hosting because customers of AffordableHOST were not allowed to move to AxisHOST per their agreement. Bliksem, as many of you know, is also going down in flames. Luckily, I could finally move to AxisHOST and I moved immediately.

Bliksem seemed to be going out of business that afternoon and the move felt very urgent to me. I told AxisHOST that I was in a hurry, and asked them to help me move my data over (I was on a WHM/Cpanel account and was moving to the same type of account at AxisHOST). They treated it with the same urgency and had me moved and ready to go in record time. I was very impressed with how quickly they got everything finished.

You may be thinking that with my long history with AxisHOST that I get special treatment. I know for certain that that is not the case. I have recommended AxisHOST to many people over the years (and AffordableHOST before that, when they still had the good owners). Those people have been treated just as well as I have.

Any hosting company with some talent can keep servers running and keep good uptime numbers. AxisHOST has quite a handful of very talented people, and the servers are always up. There are never any slow periods. They have very skilled people making sure that the servers are maintained as they should be. I've never had any complaints with that.

But lots of hosting companies deliver good uptimes, so what makes AxisHOST stand out for me? Their customer service! I have hosted with a handful of companies over the years and worked with a much bigger handful of companies through clients of mine. The one thing that always surprises me is how many companies have horrendous customer service and support. I've found that many companies seem to think that once they have a paying customer that they no longer have to treat them as well as the sales team did before the contract. Personally, I think this is very far from the truth.

Admittedly, many hosting customers sign up with a host and never open a support ticket. I have a friend who is with a very inexpensive host, and they are inexpensive because their support ticket turnaround times are measured in weeks. They say that up front, and that's okay with my friend because he doesn't require much.

I'm the opposite. If I have a question or an issue I want to be able to open a ticket. I want to open as many tickets as I need to, and I want the response time to be reasonable. Not only that, I want the responses to MAKE SENSE. How often do you open a ticket with your hosting company and the response clearly shows that they didn't really read your original question? How many responses show that you've reached some kid in "level 1 support" who barely knows how to turn on a computer? How many times have you had to keep posting back and forth with a support person on one ticket, trying to get a clear answer, and it seems to never end? That never happens with AxisHOST.

And that's the main reason I'll stay with AxisHOST. They make me feel like I'm an important customer and that they value my business, even though I'm not paying very much. I highly recommend them for both virtual and dedicated hosting.

Please feel free to PM me if you have any questions.

[ServerNinja]

Nice to hear that you are a happy customer of axishost.

Why did you put a "sad" smiley ( Review of AxisHOST) then?

[Glowball]

I see a thumbs up smiley next to the title.

You see a sad face? Well that's weird!

Edit: I use Opera and after your post I looked at it in IE. You're right, it's a sad face in IE and a thumbs up in Opera! I had to change it in IE. It should be correct now. This makes me wonder how many other conflicting icons I've used in the past. Great.

[ServerNinja]

I just washed my face and looked into the title again, still I can see the sad smiley.

Edit: Yes, it has been corrected now.

[Glowball]

I think I had the icons cached in Opera and they changed at some point. I think it's just something on my end.

[Shaw Networks]

That sounds great, what sort of technical support response times do you usually receive?

[Glowball]

You rate the priority of your own tickets. If I rate it as a "high" priority the response time is usually within 15 minutes or so. I've only used that once, so that might not be the best indication.

I usually rate my tickets "medium" and that usually gets a response time of under an hour during regular business hours. If I open a "medium" ticket in the middle of the night it may take a couple of hours.

"Low" priority tickets will get answered in a few hours, always. I usually use these for questions I have.

These are just first response times. Once there is a dialog going between me and the support technician it's much faster. If it's an important issue or one they can solve without any research on their end we end up passing the ticket back and forth every few minutes, usually.

[brendandonhu]

Originally Posted by Shaw Networks

That sounds great, what sort of technical support response times do you usually receive?

To give an idea of their response times...
At 5:18PM I submitted a low priority ticket asking if they could enable OpenSSL support.
By 5:45PM, OpenSSL was installed and PHP was recompiled to support it.

[WireNine]

Glad to hear that you've found the perfect host for youself Glowball!

Keep up the good work Tina and AH team

[ldcdc]

It's nice to read positive, detailed reviews. Here's to your continued satisfaction with AxisHost!

[Tina J]

Thank you for the kind review guys! We actually were able to close a deal on a dedicated server this morning as a direct result of this thread. Very much appreciated.

--Tina

[eric418]

Originally Posted by Glowball

You rate the priority of your own tickets. If I rate it as a "high" priority the response time is usually within 15 minutes or so. I've only used that once, so that might not be the best indication.

I usually rate my tickets "medium" and that usually gets a response time of under an hour during regular business hours. If I open a "medium" ticket in the middle of the night it may take a couple of hours.

"Low" priority tickets will get answered in a few hours, always. I usually use these for questions I have.

These are just first response times. Once there is a dialog going between me and the support technician it's much faster. If it's an important issue or one they can solve without any research on their end we end up passing the ticket back and forth every few minutes, usually.

A fresh response time I got an hour ago:

I just got an incident with my account of Axis, ticket set as "medium" by mistake (actually it's very urgent stated in subject).

i got my first reply in 7 minutes, and confirming they notice. Next reponse from Tina said it's identified and fixed.

Though it's their mistake of this incident (actually quite serious to me), but i think issues always happen, but how they are handled is more important.

[plumsauce]

Congratulations to both Glowball and Axishost.

I was just grousing to my pal the other day that the way things are now in *every* industry, someone is going to come along in each industry who will dominate the industry just by insisting that everyone at every level in the organisation offers good service. No excuses.