I just felt like sharing my love of my host. My current host is RapidVPS, and I have been with them for 5 months. Now, I’m sure at least one reader of this post will be thinking “But I’m on this awesome free host”, good for you.
Here’s my experience with free hosts:
- Limited and slow support
- Resellers. They offer others’ resources to you
- Quickly close down
- Don’t offer many things needed to run a modern website (MySQL/FTP)
- Slow
- Attacked and abused frequently
- Overselling. They offer more than they can give (Used to entice people, and it works)
I’ve probably been hosted at a dozen different free hosts so far, and that’s generally how it goes. So what makes RVPS so great for me?
- Monthly payments. None of that crap where they show you the price for a 3 years advance payment. In fact, they don’t even offer whole year sales (But actually, at the time of writing, they’re trying to fill up some shared hosting space so they are, but they’re still keeping the monthly payment an option!). I don’t want to pay for a year + at a time. What if something happens at that host? I don’t want to have wasted hundreds of dollars paying for all that surplus hosting when the host turns out to be a flop and I want to move.
- Fast servers. Oh yeah, paid hosting is a ton faster than free hosting, even on a shared plan.
- Features. Pretty much everything I could ever ask for. MySQL (unlimited), web based email, auto responders, unlimited domains, PHP, server status page, and a whole lot more.
- Support. While hosted at RVPS, I’ve only had to contact the staff 3 times and I’ll explain a bit more because you probably think that shouldn’t have to be done on a paid host. Firstly, all 3 support tickets were answered within **1** hour. Of course that’s not going to happen all of the time. Now the first ticket I sent was because they had an error on their account registration page. Their script let me enter an invalid domain name, which broke my account. This one took the longest at an hour for a response, and when I did receive a reply, my account was fixed and active and their registration page had been fixed. The second time I contacted support was for an old MySQL version (4). One of the staff graciously moved me off to a new server — seemlessly — that had MySQL 5. The third time I contacted them, it was because the server was undergoing massive stress. The load was up at 80, and a normal load for that server was usually 1 or less. 80 times the norm really took it’s toll, but the server still tried to deliver pages (and would, sometimes after minutes). I contacted the staff and got a response within 5 minutes, the load halved in 10 minutes, and the load back to normal in 20 minutes. Their support is truly lengendary IMO.
- Not oversold! That means they offer each account what they can handle. While this may be a turn off because of a relatively low amount of bandwidth, it adds up to better performance.
- Their account system is epic. I mean, really epic. With 1 set of login info, I can manage accounts across different servers with their own unique hosting plans. If I want to say, have a website running on a dedicated server and also have a backup server hosted at RVPS, I can simply login and restart both within a few clicks, or restart 1 and change the login details of the other. It’s super easy, but I have yet to actually purchase two simultaneous packages.
- Acc System #2. Their account system also allows for you to seemlessly upgrade and downgrade to nearly any hosting package. You can go from shared hosting to a level 2 VPS without any site downtime.
- What! They own their equipment, they don’t rent it out. They buy datacenter rackspace and have people working physically with the servers. Rick, owner of RVPS, even posts pictures of himself, other staff, and the servers. Rick is proud of what he does and rightly so. I don’t know of any other host (so far) that is willing to post pictures of themselves and their setup.
I’m currently on the lowest level shared hosting plan and have loved it since the day I first got it. While I’ve seen plenty of other hosts that are super cheap (some at $3 offering TBs of transfer); I chose and have stuck with RVPS. I know someone hosted at that cheapo shared hosting site and the minute he got a spike in traffic his account was suspended, then when his site was attacked they wanted to kill his account permanently. It was only by a loophole in their TOS that he was able to keep his account hosted there. That’s not the kind of company I want to be hosted with.
So, when finding a paid host, look for reviews, forums (easiest for others to voice their opinions and concerns), and check them out more. Took me a few weeks to decide on RVPS, but once I saw the intelligence, confidence, and overall joy Rick took in his job, I knew this was the host for me. I also loved that he owned the servers and thus had physical access, as well as him posting pictures that I could view before registering on the forums or buying a hosting package.
June 27th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
looks like a paid post to me, that or you luv them so much that you post the same article in multiple places: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=869711
June 27th, 2009 at 10:33 pm
Eh, well as you can see this one was posted way earlier while the one at WHT & 2-3 other random sites were all in like 1 day. Obviously there’s no way for me to prove that I wasn’t paid to do it; but that’s fine with me. While the articles I posted are quite similar, I tried to change them up a bit so it would appear less likely that I was a lame bot.
The owner of RVPS posts on the forums and such, and in my opinion it is not something he’d do. Aside from that; post people paid to post articles seem to never come back to them again – because they’re in it for the money whereas I’m just here to share my experience.
Just to clear any doubts (for some people anyway);
http://www.webhostingstuff.com/review/RapidVPS.html
or just google “rapidvps reviews” and while there may not be a whole lot, the *only* complaint I have seen against them is the price; and a review from ~5 years ago said they had bad customer support, but that’s the only negative RVPS review I’ve seen and I can tell you that in 5 years they’ve really made an improvement in that area xD.
- Matt