Valueweb Dedicated Server Experience
Written: Feb 04 '06
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Pros: Good reliability, fair base price, quick setup, high configurability, includes ensim management utility.
Cons: Technical support, Tech and incident support pricing structure.
The Bottom Line: Decent choice if the support is not an issue for you.
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| iamq's Full Review: ValueWeb |
Intro
I was on the starter dedicated hosting plan with Valueweb paying $79.99 per month. I also paid an additional charge of about $10 for about six additional usable IP addresses.
Setup
Setup was fairly quick and took less than 24 hours to complete in all. I was quite satisfied. In my case, my domains were already registered, so I merely had to transfer my whois information over to their server.
Reliability and speed
Network reliability was generally very good. In a year of service with them I have had only very brief periods of downtime with them. When downtime did occur it was usually no more than 15 minutes.
Hardware reliability was something that I was less fortunate with. I did have a hard drive failure after around a year of service and needed to get switched to another server. I was not charged additional for this (see prices and support), however, I did need to spend all that extra time uploading my data again.
Speed was very good with Valueweb. I have never had any problem whatsoever with them in this regard.
Pricing
I paid $79.99 per month plus about $10 extra for a few extra IP addresses. This got me their starter dedicated hosting package. My server at the time was a Linux Fedora box. It came with bandwidth usage up to 1000GB per month. Diskspace was 80GB, memory was 512MB.
Technical Support
Here is where things get a bit dicey. First off, Valueweb charges for extra for many technical services that other companies will do for no additional charge. For example, an operating system reinstall after you have had your server compromised. Also when you make a technical support phone call or submit a ticket, you may be charged $15 per incident deppending on the issue. For example, if you call them up and ask for help in configuring sendmail, they would charge you for that. But if you called them up because your server is down, you would not be charged extra for this. Also certain services are provided at a flat rate, for example an OS reinstall was the last time I checked $150. They do have a plan knoown as Value Support where you pay $35 additional per month. This would include many of the minor things apparently that you may have problems with, such as configuration and OS patches upon request. But note that apparently things like an Operating System reinstall due to a security compromise would not be covered and you would still pay additional for that. For more information on there support pricing, I would reccomend visiting: http://valueweb.com/dedicated/support/support.htm. I will say that I consider the support structure a little too complex. A lot of people would just prefer to pay one amount each month and have nearly anything included. Value support comes close to that, but it is not quite enough. With security compromises and the like being such a common occurance, this is something to consider.
As to the Support itself other than price now. Well for minor things such as server reboots, they are excellent. But for more involved things, I've had problems. It seemed as if they never wanted to examine the problem in very much detail. It was like they wanted to wash their hands of it, or to otherwise charge me for something each time. I had an issue getting a certain service that was required to work so I submitted a ticket. Well, they closed it and said nothing was wrong. Unfortunately at this point, they went in and looked around in my server for a while but never actually tried to duplicate the problem I was having which was specified on the ticket! I had to send out another ticket to get someone to look into it further. After doing that, they tried to upgrade me on bandwidth (which wasn't needed) and sell me professional services. They essentially washed their hands of my problem without doing a lot of detective work -- of course, because they were not getting paid extra money to diagnose the issue, so it was more economical to wash their hands unless I could prove it was a network issue or something otherwise that they would be responsible for taking care of without charging me additional.
Due to the realities of the support situation I would only reccomend a Valueweb dedicated server to someone who is either an extremely experienced system administrator with a lot of time on their hands or else a person who is willing to pay the $35 extra per month and also willing to pay $150 extra for an operating system reinstall and other such services as they come up (which can be expensive). Average turn around time for major issues was about 4-10 hours.
In this review I mainly focused on the support because as all seasoned webmasters know sooner or later it is needed and it becomes very important when it is needed. I have also included sparse details on what came with the server and pricing. My reasoning for this is that as you know these things change so quick and would likly be worthless by the time you read this. You should not rely on these figures, but instead should see what they have on their website or speak to a representative.
Recommended:
No
Monthly fees (US$): 79.99
Platform used: Linux
Hosted on Secure Server: Yes
Database used: MySQL
Main focus of Web site: Sales/E-commerce
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Epinions.com ID:
iamq
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Reviews written: 3
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