So many people here at WHT have written reviews of hosts that I’ve read and have used as a guide to making better hosting decisions, I decided that it’s time for me to contribute to the community. My review is more a rambling, sorry.
I signed up with Steadcom on November 12, 2007. I obtained one of their higher end VPS packages, which they further customized for me.
They were great through the sign-up and configuration: They removed the control panel, which was part of the offer, and discounted the difference back to me. There was a snafu with the recurring billing through PayPal. They canceled the subscription and didn’t affect my service - most hosts have their billing so screwed up that any refunds kill the service. They refunded me the difference and everything was good.
I had a few reasons to contact support over the past 4 months (in order of occurrence) :
- The billing issue I mentioned above - Resolved, no complaints.
- Seemingly low throughput - Resolved, no complaints.
- Couldn’t get apache to respond - I figured out that the server node runs apache that responds if my own apache is not running, which was screwing me up - Resolved, no complaints.
- Obtain my 2nd promised IP address - I had to open two tickets because the first sat open for hours without response. The second ticket was turned around quickly. Resolved, a little slower than expected.
- Server was unresponsive - My own configuration error in httpd.conf - Steadcom support was stellar. In fact they were aware of the issue by the time I contacted them and had already began troubleshooting the issue and allocating more resources to my server to see if that would help. Resolved, no complaints.
- Low throughput (again) - Went from great throughput (~5MB/s) to ~380KB/s from multiple locations, even downloading from Amazon S3 and dotMac. Lots of troubleshooting, I think a lot of effort and communication, but we were unable to resolve the issue. Support was at first able to resolve an issue where we were stuck at 115KB/s, but we couldn’t break the 400KB/s barrier. Unresolved, now only getting responses of “it’s not our end”.
- HyperVM backups disabled - I used to be able to perform backups in HyperVM and store at least two prior backups without an issue. Something changed and I could no longer perform HyperVM backups. Being told that they’re in talks with LxLabs to enable the feature and not overuse client’s space. Unresolved, still unclear what changed and why.
As anyone on this forum would do after having issues that are not resolved to their satisfaction, I went around and did some competitive comparisons. I think there are some good offerings from other folks (vpslink, serverpoint, wdservers, tektonic, zipservers) that would serve my needs.
However, I decided not to make a switch (yet?). Why? Great support response times. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to use names in these forums, but the support guys respond to my tickets and emails within minutes pretty much all day and night. To me, that is such an important “feature”.
Their support is also a pretty savvy group of folks. While most places discount customers’ experiences and assume the customer doesn’t know what they’re doing on their server, Steadcom support knows that I do know what I’m doing (most of the time) and treat me appropriately.
So, for right now, Steadcom remains my host. However, I have lost a bit of faith and enthusiasm regarding their platforms. I think their people are top notch, I just hope they can implement some change management so customers aren’t seeing issues and bringing them up to support.
All that said, if I have one more unresolved issue… I would be hard-pressed to justify the time and pain to stay with Steadcom. Also, if we can’t resolve the throughput issue, that may cause me to stray to an alternate host.
I hope this information and these opinions helps somebody make their own decision about hosting.
Remember: There are two sides to every story. Everything above is just my side.
