Review of SLHost Web Hosting | Web Hosting Articles

• Author: admin
• Filed under: Hosting Reviews
• Date: Mar 9,2008

I first signed up for a VPS with SLHost in February 2007 based on the special they posted on this site and the reviews of other members of this site provided. The service that I received for that site was exemplary. I didn’t have any issues with outages, my site members experienced “blazing” speeds, and things went very well.

I have a second site that I serve as an administrator on, and when we had need for shared web hosting the other members of the 2nd site agreed that based on my positive experience with SLHost that we should purchase hosting with them. This was in July 2007.

From the point of purchase, the site began having outages on a regular basis. The hosting was for a small message board (<60 active members), and rarely did we ever have everyone online at once, but the silver plan seemed to tax the hosting resources. From July to November I received over 50 messages that my message board software was unable to connect to the server, something that was not the norm for my site. We had had service with another host before we moved to SLHost that offered lower bandwidth, lower disk space, etc but had greater “uptime.” The outages reached the point where my coadministrators agreed that we should move to a VPS.

In November we asked to upgrade from shared hosting to a VPS, erroneously assuming that SLHost would coordinate the move with us so that we could least inconvenience our members. Instead, the move happened before we even received an email with the login details for the VPS.

A premature move wouldn’t be a huge deal, except that the site has never worked properly since. At any given time, half of the site members could not access the forums and would receive a page 404 error. We were told that it was a domain registrar issue, and even went so far as to move the domain registration from Hostway to Dotster, but the problem continued.

We have submitted multiple trouble tickets on this issue, and as of today still do not have resolution. The techs do not read the previous history for our account even though we have asked them to on multiple occasions, and because of this we keep being asked to do things we already have, told that the problem is resolved when it isn’t, told it is someone else’s fault, told that a setting has been adjusted and to wait another 24-48 hours, etc.

Because we have VPS hosting, we purchased a new domain name which works okay (.com) but our initial site (.org) is still hit and miss, 4 months later. I’m tired of the lack of response, tired of the lack of follow through that the SLHost techs show, and tired of their lack of ability to read about the ongoing issues, even when I paste EVERYTHING into an email. I thoroughly regret recommending SLHost to my 2nd site.

The first site’s VPS is still working as promised. If someone is technically advanced enough to not need SLHost to manage their VPS (there is someone on the 1st site who is who I turned the site over to in its entirety a few months ago), then I think that it is a great choice. But if someone is not technically savvy enough to be able to troubleshoot problems stemming from SLHost moving the site from shared hosting to a VPS, there are services other places that I believe will be a better fit for them.

Our 6 months of VPS with SLHost expire in May. At that time, we will be moving to another host with better customer service, preferably one that doesn’t make us make the same explanations for four months without resolving the issue.