Web Hosts

[Billionairebum]

Hi

I host/build a number of clients websites and I am looking for an excellent hosting company. I've been with hostking,domains, xneelo.

If you have any recommendations please let me know.

 

[Chris_auc]

Hey bud,

Give Absolute Hosting a shot, have been with them for a while. Can only say good things about them

 

[Billionairebum]

Hello, been testing them this week and so far I am pretty happy thanks!

 

[MakeMemesDreams]

I used to be at MWEB, but the service in the last year really tanked. Not answering queries, rude customer care that acted like they cant hear me when calling them. I will never take out another MWEB product. Switched to domains.co.za, and its like mweb used to be. Helpful staff, answers queries quickly, great after sales support.

 

[Oj0]

Hey bud,

Give Absolute Hosting a shot, have been with them for a while. Can only say good things about them

I was with Absolute for just under a year. They were great, but I was getting Server 500 errors (out of resources). They doubled my resource allocation but every hour or so when cron jobs were running the CPU usage was once again pegged at 100%.

I ultimately moved across to EliteHost, who did the migration at around 21:00 (I asked for it to be done after hours). Once complete, they started poking around and had some... choice words about the way things had been setup. Not by me, but by Absolute. They made a few tweaks and said I must keep on eye on things.

The migration HAD to go smoothly as I couldn't have downtime come the next day, so my nerves were shot. During the migration, the owner "held my hand" over WhatsApp for the few hours it took.

Since then, I have gone from ~60 cron jobs per day to over 700 per day (not an exaggeration, I have 4 that each run 4x per hour, and dozens of others that run between once every two hours and once per day) and CPU usage has never passed 15%.

They had an issue about a month ago whereby a security update had a known issue with certain versions of PHP and there was no fix as yet. Instead of saying "hopefully a patch comes out soon," they rolled back ALL shared servers to a version known to be issue-free, even though I was the only one complaining. In their eyes, a bug is a bug and it doesn't matter whether it affects one person or everyone, it has to be sorted immediately. This support was also provided after-hours.

Lastly, giving you several weeks worth of free daily backups (free as in they don't count towards disk quota) with take a couple of clicks to restore in a worst case scenario.

Their support is excellent. Unlike Cool Ideas where the support I've received is great but I've only used it twice so can't establish a pattern, I actually DO make use of their support frequently when things go wrong, and they're always willing to assist in record time.

Since moving to them mid-2021, I've had 24 support tickets of which I gave 16 a priority of critical - I don't know if Absolute has changed, but you had to pay for anything higher than normal priority when I was with them.

It does actually make a difference, because if I mark a ticket as normal priority (eg a billing issue) it'll be addressed within 24 hours. If I mark it critical (eg site won't connect), it gets addressed within about half an hour 24/7.

---

Carbonite also uses EliteHost - that should tell you everything you need to know. @Ageless_ZA come weigh in.

 

[IOPS]

RackZAR are also great. Have a few VPS instances and one dedi with them.

 

[Billionairebum]

RackZAR are also great. Have a few VPS instances and one dedi with them.

Packages look great.

 

[Billionairebum]

I was with Absolute for just under a year. They were great, but I was getting Server 500 errors (out of resources). They doubled my resource allocation but every hour or so when cron jobs were running the CPU usage was once again pegged at 100%.

I ultimately moved across to EliteHost, who did the migration at around 21:00 (I asked for it to be done after hours). Once complete, they started poking around and had some... choice words about the way things had been setup. Not by me, but by Absolute. They made a few tweaks and said I must keep on eye on things.

The migration HAD to go smoothly as I couldn't have downtime come the next day, so my nerves were shot. During the migration, the owner "held my hand" over WhatsApp for the few hours it took.

Since then, I have gone from ~60 cron jobs per day to over 700 per day (not an exaggeration, I have 4 that each run 4x per hour, and dozens of others that run between once every two hours and once per day) and CPU usage has never passed 15%.

They had an issue about a month ago whereby a security update had a known issue with certain versions of PHP and there was no fix as yet. Instead of saying "hopefully a patch comes out soon," they rolled back ALL shared servers to a version known to be issue-free, even though I was the only one complaining. In their eyes, a bug is a bug and it doesn't matter whether it affects one person or everyone, it has to be sorted immediately. This support was also provided after-hours.

Lastly, giving you several weeks worth of free daily backups (free as in they don't count towards disk quota) with take a couple of clicks to restore in a worst case scenario.

Their support is excellent. Unlike Cool Ideas where the support I've received is great but I've only used it twice so can't establish a pattern, I actually DO make use of their support frequently when things go wrong, and they're always willing to assist in record time.

Since moving to them mid-2021, I've had 24 support tickets of which I gave 16 a priority of critical - I don't know if Absolute has changed, but you had to pay for anything higher than normal priority when I was with them.

It does actually make a difference, because if I mark a ticket as normal priority (eg a billing issue) it'll be addressed within 24 hours. If I mark it critical (eg site won't connect), it gets addressed within about half an hour 24/7.

---

Carbonite also uses EliteHost - that should tell you everything you need to know. @Ageless_ZA come weigh in.

I used Elitehost many years back, but because I host a large amount of small sites the packages do not make sense for me.

Testing out Absolute for the time being, thank you very much for the detailed feedback.

 

[Oj0]

I used Elitehost many years back, but because I host a large amount of small sites the packages do not make sense for me.

Testing out Absolute for the time being, thank you very much for the detailed feedback.

I guess it comes down to whether you can or can't afford a weekend of downtime. For me, ABSOLUTEly (LOL) not. At the end of the day, "excellent" and cheap are mutually exclusive.

 

[K1ngFallen]

Elitehost is great.

 

[Reegz]

I'm just here to ward you away from Xneelo.

I don't get why they're so highly rated. Have a small time ecomm site hosted with them. Endless DB timeout issues. Ended up moving the DB to an AWS RDS instance which instantly solved the timeout issues that Xneelo support said were a result of the Wordpress theme.

Site is still dog slow and I'm tied in for a couple more months but will likely move to Afrihost or self-host on AWS/Digital Ocean.

My biggest bugbear that's holding me back is migrating the darn email!

 

[Billionairebum]

I'm just here to ward you away from Xneelo.

I don't get why they're so highly rated. Have a small time ecomm site hosted with them. Endless DB timeout issues. Ended up moving the DB to an AWS RDS instance which instantly solved the timeout issues that Xneelo support said were a result of the Wordpress theme.

Site is still dog slow and I'm tied in for a couple more months but will likely move to Afrihost or self-host on AWS/Digital Ocean.

My biggest bugbear that's holding me back is migrating the darn email!

I have had a few bigger clients hosting on Xneelo and I always try to finish quick and get out of there because its usually unexplainable issues that hit from no where and the support is basically a bot from 2005.

So far really happy with Absolute from a speed perspective, no modsec locks, timeouts, would love to go back to DO, but hell I am never hosting email again. the margins are far to small for the amount of time to spend keeping your IPs clean.

 

[AinsleyHarriott]

I'm with Xneelo

Luckily just domain for recreational purposes, but maybe I should move.

I like elitehost's website. Looks straight out of 2000 but it works, responds quick and just makes me trust them more.

 

[Switch]

60 cron jobs per day to over 700 per day

Why so many, part of a backend framework?

 

[Oj0]

Why so many, part of a backend framework?

Price and quantity updates as close to "live" as possible, and backups.

 

[IceQB]

Been with EH for a years - think they had different name before merged. Not had an issue yet.
Also have VPS with Rackzar for about a year now & no issues either.

 

[J37]

I'm just here to ward you away from Xneelo.

I don't get why they're so highly rated.

Probably because they were previously "Hetzner South Africa" and were associated with Hetzner Germany up until 2019.

We were with Hetzner South Africa and never had issues, when they rebranded to Xneelo we started having shit. Recently moved to a new host, no issues yet, but also too early to be sure.