Re,

http://www.100best-web-hosting.com/review....plan_name=Profi

Seems like people complain a lot that your service has deteriorated since some crash and that the downtime is very high (you contract work out and not located in the USA)

Any comments? I do understand that you can't have perfect feedback, there are always unhappy faces, but these are serious issues and I would appreciate if you could address them in details ASAP.

Thank you in advance!

You can read the answer between lines in the reviews posted there. Those issues were well discussed at our forums about 3 months ago when we had last major problem with one of our servers.

Server was down for considerably long time twice within 10 days. We had to restore a system completely twice.
It is not a fast process because linux installation and hardening takes minimum 1.5 hours + Cpanel install 30-45 minutes + account restore takes from 2 to 6 hours (depends on the amount of users data). Total 4-8 hours just for system and data restore. After restore there could be some problems with particular accounts because of the custom configurations requeste by those customers that are also should be restore manually, etc.

On the other hand we don't do full system restore if there is a chance to fix everything within couple hours. So it takes some couple hours just to realize that full restore is needed.

So if we have major downtime it may take 4-10 hours just to restore system from backup. Plus after all some customers may have problems with mail, addon domains, subdomains, etc. because of the custom configurations they requested.

Even now when we are completing with new custom backup system that will allow to restore servers account by account rather the all accounts at once like standard Cpanel backup does it will take at least 4 hours for the first account to be restored and up to 10 hours for the last to be restored.

You see not every customer can be patient that long.

When we had issues with server 10 most of the customers were understanding and patient while we were restoring server and data as well as fixing the problems (It was required us to restart services several times within couple next days after data restore in order to restore custom configurations).

Most reviews you see there are from the customers that were on the same server and experienced the same problems. There are no intermediate reviews and rating is either 1 or 10. There are always people who cannot wait long or don't understand the process. When resolving the problem takes longer then they expect they go and post negative comments. Our other customers tried to protect us with their positive feedback.

After server was finally restored all customers on that server were upgraded to the NEXT level for life and those who cancelled during server problems got their refunds. 3 months passed and that server had not major downtime till this moment.

I just want to highlight what is said above with quotes of our customer’s reviews at www.100best-web-hosting.com

By Jerkie

also a quote from negative feedback.


I don't think that 20 minutes is bad response time. Especially when you think what is behind response time. Support representative should read your message, in most cases login to the server test out the problem, find solution and fix the problem.
It is not possible to all this with 3-5 minutes especially your request is not the only one.
We try to make each response to provide a solution and when we send a first response it means that a human person looked into the problem and tried to solve it and it is either solved it or need additional information or time to finish.

Summarizing I must say that each person have the right to voice his opinion, but opinions about the same thing can very from person to person because of many reasons.

As for our support being in Ukraine. It is not a top secret and we told about this a lot on these forums.
Most of our servers are located in Atlanta and some backup servers are in Texas. We outsource support to Ukraine but have people in datacenter 24/7. Outsourcing support to Ukraine allows us to hire talents with university degrees at lover rates than in US and keep our pricing competitive. I barely see a problem with it especially when outsourcing is a major trend for US economy for last 20 years. Dell has it call center at Philippine, US flags has a label "Made in China", etc. Major part of all hosting companies outsources their support to India and xUSSR countries. The only difference we don't hide this.

To the top there is no difference between US based and outsourced support when server gets down. Support never sits near servers, because datacenter requires special air and climate conditions for servers to operate well and when server becomes inaccessible online support should call the person at datacenter to go and check the server. And we do have stuff at datacenter 24/7. When server is online support can do anything required from the office.

Thank you, your reply is clear enough.

What do you mean by "major downtime till this moment"? 30 minutes is major downtime for me, for instance. I can handle 5-10 minutes but no more.

I am sorry for being anal but I also don't want to make a wrong decision, considering that I am doing this for my company and we are on a very tight budget. Of course, you get what you pay for, but I want to bring all risk factors to the minimum.

What's your network setup? Is there any redundancy, that is, if one server crashes another should (like most companies do) kick in and replace the broken one -- two servers have identical setup with backups made twice or more a day.

Kstati, hotelos' bi poluchit' tvoi e-mail, Serge, chtobi obsudit' detali v lichnoi perepiske.

Thank you.

"major downtime till this moment"? means that there were not any downtime other than result of scheduled downtimes or maintenance.
Major downtime for me is when server goes out of the control for considerable time.
We are on Internap internet backbone right in their Atlanta Datacenter. We also have MFN backup. I also have to disappoint you because in shared hosting almost nobody uses server mirroring or clustering because customers are not ready to cover expenses. It is not just another server it is also balance loader + about $3000 per server in additional software costs.
For shared hosting customers is not wise to pay 7-10 times more then average price of the shared hosting plan especially when taking to the consideration that hardware and software for standalone servers are getting more stable with each year and downtime rarely exceeds .05%.

I hate to tell this but you are right that you get what you pay for. If you have project with very big budget (exceeding millions) you definitely must have your own server cluster. To give you an example presidents of the country and other VIP persons fly their own planes rather then share the plane with other people. But millions of other people use ordinary airlines and this is very wise choice for them and they are happy with it. The same is about choosing between shared hosting and dedicated hosting.

My email is serge@hostony.com