Hot off the my last review, a scathing indictment of Vizaweb, I’m going to talk now about the provider this site is currently hosted on, ProHosters. ProHosters is a division of Carpathia Hosting that is specifically focused on VPS hosting. VPS, or Virtual Private Server, is essentially a poor-man’s dedicated server. They typically cost about 1/4th as much as a dedicated server does and offer many of the same features.

There’s a program called Virtuozzo that runs on your dedicated server and splits it virtually into several completely separate full Linux installations. I’m not sure how many others share space with me but it’s not many.

I went for ProHosters cheapest package, the $25 a month “Starter 200GB” package. It comes with 5GB of FTP space and 200GB of server bandwidth, unlimited MySQL databases, and two static IP addresses for your site. I split it currently with a friend so that the hit isn’t so much, but it was totally worth the move.

ProHosters has a proprietary control panel software called PHCP (ProHosters Control Panel), which is apparently a rebranded version of SWsoft’s HSPComplete. It is not unlike cPanel or similar applications, but it does not include any Fantastico auto-installer like cPanel does. Not a huge deal because this control panel is great, and anyone with half a lick of skill knows how to install a WordPress blog or something similar to it on a server. I consider this a small drawback since I was very used to cPanel using my previous two hosts.

A great advantage of this control panel software is how easy it is to virtually manage several websites at a time from one area. There is a tab for the Server-related settings (global), and a tab for the current hosted website you are working on and services specific to that website, which can be changed with a click. I currently have 6 different domains hosted on my VPS and a few others I am moving. Each has its own dedicated email accounts and to a user browsing my websites they have absolutely no idea all of them are hosted at the same place other than that a few share IPs. I can order as many dedicated IP addresses I want for the site though, if necessary.

One of the best features of Virtual (and dedicated) servers is having root. Root, to those unfamiliar with UNIX-based operating systems is the “Super User”, a user that basically has the right to do whatever they want to the operating system installed on the server. This gives you the unique ability of being able to use your server for whatever the heck you want, such as setting up a Shoutcast server so you can stream music to your friends, or installing irssi so you can go on IRC from your T-Mobile Sidekick using SSH.


It was very refreshing to move to this host and not have a single problem with my email (finally). One problem with being on an overselling host like PHP Web Hosting or VizaWeb is that if one person is getting tons of spam or using up tons of server resources, everyone suffers. I used to constantly get timeouts accessing the POP mail server at my old host, and I have not gotten even ONE timeout on this new host after a full month. Timeouts were a regular occurrence for me at the old host.

This server also is definitely able to take a lot of traffic, as was proven while I was the main mirror site for This Week In Tech, one of the biggest podcasts on the internet right now. When new episodes got released (at about 30MB each), this server would get approximately 13,000-15,000 hits in 6 hours from people wanting to download the new podcast. It never once got slow or went down and was doing 10GB in bandwidth easy as one of the mirrors. If that doesn’t tell you it’s a reliable server I don’t really know what does.

Another thing I really do not want to neglect in this review is where Carpathia Hosting really shines — their support! After all the horrid web hosts I’ve dealt with so far in the last few years, especially the last one, I had a really bad taste in my mouth about technical support for web resellers. These guys are amazing, however. They reply to tickets practically instantly, and also run their very own IRC server to answer queries live! I was having an issue removing a domain I accidentally added to my VPS so I decided to try their IRC support out. I connected to their IRC server, and joined a channel that was the same as my name (#dan) and within seconds a representative autojoined and helped me. I had my problem solved in less than 2 minutes! Now THAT is good support!

The only thing I see as a negative about ProHosters, I suppose, is the price being a little steep and the the lack of cPanel support. Both are small minuses in my book. The world keeps on spinning without them. I think if you’re a tech-savvy person, don’t waste your time with crappy, small time resellers, and splurge on one of these. You will be glad you did!

Oh Vizaweb, Vizaweb… I hardly knew ye. You knew it was coming though didn’t you ol’ chap? I wish I could have stopped my fingers from writing this one, because I feel like I shouldn’t waste any more time talking about this company.

To give you some background on what I’m talking about it helps to know about why I tried Vizaweb. I was jumping around web hosts (as you may or may not have read in my article on GoDaddy hosting), and decided to try Vizaweb late last year on the strength of their pricing. The site I previously hosted my domain on before using Vizaweb was PHPWebhosting, who I really liked, but their pricing was $10 for less space and less bandwidth than you get with Vizaweb’s plan. PHPWebhosting claimed they had “great supportâ€? as well, but when my site went down for 2 solid days and I had no access to email, they were nowhere to be found. I thought going to this host (which was recommended by a friend of mine, Leo Laporte – who I don’t blame for this whole debacle) I would finally find a cheap webhost who wasn’t into screwing over customers.

I was wrong there. Boy oh boy was I wrong. Now some background:

I had a Vizaweb “Professionalâ€? package, which is $5.95 a month (with a 1 year contract) for my personal website. I also convinced my work to buy their “Corporateâ€? package because of the increased space and bandwidth. My work also had an idea to buy their “Resellerâ€? account and use it for a new product we were rolling out to customers that involved the web and shopping carts. We were really thinking it would be a money maker, since they only charge $19.95 for the Reseller package and our product made much more than that. They also claim on their site they have “Award Winning” support, Sounds good right?

I guess that’s the end of the positives about the company in this review. I wish I had more positive things to write but I hate to lie. During the few months that I had them a variety of issues popped up at both home and work. Their “support� (I use the term loosely because I swear it’s just some guy living in his mom’s basement) either gave a half-baked answer to or simply didn’t answer at all.

I had issues with their mail server timing out at both work and home (in retrospect this is probably because they were overselling so badly it just quit responding sometimes), and it got so annoying having to explain to superiors why the web host I chose for them was always down. Even their “Semi-dedicated� accounts have been having quite a bit of downtime lately.

Downtime is expected once in a great while, but when your server goes down and you email them and don’t get an answer for hours, sometimes days… it becomes a real problem. Most good sites will report downtime on their main site. The Vizaweb homepage is absolutely static, with an annoying homemade-looking graphic and flash applet that has loads of spelling and grammar errors telling you about their plans. They also discontinued their support forum a few months back and it still hasn’t returned.

It all really went to the pits one weekend near the beginning of June. They simply stopped answering any support requests and their phone voice mail just went to a message saying “mailbox is fullâ€? before hanging up on you (it usually just goes straight to a voice mail that says all support agents are busy – yeah, right!). Meanwhile we had dozens of customers waiting for us to get their service up for them and absolutely no one to contact about it. It was embarrassing for me, and embarrassing for the company I work for.

This company seemed to be taking everyone through the ringer. They explained later that their support “departmentâ€? (again, I use this term loosely since I know it was just one guy) couldn’t keep up (suddenly?) with requests, and they were “restructuringâ€?. They blamed the issue on growth from Leo Laporte’s radio spots. I could see this as a valid excuse but they had months and months to gear up for new users before reaching where they were currently at, and had been at the bare minimum answering emails up until that point. They had absolutely no excuse to just “shut downâ€? web hosting support for everyone – at the bare minimum they should have been supporting people they sold reseller accounts to. I mean come on.

After that whole debacle they sent an email to their entire customer base attempting to explain and everything was at least being answered by their staff again, even if their answers weren’t usually helpful. So we continued to use them at work for reselling. I left them for personal hosting and moved to ProHosters, where I now have a Virtual Private Server. I’m currently still using (and very happy) with ProHosters, but that’s another review. The email gave a tiny bit of confidence back but a week or two ago they again stopped replying to emails when we were trying to buy $90 SSL certificates from them and needed them to set them up for our customers.

At that point we decided to leave Vizaweb and cut out the middleman. We went straight to The Planet, who Vizaweb oversells their servers from. It’s a lot more work to set up and more expensive but their support is stellar and they are amazingly fast with replies. Their interface for buying domain names and SSL certificates is much better as well. We couldnt be happier at this point for ditching Vizaweb.

My final verdict for them is I disputed the last bill from them on my credit card, packed up my domain, and left. The company I work for is about to do the same. I hope sometime they decide to get their stuff together and stop charging people for service they don’t provide. Overselling web hosts are a dime a dozen, and these guys are one of the worst I’ve ever dealt with. If we had to go by the overused scale of 1 to 10.. I’d give em a 3, I’ve used worse but this came with such expectations I thought it would actually work. So maybe I’m really the fool for believing someone else’s word about a hosting company. Live and learn I guess.

I recently was getting fed up with my current web hosting provider (Vizaweb) and their complete lack of good customer service, but let’s leave them out of this article. At one point after Vizaweb decided to not give me the answer I was looking for on tech support, I decided to try another hosting provider.

Naturally, after being screwed over by so many of these cheap resellers who probably run their “business” out of their parents’ basements, I wanted to try a provider who might actually have some integrity (if anything like that even exists in cheap web hosts).

I had heard good things about GoDaddy.com’s hosting, so I decided to give them a try.

I opted for a similarly-priced package that offered comparible features to my previous host, a 2GB space, 100GB bandwidth package GoDaddy offers for $9.99 a month. Sounded good. The fact that most of my domains were registered on GoDaddy made me think it would be even easier to keep all my internet stuff in one place.

Setup was very easy, almost too easy. I wondered where the CPanel tool was I am used to using on most of my webhosts. They don’t offer CPanel and instead use their own needlessly confusing configuration tools which were scattered all over the site. I eventually found my way into configuring the 2 MySQL databases I needed to get my blog and image gallery (and this site) going. CPanel was much easier, though. GoDaddy included 10 MySQL databases with the account.

Then I found the section where I set up my email accounts… Apparently GoDaddy feels that a $10 hosting account doesn’t include email accounts with unlimited space (up to the point your server is full). They want you to fork over an additional amount of money per year for larger email accounts. They did give me “up to 500″ 10MB email accounts with the service. 10MB? Sheesh. Not sure if these guys have been watching webmail providers these days but GMail offers 2GB storage per user for free.

So I started using this new service and after a few bumps I was liking it quite a bit, the speed was good, and the tools (albeit unconventional) still allowed me to accomplish what I needed to do for the most part.

Then I ran into a problem with the email server and their technical support that made the relationship turn sour very quickly.

Occasionally my friends and I exchange links in email from spam messages or images on spam websites that we find particularly funny. My mail server typically lets me do this since I am in control of what gets blocked or not in CPanel. I found out after using GoDaddy’s contracted-out hosting and mail service that they have blacklists in place for certain domains which may be spammers/phishers. Sounds like a good policy, right? Except the email I was sent just had a single link in it that was a jpeg file. Nothing spammed. This is the worst kind of spam filter you can possibly implement. Not only did it bounce the message back to my friend with a very vague reply, I found out after an excruciating discussion with their tech support department that I did not have any control over incoming mail blocks. I did not have their “spam filter” enabled for this account, and it was bouncing messages I gave no authorization to bounce, let alone mark as spam.

Needless to say after hearing that from tech support for “SecureServer” (who I guess GoDaddy oversells their bandwidth and hosting service from), I cancelled the GoDaddy account and went back to my old provider, even with the issues I was having with Vizaweb, I’d rather have control over my domain than have some stupid 3rd party screening mail without my permission with some primitive spam blocking tool that doesn’t even use bayesian filtering.

I’d have to say – if you don’t really care about your email service, their $3.95 package may be right for a small domain name with a few free email accounts, but other than that I’d recommend looking elsewhere for service. Their domain name registration is still the best place on the internet but the hosting packages need work.