Hostnine Reseller Hosting Review

[espmartin]

This is a personal review of Hostnine.com.
(Legal Notice)
The views expressed here are my own personal experiences with them, and
are not meant to discredit the company in whole or in part.
Your experience with them may be simular to mine, or may be greatly
different in a positive direction.
================================================== ===
Uptime Guarantee
99.9%
Size of company
- Small ?
From what I can tell, there are 5 support members
- Medium ?
- Large ?
- How long has company been trading?
2006
Domain Registration
- Price
1 Free for Top Plan, otherwise $9.95
- TLD and ccTLD offerred
.com, .net, .org, .info
- DNS control
Yes
- Advanced DNS Control (can you do stuff like point you MX records to another host
Yes

Hosting Services
- Share Hosting
Yes
- Virtual Private Server
Yes
- Windows Hosting
No
- Linux/Unix
Yes
- Reseller Option
Yes
- Additional IP address
Yes $1 each - but not for "SEO purposes" - only SSL
Speed
Uptime
Server setup

• Data Center Level: On-site physical security, redundant switches, routers, power systems, fire suppression systems and air conditioning systems;
• Network Level: 24/7 monitoring, multiple Tier 1 bandwidth providers, an Overlay Network that delivers your data to website visitors using the fastest and least congested path at any given point of time
• Server Level: We keep a supply of hard drives, network cards, processors, motherboards and every other piece of equipment that has even a remote chance of failure.
• Data Level: We use a multiple-SCSI backup cluster system for data storage and recovery.

Admin Control Panels
-cPanel
Yes
- Ensim
No
- Pleask
NO
- Others
NO
Email Option
- webmail
Yes
- IMAP
Yes
- POP3
Yes

Support
- Email support
Yes
- Support desk response time
Email support via trouble ticket times lag greatly. I have had (and several members post about it in the Hostnine support forum) many tickets go unanswered for a day. Some have even been closed without resolutions
- Skills of support staff
Varies. Dan (support team) is very good - the best there.
Limitations
The support process is in great need of work. Initially, I had no real issues, other than standard questions. But once I got "major" issues, support was mediocre at times. One support person was highly helpful.

Conclusion
The benefit of having multiple datacenters was great, but the downtimes (and according to Hostnine - those downtimes were NOT covered under their 99.9% guarantee) happened very often. I had many sites down for days, and after trouble tickets and posting on the support forum, I was simply not satisfied with the support.

After my main (personal) site was down for 4 days - without any exact explanation as to why it was "lost" (site showed 0 bytes on it's hosting server.) after it was migrated, I had to cancel.

And even that processes was broken. I issued a cancellation request via the online cancel form - and had to open a trouble ticket to follow-up on it, as my account was still active. After 3 days of trying to cancel the account, the account was finally canceled.

Can you imagine the frustration of that?


Rate them out of 10 (1 being the lowest and 10 the highest)
4
Would you recommend them?
Only if you are a very patient person, who does not rely on your reseller hosting to provide you with finances (in case your site goes down) - then I'd maybe recommend them - but otherwise, I'd say go elsewhere.

[temi]

Martin, excellent review, thanks for taking the time to provide this review, rep added.

[espmartin]

I'll be posting a review of my new and current reseller when I have enough time established
with them. This forum is a great idea!