After events that have unfolded during the last 24 hours, I thought it would be beneficial to the community to add a review on the web host I am with called Netwise Hosting.
To be honest there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of reviews and/or discussions on the company so naturally I was very sceptical in taking out a solution with them about 7 months back. I am pleased to say that in general I am very impressed with the service and support they have provided me throughout this time.
To give you an idea of their levels of service, I had a hard drive failure this Friday evening on our main web server which I was unaware of as the dedicated server I have with them has a hardware RAID 1 controller included. Anyway, I had a phone call and a support ticket raised at 23.04 with a member of staff apologising profusely for calling at such a late hour but to make me aware of the situation and how they would resolve the issue.
Naturally I was slightly concerned about the data but at the same time I was most impressed with their pro-active support and the politeness they conveyed. In the morning I checked for an update on the support ticket and it shows that roughly half an hour after the call from the previous night, the server had been rebooted with a replacement hard drive in place and our array monitoring software is now showing a healthy configuration.
I realise this may be standard practice for most hosting companies and indeed part of their SLA and Agreements, but I thought that the personal touch I received really stood out from the ‘big boys’ I have used previously.
Since I am reviewing them in full, I may as well give a bit more of a rating on the other aspects of the company.
The speed I am receiving from the network is excellent and I am using the full unrestricted 10Mbps connection they have provided – my one qualm would be that if you need to expand beyond the 10Mbps then you have to jump straight to 100Mbps which carries a rather hefty fee. I am guessing the bandwidth is managed through the switch port speeds hence the above jump being their only option.
As mentioned above, the Support, when I have needed it, has always been there. At times support tickets take a little while to answer but looking back at my account it doesn’t seem to ever be more than a few hours. Not too bad for what I would call a budget host.
The hardware is of a decent specification, not i7 standards, but there is no desktop hardware or cheap components in place from what I have seen. I am on a HP DL140 server with a Quad Core Xeon Processor and 4GB of DDR2 RAM with 2 x 500GB SATA Hard Drives and running CentOS with cPanel. I realise this is not the latest of machines, but for the price I am quietly happy with it.
We have never had unexpected downtime so far which has been pleasing but we do occasionally receive scheduled maintenance windows every couple of months or so. I suppose this is to be expected.
Anyway, it would be great to hear if any of you guys have used them and overall I would rate them pretty highly for a budget host. I really hope they keep it up as I believe I am getting pretty good value for money.
Carl Naya
Network Quality: 9/10
Support Team: 9/10
Sales Team: 8/10
Reliability/Uptime: 8/10
Price: 7/10
Final Grade: 9/10
written by Carl Naya
Learn more about Netwise Hosting company. Monday November 1, 2010 12:09:36
