A positive experience I'd recommend to others

[neekfenwick]

Full Name: Nicholas Fenwick

Website URL: www. premierrange. co. uk, auctionability.co.uk, nickfenwick.com

Comments / Suggestions:

I was introduced to Webhosting UK by a client who happened to be running his VPS with them. Since then I've introduced another client and host my own personal server with them too.

The live chat is really excellent, especially because I often have trouble with the accents of the agents when I speak with them on the phone. While they sometimes seem to be dealing with more than one thing at a time, almost all my problems have been dealt with quickly and efficiently.

The instigation for this post is a recent chat with Austin on their live chat. I wanted to upgrade my VPS to a new plan (for more RAM) and was politely walked through my misunderstanding of the billing amount, an invoice was raised, and 5 minutes later the upgrade had been performed without requiring a server restart. Not only is their customer service process smooth, their billing and technical rollout operations seem flawless.

Another great experience was when we wanted to get two DVD's worth of data transferred onto our server. I put in a support ticket, was given a postal address, we (eventually) got the package delivered (always send by registered post!) and Alex uploaded the data to our VPS, all for no extra charge. My client had been worried they would try to slap a few hundred pounds on our bill for the privilege.

Over the past two years I have resorted to their live chat in desperation a number of times, often through my own fault (e.g. changing the sshd port without opening the firewall for the new port) and they've helped me through every time.

I've only been left hanging a couple of times. When trying to understand their VPS OOM reaping process, when the total memory in use on your VPS exceeds a threshold it will randomly kill processes, even those owned by root, which can completely kill any long-lived java VM you may be using, meaning the use of any in-memory cache system is highly unwise. Their staff became very tight lipped and refused to help me figure out how the combination of httpd, php and java was exceeding the box's memory limits, or how to snapshot the memory situation at the point in time the reaper kicked in.

The staff are sometimes too reliant on the cPanel/WHM solution (which I opted not to install) and tend not to want to use the low level tricks one resorts to when the web interface isn't enough. But, this may have been a case of me not talking to an experienced enough engineer. Before I knew much about WHM I tried to ask how to upgrade my system packages using yum and received no assistance whatsoever, so I would suggest you go into a WHM package with the ability to research and learn about WHM on your own. The system will be hobbled in certain ways dependent on the WHM and easyApache build system, and traditional RPM package management does not apply.

Well, enough procrastinating, I have a newly upgraded server to go configure

[Jeffrey]

Thank you for the honest feedback, we highly appreciate for the kind words.