I have been a Servage customer for about 4 years and I have to say that I was generally satisfied with them. You get a bunch of hosting (750 GB space, 7500 GB transfer, 1000 MySQL DB´s, fast support) for a really cheap price.
(image property of Servage, http://www.servage.net)
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Naturally you can´t have everthing for that price. The most important constraints from my point of view are :
- slow database performance
- FTP problems (I guess caused by the cluster structure)
- Webdrive doesn´t work stable and reliable
- strange behaviour of the hosting itself from time to time (timeouts, http errors)
The good definitely is :
- a lot of webspace for a cheap price
- unlimited and directory lockable FTP accounts
- very very very fast support ticket system (not always helpful in the 1st step, but mostly in the 2nd)
BUT – things at Servage got worse, starting in the 2nd half of 2009. The strange behaviour of the hosting itself increased, the performance of the db´s got even worse (leading to complete timeouts and not acceptable latency (especially when hosting a wordpress blog)) and the support started delivering lower quality help than before. Additionally they changed their Admin Panel and made it look in a common Web 2.0 style. Good for the look, bad for the features. Some really useful features (like selecting the destination when moving a file / dir) got lost and due to the bad performance the Admin Panel needed a lot of manually reloading. Too often just a blank page was presented.
The 30th of march 2010 (and the following 2!!! weeks) were my darkest days with Servage. I don´t know what happened, but I guess some of their storage clusters crashed and so my account was gone.
Yes, not a single website, the whole account with a dozen websites and many stuff hosted for about 30 users. But – as always – not everything had gone away. Some websites were partially accessible, some files could be backed up via FTP, others not, a connection to some db´s was possible, to others not. So far bad enough but the support didn´t managed it for 3 days to realize (or to admit) that something is terribly wrong with my account.
This was the most funny reply from a Servage supporter :
2010-03-31 15:52
Servage – JulieYour rating of this reply:
This is a script error as I can see from http://hyperpac.info/users/steff/_kh_mod/index.php
I request you to install an updated version of the script please.
Thank you! 🙂
Kind Regards
Julie, Support
Servage Hosting
Right now, I can laugh about this but at the time being I nearly crashed my screen. And I received this reply at a time where the account was totally fucked up.
Anyway – Servage needed about 2 weeks to fix this. In the end all the data could be restored but it cemented my decision to leave Servage (which has grown in the last year). Now the site is hosted on a virtual server at German´s hoster 1&1 (1und1) and let´s see how it goes.
My first impression is good :
- great performance
- unlimited traffic
- stable Plesk & Virtuozzo integration
but :
- their support is so damn slow (2 – 4 business days) in comparison to Servage (less than 10 minutes in most cases)
- only 40 GB webspace
- 3 times as expensive as Servage (but to be fair – this is a real server, Servage was only shared hosting)
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I used this big relocation to update the blog to a new theme and some smaller changes will follow. After moving like a dozen very different wordpress blogs from on server to another I could aquire a bunch of knowledge about it and I´ll post it soon in another article.
Stay tuned !
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