Thread

I want to hear some actual user feedbacks about hosting with EngineHosting. Pros and Cons?

Obviously, EE should run seamlessly with its sister company but how does it stack up with other hosting companies like Dreamhost?  It doesn’t seem to offer much self-administrative tasks. Do you see any issue with that?

I’ve run my site at EH for years and have several clients hosting there as well. Have never had any problems or down time. The customer support has been very responsive throughout the years. Nevin (chief cook) is very knowledgeable.

I have two sites on Engine Hosting, and honestly haven’t had any problems.

I understand that the control panel isn’t as robust as some would like it, but for my needs (and I would imagine the needs of most people), it’s sufficient.

Support so far has always been top notch. I haven’t had any emergencies, and typically have a response to my non-urgent email requests within an hour. There’s a phone support option as well…I just (thankfully) haven’t been in a position to need that yet.

I can say that it’s nice to have a host that understands my CMS. There have been two occasions when, in response to a support request, they made a suggestion to change something in the EE admin. Can’t beat that.

As far as I can tell, the uptime has been 100%.

I run Solspace. We build many EE sites. I tell all my clients to host on EH. When they don’t, I get worried. Nevin can do with one shared hosting account what entire IT departments at enterprise level companies cannot accomplish. In fact, in some cases, when I know I am going to customize EE and subject it to extremely high traffic spikes and such, and the client insists on Dreamhost or MediaTemple, I walk away. I honestly don’t have time for the emergency phone call on the weekend when the server chokes on a simple PHP or MySQL process in EE. I’m too old for that nonsense. ‘Been doing this too long. I go with EH because I get to have a life that way.

mk

I want to hear some actual user feedbacks about hosting with EngineHosting. Pros and Cons?

Very reliable, speedy, professional service. No, they don’t offer many self-administrative tasks, but an email is all it takes, so that’s not an issue. The only “flaw”, if you want to call it that, for me is that there’s no SSH access available. If you don’t know what that is, or don’t need it, not an issue at all. Even so I have half a dozen or so clients hosted there, but still keep a separate developer account elsewhere 😉

I host my own site with them and about 10 of my clients (and that list is growing).

For new clients who don’t have existing hosting Engine is my default recommendation.

While other hosts may have fancier control panels, Engine’s tech support is top notch, friendly and fast. The servers are reliable and the performance excellent.

And of course, Nevin is like the guru overseeing everything. 😊

Engine hosting is based in US, correct? Is there a way to check response times in other continents without actually being there?

Engine hosting is based in US, correct? Is there a way to check response times in other continents without actually being there?

Of course “response times” is a relative thing, depends of course on the web site itself, the specific routing across patches of the Internet between the monitoring location and the servers that are likely not in control of either our upstream providers or your ISP/testing location, and so on.  Our primary data center is located in Minneapolis, MN and currently we are provided upstream connections through Qwest, MCI, and Level3 and we have the option of getting connectivity if needed from 7 other fiber/bandwidth providers that have PoPs within the data center as well.  So the routing and latency into our data center location should be great from most global locations as all three companies have large private networks along with global peering arrangements of their own of course.

We are actually working on a status page that will be powered out of our business continuation data center that will display a number of our own global performance and sampling systems.  Along with a number of other things we are working on, this should be rolled out during this summer.  We actually use testing between our data center locations as well as 2 separate 3rd party monitoring companies to get a full picture of our network and server speeds and health over all.

To directly answer your initial question though, there are a lot of site uptime/performance monitoring companies out there that offer free testings, and of course our clients are free to use external testing/monitoring of their sites through these services for their own records/piece of mind about their sites too 😊

Just because I feel like sharing 😊

Disclaimer: “Response Time” in the attached image is the length of time for the remote monitoring location to pull down the web page and find a “verify string” within the footer of the page.  Any test “failure” is automatically recorded at a minimum of 5 minutes of downtime as we sample every 5 minutes using this particular monitoring system, so even a 15 second outage would be listed as 5 minutes.  This lowers the overall “uptime” percentages a bit as you can imagine.  We do not disable the monitoring systems during system/network maintenance, so this reflects down-time even for scheduled maintenance periods on the network, or the specific servers this is monitoring.  Anything related to the monitor location network/data center, or the overall Internet between monitoring locations and the test target can also skew results too.  This is to help represent the overall health of our network, not any specific site or service hosted with us.

This is similar in nature to the reporting viewable later this summer on our status web site, but not exact.

Now with all of that said.

Two big thumbs up here.  I’ve got my site and a few clients on EH - nothing but good stories. Support is great and fast and the servers are blazing. The control panel is relatively non-existent, but you’ve got access to phpMySQL which is about all I usually use anyway (setting up email addresses would be nice - that’s ‘in the works’ but hard to say what that means).

Hm, Nevin can correct me here, but I remember doing some kind of email self administration. Had to be set up explicitly, I think?

Hm, Nevin can correct me here, but I remember doing some kind of email self administration. Had to be set up explicitly, I think?

Yes and no.  We had self-administration available on our old e-mail server setup that was a single physical server, we had a customized admin interface done for it many years ago.  But when evaluating the process when we moved to our clustered mail server configuration we found that approx. 5% of our clients ever had requested self-administration access on our old mail servers, and only a portion of those users ever actively used it once set up for them.

So yes, it along with a number of other additions are in different stages of planning and development, but as we tend to focus more on a “managed” style solution the self-administration of things like e-mail are of lower priority then other projects in the works as well.  Also some of our plans revolve around changes in, or the use of EE 2.0 so some have been put on hold until EE 2.0 is available to us for the underlying development too 😊

I realize that I am the VP of EllisLab but just let me say that I was a client of EngineHosting years before I was hired. Back in my freelance days I used dozens of different hosts and when I discovered EngineHosting (then pMachineHosting) I migrated all my clients to Nevin’s team. Though my freelance days are now over, all my personal projects are on EngineHosting not because I’m an employee with EllisLab but because I trust Nevin implicitly when it comes to protecting my data.

Hm, Nevin can correct me here, but I remember doing some kind of email self administration. Had to be set up explicitly, I think?

Thanks for everyone’s feedback.  I want to understand a bit more about the email management or the lack of it?

So does it imply something like that:

Scenario 1: If my client hires a new employee and wants to setup a new email account, my client emails me to set it up. In turn, I have to email EngineHosting to set it up.  Similarly, an employee quits and I need to remove his email account.

Scenario 2: One of my client’s employees forgets his password and wants me to reset it.  I have to email EngineHosting to do so.

Scenario 3: One of my client’s employees wants to forward all emails to another email address.  Again, I have to go through Engine Hosting.

And does it have web mail?

Yes, to everything, including the web-mail question. 

Think of it as the simple fact we are an IT department.  If you were at a corporation you would unlikely have direct access to any of the servers in the corporate IT department to self-administer things at the server levels.  In fact being a large portion of our clients are in fact corporations, educational institutions and government agencies, on a global basis, our staff generally are in direct contact with their IT staff or central support desks, which in turn work with us just like them delegating the request to someone in-house.  While quite different from the bulk hosting market commonly used for smaller projects, this fits in quite well with our typical clients.

On a side note, if you do not want to be the middle man on those requests its quite easy to provide authorization for someone directly at your clients location to be able to request the changes directly instead of having to pass them through you.  That is a choice for you and your clients to make though.