webhosting

Well here goes, some communication with Iweb over the past couple of weeks spawned this review - that and coming up to the 5th anniversary with them, also you don't seem to see too many long term reviews on WHT

Background
I run a small specialist hosting company in Scotland and initially chose Iweb after some real horrific dealings with other companies, I have been hosting since 1995 initially through resellers before going to first dedicated around 1999 some of the companies I tried between 99 and 03 were plainly atrocious - couple of them have a decent reputation now so I won't dwell on the past other than to say I was ready to give up in 03 if I had not been able to get a decent provider.
I dealt with Martin at the time and no things didn't go well but for some unknown reason I stuck with them, sorted through the initial problems and have been here since although I have a couple of servers dotted around elsewhere but the bulk are with Iweb currently 5 including a dedicated backup server

Network and uptime 10/10
Quite simply I cannot complain servers have been up and only minor glritches in network over 5 years makes me a happy bunny. Below is a link to a hyperspin report for one of our servers covering from June 2005 til now, its also on a 5 minute test so will show 5 mins downtime even if it was only a reboot
http://www.hyperspin.com/publicrepor...2/3666/3/37178
This is a "warts and all" report as I do not switch off the monitoring during maintenance or upgrades so I can see the whole story, biggest outage was when a software raid went belly up and required the drives to be changed, a couple of hours and I was restoring from backups.

Support 8/10
Generally very good, couple of smallish glitches over 5 years, the reason for a couple of points mark down is due to the "emergency" ticket system, the system refuses to accept an emergency ticket if your server pings which means you have to call in if your server is down but still pings, another issue here is that when creating an emergency ticket you are told that if no response is heard within 20 mins ?? then to call with the ticket number - on 3 emergency tickets made I have always had to call and chase up. I use support very little and to be honest I have only probably submitted maybe a dozen in 5 years so I don't have that great a knowledge of the support system. On further issue is one of our machines is fully managed by Iweb ( backup server) this is their level 5 management and it took me around 24hrs to get a new server hooked up - this to me is too long.
Oh yeah and sometimes if you are stuck on hold on the phone system it reverts to French.

Servers 10/10
Server builds seem to be robust with few problems over the years in fact I am still running the same dual xeon that I had as my first server with them

Sales 1/10
Seriously the only reason this doesn't get a 0/10 is that I would feel guilty as quite simply I can find no endearing qualities about sales or account managers period - It just sucks!!!
Ordering new servers through the Iweb hub ( user control panel)is easy enough just don't expect a great deal of help if you need assistance outside the box. The last time other than just now I had to deal with sales I ended up escalating the issues up to top level but I simply refuse to do this every time I need to expand ( makes you feel like a schoolboy telling tales) so I will just go elsewhere.

Maybe it is a cultural thing as I do find many sales staff in America / Canada are just reactive order takers not true sales staff. So maybe it is me expecting too much.

To give an example I was looking at one of their advanced backup systems, sales information totally contradicts what is posted on the website and 5 emails later basic questions are either ignored or dodged, with a final email telling me that I would need to "purchase the server to see if it would do the job" instead of giving me benchmarks to work things out - yeah and I also zip up the back.

Overall 9/10
Providing you know what you want then Iweb to me is still a good choice and a company that I will continue to use for the foreseeable future, better the devil you know.............