UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Programming Web Hosting Liquid Web

Has anyone here gone with liquidweb.com?

I am currently with FutureQuest, but am rapidly growing out of my Platinum 20gig/month package. I'm looking for something with PHP4, MySQL, blah blah with at least 150megs of space and 30gig/month bandwidth.

Liquidweb seems to fit the bill, except its hard deciphering the conflicting glowing/miserable reviews.

Anyone with experiences here please reply.

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Shalazar
www.charisma-carpenter.com

I had one of my domains hosted at Liquidweb...for about 3 months. In that 3 months I ran into a large number of problems like downtime, unanswered tech support emails, and features not implemented as promised. However, that was over two years ago if I remember correctly, and it looks like they've changed a lot in the time being. At the time, my suspicions were that they were running their webhosting off a VIrtualis dedicated server account, but I'm not 100% sure. Either way it doesn't look like that's the case anymore.

Bet that didn't help you at all. []/w3timages/icons/smile.gif[/]

I just signed up with Liquidweb because they had the best package that suited my needs. Anyway, I found that they had my account ready within a day and they answered the email I sent them within a few hours. So far, all the features they advertised have been working and my site is fast as well. So the initial impression is good, I just hope that it stays that way over time.

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Later,
Jacob - http://www.dragons-den.net

I signed up with them too. Unfortunately, it appears that the server I'm on can't maintain uptime over 1 or 2 days, whereas my old host's server was up for 85 days when I left. And for the life of me I can't figure out their e-mail setup.

I think I'm going to take advantage of their 30 day policy and head back to my old host. Maybe just maintain a liquidweb account as an overflow account.



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Shalazar
www.charisma-carpenter.com

Sorta' reminds me of HostPro... They sucked.

Try WebAxxs . I've been with them for a few years now and they have been fantastic: They're cheap and reliable (and they support W3T). That's a dynamite combo.

Socrates
ForumExperts

I'll be honest, my initial reactions to Liquid Web might've been a tad harsh. I've remained with them, and have found their service to be fairly reliable. For 24.95 a month, their connection appears to be nice and fast, the servers uptime is satisfactory (the longest I've seen so far is 15 days), and the features available are impressive. All current, non-beta releases of PHP4 and MySQL are available, and I haven't yet run into any problems with too many connection errors or other problems with that service. And WWWThreads installs and runs efficiently, from my tests. And 30gig a month bandwidth is one of the largest packages currently available on the virtual server market.

They were having problems with some slowness, but apparently they were having to deal with problems with illegal warez accounts, and some DoS attacks. But they've apparently cleared everything up, and things seem to run smoothly.

And server problems seem to be dealt with swiftly.

On the downside:

cgi-bin is located in the document tree, not the greatest in terms of security, but not much you can do about it.

All scripts run as apache user nobody, which can be a problem if you're using it to manage a mailing list. you receive no bounces.

I still can't figure out why it took so long for my e-mail to get set-up and running, and nobody in support could figure it out either.

Support doesn't really get a gold star. E-mail is usually answered in 24 hours, otherwise they have a phone support during the day. Answers are often very brief, and sometimes uninformative. Probably because the same guy is answering both support and sales calls. I've had some simple questions about their core software and technologies that they couldn't answer, and sounded as if they didn't know it even existed. So be prepared to be your own admin, as I wouldn't count on their trouble shooting capabilities. Know your scripts, and be prepared to seek help outside of their service.

They have no excess bandwidth provisions. If you exceed the 30gig per month, you cannot purchase more bandwidth. You either get shut down, or have to go to their dedicated server plan.

There's no real community forum where you can find out what's wrong with servers or how they fixed them.

But, in a world of really poor service providers, the service to dollar ratio really can't be beat. I plan on staying with them until I exceed their bandwidth capabilities.

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Shalazar
www.charisma-carpenter.com

Thanks for the very informative / thorough reply.

- Da Birk
http://www.ncaastrategies.com

getting far too many too many connection errors with them, my message board is unusable during the weekend :-(

If they could sort that out then they would be great, but at the moment I am looking for a new host

In reply to:

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getting far too many too many connection errors with them, my message board is unusable during the weekend :-(

If they could sort that out then they would be great, but at the moment I am looking for a new host

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If you don't mind, I'd would like to hear about your results.

- Da Birk
http://www.ncaastrategies.com

You should check out Candidhosting out of Tampa (http://www.candidhosting.com). They have a super system and reasonable prices. I've actually been there and met with the sys admin and others and toured their facilities, and I was very impressed. They've treated my fantastic in the time (almost a year) I've been with them. David (the sys admin) gave me his cell phone number and I can get in touch with him almost 24 hrs/day. He says he has to sleep sometimes though, who'd have thought []/w3timages/icons/laugh.gif[/]? They used to host only adult sites (which made me a little skeptical), but have since been offering to mainstream for over a year. They offer both virtual and co-location (I have my own server co-lo'd there).

http://www.yourvacationdreams.com

I would just like to counter with my lack of experiences of too many connection errors with the LiquidWeb MySQL servers. My W3T forum runs fast, and reliably, and the server I am on hasn't been reset in over 40 days. And if you're a high traffic server, you really only have one other choice. The 30gig/month package is unbeatable for their prices, and I'm comfortable here for the meantime.

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Shalazar
www.charisma-carpenter.com

No prob Shalazar. Just thought I'd throw them into the mix. My server has only needed resetting twice in 9 months since I switched to them; once because a hacker somehow broke in, and recently we reset it to install MySQL. It's never been down (surprisingly, as I write this, mySQL db server is down, but we're still tweaking that, so I don't know if that counts), pumping out 50-60 G/mo. Only times there have been problems is in the upline (AT&T, Sprint, etc.), which affected everybody, not just Candidhosting, and then the problem was maybe 1-2 hours max, and that was just speed, not accessability. Anyway, I had noticed they offer packages of $15, $25, $35, $50, etc., and thought someone might be interested.

http://www.yourvacationdreams.com

I've been with Pair, and then with LiquidWeb. Pair was slow to answer questions, if they did at all. While LiquidWeb does answer them, they've not been completely. My forums have been down at least 4 times so far during the month of March. Unfortulatey, while I believe they started out good, I can't take this anymore.

Problems experienced have been:

1) They give you a lot of options, yet hardly any of them were enabled. They were only enabled after I submitted a support request (one for each I needed enabled)
2) Good price, but service lacks. I've had to wait sometimes two days or more for a response.
3) MySQL database server very unreliable. When I upgraded to 5.3 of W3T, the server came up with an out of memory problem. Forums were hosed for over 24 hours as a result until they were able to boot the server again. The MySQL database has actually been a problem for some time, repeatedly.
4) E-mail down on occassion.
5) As previously noted in another post, the cgi-bin directory is below the standard root directory. It takes a bit of finese to get scripts to work, if you can. I have yet to actually get a page counter to work.

I've been looking quite a bit for a new location now, offering the same or similar features for around the same price. I really don't mind paying a bit more IF I can get something reliable. Even Pair was more reliable then my last 6+ months with LiquidWeb. Pair was bad because their support was bad, either they didn't respond within 24 hours (forget weekends), or they didn't find a problem or pushed it off to something that wasn't related.

I should be done reviewing a small list of companies for hosting and will post results if anyone's interested.

Summary? I had some very high hopes for LiquidWeb. I found their control panel a bit frustrating to use, especially since it didn't perform a lot of the features I had expected until I got support to enable them. Looked good, good price, just had some serious bad luck with them every month since I moved.

Danbo
Danbo dot Com

Check out JTAN.COM

I don't know how their prices will stack up against what you've paid, but I gurentee you their service makes up for anything.



Scott Cargill -WebMaster
East Hills Kung Fu San Soo

Yeah, great, NOW I notice Danbo posted about this.. heh Yeah, Liquid Web has issues..

Edited by Dalar on 04/06/01 08:40 PM (server time).

What's your experience with them? I guess very good but can you give more details?
I looked at their site and it seems to good to be true....I also read their fineprint (policy) and it seems to be written specifically for hackers (or something like that...I could not relate to 85 % of what they said...).

One concern that I have is that I used a similar host a long time ago (small, friendly, very cool people) but the problems that they had, basically because of what their customers did on the server, made it hard to stay with them...(so much that I had to leave).

Thanks

In reply to:

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What's your experience with them? I guess very good but can you give more details?

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I've had nothing but excellent help and service from them.

Not knowing zip about half the stuff I needed to do to get the php version up and going, I contacted them and they would help me out step by step in getting the forum up and going.

In the midst of all this they had upgraded php4, and mysql on their site, somewhere along the line we had some problems with the database. As soon as I said "Houston we have a problem" they were all over it for days.

I asked about setting up a directory for phpmyadmin and they'd tell me all the pros and cons on setting things up one way or another until I could decide what would work best for me.

I asked about multible mysql databases, within a week they added the feature. Now I've got two seperate databases for different projects.

I don't know how "mom and pop" they are, but I can tell you that they've been up and going strong for at least 3 years that I know of.

I recently posted a review of their site, my statement "I dont give my customers service as well as they do" and "A 10 on anyones scale" barely tells the tale as far as I'm concerned.

As for the hacking theme? No, they're pretty straight as far as I can tell, I setup a second ftp account, and their first concern was to clue me in on people trying to use the site as a hacking storage depot.

I hope this helps.



Scott Cargill -WebMaster
East Hills Kung Fu San Soo

Yes, thank you. Very interesting host, I guess I'll contact them directly since I happen to be looking for a new host.