Potential customer has some questions.

Hi,

I'm a software developer who needs a reseller solution for some personal sites and some client sites.

I signed up with another hosting company who that has similar features to this one, and have been very unhappy with them so far. Before jumping ship, I was hoping to have a few questions answered here.

For windows accounts, does Matrix run IIS? If so, what version. Can I specify W2K3 accounts vs W2K accounts?

Has anyone successfully connected to their sites using VS.NET 2003?

Can additional applications under the root application be created by either me as a host or an end user via VS.NET 2003 or subwebs via frontpage? Or do I need to contact support in order to have this done.

Is there a hard limit on database space, or is it considered part of the overall diskspace of the package?

Is there spam filtering and antivirus software on the mail servers?

Can hosts have custom com objects installed? If so, what is the procedure/cost?

Is support very responsive?

Thanks in advance for your answers.

deadwax

[bigdave]

We run IIS 5.0 and Windows 2000 on all the windows web servers, we tried 2 machines with 2003 with horrible results (constant crashing of IIS), I'm sure there are other reseller here that can tell you about that.

I know there are a few customers using VS.net, I am to beleive that it uses frontpage extensions which we support fully.

You would need to contact us to set directories as application in IIS, but you can set up anything you'd like.

Diskspace is based on actual usage so say on a cypher you get 2500 megs for everything web space, mail, databases, etc.

We use spam assassin on the mail servers and suspect messages are marked with a [SPAM] tag and most executables are dropped.

COM objects are a $25, one time fee, we only install .dll's. You would just send in a support ticket, and upload the object to your site, tell us the site, object and a link to the author's site so we can check it out, then we will install it, reply to you to test it then we would charge you.

Yes, we are here 24/7, we have the ticket system, forum and phone support available.

[jmbeach]

deadwax, I can honestly tell you that after several years of host hopping, I found Vortech/Matrix just at the right time, and have been extremely happy with the services they provide for the better part of this year.

Highly recommended. Jump now

[vonbrocklin]

Just to play Devil's Advocate: I love Matrix too, I have no plans on leaving, and even refer people here. However:

1. I have several important clients who I would not DREAM of putting on these servers in a gazillion years . . .

2. The database servers here are unacceptably wobbly. I had many sites on MS SQL that constantly crashed, timed out, or were simply unavailable. (These same sites ran flawlessly at our old host, and run flawlessly now that we have moved.) Two big clients left me over this, so I painstakingly converted several sites over to MySQL in hopes of better performance. :-( On ALL of the MySQL servers here, there are periodic slowdowns throughout the day and night where a page will not render for 30 seconds or more, and it is very obvious that the db server is choking. (Static pages on same site blaze along.) If you don't believe me, set up a test osCommerce store and visit it several times an hour throughout the day. You will be very surprised and disappointed. This has been going on forever, with no signs of improvement. My latest site is on MySQL2, and it is even worse than some sites I have on MySQL1.

EDIT: In fairness, I do still have several MS SQL sites here and things appear to have gotten a lot better, although I still get the occasional timeout. MySQL is a whole nuther story.

3. Email problems are also very difficult. I have had several clients leave over this as well, and I do not blame them for a SECOND. I have been on mail1 and have had periodic email outages throughout my entire time here unlike any other host or ISP I have ever used over 12 years. I have documented records of at least 10-15 test emails I have sent myself during outages that have never arrived, despite insitence from Vortech that no mail is ever lost. Everytime there is an outage now, I immediately begin sending myself test emails once per hour until the system is back up. There are many, many times that this mail never arrives (two from the other day for example, on mail1)

All of that said, this is a good company that is trying hard. They listen. They are growing and learning. Vixen is not as as mean as she used to be :-) And I have many customers who like having to pay practically nothing for hosting, and are willing to put up with some glitches. That is why I am still here, and why I offer Vortech as an option to certain clients. But the lion's share of our clients DO care about this stuff. And unfortunately for us Vortech is a budget-class shared hosting company, and you get what you pay for.

I have long argued for a "premium" plan with limited customers per server, our own email/db servers, and being generally seperate from the unwashed masses. I would gladly pay $300 a month or more for this service. That may sound like a lot, but try getting your own set of managed servers (www/email/db) for anything close to that. My point is that I do not want to own or manage servers, and I am willing pay good money for somebody to do it for me the RIGHT way.

And that is not to say that what Vortech is currently doing is not the "right" way, just that I need something different than a high-volume, low-cost service with gazillions of clients causing all sorts of trouble that aren't Vortech's fault to begin with. I have yet to find what I am seeking, and keep hoping that Vortech will take the leap into becoming a high-end provider.

The best example for me is MaximumAsp.com: I have 6 clients hosted there. Every last one of them pays $149 a month, and I don't see a dime in profits. But I don't care and my customers don't care, because in more than 2-3 years of hosting multiple high-volume sites there I have yet to have a SINGLE email outage, a SINGLE database crash, and almost ZERO downtime of any kind. The same thing goes for Pair.com on the UNIX side. Practially nothing EVER goes wrong there, ever. My client's care about this, and will pay for it. By extension I care and would gladly pay for it if somebody would simply provide it for me.

Okay, enough ranting. Go with Vortech. You can't go wrong!

[admin]

I still have that high end, High Up time idea in my head.. We have learned a LOT in the past 3 months on ways to make our curent cluster MORE stable..

I don't want to put a HIGH END cluster before we are 100% sure we can do it 100% of the time..

I think we are getting close, we now have rock solid hardware, rock solid network.. Now we just have to make sure H-Sphere can be as solid as we need it to be to do this.. We have made a LOT of changes to the way H-Sphere does things on the backend and they are starting to show a LOT better up time. We have also made some network changes to speed things up like mysql and mssql since they don't run on the same systems as the sites.. Mail servers are now stable for the most part..

I will see if we can't start a High end Plan for a new cluster. Maybe Q1 of 2004.. But we will never slack off on our curent cluster.

Well, the mail problem is enough to scare me away. I can deal with SQL Server being slow, as most of my sites cache data anyway, but I can't deal with lost mail or frequently down mail servers. Thanks for the honest appraisal.

deadwax

[vonbrocklin]

Originally Posted by deadwax

Well, the mail problem is enough to scare me away. I can deal with SQL Server being slow, as most of my sites cache data anyway, but I can't deal with lost mail or frequently down mail servers. Thanks for the honest appraisal.

deadwax

I hear you. Also, it is not like the email outages happen every week or anything. But when they do happen they are quite spectacular, last for hours, and seem to come in waves. This makes it very difficult to conduct a real business under any circumstance. There is nothing quite like having to send an email to 150 development clients saying that our email was down, and that mail may have been lost, and then have to do it AGAIN less than 3 days later. It made me look like a real moron, to a group of people who rely on me for technical expertise and advice. This happened to me during the last series of outages, prior to the most recent one, and in fairness the email outages seem to be getting less frequent and shorter when they do occur.

But even in this last outage on mail1, I lost messages with no bounce backs for a period of at least two hours. (Actually I have no way of knowing if this is true, but it is based on test messages I sent myself from another account. The first two disappeared into the ether forever, but the next one at hour three arrived intact.) Granted this is better than the 7+ hour gap from two outages ago, but either way it makes it real hard to sleep at night if you are relying on email to conduct real business. In my opinion, nothing is more sacred than making sure email is running 100% of the time, with no lost mail. I don't care if mail bounces back to the sender, or gets slowed down occassionaly, but to have it disappear without a trace is the worst possible scenario. And it happens here, way more than it should.

[jmbeach]

As for email, I do believe that the newer mail servers are more stable than say mail1, which has been plagued, it seems, with issues for a while. Perhaps that is because it's more loaded than the newer ones. Considering new servers are coming online more quickly than they used to tells me that the newer servers have fewer users on them.

As a new user, I would bet that you'll have better luck than some of us unlucky ones on some of the older boxes.

[vonbrocklin]

Also, I want to say one more thing because I feel like I am sort of bashing Vortech here and that is not my intent:

My guess is that 95% of all shared hosting companies in the same market as Vortech have similar or worse problems. It is a fact of life when you are dealing with gazillions of resellers, and gazillions of their customers, and charging practically nothing for it.

The difference between Vortech and the others, and this is why I am still here, is that are usually HONEST about their problems, and they are responsive about trying to fix them. They don't delete critical postings from their forums. They explain WHY things go bad, and how they fixed them. All other things being equal, it is laughable how much they provide here for so little. Thier support is GREAT. These forums are invaluable. I just wish it worked better, and would be willing to a pay a very high premium to make it so.

mail1 had a pretty big issue, but we did our best to solve it and keep you informed. We are currently in the process of getting the hardware together so that we can allow you guys to keep your mail on the server however long you want... (One caveat is that it wont be included in nightly backups... too much data).

I think the mail1 problem is the first seriously major issue that we've had in months, and it turns out that it was mostly a lot of people sending volumes of bad mail ... :/ Risks you take on a shared server.


Also, I've compiled some serious optimizations into the mysql servers (mysql and mysql1, we'll see how it goes and then apply to mysql2). If you have sites on mysql1, please let us know if they seem faster/slower, etc.

[vonbrocklin]

See what I mean? A lot of hosts would have deleted my first two posts, these guys respond.

Originally Posted by Bladesnitz

Also, I've compiled some serious optimizations into the mysql servers (mysql and mysql1, we'll see how it goes and then apply to mysql2). If you have sites on mysql1, please let us know if they seem faster/slower, etc.

Veeeeery cool. I have been completely fixated on mySql2 for the past two days because we just launched a new site that is really bogging down, but I will start checking our older mysql/mysql1 sites right now. This would be the best news of the month.

Also PSoft is implementing support for mysql4... that should speed it up a bit too.

May not come till Hsphere 2.4 though... They just announced Beta2 though... (Which we WONT be implementing.. hah)

[Vixen]

Originally Posted by vonbrocklin

Vixen is not as as mean as she used to be :-)

Only when I need to be.

[newmem]

Originally Posted by deadwax

Well, the mail problem is enough to scare me away. I can deal with SQL Server being slow, as most of my sites cache data anyway, but I can't deal with lost mail or frequently down mail servers. Thanks for the honest appraisal.

deadwax

I am on a new mail server since I am relatively new here, and I have not had a single problem with any of my mails, no downtime.

About MSSQL, I have not yet set my own db here, but I am just about to do it. But I have read many times in this forum that pages that get data from MSSQL are very slow and they have left matrix only for that reason.......has that problem been solved?

My new site will be entirely depending on the db.....and the speed should not be different than the static pages, except for a few seconds. Because a visitor won't stay on the site if he has to wait......

I hope it's not just an optimization, but a complete resolution of problem......since all other things are perfect here I wouldn't want to leave matrix just for the db issues........

[Brangwyn]

Theres never been any major issues with MSSQL newmem, every now and then there may be a slowdown but overall things are pretty good.

It's hard to judge how performance is based purely on what's posted in a support forum, remember people are only going to post when they have an issue which is maybe 1% of the time, things are running absolutely sweet the other 99%.