Review of different hosting companies & services side by side with our continous testing/monitoring over website performance, customer feed backs and overall industry reputation. We host sample website and do necessary testing on some crucial features to ensure our recommendation is perfect.

Top 10 Dedicated Server Hosting

Dedicated servers provides the best performance and scalability for your enterprise IT applications. Dedicated server can be setup by following your exact requirements so you have full control about its overall costs. It's easy to get a server service from the huge provider list, but you have to evaluate carefully and select the right server provider. We have compiled a list of the top 10 dedicated server hosting providers by professionals experience and existing user comments. They're rated in the list based it's data center specs, connectivity, server structures and price. No matter if you need to host big applications or just use it for network or storage purpose, you can always get a solution from the list below.

RackSpace
Started in 1998, rackspace is the most well known server provider who has been leading in dedicated server and cloud solutions. Their people also developped the mostly used cloud server managing platform "Openstack". Till present, rackspace manages total of 6 global data centers in USA, Europe, Asia and Austrilia. Rackspace combines public cloud, private cloud, and dedicated bare metal computing to provide the perfect infrastructure for each customer's specific needs. Server price might be a little high from rackspace but you get what you pay.

top 10 dedicated server hosting - rackspace

Rackspace official site: http://www.rackspace.com

SoftLayer
The biggest data center provider who is powering hundreds of reputable hosting brands. Softlayer manages data center space from almost every states in USA. All available leading network/computing groups have partnership with SL to generate the best server service. Especially after acquired by IBM company, softlayer can upgrade their systems by leading IBM solutions. Because the company provides a variety server plans with different setup features, you can always get a perfect server with your needs.

top 10 dedicated server hosting - softlayer

Softlayer official site: http://www.softlayer.com

LiquidWeb
Liquid Web Inc. is a privately held managed web hosting company founded in 1997, with three wholly owned data center facilities and 13,000 Servers located in Lansing, Michigan. From it's own stats report, liquid Web has over 20,000 clients served in over 120 countries. It's also selected to fortune 5000 list every year since 2007. Besides its leading dedicated server plans, liquid web also provides all traditional hosting solutions including shared, VPS and managed service plans. The most popular web hosting forum site "webhostingtalk" is hosted by Liquidweb.

top 10 dedicated server hosting - liquidweb

LiquidWeb official site: http://www.liquidweb.com

Krypt
Krypt was founded in 1998 as a shell and web hosting provider out of Newport Beach, CA. The company was best known for providing some of the best Counter-Strike game servers on the west coast from 2000 – 2005. Krypt has two of the best rated data centers in California – Santa Ana and Los Angeles. The KR server starts at $84.95/mon with free support for windows and linux. To most their users, speedy and stability are mostly talked about with Krypt servers.

top 10 dedicated server hosting - krypt

Krypt official site: http://krypt.com

FDCServers
One of the largest dedicated server providers who manages over 10 data centers from both USA and Europe. It's also one of the very few server providers who provides multiple languages support to clients from different locations. It's especially optimized for Chinese clients and ranked in top 300 websites list in that area. FDCServers provides VPS, dedicated server and colocation service with very affordable price.

top 10 dedicated server hosting - fdcservers

FDCServers official site: http://fdcservers.net

QuadraNet
A leading server provider since 2001. Unlike any other server hosting service, user can find any kind server configuration from quadranet company. The company also provides a full range services including storage server, CDN/DNS hosting, backup and server management service. Especially after pacificrack joined the group, it made quadranet a big server provider in short time. QuadraNet mainly operates from 3 data centers: Dallas, Miami and Los Angeles

top 10 dedicated server hosting - quadranet

QuadraNet official site: http://www.quadranet.com

100TB
100TB is one of the UK2 sub brands. Like their domain name suggests, 100TB is specialising in on-demand scalable-bandwidth server service. If you're operating a heavy traffic website and in need of decent server service, 100TB is highly suggested. Actually, it's hard to find another server provider for such big offer in bandwidth and disk drives. 100TB servers are powered by over 20 data centers all over the world as suggested by UK2.

top 10 dedicated server hosting - 100tb

100TB official site: http://www.100tb.com

SharkTech
SharkTech is most famous for its ddos protection firewalls. Since 2003, the company has been offering high-transfer server hosting to both IT professionals and enterprises. In order to guarantee the best performance and security, Sharktech setup modern data centers in Chicago and Denver. Each data center is supported by multiple reputable network backbones and hardware vendors.

top 10 dedicated server hosting - sharktech

Sharktech official site: http://www.sharktech.net

BurstNET
One of the most well known budget server providers who can offer leading server configurations with affordable price. With a lower price you get a powerful server configuration that's only provided from larger packages by other hosting companies. Being one of the largest server providers, burstNET operates from multiple centers in USA and UK. Most popular IT groups have partnership with them in offering leading server service.

top 10 dedicated server hosting - burst.net

BurstNET official site: http://www.burst.net

SolidTools
A less popular server provider who operates multiple data centers all over the world. The BGP network is specially optimized for eastern Asia area like Japan, Korea and China. Main service by solidtools includes cloud VPS, dedicated servers and colocation. Their website is probably the simplest one from all their competitors, what really makes their service outstanding is their enterprise grade server facilities and service.

Solidtools official site: http://solidtools.com

Best SSD VPS Hosting

ssd vps server

Looking for high performance and super reliable vps server? If you're evaluating multiple server plans with similar offers, SSD support should help with your quick decision. You might pay a little more for the service but it absolutely gives back more value for its leading performance. This article will guide on how to select the best SSD vps hosting service.

SSD disk comes with fast reading speed and powerful fault-tolerance abilities. Comparing to traditional HDD, SSD is 10 times faster from production testing with much longer life time. SSD has approved its unbeatable advantages once and once again from enterprise solutions. However, not too many hosting servers are SSD based because of the costs and less requests from clients. With the modern website requirements from users and search engine, performance is considered more and more thus lots of people start to consider this support. But the truth is most hosting servers are still HDD configured. Here I'd like to introduce one of the most reputable SSD vps hosting provider – A2 hosting.

A2 hosting might be not so popular as every other hot names like hostgator and justhost, but it's absolutely one of the most developer friendly hosting providers who can provide various custom supports to every hosting plan. A2 hosting group currently provides shared, vps, cloud and dedicated hosting solutions with support for almost every available server technologies. It's also one of the very first hosting groups with SSD support.

A2 SSD VPS hosting plans are fully customizable based your requirements. Following is quick view of their advantages

Blazing fast SSD VPS server

A2 group actually provides both SSD and standard hard drive support for their vps servers. All hardwares are newly production by industry standards. Their SSD vps server guarantees up to 300% faster on page loading. For those who have extremely high requirements of website performance and availability, SSD is a MUST and A2 provides the best choice.

a2hosting ssd server

Fully customizable server setup

At A2 hosting, you simply design a perfect SSD VPS server by yourself. You just pay the resources you wanted for zero waste. You decide the server RAM, space and bandwidth. You also have a variety of linux OS choice including CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo and Slackware.

Free A2 Installer

The most outstanding offer by A2 vps hosting. A2 quick installer will auto install the most popular developer softwares with its exclusive resource. Just select the service you want to use and everything will be auto configured with no headache. You no longer need to deal with those boring and challenging work in order to configure a proper service. Unlike the app installer in cpanel like softaculous or fantastico, the A2 quick installer is simply a gallery of all server level service like web server, mail server and most development tools. Following is a list of popular softwares from this installer

  • Application Servers. Includes LAMP stack, MongoDB, Tomcat, Nginx, MariaDB and more.
  • Frameworks. This includes Django, Node.js, Grails and turbogears etc.
  • Version Control. SVN, Git and mercurial included.
  • Control panel. ISPconfig, Ajenti and zpanel included
  • CMS/CRM. Some popular website softwares like wordpress, joomla, similar to app installers in cpanel.

You can also install other popular softwares like OpenVPN and Asterisk based your preference. So basically, the A2 support group has prepared everything you might need and simplified the deployment process on behalf of you. Till present, there's not another server provider managed to do so.

Very affordable price

You don't have to pay a lot in order to use SSD vps server from A2 group. If you want to try out first or just want to see how it works, the initial payment after discount is only $13.19/mo. Because you decide all server configurations, the server cost is 100% under control. You can determine the best server configuration by affordable costs.

Refer to this page for quick review of a2 hosting plans and sign up a2 ssd vps server for 34% discount today! http://www.a2hosting.com

MariaDB Hosting

mariadb hosting

Looking for high performance database engine to support your website? You might be surprised for the limited choice. Most developer and webmasters install either mysql or sql server to work with. But today, we'll introduce another leading database engine – MariaDB.

MariaDB Introduction

MariaDB is 100% open sourced database that's released under GPL license. The project is supported by a huge community and everybody be able to contribute to each new release. The name MariaDB is named after the project leader's younger daughter – Maria. The latest version is MariaDB 5.5.30

The purpose of MariaDB is to provide a responsive, cross platform compatible and high performance database engine to small and large applications. The Maria project early members are mostly from Mysql community. The community keep each release the same as mysql version, for example MariaDB 5.1.47 while there's MySQL 5.1.47

MariaDB Web Hosting

Comparing to all other database systems, mariaDB is very new. But it's already installed by lots of popular groups like Wikipedia and Google because of its high performance and abilities in handling large data transfer. However, it's hard to find a regular hosting plan with MariaDB support. Most hosting servers are still Mysql powered for it's long historical popularity. If you are web developer and would like to use MariaDB, you need to get a VPS or dedicated server then install the database software. It's free to get and just the same way of mysql installation. You wouldn't get a single problem to have it setup and running perfectly.

MariaDB has very low server end requirement so you can easily on a budget or enterprise server system. If you're looking for a decent VPS server plan, we highly suggest the best 5 vps hosting list. If you only like to try out MariaDB on live server system with less investment, the vps under $10/mo page is suggested.

MariaDB vs Mysql

The mariaDB project is announced to be drop-in replacement of mysql and improved a lot for its storage engines. Below is a list comparison of the two softwares.

  • Development. The mysql core development is limited from Oracle group while MariaDB is completely opened to everybody. That means mariaDB can be improved fastly by more professionals. Especially when referring to security, mariadb can be more reliable because you know how it's configured in source codes.
  • Structure. MariaDB uses different sotrage engines than mysql and each engine is drop-in replacement. Their PBXT, XtraDB and FederatedX engines are recognized more efficient than mysql engines with less bug/warning.
  • Performance. Both are high performance database solutions but mariadb is more advanced system which can be recognized deeply optimized mysql. Because the mariadb core developers are actually from mysql group, they fully understand how mysql is orgnized so they can fix lots of weakness to their new products release. Because of the maria improved storage engines, it's used on lots of enterprise solutions by wikipedia and google.

Official comprison between mariadb and mysql: https://mariadb.com/kb/en/mariadb-versus-mysql-features/

Best Exchange Server hosting & Alternative

exchange server hosting

Exchange server or microsoft exchange is a mail program devloped by microsoft. Since from the initial release, it's considered the best enterprise mail solution. Till exchange server 2013, it's included as one of the office 365 services though you can install it independently. Exchange server provides a list of advantages that you can not get from any other product. Those outstanding features include the following

  • Get business email, calendar, and contacts on your PC, phone, and web browser.
  • Run email on Microsoft globally redundant servers.
  • Stay protected by anti-malware and anti-spam filters and supported by 24/7, IT-level phone support.

Exchange server is fully mobile compatible for all its features. People get both web access as well as email client access based your preference. The newest exchange server outlook interface is fully integrated with office so you can beautify email contents easily. Another great feature of the product is group meeting. Users can compare calendars to schedule meetings and can access collaboration features, including shared calendars, groups, the global address list, external contacts, tasks, conference rooms, and delegation capabilities.

Best Exchange Server Hosting

A lot of hosting providers offer exchange server plans. Some providers like Godaddy, rackspace and amazon all support exchange hosting with different price and features. However, the best exchange server hosting provider is absolutely microsoft. It's their own product and they provide the service directly on website. The best feature of microsoft service is their global data centers on every continents. You don't have to worry about service failure because of a single server crash because there're lots of redundant servers behind.

For the moment, microsoft provides two exchange server plans and single user service just starts at $4/mon. Each user gets 50 GB of mailbox storage and can send messages up to 25 MB in size. For $8/mo plan you get unlimited storage and voice mail support! Such service is not available from any other providers.

exchange server price

We should note that all exchange server hosting plans are dedicated for email service. Means no matter how much space you get, you can only use for email contents but not other purpose such as website. There's no support for other services.

Best Exchange Server Alternative

As explained from above, microsoft exchange server provides unbeatable features for all other email solutions. However, it's not cheap to get started. Unless your company highly relies on email communication with extremely high requirements to this service, many people will not consider it. But what if we need similar service with less costs? Yes, there's a product called "smartermail" which is almost designed the same as exchange server. Their official proudly to announce its the best alternative of microsoft exchange.

The advantage of smartermail is you have free try out opportunity before paying. Their free edition support a single domain with up to 10 mail boxes with no feature limitation. If your requirement is just like this, you can always use it for free! Since it's a stand alone windows software, we can easily setup it on vps or dedicated servers, just few clicks away and the installer will auto configure all needed environment without manual action.

Till present, there're multiple reputable windows hosting providers use smartermail for their email system like winhost, hostgator. They both configured enterprise edition smartermail on separate windows servers and provide the service for free to all clients. You can check the following video for further details.

Smartermail is also the best choice when you would like to get control over all your web properties, you just need to install the software on server end then provide mail access to company staff. All mails and traffic details are stored on your server hard drives and no one can access to it except youself.

Smartermail official site: http://www.smartertools.com

Media Temple Review

media temple review

You might have not heard media temple because cheap hosting service is advertised everywhere on the internet. However, you should not ignore this great name if you need enterprise web solutions. Media temple is simple one of the best choice.

Started in 1998, media temple has been updated with latest computing technologies. Based a customer-focused organisation, media temple provides scalable and reliable hosting solutions to individual websites, business applications as well as governmental sites. The company opened multiple communication channels to interact with clients in professional manner.

Media temple Hosting plans

Till present, media temple provides a full range hosting solutions including shared, VPS, enterprise and cloud server plans. The company also provides a powerful sitebuilder service where you have access to code behind. The spotlight is you have chance to try out 10 days for zero fees. You don't have to submit payment in case you do not like the service. ProCDN service is also provided to existing clients with affordable price. Unlike all other hosting server plans, the media temple servers are 100% cloud based for scalability and reliability.

  • Shared Hosting. It's called Grid shared web hosting there and extremely optimized for open source scripts like wordpress. The media temple grid servers are installed with newest server technologies like PHP 5.5, PageSpeed, FastCGI that can make your website pages load up to 6x faster from its official annoucement. Unlike traditional cpanel hosting service, the media temple tech group devided some essential services on different servers. Web server, mysql server and email servers are all separated for best performance.
  • VPS Hosting. Media temple provides multiple VPS server plans: Managed, Developer and Enterprise VPS. Each vps server includes free plesk control panel, a free billing application and resource management tools so you can use it for reseller hosting purpose. If you need more than guaranteed resources, you can upgrade to enterprise vps server where you have full access to entire virtualization environment for customization. 16 cores with up to 64GB RAM, it's actually much more powerful than a dedicated solution.
  • Cloud hosting. Dedicated cloud server is provided by media temple service. Unlike other cloud plans from the company, their Helix dedicated cloud is created from SSD drives which can be fully customized with your requirement. It's some kind expensive than many other cloud service($7,500/month) but you get 10 times more value than paying based their leading server configuration.

media temple hosting features

Media temple Server uptime

There's no doubt media temple has setup their servers by most powerful hardwares under cloud environment. The company operate total of two data centers on both east and west coast USA with a total of 171,200 sq. feet available for operations. A redundant, private Fiber connection is in place between their Virginia and California data centers. Low latency network and secure communication is guaranteed for business applications.

From existing customer feedbacks, media temple is hosting lots of .gov websites and received heavy attacks that might lead various problems to victims. However, the media temple level and quality of support has been doing their best to make sure all their service is up and healthy. Their people are truely working 24*7*365 so any urgent issue can be addressed in time and professionally.

Media temple Support

Besides all traditional support resource such as online chat and phone calls. The media temple staffs are very active in lots of social media sites and web forums like twitter, company blogs and facebook etc. They have multiple accounts to work with to handle customer requests at the earliest time. Their people are trying to reach their customers in as many channels as possible to make sure each single issue is concerned. 

Instead putting all support staff in a single office, the media temple support is located from multiple locations with different responsibilities. For instance their data center support is opening their eyes on every single server for performance and connectivity monitoring. They need to make sure all servers are well cooled down and properly secured to ensure your sensitive data is placed in safe place. Other traditional support like sales and basic tech support is mainly provided through business hours because over 99% questions can be answered through prepared video and FAQ knowledge base.

Media temple Promotion

Webhostpark has coperated with media temple. If you have interested with their hosting service and looking for some discount, their people provided us a promo code "Webhostpark" for 20% off initial payment. This promo offer can be applied to shared and VPS server plans but not valid on Virb and DV Enterprise. It's by far the highest promo code from media temple group. Don't miss out if you have interested with their hosting

Go to www.mediatemple.net for cloud hosting plans http://www.mediatemple.net

iPage VPS & Dedicated Server Hosting

ipage vps & dedicated server hosting

iPage finally launched VPS and dedicated server hosting plans after several months preparing. If you have used ipage shared web hosting services and got good growth on website, you don't have to switch hosting providers anymore. Just upgrade directly for higher hosting solutions and keep your business always up!

What's good of ipage virtual server and dedicated plans? What's included with the offer? If you're considering to upgrade to this service or evaluating for the first time, we're going to clear out all your doubts and find the backend secrets so you can sign up with the best deal.

About ipage VPS server hosting

iPage released their vps server plans in the end of August 2013 with a bunch of industry standards and competitive offers. All vps server plans are managed service where you get all necessary tools and service to work with. Here's quick view of the main features:

  • Up to 4-Core CPU & 8GB RAM
  • Free domain name registration/transfer
  • 40GB storage with up to 4TB monthly bandwidth
  • Centos 6.4 and cpanel control panel
  • 20% discount for initial term
  • 100% wind energy power supply

ipage vps server hosting

iPage VPS Spotlights in details

  1. Server OS. As we see, ipage introduced industry leading choice – Centos for all vps servers. Centos is recognized as production server choice based the great compatibility with management tools and great performance. You can easily install softwares and updates via few commands.
  2. Control panel. You will get the best server control panel – Cpanel for server management. Basically you get standard cpanel installation with latest updates for production server purpose. Root access is optional if you prefer to command line operation.
  3. Cloud based flexibility. Your vps server is created via cloud computing. All server resources can be customized and provised instantly. If you have outgrew the current server plan, there's no need additional sign up, their people can handle seamless migration/upgrade with no service failure to your account.
  4. Leading technology and support. All vps servers are semi-private for guaranteed memory and all server resources. Each vps server will work independently with no effect each other. Moreover, their support staff is monitoring equipments around the clock in data center space for instant response in case problem occurs.

About iPage Dedicated server plans

The ipage dedicated servers come with exactly the same features as VPS plans. You get same technical offers and support as well as promotion rates. The only difference is you get dedicated equipments and much more resources in data center space. You can make full use of all available resources to fulfill your needs. There're total of 3 dedicated server plans to subscribe and upgrade. Server specifications are configured as following:

  • Intel Xeon E3 – 1220LV2 3.5 GHZ
  • 4-16 GB RAM with upgrade option
  • CentOS 6.4 with cPanel installation
  • 20% discount for the first payment term

Because it's a dedicated server, almost everything can be customized so what's showed on their page is really not so important. Just send your requirement to their team and they will prepare a server for good price.

ipage dedicated server hosting

iPage VPS and Dedicated Server secret revealed

So what's the secret behind? You might have surprised about the great deal and decide to purchase. But please keep reading and find more.

As we know, iPage and many of its sister brands like fatcow, ipower etc are Vdeck control panel based hosting service on Debian linux. The vdeck is inhouse developed control panel software by endurance group and only available to their own hosting brands. They might not ready to offer this control panel to VPS or dedicated server yet for any reason but it's quite rare to get cpanel option from their service. From editors interview, we finally found those servers are actually created from bluehost data centers. Means it's part of bluehost service but just offered in different terms. If we compare their server plans we'll find all server details and even price are exact the same. However, bluehost dedicated server definitely provides better price where users get 50% discount for the first term, but we just receive 20% discount from ipage for same service.

Bluehost manages total of 3 leading data centers in Utah. Based its previous stats revealed by Matt heaton, bluehost servers just took about 25% server racks so there're lots of free space for new server installation. Although hostgator has migrated their servers there, at least 30% free space left for new servers. Since bluehost was merged to EIG group, all existing facilities are totally managed by new teams. It's not a surprise to see they provide VPS and dedicated server plans on more and more sites because they want to be profitable from unused space.

So, do we recommend the ipage upgrade server plans? You might have found the price difference for initial terms. However, the promotinal price is only for the first month and you have to pay full amount after that period. In case you have business from ipage hosting and need higher hosting solutions, we don't recommend to migrate to bluehost just because you can get few bucks discount for the first month. You might have to deal with various problems during migrating to new server. Instead, you upgrade is almost automatically with ipage because their people will handle everything on behalf of you. No worries for a single failure!

Go to ipage for server plan details http://www.ipage.com/advanced-hosting