Overview: Outgrown your shared hosting? Is it time to go with VPS or dedicated managed hosting? You sound like you may want to take a look at UltraHosting because that is all they do, and they do it well. Not only that, but they set the bar for graduated scalability and pricing.
Rarely do I do reviews where I seem like a “fan” of the hosting company, but this is going to be one of them.
Please note: if you have been to other website hosting review sites, you should realize that I rate based on personal experience (rather than hosting company marketing) and am usually a tough grader. Please read the review to see the explanations and reasoning behind the ratings.
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Disclaimer:UltraHosting offers a very powerful product, but if you are a first-time website owner and don’t have a great deal of knowledge and experience, you may want to start somewhere else, like with shared hosting. That’s not to say that UltraHosting would be a poor choice. It may just be overkill.
That said, if you are confident that you have a good product and are dedicated to making it work, then you could do far worse than to begin your hosting with UltraHosting because of their flexibility, power and price-points. Unlike shared hosting companies, you will never have to worry about outgrowing UltraHosting or going bankrupt due to bandwidth overages.
If this disclaimer is scaring you, go away quickly. If not, welcome to the magical world of UltraHosting.
Hosting Plans and Scalability:
You can never outgrow Ultrahosting. From VPS to huge banks of servers, they can take care of anything. Among VPS and dedicated hosting companies, Ultrahosting sets the bar, and very high, for the variety of plans, flexibility and scalability they offer. The range is just about staggering, and yet it is easy enough to go through and pick exactly what you need. For instance, let’s say you want to go with VPS to begin with and plan to move up as needed, a very reasonable plan. So you click on VPS and are provided with three options, clearly explained, from $19.99 to $39.99. After you pick the option that is best for you, you go to a page that further breaks down the capabilities in this category. Select the one you need and click “configure and order.” For VPS, you simply have the option of adding extra bandwidth and additional dedicated IP addresses. Pick what you want and go from there. On dedicated plans, you have the option, once you get to the configurations pages, to select just about all features of your server.
The scalability is what is staggering here. Because of the vast options available, you can literally work your way up in a very orderly fashion from $19.99 per month to whatever you would need, taking leaps by only about $10 a month.
Aslo available are private racks, or colocation hosting and fully managed hosting.
Moving from one plan to another is a breeze, and they even help you.
Pricing:
From everywhere I’ve checked, and I’ve checked a lot of places, UltraHosting’s pricing leads the industry. Actually, they make such a point of it that they offer a 110% price guarantee.
Speed and Uptime:
A lot of time, people will assume that all their hosting problems will end once they finally make the jump to VPS or dedicated hosting. Many times they are sorely disappointed. What you get at Ultrahosting, however, is what you would expect and what you are paying for. They are fast so long as you pick the right plan and put the right site on it. Because of their scalability and the number of plans that they offer, it is possible to go the wrong route and bog a very complex, traffic intensive site down. That’s not their fault; that’s your fault. Make sure you pick the right plan for your needs.
They offer a 100% uptime guarantee. I can’t imagine that they absolutely NEVER go down. Everyone goes down eventually. I tried to find out what would happen if your site went down, but couldn’t. I’m sure they would issue a credit or something.
Bandwidth and Storage:
This is the rarest of rankings. Ultrahost joins Media Temple as the only site you can’t outgrow. You can literally order a 10,000 foot bank of servers, assuming you are quite wealthy. If you ever buy that 10,000 foot bank of servers, let me know. You’ll be one of the true “big boys” of the Internet, and I’ll post your picture on this site as a famous person who read this review ; )
Power Rating:
Yep.
Customer Service:
Giving out all fives on the ratings has made me grumpy, so I’m going with a 4.5 here. Plus, their live-chat is down this morning. Outside of that, you can call their toll free number. One thing to note here is that the product that Ultrahosting has is more complex than the products offered by shared hosting companies, so the level of support has increased. The people you talk to at Ultrahosting are real IT professionals, not just people answering a telephone.
Ease of Use:
I gave very serious consideration to this rating, and decided I would mostly compare Ultrahosting to other VPS or dedicated hosting providers. This is a different type of beast here, and you should be aware of that. VPS and dedicated hosting is not as easy as shared hosting. But Ultrahosting does their best to make the process of setting up your accounts and getting you running as easy as they can, and they really do have helpful technicians. If ease-of-use is a great concern to you because you aren’t comfortable with with the IT side of things, you should consider choosing their fully managed plan.
Overall:
Obviously, I’ve very high on Ultrahosting. Uncomfortably high for me, but there is no doubting that they do this part of the market better than anyone. I can’t imagine even recommending anyone else for people who are shopping for VPS or above hosting.
Was this review helpful for you? You can’t get Ultrahosting any cheaper anywhere else, so if you decide to check them out, please follow the link below and enter the coupon code “July09″ to save 50% on set-up and 10% on your dedicated server (VPS has no set-up fee)
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