Adequate...sometimes
Written: Oct 25 '00
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Pros: allows multiple domains under reseller account
Cons: outages, poor support
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| kathi's Full Review: XO |
In the beginning, I was hosted with Concentric. Being basically displeased with my experience with them, I bought and began reselling space on 9Net Avenue. Lo and behold, 9Net was snapped up by Concentric a year or so later. Then NextLink bought Concentric. Out of this unholy union evolved XO Communications.
Being an ASP specialist, I cannot speak of the reliability of XO's Unix-based hosting, as I haven't had any practical experience with them on this platform. I am hosting approximately 12 domains, each on a different XO Windows 2000 server and the experience has ranged from adequate to downright maddening.
When things are good, server performance is adequate - there seems to be plenty of bandwidth to spread around, even though XO tends to pack a whole lot of domains on a server. Aside from recent routing issues and outages, most of the servers seem to be available most of the time. Unfortunately, most of the time isn't always sufficient for those hosting commercial websites...
Tech Support
I have had numerous opportunity to contact their tech support staff (usually due to outages). I have learned not to submit a trouble ticket online, as I don't seem to get any real help in this manner. Usually, my email will go unanswered until the problem is fixed - and then I get a curt response informing me that "nothing appears to be wrong with the server". Perhaps if they'd just acknowledge that there had, in fact, been something amiss, I wouldn't be so critical. However, when I am trying to help one of my clients who is concerned that their website is down, the last thing I need is to get no response until the problem has been fixed. At least let me know there's a problem and that you're actually doing something about it!
Calling their tech support staff is slightly more efficient, although maybe not entirely helpful. One of my newer clients is hosting on a particularly cranky XO server, and in a period of two weeks, I received frantic calls that the server was down no less than four times, with each outage being a minimum of 30 minutes - the last one was over 90 minutes!
Each time I called the tech support line, and each time I was told that it "would be up in five or ten minutes". It seemed to me that I wasn't being taken seriously until my second or third call per incident.
Dedicated Servers
Right around the time of the 9Net/Concentric merger, a client decided to get off of shared hosting (on 9Net) because of server problems. The decision was made to use one of their dedicated servers. The server was ordered, and about a week later they had it up and running, for the most part anyway. PCAnywhere was crashing each time we tried to log in, and at that point, this was our only way into the server. Repeated calls eventually got the problem solved - it was a matter of upgrading PCAnywhere to work with the Windows 2000 server. However, it set our schedule back approximately two weeks.
Since the initial setup glitches, the dedicated server has been humming along, performing admirably. There haven't been any outages, and I'm quite pleased with the service. We haven't had to contact tech support regarding this server since the PCAnywhere problem was solved, but we did seem to get priority when we had those initial problems.
SQL Servers
Oh my, my. What a hassle we went through trying to get them to set up our SQL Server space! From start to finish, it took approximately 2 weeks to get our login and password.
I have been using our SQL database heavily since that time, and it has performed well. The speed is adequate, and I haven't noticed any down time at all. They are doing a decent job on this count.
The Admin Panel
The admin panel drives me kind of crazy, frankly. I don't know how they decided which of my domains to load as the default, but they managed to make the default the domain I have least to do with. Fortunately, switching between domains is a matter of a couple of clicks.
Compared to other administrative panels I've seen, this one is adequate, but nothing special. One can configure email, add domains, submit trouble tickets - all the usual suspects. While it isn't especially intuitive, its not difficult to figure out how to use it. The main objection I have is the number of clicks it takes to accomplish any task - the older version of the admin panel was much more intuitive and required far fewer clicks. Still, its not bad.
Web Statistics
XO uses an evaluation version of http-analyze, which is ugly to look at, worse to use. Other NT web hosts (such as innerhost) seem to do a much better job... but then, they actually pay for Webtrends or other high-end packages. XO is not the place to be if you want password-protected, easy-to-use web stats.
Summary
Overall, I rate XO slightly sub-average, and I can't honestly recommend them for NT hosting. There have been numerous outages, the tech support leaves a lot to be desired, and their actual hosting services are at best average. I'm testing a new host right now (maximumASP), and plan to terminate my contract with XO (and move all those domains) as soon as my test period is over. I will not miss XO.
Recommended:
No
Monthly fees (US$): 44.95
Platform used: Windows NT
Hosted on Secure Server: Yes
Database used: MS-SQL
Main focus of Web site: Sales/E-commerce
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Epinions.com ID:
kathi
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Member: Kathi O'Shea
Location: 49th Parallel
Reviews written: 53
Trusted by: 94 members
About Me:
Geek girl, hockey nut, and avid boater.
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