Interview with Meredith Livesay of VPSNext
July 21, 2010
I had the opportunity to get in touch with Meredith Livesay of VPSNext recently and I’m honored to have her as our interview guest today. As there are little forum discussion or user reviews on VPSNext, this interview is a must read for those who are interested with the hosting company. Meredith has done an excellent job answering the questions and her insights on the hosting industry are as precious as gold.
Q&A with Meredith Livesay of VPSNext
Hi Meredith, thank you for being with us today. To get things started, let’s go with some basic introduction. What can we know more about you and your company, VPSNext?
You’re welcome! Thank you for giving me the change to have this interview. Currently, I am the Marketing Manager for VPSNext. Through the time that I have been with them I have seen this company grow tremendously even in a short amount of time.
VPSNext began about five years ago as a web hosting company that focuses solely on the virtual private server market. One of the aspects I love most about this company is that it is locally owned and operated; this allows us to really focus on our customers and what they want. Feedback is crucial to our business. VPSNext as a company is very focused on offering quality products, while still keeping our prices competitive.
Who should use VPSNext? Please briefly describe VPSNext ‘s target market.
Our typical customer is one who has outgrown their shared environment but is not ready to move to a dedicated server. A VPS is also the perfect fit for large scale communities such as, developer forums, design boards, and many other types of resource consuming activities.
Additionally, e-commerce users prefer to be on a virtual private server because it is like having their own box.
Let’s talk about VPSNext’s hosting packages – cPanel, Plesk, and No Control Panel VPS Hosting Packages (see table below). Which is the most popular package; and what are the major differences among these three?
| Features | cPanel VPS | Plesk VPS | NoCP VPS | |||
| Packages | VPS Fusion | VPS Nitro | VPS Spark | VPS Ultra | VPS Starter | VPS Basic |
| Disk Space (GB) | 50 | 100 | 50 | 100 | 30 | 60 |
| CPU Limit | 16 CPU cores | 16 CPU cores | 16 CPU cores | 16 CPU cores | 16 CPU cores | 16 CPU cores |
| Dedicated Memory (MB) | 1024 | 2048 | 1024 | 2048 | 256 | 512 |
| IP Address | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Control Panel | cPanel/WHM | Plesk 9 | (none) | |||
| Price (/mo) | $39.96 | $71.96 | $39.96 | $71.96 | $29.95 | $39.95 |
Currently, the most popular hosting package is the VPS-Fusion because of cPanel/WHM that comes with the account. It is a highly customizable account that is ready out of the box.
In terms of the different packages, it appears that the cPanel/WHM combination tends to be more popular in the N. America market, while the Plesk control panel tends to be more popular in the Asian and European market segments.
In terms of the NoCP VPS, this is more appealing for avid Linux users that have more experience and know their way around the virtual server environment.
From the website, I learned that VPSNext does not run on its own data centers. Should your customers be concerned by it? What can we know more about the hardware behind your hosting services?
That’s a great question. We are currently running our data center out of Equinix; one of the largest and most secure data centers on the east coast.
However, we are currently in the process of migrations over to our own facility, which is about to come online within the next 30 – 45 days (in middle or late August this year). Our customers will see a vast improvement in speed and reliability. We are very excited about this!
Moving from a web host to another could be very tiring. What can VPSNext do for its customers in the process?
We realize that moving to another host provider is a hassle. A large percentage of our customers have transferred to us from another host, so our support technicians are very familiar with this process. Our technicians make this process as smooth as possible and will work with the customer for as long as needed.
How about day-to-day customer support – what kind of after-sales service we can get from VPSNext?
One aspect that we offer for all of our customers is 24×7 support. Offering this kind of support is imperative. Our customers are able to get in contact with us at their convenience, this is why we have engineers available 24×7x365 and ready to answer the phone in 20 seconds or less.
We offer many ways for our customers to get in contact with us: phone, live chat, email, and ticket support. The most popular support method is our ticket support. While we always strive to answer tickets in the fastest possible time, some cases require escalation. However, on average our response time is less than 15 minutes!
In your opinion, what makes a good VPS host? It would be great if you can tell us some key points when it comes to picking up the right VPS hosting.
Since we belong to a niche market of avid users, one of the hardest parts for a good host is to ensure that customers are constantly satisfied with the level of service and the resources that they are receiving for their money. The other obvious one is; marketing to a niche market since it’s a smaller market segment.
The global economy seems bouncing back a little recently. Does that affect sales and growth rate a lot at VPSNext?
Yes, we have felt some of the effects of the global economy, but overall our growth rate has continued to increase. We have found that many people that have been effected by the economy have turned to the online sector to build a virtual presence.
Where do you see the company in 3 years time?
We see ourselves continuing to grow and further ourselves within the VPS market and offering other flavours of the VPS series such as; OSX (Apple OS), and Windows.
Well that’s all for my questions. Is there anything you wish to add?
I think that covers it! Thank you again for giving me the chance to share a little more about our company!
Sound Bites
VPSNext has been in business for about 5 years. The company offers VPS hosting services in various control panel and provide 24/7/365 customer services. VPSNext is in the mid of migrating their facilities to its own data centers and the staffs are expecting a vast improvement in hosting speed and reliability.
In case you wish to learn more about VPSNext, visit: http://www.vpsnext.com
Interview with Meredith Livesay of VPSNext
July 21, 2010
I had the opportunity to get in touch with Meredith Livesay of VPSNext recently and I’m honored to have her as our interview guest today. As there are little forum discussion or user reviews on VPSNext, this interview is a must read for those who are interested with the hosting company. Meredith has done an excellent job answering the questions and her insights on the hosting industry are as precious as gold.
Q&A with Meredith Livesay of VPSNext
Hi Meredith, thank you for being with us today. To get things started, let’s go with some basic introduction. What can we know more about you and your company, VPSNext?
You’re welcome! Thank you for giving me the change to have this interview. Currently, I am the Marketing Manager for VPSNext. Through the time that I have been with them I have seen this company grow tremendously even in a short amount of time.
VPSNext began about five years ago as a web hosting company that focuses solely on the virtual private server market. One of the aspects I love most about this company is that it is locally owned and operated; this allows us to really focus on our customers and what they want. Feedback is crucial to our business. VPSNext as a company is very focused on offering quality products, while still keeping our prices competitive.
Who should use VPSNext? Please briefly describe VPSNext ‘s target market.
Our typical customer is one who has outgrown their shared environment but is not ready to move to a dedicated server. A VPS is also the perfect fit for large scale communities such as, developer forums, design boards, and many other types of resource consuming activities.
Additionally, e-commerce users prefer to be on a virtual private server because it is like having their own box.
Let’s talk about VPSNext’s hosting packages – cPanel, Plesk, and No Control Panel VPS Hosting Packages (see table below). Which is the most popular package; and what are the major differences among these three?
| Features | cPanel VPS | Plesk VPS | NoCP VPS | |||
| Packages | VPS Fusion | VPS Nitro | VPS Spark | VPS Ultra | VPS Starter | VPS Basic |
| Disk Space (GB) | 50 | 100 | 50 | 100 | 30 | 60 |
| CPU Limit | 16 CPU cores | 16 CPU cores | 16 CPU cores | 16 CPU cores | 16 CPU cores | 16 CPU cores |
| Dedicated Memory (MB) | 1024 | 2048 | 1024 | 2048 | 256 | 512 |
| IP Address | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Control Panel | cPanel/WHM | Plesk 9 | (none) | |||
| Price (/mo) | $39.96 | $71.96 | $39.96 | $71.96 | $29.95 | $39.95 |
Currently, the most popular hosting package is the VPS-Fusion because of cPanel/WHM that comes with the account. It is a highly customizable account that is ready out of the box.
In terms of the different packages, it appears that the cPanel/WHM combination tends to be more popular in the N. America market, while the Plesk control panel tends to be more popular in the Asian and European market segments.
In terms of the NoCP VPS, this is more appealing for avid Linux users that have more experience and know their way around the virtual server environment.
From the website, I learned that VPSNext does not run on its own data centers. Should your customers be concerned by it? What can we know more about the hardware behind your hosting services?
That’s a great question. We are currently running our data center out of Equinix; one of the largest and most secure data centers on the east coast.
However, we are currently in the process of migrations over to our own facility, which is about to come online within the next 30 – 45 days (in middle or late August this year). Our customers will see a vast improvement in speed and reliability. We are very excited about this!
Moving from a web host to another could be very tiring. What can VPSNext do for its customers in the process?
We realize that moving to another host provider is a hassle. A large percentage of our customers have transferred to us from another host, so our support technicians are very familiar with this process. Our technicians make this process as smooth as possible and will work with the customer for as long as needed.
How about day-to-day customer support – what kind of after-sales service we can get from VPSNext?
One aspect that we offer for all of our customers is 24×7 support. Offering this kind of support is imperative. Our customers are able to get in contact with us at their convenience, this is why we have engineers available 24×7x365 and ready to answer the phone in 20 seconds or less.
We offer many ways for our customers to get in contact with us: phone, live chat, email, and ticket support. The most popular support method is our ticket support. While we always strive to answer tickets in the fastest possible time, some cases require escalation. However, on average our response time is less than 15 minutes!
In your opinion, what makes a good VPS host? It would be great if you can tell us some key points when it comes to picking up the right VPS hosting.
Since we belong to a niche market of avid users, one of the hardest parts for a good host is to ensure that customers are constantly satisfied with the level of service and the resources that they are receiving for their money. The other obvious one is; marketing to a niche market since it’s a smaller market segment.
The global economy seems bouncing back a little recently. Does that affect sales and growth rate a lot at VPSNext?
Yes, we have felt some of the effects of the global economy, but overall our growth rate has continued to increase. We have found that many people that have been effected by the economy have turned to the online sector to build a virtual presence.
Where do you see the company in 3 years time?
We see ourselves continuing to grow and further ourselves within the VPS market and offering other flavours of the VPS series such as; OSX (Apple OS), and Windows.
Well that’s all for my questions. Is there anything you wish to add?
I think that covers it! Thank you again for giving me the chance to share a little more about our company!
Sound Bites
VPSNext has been in business for about 5 years. The company offers VPS hosting services in various control panel and provide 24/7/365 customer services. VPSNext is in the mid of migrating their facilities to its own data centers and the staffs are expecting a vast improvement in hosting speed and reliability.
In case you wish to learn more about VPSNext, visit: http://www.vpsnext.com
JustHost User Review by Katja
July 19, 2010
I received an unsolicited JustHost review from a reader named Katja recently and I think it’s a useful piece for those who are considering JustHost.
JustHost Review by Katja
Just as you, I have been spending hours searching for a reliable host and reading reviews. To be honest, I do this about once a month, every time our hosting with JustHost majorly tanks and causes problems.
Frequent server outages
We have been with them since January 2010 and so far had at least once a month server outages, promises of being moved to a newer “faster” server, suggestions of add on fees for priority support (which completely ignored us during one episode of issues), daily backups and faster server guarantee for additional fee… all of which we purchased to make our forum site running more smoothly.
Every time we started encountering issues and escalated it to priority support they started off with the old “the problem is on your end, have you tried turning it off and on again” bit and endless email trails to finally get to the bottom that a server had failed and they were working on it.
Now things like this can happen, a bit of a downtime is unfortunate but I guess to be expected, however to go through this once a month, lies of them moving the site to a faster server, them migrating the sites and doing it incorrectly (TWICE IN A ROW) by forgetting to point the nameservers to the new servers so the forum was active in two “universes”… them telling us the site cannot be restored to the daily backup but only the last weekly one (losing a weeks worth of data despite having paid extra for daily backups), their customer service not even properly reading mails and properly addressing the people who sent it and after all of this not ONCE being refunded the monthly hosting fee when we had major troubles and downtimes.
10 hours down time!
Last issue was a 10+ hours outage and continued problems when the site was restored, mainly data loss and again wrongly pointed nameservers, despite them being warned about that when they finally agreed to move the site to a new server after being out for 10h already. What is frustrating is that there are no warnings or info mails when a server tanks or is undergoing some sort of maintenance. They don’t apply any type of load balancing that servers can be maintained without customers losing uptimes. When the customer contacts them about an issue they have a long list of lies to reply with before they honestly admit what is going on, they don’t apply services you pay for (priority service taking 24h to reply when they promise 30 minutes, daily back ups, faster servers) and every small issue turns into a few days worth of email trails and headaches.
JustHost -cheap and good for low traffic website
So all in all, JustHost may be cheap and good for websites with low traffic (as you mentioned in your JustHost reviews, that’s how you test them) but their technical support is incompetent and reliability is significantly less than 97% stated in most online reviews.
Cheers and happy reviewing!
Katja
P/S: Katja if you are reading this please contact me – I wish to give a link to your site (as credit) but can’t reach you.
Send me your web hosting reviews!
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FatCow: Host Smart Drive Smart Contest
July 15, 2010
In case you are not aware, FatCow is running an awesome (they called it ‘moovelous’) sweepstake and the hosting company is giving some great, great prizes away! A few lucky winners will drive away a Smart ForTwo Coupe, a Vespa scooter, and one of four Shwinn bikes to its customers.
Free car for a $3.67/mo hosting?!
No joke! Buy a $3.67/mo hosting and you stand a chance to win a brand new Smart ForTwo.
Look at the picture below (ladies please, the car not the cute guy!). Deep breath. Close your eyes for 10 seconds. Imagine yourself sitting in the car and driving it around your neighborhood. Don’t you just feel G-R-E-A-T?
To enter FatCow Host Smart Drive Smart Giveaway
Okay I know you want this so here’s how you can get yourself in.
You will automatically receive one entry into the Sweepstakes for doing any one of these: signup for a new hosting account at FatCow now, refer a friend via its affiliate program, add a client to your FatCow reseller account, or be an active FatCow customer with a hosting account with no outstanding account (yes, this means if you are an existing customer you are in automatically).
UNFORTUNATELY, the sweepstake is only open to legal residents of the 50 United States (and D.C.) 18 years or older (rules, here). This means if you are living out of United States (like me 
) then you are not included in this promotion. The sweepstake started on May 17, 2010 and ends at 11:59 pm ET on September 30, 2010.
Other things you might want to know
About the car
The Smart ForTwo is a funky urban ultra-compact car. The car is based on a platform developed jointly my Smart and Mitsubishi for space efficient cars. The small size and low weight make this trendy car also one of the most fuel efficient cars barring the hybrid duo from Honda and Toyota. It is also the least expensive one in this list. The prices of ForTwo start at $12,635 and it return 36 miles to a gallon of fuel… More at Smart Homepage.
Further action
In case you want to know more about FatCow and its giveaway.
Read my FatCow Review.
Signup FatCow now – Enter to win a brand new car.