Web Hosting Lab

Page 2 - AceNet benchmark results

AceNet is currently hosting around 40 000 clients according to their site. It is a quite impressive number having in mind that their domain was registered in March 2003. Their datacenter is located in Atlanta. They have premium bandwidth from Abovenet, Allegiance, Aleron, Global Crossing, IBIS7, and Telia. Their servers are Dual Xeon 3.06 GHz with RAID10 HDDs. Their site looks very simple but they offer a full range of hosting products - shared hosting, VPS, reseller hosting and dedicated servers. They have a big Live chat button on all pages (with the exception of the Dedicated servers page), which shows that they are trying to provide the necessary info as much as they can. If you are looking for such info you simply cannot miss this huge Live chat button.

Their hosting plan is good and includes even static IP address, PHP 5, Site Studio and another 3 pages of features (I nearly lost myself :). They even offer a shared SSL certificate for free (though they don’t mention that it’s a shared one on their site).

Now it’s time for me to create an account. I ordered one, received a welcome email immediately and started to examine the features they were offering. Almost immediately it turned out that that the info I had of how to access the cPanel CP and the temporary URL was not correct. I opened a ticket and received a reply 4 minutes later. They are very fast and extremely polite. I even liked the fact that the URL was wrong in the welcome email because I had an opportunity to test the quality of their support. On the next day, while I was running my benchmark tests, I opened a ticket to see how they would reply again. They replied in a matter of 5 minutes again and were very exhaustive and polite.

The next step (on the next day) was to make benchmarks on the server I was at. After all the benchmarks had passed, I was stunned by the result from the big PHP stress benchmark. Only 1% failed.. Hm.. Strange. I decided to run the test one more time – again only 1% failed. I waited for several hours until the peak time came and ran the test once more – again only 1% failed. But running the big PHP stress test 3 times was obviously too much for them to handle. Soon after I had stopped running the 3rd test, I received a ticket from their administrator who said that he had seen pretty heavy PHP scripts and that he had blocked the script that loaded the server most. I told him it was only a test. He said "okay" and authorized the script again but told me not to run it to such an extent because it made the proper functioning of the server difficult. That’s a fact.. Especially since I had run the test 3 times in a single day.. I even wonder why they didn’t block my account. A little bit later I decided to run the MySQL stress test but got carried away and ran the big PHP stress test again – for the 4th time in a single day! Another ticket from the administrator came, informing me that they had again blocked the PHP that loaded the server most. They told me to inform them when to authorize it again. In reality, I didn’t expect to receive such information in return of the mistake I had made running the big PHP stress test. I happened to be blocked by certain hosts for overloading, but this one exceeded all my expectations. They respond very politely, without threats or panic whatsoever. They block only the PHP that loads the server most and when you tell them this won’t happen again, they authorize it. Even if it does happen again, they will block only the respective PHP instead of your whole account.

Pros:
+ super fast & polite customer support
+ the servers are not overloaded and have enough available resources
+ cPanel control panel, which is quite fast
+ they offer SiteStudio, PHP5, and a free SSL certificate
+ friendly administrators

Cons:
- the free SSL, which they offer, is a shared one
- they do not back up media files such as images, videos, or audio

Page 2 - AceNet benchmark results