Web Hosting Lab

Page 2 - eBoundHost benchmark results

The Chicago-based eBoundHost has been offering web hosting since 2000. Their datacenter is also located in Chicago. The servers they are utilizing are P4 3 GHz with 3 GB memory. According to their blog, they equip some of the servers with Dual Core XEON 5130 (2.00 GHz) Woodcrest. This is very good, but, being a new user myself, I didn’t get the opportunity to be on such a fast server with 4 cores.

I created an account with them. The procedure was short, and the welcome email with the fully activated account arrived in 15 minutes. The welcome email didn’t impress me much. It contained a login link to the control panel, FTP info, MS Front Page info and Webalizer info – a quite scanty welcome email on the whole. But on the other hand, when I logged in the control panel (they use Plesk) – I found all the necessary links there – for the help center, the billing and the domain name management sections. This is very useful because some people don’t like reading welcome emails much, but instead prefer to search the site itself and find what they need there. They have a very well arranged control panel on the whole, with 31 pre-installed scripts (Mambo, phpBB2, osCommerce, etc).

Now it’s time for me to test their customer support. They use "Help Desk Software By Kayako eSupport" for their ticket system. I myself had used it in 2-3 other places and quite liked it. You create an account once, and then browse wherever you want. You can open a ticket via email or through the ticketing system’s page. Despite the good choice of a ticketing system, it’s evident that they didn’t do their best to provide more information – the FAQ section is empty. You will have to open a ticket every time you have something to ask. Speaking about tickets – the replies definitely don’t arrive very fast. I received my first reply after 2 hours and 26 minutes, and the second reply – after almost 20 hours. It depends obviously on the time you ask a question and on how much they are loaded with work. Apparently they don’t have customer support staff in excess, and so you cannot always rely on a fast answer.

The next step I had to take was to run the tests. This time I started with the email test – the mail came fast – in a couple of seconds. During most of the tests the speed was from average to very good. On the other hand, eBoundHost passed the MySQL test excellently – the speed was FAST! It seems that if there aren’t overloaded sites on the server (where I was at the moment) – I won’t have a problem in the future as well.

Pros:
+ a very good client area (Control Panel - Plesk) full of content
+ friendly support with exhaustive explanations
+ if you are lucky your account will be placed on a very fast server
+ they offer a free trial – you can try before you buy
+ they offer streaming audio and video
+ a few failed requests on the PHP stress test
+ fast MySQL

Cons:
- not too fast execution of PHPs
- sometimes the support team is too slow

Page 2 - eBoundHost benchmark results