Web Hosting Lab

Page 2 - eWebZone benchmark results

eWebZone – my first choice of a "normal" web hosting company, which isn’t that famous and doesn’t have ads on every hosting related page. My first impression upon seeing their site was that probably this is a company, which does a very good job and won’t make a compromise with the quality of its service. I created an account (which, by the way, is free for 1 week) and I was just going to check my mail client expecting to see an email from them when I received a phone call from someone from their sales staff who turned out to be very polite and activated my account immediately. I was pleased and could hardly wait to run the tests to determine the speed there. Everything I had seen so far left an impression on me that it was going to be one of the fastest hosts I had ever run a test on.

I had no reason to complain whatsoever – the welcome email was rich in content, everything worked just fine and I started running the tests. Their Control Panel is a cPanel and has everything necessary for running a website. The cPanel CP and Fantastico are quite fast.

You can open a ticket easily and without looking for a link for a long time. Their billing software is very user-friendly and contains everything necessary - FAQ (though not very rich in content as of now), a server status page with live monitoring of the services, an affiliate program and other useful features. The tech support is of good quality – I asked them about the server hardware where my account was and they replied very exhaustively after 1 hour and 44 minutes – the machine was Dual Opteron 265 with 8 GB RAM and the server was divided into 4 VPSs, each responsible for a specific task – I assume that it means that 1 VPS takes care of the MySQL, 1 – for the PHPs, for example, but I guess that this is the reason why the cPanel section loads very fast. Great, everything should be fast then.

Upon running the tests, though, I ran upon the rocks - eWebZone turned out to be one of the slowest hosts in my list. What’s even worse – they failed where no other host had – they did pass the PHP benchmark test, but they had 13% of failed requests (for comparison, the other hosting companies virtually didn’t have any failed requests), the PHP stress test - 42.6% of failed requests, the big PHP stress test - 46.8% of failed requests. This is even slower than the big companies, which hardly have such powerful servers. The MySQL test wasn’t bad, albeit quite slow, and hadn’t so many failed requests. This whole thing makes me think that the system with the division of the server into 4 VPSs is half-baked. Some sections have been allocated more resources than actually are needed, while others – lack the necessary resources. Most probably they just overload the servers and don’t allocate well their clients. Anyway, I don’t intend to pay for their hosting services under such conditions. I will cancel my account before the free period expires. Besides, I already have their IPs and so I will be able to monitor their uptime in the future. If, after all, somebody from eWebZone should read this review and decide to take measures to better eWebZone’s performance – then he may contact me. I would love to run my tests again (although I won’t be running them during the hours they are expecting because they shouldn’t get to know what my account is so that they won’t manipulate the whole procedure).

UPDATE:

The owner of eWebZone contacted me in the middle of February. He was delighted by the fact that a hosting review site had paid special attention to his company. But, of course – he expressed doubts about my tests. I completely understand him – after all, almost everywhere eWebZone had ranked last. It’s perfectly natural that he worried about this result. But, after all, there’s an undisputable fact – the scripts take time to be executed. It’s this particular time that I try to measure. As to whether his server is overloaded or not – it’s a part of his job, not mine :) By the way, let me tell you – I’ve recently received emails from satisfied users, who too have tried to measure the speed of the different hosting companies. The tests they have run coincide entirely with the results of my tests. After all, if the end users seek exactly this – I will give it to them. The only difference is that the incoming emails defined the hosts as being either "fast" or "slow". Without numbers. As for the numbers – I will take care for them. Anyway, let me return back to the concrete review – I seem to have deviated from it. I showed him the tests and a few days later I ran those benchmark tests again. The results this time were much better. Here’s a comparison between then and now:

1. There are no failed requests during the normal PHP test – there were many of them before!
2. Considerably less failed requests during both PHP stress tests + 2 times faster execution of the two tests.
3. The MySQL test now went much faster
4. The MySQL stress test has considerably less failed requests
5. The light PHP test was executed 10% faster than before.

The end result, according to me, is impressive. I sincerely hope that eWebZone have understood that the client is more important than the hardware expenses and that they will at least keep up the good level they have recently reached. The company’s owner has left a very good impression on me and I have a feeling this could be the beginning of this company’s upsurge. They have a big potential and they can climb up the hosting ladder with better servers (and good balance of their VPSs, of course). Well done, eWebZone!

Pros:
+ a very good client/billing area
+ good and friendly support with very good explanations
+ very expensive and strong servers
+ cPanel control panel, which is quite fast
+ they offer a free trial – you can try before you buy
+ they seems to care of the quality (since the owner contact me and the 2nd test is better)

Cons:
- even after the 2nd benchmark test the big PHP stress test has too many failed requests
- a very scarce FAQ section

Page 2 - eWebZone benchmark results