Web Hosting Lab

Page 2 - ImHosted benchmark results

ImHosted is a company, which was established in 2000. Their site is very detailed and one can find everything about the company with one exception – its location. Where is this company located? Maybe in the USA? But then in which state or city? Not that it’s that important but usually such big companies provide a full address for contact purposes. That way you’d know whom you’re dealing with. And now it seems to me as if it was a phantom or something. Nevertheless, I will trust them and test whether they actually deserve all the awards they’ve received.

The signup process went smoothly and fast. They have a phone verification system. Everything was done in 15 minutes and I received the welcome email immediately. The welcome email itself was very detailed and contained explanations about everything – FPSE, the cPanel account, the billing account, the e-mail setup, FTP, the web site builder, the SubmitCentre account (where you submit your site to the search engines). A good start I’d say.

I don’t know the reason why but it was not until I logged into the cPanel that the plan made an impression on me. A 150 GB plan? Great - a whole disk especially for me. And the bandwidth - 3TB (3000 GB). LOL! It meant that I could upload one or two albums, each 1-2 GB... But in order to avoid risk I checked the terms and conditions first. It turned out that this space amounting to 150 GB could be used only for HTML and PHP files.

Multimedia files (photos/images, videos and so on) could not exceed 30% of all the uploaded files. Let’s do a simple calculation: 300 HTML/PHP files, each 10KB = 3 MB. It meant that I could not upload more than 1 MB of images. Yup.. I had to forget it. For me, this storage would be nothing more than a mere number in the cPanel, which I would enjoy only in my dreams where nobody could restrict me in anything :)

Now is the time for me to test the quality of their support. I tried to find out whether they had won an award for support.. but afterwards I found out that all the awards they had received were actually "general" awards. An award winner for budget hosting!? What’s that “budget hosting award winner” thing all about? Do they have fast servers? Good support? I had to take a wild guess since there was no info anywhere to be found. Anyway, I opened a ticket (by the way, their ticket system is very good) and received an answer 2 hours and 2 minutes later. It’s not bad. After a few days I opened a ticket again - 2 hours and 43 minutes response time. They answer well and exhaustively. I have no critical remarks in regard to their support. It’s good.

It’s time for me to run the benchmark tests. Basically, it’s not very charming – the stress benchmarks fail. While the single benchmarks passed well with an average speed. It means that as long as there isn’t a site, which loads the server heavily, the rest of the sites will load well. If, however, a given site loads the server a little more than the server can actually take – this will cause problems to the other sites. The boundary is very fragile.

Pros:
+ much info can be found on their site and in the welcome email
+ they have won many awards
+ they offer a website builder
+ they have US, UK and AU phone numbers
+ good support

Cons:
- 150 GB space? But impossible to use for anything but HTML/PHP files. You are allowed maximum 30% of your current hosting files to be multimedia files (images and videos)
- Tricky terms and conditions
- their servers are not very powerful and cannot take up big loads, but at the same time they offer 3000 GB traffic per account…

Page 2 - ImHosted benchmark results