3 Month Review: Ripple Host (RippleHost.com)

[MMiz]

I've had a domain hosted at RippleHost for three months now and thought I would come back and share a review.

I currently have two domains hosted with them that can by privately verified by contacting me via this forums Email or PM feature.

Background:
RippleHost is owned by the same guy (Alan) who owns SplashHost.com. Started in December of 2002, they have only been in business for a few months. They are located in the NAC datacenter.

Services: C - Average
They offer a single package with 100 MB of space and 1 GB of transfer for $10 a year. Additional information regarding their package can be found on their site. They use cPanel (http://cpanel.net) as their control panel. There is no option to upgrade and if more than 1 GB of bandwidth is used per month, one's account is suspended until the next month.

Customer Support: D - Below Average
Customer support is handled via their support forums / main site. All support is handled this way, and no email / helpdesk / phone support is offered. Private issues may be Private Messaged to the admin only after his approval. This company is able to exist because of the time the admins spend on the forums. Admins give short responses if ever, and it can take more than a month to have a module installed (if ever). If you're looking for amazing or even okay customer support I would look elsewhere. FAQs are limited via their forum, and it is mostly members helping other members.

Network: C+ - Average
They are located in the NAC (http://nac.net) datacenter. Its a great datacenter, but over the period I was using their services there were some major outages due to power issues. This problem was not isolated to RippleHost, but caused some issues.

Value: A+ - Excellent!
Who can beat $10 a year? I bought multiple accounts for $5 and actually use them as my main mail server.

Overall: B- - Above Average
If this company was run by anyone besides Alan who has a proven record, I would say "This is too good to be true," and move on, but it has been a great experience overall. I continue to use them and see myself using them for a long time to come. They are able to provide such cheap services because of all the automation and cost-cutting measures. I've been very pleased :)

Hope this is helpful to some others :)

-Matt

[suppleSupport]

Great review, thanks :)

[Curtis H.]

Nice, highly detailed review Matt. Great job. Thanks for sharing with us.

[Dapon]

We need more of this type of information instead of the normal "they suck" reviews we normally see.
Good job Matt.

[JeremyV]

Very detailed review. Infact... I think it would be quite beneficial to have a review forum, and come up with a strict format such as what Matt did. Giving a few topic areas, give them an A-E score for each one, and a reason of why it was scored that way :)

[no1v2]

Like everyone else said, good review :beer:

Btw, why exactly do so many people at WHT and now here claim NAC is an unusually great data center? I've never been there, for all I know it puts most places to shame, but the impression I get is that most of these people haven't been there either, and don't know anything more than what's shown on their site. I'm not trying to put NAC down, I just want to know what all the hype is about. The recent power outage definately wasn't impressive.

[Chicken]

Well, the question(s) are, "What is so great about them? What makes a great datacenter great? What are you comparing it to?" -etc. With some of the datacenters some people use, I'm not sure it is surprising that NAC would automatically fall into the great category, however when I had a server there, I had no problems, speeds were great, connection great (Internap), I didn't have any complaints. I've never used a server directly through the datacenter (except for Tera-byte, but I don't think they built the facitily/area they are in).

[DarktidesNET]

A "Hosting Provider Review" forum would be pretty cool actually.

[no1v2]

Originally posted by Chicken:

What makes a great datacenter great?That was actually part of my question, but I think I only implied it to myself. The obvious answer is redundancy, redundancy, and more redundancy, but of course there's more to it than that. I also happen to be partial to free arcade's and coffee... :D

Originally posted by Chicken:

What are you comparing it to?I've rented servers in one of Hurricane Eletric's (via FastServers) and Webreseller's datacenters, but I don't really know if either of them is a particularly good facility. I work in some Equinix and Exodus datacenters, so I suppose they're my only real points of comparison. Sometime when I'm in the area I really should see if Webreseller will give me a tour and show me my server.



Speaking of redundancy, I'm supposed to get to see a newly opened datacenter with at least N+2 redundancy in every system. Supposedly there aren't any other facilities like it, so I'm wondering if anyone here knows of any.

[Chicken]

Originally posted by DarktidesNET:

A "Hosting Provider Review" forum would be pretty cool actually.
You mean of hosts who provide services to end-users, rather than for hosts (datacenters and providers of hosting services):

Datacenters and Providers of Hosting Services (for hosts) (http://hosthideout.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=40)
Want to lease a server or colo your server? Have a Windows client but only provide Linux services? Here you can discuss datacenters and providers of hosting services, etc.

[Adam]

Great review Matt =)

[JeremyV]

Originally posted by Chicken:

You mean of hosts who provide services to end-users, rather than for hosts (datacenters and providers of hosting services):

Datacenters and Providers of Hosting Services (for hosts) (http://hosthideout.com/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=40)
Want to lease a server or colo your server? Have a Windows client but only provide Linux services? Here you can discuss datacenters and providers of hosting services, etc.

I think what he means is the same thing I was getting at. A forum that is only for detailed reviews like Matt did. Meaning, :chicken: sets up guidelines with certain questions to answer and/or a rating scale of 1-10 or something.

Sure people can post their experiences and reviews in that forum, but most of them are always some real quick this host sucks, or this host is good. But if you had a forum that was only for reviews, and ONLY detailed reviews that answered the specified questions and kept the same format, it could be benefitial.

Not really benefitial to me, but for others who may not be hosts and would like some good info about someone :banana:

[Alan]

Thanks for the review MMiz.

We dont offer technical support, the idea is the users are meant to support each other. So you can complain about it being slow :P

[Chicken]

So the new forum isn't xactly what either of you were thinking I gather. A 'nothing but reviews' reviews forum eh? Hmmmmm.

[MMiz]

Originally posted by Alan:

Thanks for the review MMiz.

We dont offer technical support, the idea is the users are meant to support each other. So you can complain about it being slow :P

Alan,

Ive been 100% satisfied plus some with your service. I try to keep the playing field level with all my reviews though, so when I gave VO a B for support, a D in my opinion for the services offered is just fine. Keep up the good work!

[JSpired]

Nice, thorough review, MMiz. I have an account with Ripple Host as well and have been equally as satisfied and impressed with their services. Thanks for sharing your experience!

[proxy]

Great review! very informative