Jaguarpc.com Vs. Webfusion / Pipex
…a quick comparison/review of my experience with Webfusion/Pipex and Jaguarpc.com…
I first signed up with Webfusion as my web server provider in about 2004, Webfusion were a small-ish web-hosting company, they came recommended by people who knew what they were talking about; “they stack it high and sell it cheap” I was told… and they did…
Not very long after I signed up Webfusion were bought up by Pipex, an enormous web-hosing company. It s hard for me to say if Webfusion were bad before the buyout, but after they were terrible!
I had a VPS from Webfusion (a VPS is a Virtual Private Servers, a server which appears to be one server on a dedicated machine but is actually many servers on the one machine). Webfusion/Pipex “over sell” their VPSs so there are way too many VPSs on the one server. Providing VPSs is a perfectly legitimate way of providing servers to people won can’t afford or don’t need a dedicated server, however “over selling” means that the real-server’s resources, memory and such, are not adequate when divided between each VPS to perform its normal tasks.
My server was constantly running out of memory (a symptom of over selling), there was simply not enough available memory to perform even basic tasks. When I asked about this Webfusion/Pipex support took weeks, literally, to respond… and then they were not very helpful at all… and then again took weeks to respond to my responses to their responses… (this was VERY typical of my experience of their email support)… ultimately their answer was for me to upgrade to a more expensive VPS even though my VPS was running about 2% of what Webfusion/Pipex claimed it was capable of running.
Specifically, in case you care, it was the VPSs “kmemsize” which was the main, but not the only, problem.
About a year ago I found out that Webfusion/Pipex offered the exact same VPS I was on for half the price I was paying. This made me mad as hell! I pointed this out to them… and… nearly a month later… they responded telling me I could have the cheaper service, all I had to do was move my entire VPS to a new, identical and yet cheaper, VPS.
I tried to move everything to the new, cheaper, VPS… but it was too hard… Webfusion/Pipex Support were little/no help… and, frankly, the idea of all that work (moving everything from one server to another server) for a cheaper VPS that was not going actually work any better than the old VPS did not inspire the effort required to move my half-a-dozen web sites.
(In fairness to Webfusion/Pipex they did refund me for the new server that did not work out when I asked them to).
My VPS at Webfusion/Pipex limped and dragged its ass along along for five years. It just about managing to stay on line, sort of, until the end 2009 when life gave me a few weeks of nothing to do and I finally plucked up the courage to move my sites to another new web-provider and better VPS.
Again, on a personal recommendation, I chose Jaguarpc.com. The difference was enormous, no exaggeration to say the difference is from black to white, for very little more money (the difference in price is about $2 more per month) I have a working, functioning, VPS which does not run out of memory every five minutes (seriously, it was that bad with my old VPS, going off-line every five minutes), my new server works perfectly.
In addition I have access to a Support service that I have been so impressed with that I cannot express how pleased I am… Am I gushing about a web-host, of all things? I guess I am… Maybe this is the norm with anyone who is not used to Webfusion/Pipex, but Jaguarpc support have been amazing for me, quick and helpful responses to my (stupid?) questions, usually in less than an hour, and so far they have not charged me any extra for their help.
Was the transfer easy? No it was not! I am not brilliant at these things and it was tough; I had to get a lot of help from a friend a fair bit and my sites were off-line for about a week.
Was it worth it? Oh yes! It was so worth the time and effort, but it was a big deal and this is why I took so five years thinking about doing it and not getting on with it… In truth I only stuck with the guys that sucked for five years because of how scary the idea of moving everything was, indeed this is probably why so may other people just keep on putting up with their crap web-host.
Please, Jaguarpc.com, don’t be bought out by anyone.
