HostRocket.com?

craigh

I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience with HostRocket.com -- a hosting service. Positive or negative.

tanx!

Anon

I have lots of experience. I'll help you out.

First, their deals are good. For $10 or $20, you can get monthly Web hosting, use of your own domain name, use of their DNS servers, etc. You get a fair amount of bandwidth, although even a medium-successful site will have to purchase additional bandwidth.

They try to be VERY secure with server access, so there is NO telnet. You have to use a secure shell client (like Telnet, but uses encryption). However, because their "control panel" is so tricked out, I just use that. You can completely manage the file system through their Web-based control panel.

They have online discussion forums and a knowledgebase, so you can get answers at 2 a.m. if you need.

As for PHP, its good, and regularly upgraded. It was at 4.0.3, just went up to 4.0.4pl1 a month or two ago. You can use a .htaccess file to change around the php.ini settings, and it seems to work nicely for me.

MySQL use at hostrocket is great. They have a Web-based control panel for that, too. I've been able to easily set up tons of tables and browse the data using their tools.

The bad stuff -- there isn't much, but I do think the company is a bit overloaded. The mail server sometimes blocks outgoing email for an hour or two. And the Web servers seem sluggish. For instance, right now my site (www.outshine.com) consists of two lines of text on the home page. That's ALL. Yet it takes about a 5 second lull before the page displays. However, once you get "in" the site, subsequent pages seem to display fast, so I guess the problem could be just a sluggish DNS server.

keegan

I'm currently hosting two sites with HostRocket, http://prescottontheweb.com and http://brokerlounge.com.

My experience is that they have an excellent and responsive staff, but their operation has a few problems. First, the servers seem slightly overloaded; sometimes when a script on one of my sites attempts to connect to the MySQL database (on the same server) it gets an error saying there are too many connections. This doesn't happen very often but it's making us look at other options anyway.

Also, I have had several minor billing issues with HR which have so far gone unresolved. For some reason they simply haven't answered my numerous email messages regarding billing yet.

So overall, I'd say HR is very good to run a small site on, or to develop a site. But I wouldn't recommend trying to run anything too complex on it.

Keegan

Anon

A client of mine has a site with them. While we were waiting for them to switch the DNS over, we were working on the site and implemented an extensive online library of db tables. When they switched the DNS, they erased our account "on accident" and wiped all of our files and db tables out. We had the files backed up (thank goodness) but lost the entire database.

I say, ditch Hostrocket. They suck.

Anon

HostRocket is not for the feint hearted. the prices used to be good, but now they have hiked them on the more expensive side of the range, that is similar hosting service providers.

the support is unqualified, they mostly don't answer to your problems because they mostly don't know how to solve the problems.

HostRocket.com's policies and procedures are confusing at the best, and damn neigh frustrating mostly, a few examples:

they took down the mailing list software that we paid for because it was, in their words "too much pain to maintian".
they announced reseler packages about six months ago, and they are not up yet -- well, you could 'register' for a reseller plans, and pay 60 $ + for them, but can't activate them.