Moving from Memset to EzPz
Back in September I wrote about the Memset Miniserver not being good enough for my site, and it’s only finally now that I had the time to make the switch elsewhere.
After much research, it was eventually a comment on my blog post that led me to EzPz hosting, with whom I finally decided to host. And not before time—after significant problems with the 128Mb VPS, Memset wrote to me saying I’d really need to upgrade to the 256Mb version, boosting my monthly payments from £30 to £50, and still with no paid support. To get paid support would be another £30 per month. £960 per year to host a few WordPress powered sites and have someone available to answer questions? I’m in the wrong business!
Don’t get me wrong—Memset have always been very helpful, but their offered solutions are way too expensive for a small one man business like mine. You need to be a big company with a fat hosting budget to really make good use of their dedicated solutions.
EzPz Hosting
So, having decided on EzPz, I took about getting informed. Their pre-sales was exceptional, with an open forum where you can ask anything and be answered very promptly. I spent a few days asking questions on there and reading other customer enquiries and it answered all my questions. One customer asked well over 50 questions and all were answered clearly and promptly, with no suggestion that the customer was being difficult or annoying—something I’ve seen only too often on other similar forums.
I finally made the purchase of the Enterprise Reseller Package at around midnight on Friday 13th Feb—unlucky for some, but not in this case. Online purchases were handled through Google Checkout which can often take a while to register a purchase, but even while that was going on, the automated account was setup and I received immediate login details to my client area.
The excellent
The first thing I did was to raise a support ticket to ask for one of their free services to be implemented: copying everything from my old host to the new. Since they both run on WHM/cPanel, it’s apparently straightforward to do this. You simply provide your login details to your old hosts WHM, and everything is transferred for you: email accounts, websites, databases, users, files—you name it, everything! The only bit that went a bit screwy here was that the transfer will override your new WHM username with your old one. I didn’t know this, so I couldn’t login with the new details sent in the welcome letter, but a quick support ticket solved it, sent at 12:30am and answered by 12:45am. I’ve never had that kind of response time from any other hosting company after hours: it’s normally handled the next day in my experience. Excellent stuff.
One of the great things with having everything copied over is that you don’t have to reconfigure any of your email software—it all just carries on working as before. Superb!
I sent a few other support requests over the next day and everything was responded to within 15-30 mins. I’d repointed my name-servers before I went to bed, and by late Saturday, they were all pointing at the new host. Everything has been working fine since.
I haven’t yet had a chance to explore all the stuff in my Client space, but with my previous knowledge of WHM, I know it’s going to be easy to manage my own multiple accounts and set up new clients with hosting.
The slightly less than excellent
I have two small criticisms:
- The Support Knowledgebase is a little thin on the ground and the search tool often yields no results for obvious terms such as “nameserver”. However, there are some nice and simple tutorial videos for common activities which have answered most of my questions. And to be honest, not having an extensive support library (compared to other hosts I’ve used) isn’t really an issue with the support requests being handled so fast.
- No telephone support. I usually see this as a warning about the professionalism and responsiveness of a company. However, all email support tickets have be handled very fast so far, so hopefully this won’t be an issue.
Overall, I’m very impressed with the experience so far. Of course, I’ve yet to use the service in any great capacity, so I’ll write an update within the next couple months once I have a better idea of how it all performs.