A Small Orange Setup

[Marc118]

I was just wondering for those of you who use ASO how long it took for your services to be active?

[Christie]

Remembering back around 8 hours - support were helpful all the way

[yellow_spider]

Mine took about 5 hours i think ... Support is good and they are very helpful if you have problems.

[simsim]

2 hours.

[rareclownfish]

6 hours

[bmc]

A Small Orange Sets Up Fast!

Mine took about five minutes and I used PayPal as my payment option.

[Qryztufre]

I got my final donation to pay for my host & vB around 12:30 on a Thursday afternoon. I had my ASO account set up & vB installed by 5:12 that evening...and I was certainly NOT in a rush, and had to read the manual (as I had no install or server experience).
Q

[rnmcd]

So is everyone satisfied with their Small Orange service/account?

[Qryztufre]

Yes, I am VERY pleased with them, even their support (they are real people, and nice). Though, keep in mind, I've nothing to compare them too, as this is my first go at owning my own site.

[rnmcd]

I've only had one host and they have been a nightmare for me. But I'm too afraid to go anywhere else because I don't know if this is the way it is everywhere.

[mlucek]

So is everyone satisfied with their Small Orange service/account?

I've only been with ASO for about 4 mos and am very satisfied so far. Tech support has been pretty darn good via email and the 1 chat session I had a few mos ago. The guy I chatted (IM) with for support was very helpful & even courteous (as can be via IM). It turned out to be a config problem on my side, not ASO's, yet this guy was professional and pleasant the whole time. We wound up chatting about unrelated stuff for about 15 mins after I fixed my problem. I wish I could remember his name so I could put in a good word on ASO's support forums.

Yes, ASO has a decent support forum (uses IPB, not vBulletin )

My sites got hacked on my last 2 hosts and both of them couldn't give a rat's hinney, even after I spent hours typing up support emails and sending data showing how they were hacked and begging and pleading with them to call me - no phone support. How's this for an excuse, "There's no phones in our data center." Yeah right, guess nobody in the Atlanta area has a cell phone ? DUHHHHH. They must think people are really stupid to buy that line of bull. Support started out very good on those 2 hosts, then went to sh*t after they were bought out by bigger hosting companies.

I did a lot of research/looking for a new host last fall. There are literally thousands of hosting companies so you kinda have to weed thru the crap. Read a LOT of people's reviews, opinions, experiences and you'll get a sense of which hosting companies are the more reliable and legitimate ones. One of the best all around web sites for researching is:

WebHostingTalk.com

or WHT as it's called many times.

SitePoint.com

is also good.

I kept seeing the ASO name pop up with consistently good reviews, don't think I saw anything negative about them. I did a trial run which went well, so decided to host the rest of my sites with them and so far have been satisfied. Prices are reasonable, they don't oversell their resources (e.g. no 100G bandwith or 100G disk space, etc.). I'm not really fond of the CPanel control panel, it's way too clunky, but it's used by quite a few hosting companies and I can live with it, does what I need.

So bottom line: ASO is recommended by me

Mike

[VBUser12]

So is everyone satisfied with their Small Orange service/account?

Well, I'm sorry to say, no we are not!!

We have been with them for over a year with a good sized vBulletin forum (have about 10,000 posts in it as of now) tho' only 37 members, but LOTS of attachments.

Anyway, yes they are fairly responsive through email, tho' I gotta tell you it is MUCH better to have a live human to talk to over the phone, which ASO does not have. It is MUCH better to work a real-time problem with a live person, obviously.

The thing is... yeah alot of the time performance is fine, but what is NOT acceptable are random "outages" where sometimes we just cannot even get to our home page -- the connection totally times out. Then later tech support at ASO says they had to do another "emergency reboot" on our server again. To me this sounds like a tech support cop-out or "blanket excuse" when something is wrong. Maybe that server is just overloaded, but we have had enough of excuses and are looking elsewhere.

Right now I'm thinking about a virtual dedicated server on GoDaddy.com since they have CPanel as an option and allow full ssh access with such accounts.

But I'm searching these forums to see if anyone else has solid perfomance with almost 0 downtime, full ssh and mysql access in a regular shared hosting account... I think I might have to go to a virtual dedicated one to get all of that. Opinions welcome!

[simsim]

I would strongly argue against GoDaddy. They're a good domain registrar but an awful web host.

Have you looked for opinions & reviews at webhostingtalk.com? Personally I would recommend LiquidWeb.com or HostGator.com.

[Neal-UK]

So is everyone satisfied with their Small Orange service/account?

Not me, their service was terrible and I had times when the site would load very slowly and the images would time out showing the red x's. FTP was a nightmare as that had time out issues which ended up taking about an hour uploading a few vBulletin files due to the problems.

It all worked fine for people in the US from what I could tell, but very poor to the UK. They said it was due to my ISP having the data bottle-necking between the UK and USA, which was weird as no other sites gave me problems!

I paid for 4 hosting accounts, two upfront for a year but left them with over 7 months remaining as it was that bad. Even my users started to complain.

[GreekieGurli]

Not me, their service was terrible and I had times when the site would load very slowly and the images would time out showing the red x's. FTP was a nightmare as that had time out issues which ended up taking about an hour uploading a few vBulletin files due to the problems.

It all worked fine for people in the US from what I could tell, but very poor to the UK. They said it was due to my ISP having the data bottle-necking between the UK and USA, which was weird as no other sites gave me problems!

I paid for 4 hosting accounts, two upfront for a year but left them with over 7 months remaining as it was that bad. Even my users started to complain.

I have had a ASO shared account for two years with several outtages over those two years. Now that account just hosts a script that I upload pics to post on my board and that is all. I did try opening a VPS with them but had to cancel it the same day because they told me I couldn't add some support scripts that my youtube clone site needed. They refunded one year prepaid fee and I moved over to JaguarPC.

JaguarPC has been my number one host and is extremely reliable over ASO.
Their support is very fast too.