Whenever I get a new server, I tend to screw around with it for awhile as a learning experience, refining my software stack (see signature if curious). As such, my server with Hivelocity only saw solid use beginning around June, though I have had the server for a few months longer than that.
Context
I do self-managed, only. VPS or physical server. I have no first-hand knowledge of Hivelocity’s or nearly any other company’s relative skill at managing actual servers. That is my job, as far as I am concerned. : )
While Ubiquity, Hivelocity, and HostVenom are the only companies I have rented physical servers from, I have had VPSes with many more. So while these three are the ones being compared, they are not the total extent of my experience.
Hivelocity hosts my smaller sites, mailserver, Minecraft servers and such. Averaging about half an mbps out. Nothing overly impressive, but between everyone there are enough users that I get notified of issues promptly.
Ratings
My parting review for my previous host looked rather ugly, so I’m going with ratings this time.
Network: 5/5 While there was a bit of an ickier period about a month ago, it seems to have passed. Still, Hivelocity’s network merely went from “Dropped packet? No idea what that is, sorry.” to merely “Well above average.” I have difficulty judging its speed – I don’t often host in Florida. My members in Florida sure do like it, however.
Outages: 4/5 Would have been 5/5, but just after finishing this review, the power plug on my machine got backed out yesterday. Annoying that that was even possible, though not the first host I’ve had this sort of thing happen on (ahem). It was certainly resolved promptly.
Security: 5/5 Was 2/5 when I signed up, but they have since cleaned things up nicely. IPMI is now over VPN, which is still not as typical as it ought to be. No silly ‘security questions’ or other such nonsense, and they have a very by-the-book way of going about things. You can tell you are going through a procedure when dealing with them. They did needlessly ask me for root rather often early on, but they appear to have gotten the hint and pulled that from their procedures. The 5/5 score is assuming that they have put a stop to that, anyway.
IP Reputation: 4/5 The relatively high prices seems to keep the worst of the scum away (plus the whole $500 spammer charge thing). While not perfect, my interaction with blocklists has been far more pleasant than when I was at Ubiquity. 4/5 is because I see Senderbase wagging its finger at some neighbors, and still had to get the /24 removed from a couple of blocklists (Trend Micro and a small ISP both thought it was a dynamic range…)
Resolution Times 5/5: “First, get their machine running.” Seems to be the top item in their list of procedures. Replacing hardware happens in under fifteen minutes, often. Used to Ubiquity’s lack of celerity, they got a bit flustered with how slow I responded for awhile.
Response Times 4/5: Ticket response times are about 5 minutes or so. Things move to resolution quickly.
Prices 4/5: Not ‘cheap’, but their hardware is solid for the price, and their network certainly is. They are not so inexpensive as some leaner outfits, but that is to be expected.
IPv6 3/5: There were some initial issues regarding their assignment scheme and planned pricing, most of which got resolved okay. I do think Hivelocity is in for a lot of hurt in a decade or so if they don’t do some rethinking about their assignment policies in the sooner term, which is most of the reason for the 3/5. Their IPv6 network is somewhat slower than their IPv4 network, but this has improved considerably over the past year. They offer PTR records for IPv6 addresses, which lets me do IPv6 mail and seems to make Google and Comcast happy.
PTR Record Setup: 2/5 Has to be done through ticket. Requires that the desired A record already be pointing to it. While I can understand the need to verify domain ownership, pointing the exact A record can be frustrating when moving things.
First-level Skill: 2/5 Hivelocity does have a lot of good people working for them – this review would not be so glowing if they did not. Regardless, some of their lower-level employees have left me a bit flustered. One repeatedly demanded my root password for things he did not need it for (I get the feeling it was procedure until they figured that I probably know what I am doing), and when I asked him for a public key he could use instead, he sent me a malformed one (did not bother checking until later). I can and did work around it, to be sure, but there were some frustrating moments.
- Note that most of this issue took place a year ago. It is quite possible that they have brushed up on some training in the interim. Good procedures do make up for a lot of the headache, however.
Conclusion
I have found there are always some initial headaches when doing something like ordering a server from a new company, and no one is perfect. You get used to their culture and policies, hardware is sometimes bad, etc.
Thankfully, those initial issues have stayed there. Hivelocity has had zero outages since my signing up with them, and only one potential regional outage, which I could not verify since I could not even get a traceroute from the user. So will let that slide. The power incident yesterday is unfortunate in coming between writing and posting this review, but my server was back up five minutes after submitting a ticket.
The issues I describe above are things I think they can improve on, and for all I know, they may have already (save the IPv6 bit, which they may be mulling over anyway).
I am satisfied with what I am getting for my money with Hivelocity, and fully intend to continue doing business with them for the foreseeable future.
Server-Extra.com via Hivelocity ~1 year review (comparative).