Close to a year and a half with MDDHosting and lovin' it!

[kuemerle5]

I figured it's about time that I wrote a review about MDDHosting as I have been with them for almost 1.5 years... So here goes:

 

I joined MDDHosting September of 2009 after having been at Site5 for around a year and a half-ish I think. To be quite honest, I switched from Site5 because they required a php.ini to be placed in every directory just to change the default values. That means there were hundreds of these little bug-gers (apparently, without the hyphen, it's a blocked word. Why???) everywhere and I was kind of sick of guessing if I had copied a php.ini to a place where I needed to upload limit to be 50m instead of 2k. Dumb reason - maybe - but I was able to sell the remaining time of my account to my friend, so it was all good.

 

I was a little unsure of MDDHosting at first becuase I had never heard of them but they seemed to have a pretty good reputation on WHT, so I figured I would ask a few pre-sales questions, check some more reviews, and then make my decision. I ordered and the transfer went smoothly and I'm fairly certain I was up and running with MDDHosting the next day.

 

Over the next several months, I became even happier with MDD as they continued to have excellent uptime, transparency in their issues on the servers, and superb support. Certainly, there were times when the servers when down but Mike would always make an announcement on the forums and tell the clients exactly what the issue was, which servers were affected, and when the expected uptime was. I remember 2/3? months ago, there was a server issue along with a backup system problem and it took a good 1.5-2 days to get it fixed and that one incident is the biggest reason I will continue hosting with MDD after my current account cycle ends(Ironic, right?). I know for a fact that if a big box hosting company came across an issue where that backup would need to be a bare metal restore and it would take 2 days that they would have just given up and refunded the client's money. Not MDD. I swear, Mike and his team worked around the clock to get the server back up. There were periodic announcements on the status of the restore in the forums and Mike was doing his best to answer and respond to the other (grumpy) clients in the forums. I haven't been in the web hosting world for eons like others, but I have never seen dedication like that. Eventually, the data was successfully restored (albeit, a few days old) but that was truly an amazing act that I think you only see at a smaller and more personal hosting company like MDDHosting. And just the other day, the servers were out and Mike posted on WHT that the reason they were down longer than they should have been was because the person who was supposed to me monitoring the servers was absent and so it went unnoticed for 4 hours. Clients have a right to know things like this and Mike knows that and it's the reason he is so transparent about those things

 

Besides the transparency, MDDHosting has the fastest support response I have ever seen (even faster than Media Temple, and they were fast). Usually, anytime I opened a ticket, I get a response within 15 minutes (the fastest was 1 minute, the slowest was only 30 minutes)! Can't say much else about support (don't really use it that often) other than it rocks.

 

There are also the occasional times I browse WHT, and I have seen numerous posts of other web site owners saying what a great guy Mike is and that is really an awesome thing to see when you a client at MDD.

 

Also, how many people follow and are followed by their web host owner on Twitter? How about Skype or IM? Not the 1and1 folks, I know that much! This is just another example about how Mike and his team are willing to go the extra mile to make their clients happy and it's certainly worked on me!

 

If you want a solid web host with good prices, possibly one of the best support systems in the web host world, and a team that goes the extra mile for their clients, then I would strongly suggest MDDHosting.