Switched to eLief for hosting

Robbie Goacher said

Yeah, same here (although I'm in the UK). I've got a 100Mbps fibre optic connection, so a cache is quite unnecessary!

Remember when we were all so happy to have decent browser caching. Ahhhhh….the good ole days.  

Bob

Richard-

I want to make it very clear that at no point was I really unhappy with eLief or its service. I suspect that the talk of Litespeed being X% faster than Apache and other marketing did create a tyranny of expectations that was simply not met initially.

My first contact with your support team was the question about Litespeed and he quickly threw a phpinfo.php into the root directory and referred me to the output for server API. That sorted it but I just hate any confusion. Perhaps I fear dementia creeping in and me needing to be reminded of everything.

About the slowness: I had originally said I'd give it a couple of days to see how things settled and then those expectations took over and had me frustrated, again probably the result of the marketing of Litespeed's benefits. Things have settled since this morning and I think the typical load time is perhaps a bit faster than on my old host with the exception of one page. I'm figuring that may have something to do with the code as it is the only page (as I recall) that has a child page. It's almost as if it is prefetching the child page before rendering the linked page.

I will tell you that the time to display an mp4 file for streaming is faster than it was on HostGator which is also encouraging with regards to the high-res versions of images which are available.

Your support times are fine. HostGator has over 300 support techs as I recall so it is not too difficult for them to throw a body on a ticket. I think a more meaningful metric is time to resolution and, yes, I am anal enough to track the time from reporting the problem until its fixed. You guys do fine in this regard.

My plan is to gradually add some members to the site over the next month and just track resource usage and server responsiveness. Then I'll switch on Cloudflare which should improve performance, hopefully in a meaningly visible manner.

So, I'd say I'm a happy camper at the moment but you can be sure that you will hear from me if I feel something is seriously mishandled. I suspect you needn't lose any sleep over that.

Thanks for the help from you and your team.

Bob

Robbie-

I think I want to move to Palo Alto:
Google 1Gbps network near Stanford is live | Signal Strength - CNET News

Talk about not needing cache. All it would do is slow you down.

Bob

so OCP staff have some kind of control over eLief ?

I see that R.Rowan - OCPstaff admin comments as if he works at eLief.

just curious.

Richard Rowan is the principal at eLief.

I don't know of any other connection between the two although the fact that he is listed as ocPortal staff is interesting.

Bob

The two companies are not related other than the fact that we have been ocPortals partner in providing hosting the last couple of years.

I came to Chris asking if he would like us to do a newsletter once a year to offer a special promotional discount for hosting to ocPortal users, so that is the only reason I have some type of admin access. I am not affiliated with ocPortal in any way.

Thanks!

I just wanted to do a quick update. I am still working through a couple of issues but other than that, things are much improved. My pages load very quick for the most part and then other times they stall a bit - I suspect that the latter has more to do with the voodoo that is the network we call the Internet.

My large files definitely load faster which is a big benefit.

Support has been very good. I don't want to say that it's gone above and beyond the call of duty  - I think a good hosting provider does that as a matter of course - but their support certainly takes you right up to that line and I am being a bit harsh, I suspect.

eLief is not the cheapest hosting around but they are very competitively priced for what they offer. One thing that really stands out from my previous provider is the instant access to daily off-site backups. No begging for a quick restore, just do it yourself. This alone is worth a couple extra bucks a month compared to hosting providers who often want to charge you for a restore for other than a hardware problem.

I think I will be a happy customer at eLief and would recommend them to anyone looking for solid hosting at affordable prices.

Bob