RimuHosting has not paid us or encouraged this endorsement in any way (e.g. free stuff).
UPDATE: It has been a few years since writing this and folks finding this in 2011 might be wondering “Is this even relevant?” and yes, all of this is still true. We are still with RimuHosting, I still regularly recommend them to people (especially companies that want to grow gradually; you can start with a small VPS image and they will just move that to higher and higher hardware as needed, resizing it as needed as well). We continue to have next to no down time (except for something like 8mins total in 2010 when a host needed to get rebooted) and support continues to be fast and spot-on with fixes/diagnosis.
This post explains why we are “Powered by RimuHosting” and why we have taken the time to call out exactly what that means. We hope anyone looking for hosting online find this post valuable.
Over the last 5 years we have tried a number of the more popular VPS/dedicated hosting services out there, namely:
- RimuHosting (3 years – Dallas – Miro1, 4, Semi-dedicated and Dedicated)
- MediaTemple (1 year – (gs) service upgraded)
- Amazon EC2 (2 months – East Coast – ‘Small’ instances)
- SliceHost (6 months – 512MB, 2GB, 4GB and 8GB slices)
- VPS.NET (1 month – SLC – 2, 4 and 8 node setups)
The only hosting company we’ve successfully hosted with where hardware failure, unexplainable virtualization-software failures and/or unusably-low performance wasn’t an issue was RimuHosting. While some of the virtual plans on these other hosts were cheaper than a dedicated solution at RimuHosting, we found that in most cases to get comparable “real-world” performance out of the accounts (as they were consistently underperforming under load) we ended up purchasing larger VPSs than we originally wanted – usually equaling the price of a dedicated machine at RimuHosting.
We have interacted with customer support for MediaTemple, SliceHost, VPS.net and RimuHosting. MediaTemple and VPS.net tied for the most frustrating and long-winded experiences, typically requiring the respondent to “contact a server admin” for more details that could take hours. SliceHost and RimuHosting both have excellent support that is either real-time accessible via chat or a quick turn-around time via the Ticket System or support email address.
NOTE: I would point out that RimuHosting, unlike the other providers out there, seems to have no sales team. It is an office full of something like 20 really smart Linux server gurus that all like working together just hacking away at servers. I’ve never talked with someone that didn’t understand init.d scripts, kernel compilation or Apache/nginx setup and tweaking. I think that is why support works so well at Rimu, there is no useless “Level 1″ support that just directs people to “Level 2″ when the questions get too hard or something like that (which I saw at VPS.net). You also don’t get forgotten because you don’t have a big enough account with them (which I saw years ago at MediaTemple with a GS account).
It was the combination of reliability, performance and customer support at RimuHosting that we never found an equal for. Many of these other hosts have nicer websites or extremely slick management interfaces that attracted us to their service in the first place. Unfortunately, the reality was that flaky management software or faulty hardware on the backend always pushed us into the same situation on all these other hosts — contacting customer support and waiting for them to fix some critical system error. Typically these problems occurred at the worst times (under heavy load).
We are happy to report that after 3 years (non-contiguous) of hosting with RimuHosting these types of issues have not reared their ugly heads and the few times I had relatively hardcore software-configuration questions, a Rimu admin hopped on my server, fixed it, and let me know how he did it so I could do it in the future.
No amount of shiny AJAX-enabled management UI is going to replace that for us anytime soon.
The only criticism I have of RimuHosting is that they don’t advertise cheap bandwidth well on their site at all. When I’ve asked on overages for data beyond the 2TB buy-in they offer, they have told me from Dallas, it’s $0.10/GB which is actually cheaper than Amazon S3/CloudFront; but for some reason they don’t have this in giant text anywhere.
Also, the bandwidth they are paying for out of London is astronomically expensive which I find frustrating as someone who might want a European mirror. I don’t think this is Rimu’s fault, I just wish they provided a better alternative for Europe for me besides probably one of the most expensive cities on the planet. My recommendation is to get something in Ireland since they are on a rampage attracting foreign tech with cheap operating costs.
As with any review of any service I have to point out that there are perfectly happy customers at all the other hosting providers listed above, they just didn’t work well for us for the reasons stated above. The best we can do is provide some insight into our experiences with these different services and hope they help someone else in a similar situation.
If you need a good VPS or dedicated host, give RimuHosting a try. If you have any questions about our experiences, let us know!
I’ve never heard of RimuHosting. I was looking around not long ago for VPS servers either in US or UK. In the end I went with switchlink (www.switchlink.co.uk) and i’m very happy there.
I was going to get a VPS with http://www.site5.com but decided against it after having bad webhosting from them (cant have adult stuff).
Hey Riyad,
Will Rimuhost help me set up my site on a VPS? I’m not real technically skilled when it comes to managing servers but I need to step up from my current shared hosting plan at another host company. My current site traffic and server loads are causing servers to crash and my site has been down for almost 24 hours. I’m losing lots of money and reputation as we speak.
I basically just need a VPS company to help me get my files transferred over from my current host so I can get things up and running. Let me know if you’ve had any experience with this. Thanks for your time.
-Pat
PS – I sent you this exact same post in a personal contact message.
Hey Pat, I just saw this question here after answering your email, I’m gonna paste my reply to your here as well in case anyone Googling comes in here and has the same question.
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Patrick,
I’ve been in that position before and first let me congratulate you on the traffic growth — it’s a great feeling, then as soon as your site goes down you get chronic diarrhea from the stress… at least I do
Rimu is great, they are very “common sense” about server software/OS work — basically if one of their guys can knock something out in under 30 mins, they’ll do it for free no matter what it is
What I like best about them is that it’s just an office of super technical people down in New Zealand, hacking away all day being awesome at their job. There isn’t really a sales team, support team and then tier 2 team… it’s just a bunch of server geeks that know what they are doing which (when you are in a bind) is the difference between your site being down for a day, or 10 mins.
I’ve hosted with Slicehost and VPS.net (their biggest competitors) and while their websites are way nicer and the whole “Tweak on the fly” server stuff is in theory awesome, taking The Buzz Media over to those sites was painful learning… I had chronic down time on VPS.net that took a day to troubleshoot multiple times because it had to go through Tier 1 and Tier 2 support each time and it would sit in Tier 2 support queue for hours with responses like “Your machine has been restarted”; then the issue would happen again 6hrs later.
Slicehost had chronic performance issues, I always had to buy 2x the VPS specs than I technically needed which ended up being more expensive per-month than a dedicated server with 2x the power spec’ed at Rimu — Rimu also doesn’t do a good job of advertising it, but their bandwidth cost per-GB when pre-purchased, it cheaper than almost anyone else out there, inclusing AWS by a big margin. I’ve told them multiple times they need to show-case this as a huge plus, but I guess they are modest
There are plenty of happy customers on both those services, it’s just my experience with a relatively busy site and I guess bad luck. To their credit, VPS.net was very concerned with my down time, but it *just* *kept* *happening*.
– NOW, back to your original question about Rim and helping you transfer files, I’m not sure of the policies in that area, but the good thing about them is just to open a ticket here:
http://rimuhosting.com/ticket/startticket.jsp
And I recommend telling them:
1. What kind of host you are on now (Windows/Linux box)
2. What kind of access you have to your files (root/ssh/FTP)
3. What kind of site you have (WordPress? Drupal? Something else?)
4. What kind of DB backend you are using for the site (MySQL? PostgreSQL?)
and then say “I want to move to you guys, to but I’m not technical and need help moving my files over”
From the data above and then your request, they should get a really clear idea of what it will take one of their engineers to move that stuff over and can either say “Oh yea no prob, will take 10mins” or “That’s a custom setup, we’ll charge for 1hr to do it” or whatever it is.
Like I said, they are really common sense. You can negotiate stuff like “Try and move it, but if it takes longer than 20mins and you need to charge, go ahead and stop and I’ll figure something else out” — if that is what you want to do.
Hope that helps.
I’ve been using RimuHosting for 4+ years now and it has been the best decision I’ve ever made. We’re on our 2nd dedicated server and have several other VPS’s. Competitive pricing, but most importantly the best service, support, and reliability I’ve been able to find.
Heya, I would just like to mention that the guys here at Rimuhosting love doing our jobs, we love to help out, and its articles like this that really make our day. We know what we do is appreciated.
Our boss always tells us ‘meet and then exceed their expectations, no matter what’, so this makes being helpful a lot easier also
Liz,
You guys are a great team; any interactions with any of the team members always leaves me with the feeling that you guys all get along, love what you do, respect each other and just generally kick ass in all sorts of ways.
As your customers, we are lucky to have a company like Rimu to work with. The idea of going to another host (given my review, you’ve seen that I’ve tried plenty) gives me night terrors
I’ve been with Rimu Hosting for about 4 years and they have been fantastic since day one. Their support is well worth the extra money in my opinion. I’ve even had them recover data from their automatic backup system for free after a stupid mistake on my part.
JP, really glad to hear that. I think I’ve been with them a similar amount of time and feel like a bunch of smart friends are helping me host instead of a mindless company.
Every time I consider moving to AWS, I always do a cost analysis and RimuHosting is either slightly cheaper or the same raw cost as AWS but then with AWS I lose all the great support so I never move.
Thats a good comparison, but you might want to add in other factors, uptime, bandwidth, hourly support costs (if you need it), etc