A Review of TSOHost

Hi,

Am pretty new to the forum and thought tsohost deserved a review from me :slight_smile:

Have been hosted with them for a good 5 years now and am still hosted to this day and can confirm I’m not an affiliate or staff meber - just a happy customer.

Current plan: their ultimate clustered hosting plan for about 50% of my work sites. Currently have my blog - web-design-talk.co.uk hosted with them.

TITLE: TSOHost

TOPICS: Please cover features such as the following and include your rating of the company with numeric (e.g., [8/10]) or verbal (e.g., [excellent, good, satisfactory, bad or unsatisfactory]) values. Providing a reason for your score would be most helpful.

General Features [8/10]
Overall, very good and very very accomodating to adding custom features. They allow access to use your own php.ini, .htaccess files and SSH access too. If there is ever a specific feature I need and tsohost don’t have it, they are always very willing to help me get it up and running. The only area I’m not a huge fan of is their domain management system - which seems a little dated compared to the rest of the site. However, there is talk on the forum of them releasing a new system soon. Only feature I’d like to see implemented, is to restore your own site backups. They also have the facility to upload files via SFTP, which is nice.

Reliability [9/10]
Again, spot on in this aspect. In the rare instances when they are having issues they update a variery of mediums including: twitter, their status page (status.tsohost.co.uk) and their forums.

Customer Support [10/10]
I couldn’t rate them any less than a 10 here. As I deal with a range of hosts frequently, as I’m a web developer, I really appreciate good good. TSOHost have this an more and to be fair, it’s some of the best support I’ve encountered. In 5 years, I have never had to wait more than 10 minutes to be emailed back. Their staff definately know what they are talking about and have always promply fixed any errors - the majority of which are me being dim :slight_smile: Same story via telephone support - have never waited on hold to speak to someone, it’s pretty much instant. I’ve been sometimes workijng very late at night - 2am - and have had emails replied to via their support team. I’m pretty sure they don’t sleep :slight_smile:

Pricing [9/10]
Pricing is again pretty much spot on - especially considering the high level of service you recieve. I’d say they are a couple of pounds more expensive than the competition, but I see that as a little cost when you look at the service levels you get for that.

Space [8/10]
At work I use their ‘ultimate’ package, where you have approx 15GB of space (iirc) for 100 websites. Upgrading is simple - I just emailed support to add more site slots - work out about a pound for site, per year. Their limits are also soft - in that they’d notify you of a problem site before simply disabling deleting it (unlike a couple of other hosts!!!)

Speed [8/10]
Have never had any issues. Host lost of big, busy ecommerce sites and have never seen them slow down once, or had any complaints off customers. A site tsohost hosted for me last year was part of a national campaign for a music festival - the site got absolutely hammered with visits (9,000 uniques within the first 5 minutes). After several days of further sustained hammering not one person emailed to say the site was non responsive and/or unavailable.

Bandwidth (Data Transfer) [9/10]
Have never had any bandwidth issues at all. See reasoning in latter paragraph.

SUMMARY [9/10]
One of the best hosts I’ve used. Can’t fault them at all on features or pricing. They are definately standout for their frankly superior customer support and flexibility when asking for new features and dealing with silly questions from me :slight_smile: Their staff are also very active on their forums too.

The Bad
Have only had one semi serious problem witrh tsohost - when they setup an SSL certificate for me it was done incorrectly at their end. However, was rapidly fixed after an email, so no harm done. They have recently had a new member of staff, who I feel sometimes assumes a lot more knowledge. For instance, at the advice of the staff member I was told to do a ‘recursive ftp delete’ to remove some rogue files from my web space. I had to do a bit of Googling to find out exactly what this was and how I would do it. Other than that, no issues at all in several happy years with them.

Your opinion
Yes, used them for a couple of years for personal sites and moved approx. 50% of my work websites over to them. No hesitation in recommending them at all.

Glad you had a good experience with them. :slight_smile: