Hostway Review

Hostway is a global managed hosting service provider for over 350,000 customers worldwide. Headquartered in Chicago, IL, Hostway has expanded to 8 international locations in North America (Chicago, Tampa and Vancouver), Europe (UK, Netherlands and Germany) and Asia (Korea and Australia). Hostway offers two unique lines of managed dedicated server solutions: Advantage and TruFlex. The Advantage line caters to customers with limited or no internal IT resources. The TruFlex line caters to power users and enterprises that demand maximum flexibility and control while maintaining power and savings of outsourced hosting solutions.

Hostway Corporation
1 N. State St., Suite 1200
Chicago, IL 60602
sales@hostway.com

Website: http://www.hostway.com/enterprise/dedicatedservers/index.html

Support

Hostway offers no non-sense support to its dedicated server customers. It's quick, accurate and efficient. Hostway's legendary average turn-around time of 10 minutes (as measured from the time a problem is reported to resolution) is extended to the dedicated server program. It offers always on, always-available 24x7 toll free support to customers who are in need. Hostway's support is based on years of experience in having served customers from the very early days of commercial Web hosting. The in-house knowledge base is enormous and there isn't an issue that Hostway hasn't dealt with before. The Hostway staff goes through an extensive training regiment (which is repeated every three months) to keep up-to-date with the latest technologies.

Different service packages are available for the two lines of dedicated servers. Managed firewall, backup services, and other professional services are also available. Additional professional services are available upon request.

Services Offered

The Advantage line comes with 100% system administration. This means OS upgrades, security patch installation, server monitoring, security service, back-up service, email management, log file management, DNS management and other complex server administration tasks are completely taken care of by experienced Hostway system administrators. This opens up the door to the customers who couldn't upgrade to dedicated servers because they lacked the necessary technical skill or time to manage their own servers.
OS: Windows2000 or Linux
Database: MS SQL, MySQL
Urchin
Managed backup

The TruFlex line is a power solution for power users. You can choose to outsource anything to Hostway, including server administration, patch installation, OS upgrade, firewall management, and other higher end services for an extra fee. These are available and Hostway is ready to provide no non-sense advice so that customers can make informed decisions. We leave the choice up to the customers.
OS: Windows2000 or Linux
Database: MS SQL, MySQL
Managed backup, firewall, load balancing, IDS, Streaming, Urchin, Other third party software support (optional)

Value

For people with limited time and server administration know-how, the Advantage line is a great value. At a starting price of $179/month for Linux, it's a natural upgrade path for shared hosting customers who need the power of dedicated servers.

For power users, Hostway's flat pricing on TruFlex line makes a lot of sense. For example, you get a Red Hat Linux, 2.4 GHz machine with 56GB of SCSI RAID disk system for only $279/month. Over a course of one year, you will save over $5,000 to $10,000 over other players for similarly configured servers. And by having a large menu of service packages that customers can pick and choose whenever they want, Hostway's TruFlex line of dedicated servers are living up to its namesake.

Network Infrastructure
Hostway maintains multiple connections to diverse and independent Internet backbones in each of its datacenters to ensure that customer data traffic is routed through the fastest and the most efficient path possible. Hostway has SLA with all backbone providers.

CISCO network gears - redundant routers and switches
Multiple power feed
Power backup
Centralized Backup System
100% dual ported switch based internal network
BGP-4 routing protocol
Pre-action fire suppressant system
Raised floor
HVAC system with backup