By tagle.it on

Before I post this review I want to lay out some facts:

RE: Credibility

- I'm a NEW user of Drupal and NEW member of the community so I have no posting history (hope to change that immensely going forward :-)
- I'm *NOT* being compensated in any way by http://www.hotdrupal.com/ for making this post, nor do I have any previous relationship with them.
- I have Drupal 5.7 installed on my site (http://www.tagle.it), but I do not yet have any traffic so I have not put this service through a performance test. This is only a review of my experience with signing / setting up.

After an exhaustive search through review after review about discount hosting packages (and nightmare testimonials), I realized that it's absurd to compare the shared hosting packages based on a price difference of a few $ per month or storage of 1 TB vs 3 TB, etc. This website is for my business, not personal use, so I needed a provider who is above all, RELIABLE.

I found HotDrupal via this forum and after reading their website, it looked like what I needed. I decided to go through their 800 number instead of the web to sign up in order to test customer support from the get go. To my surprise, a person answered the phone, he spoke clear, fluent English, and he was... wait for it..... COMPETENT. It was the owner, Steve.

To make a long story short, I grilled the sh*t out of him. I asked about scalability, performance, backup plans, etc, a lot of which was already answered on his website, but just got him to repeat in his own words. To be honest, I really don't have a sniff of knowledge about any of these things, but I do know BS when I hear it. I heard none.

Steve stayed on the phone with me for over an hour, on a Saturday evening, on HIS 1800 number. He helped me configure my DNS zones from my domain provider to point to his servers, my MX records for Google Apps, held my hand through the Drupal installation, and answered a ton of newbie questions without a hint of snippiness. Because of the date, I didn't need to pay for the whole month so the first month was a total of $2.47. The call likely cost him $5. Since Saturday, all of my non-critical support tickets (asking questions like, "how do I set up my FTP") were answered within an hour and usually much sooner.

Again, I have only STARTED using the service. It has not been put through the test of real life loads. The purpose here is to share a very positive experience of user support, and to relay on to this community that Steve knows what he is doing.

I'll follow this up in a few months with another report about how the service works.

Mark

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

I dont usually post on here because, frankly, I can't stand this forum. But the title caught my attention in the tracker. I've been using Hot Drupal for hosting for a while and have been quite happy. Steve is very nice and the service is excellent. I really can't imagine him making a shill account so I'm sure the OP is for real even if he's new. :)

Michelle

--------------------------------------
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

Nitemare’s picture

Nitemare commented

Customer support especially, that's why I love HotDrupal so much.

I never told with them by phone, because to me, read English is easier than speak and listen. If I can speak English well, I hope I can talk with them too, I'm so glad to know them, it is my pleasure.

Here is my experience:
There is a problem when I was ordering my first hosting package, I got "credit card payment failed" many times. I'm not sure what makes this happen because different countries, different languages, and different address layout. After I got "credit card payment succeeded", the credit card company told me there are 3 payments, and than I told HotDrupal this problem. 4 minutes later, I received their response:

Don't worry about it, our bank is telling us only one payment was authorized and charged.

We will follow up to be sure only one payment went through. If any duplicate charges occurred we will make sure that excess payments are refunded to your card. You do not need to do anything, we will investigate and follow up as needed.

We consider it our responsibility to make sure everything is taken care of.

Customer Support

And I've received more detailed response on the same day, they have verified that their bank has only one charge listed to be charged to my card.

Here is another experience:
Sometimes I have to reload few times to access my sites. I'm come from Taiwan, and their servers are in North Carolina, there are 19 routers traversed, who knows where is the problem. Steve told me the other customers haven't reported anything similar, but he has moved my sites to another server to made sure there isn't a server issue.

At the first time I contacted them, this is a part of their response:

I suggest you look over our website. It has lots of information about our service and how we are different from other companies. We charge a little more than others, but on the other hand we try to provide a little more in terms of service and support.

Maybe there are something seems unbelievable, I understand, I have the same thought. But I can pay monthly or quarterly, if I tried and I don't like it, I can move out at anytime. So I gave it a try, and than I'm a happy customer. They have did too many helps for me, and always nice to me. To me, they are my friends. I got the excellent service and good friends, and I've learned many things from Steve, he is my great teacher too. I don't have any reason to move out. Seeing is believing.

Thank you Mr.Brown, John, and all customer support team.

But I have a question: "Steve, do you sleep? Why I got your help at anytime?"
Of course I never asked him this. I've asked too many stupid questions, and I think this is a stupid question too.

karunadave’s picture

karunadave commented

I have migrated my Drupal sites through four hosts now, over the past 5 years. I run Drupal in multisite with CiviCRM for small but richly featured community websites. I find the configuration that differs most between hosts is the cron configuration and the SMTP settings.

Steve was very helpful, with quick and sometimes proactive support across about 18/24 hours in a day, even to the point of trouble-shooting a CiviCRM SMTP configuration issue through a test instance of Drupal/CiviCRM I set up at his request.

So pleased I was, I gave him a tip for outstanding service.

Ahh, and the nice treat for having chosen Hot Drupal - speed. Sooo nice not to have to wait on the 'administer' link!

Dave
www.upayasolutions.org

HotDrupal.com’s picture

HotDrupal.com commented

Wow, I saw this thread when the first post was made but just now saw some of the other responses. Thanks everyone.

Yes I do sleep believe it or not. Too many nights in college staying up to 5am programming and eating Chinese food (the best food available near campus) so now I can never get to sleep early.

Steve

noid’s picture

noid commented

Just wanted to add another testimonial from another super-satisfied customer.

Just recently, I was having problems with saving changes to my block settings. A few minutes ago, Steve solved the problem -- http://drupal.org/node/258856#comment-846649 . This is not the first time that Steve came through with a solution. He's always prompt in answering support tickets, and never fails to follow up on your problem even if the issue has already been fixed. The great thing is that Steve also points out problems you don't even know exist! (Yup, he's so client-friendly, you begin to wonder not only if he ever does sleep, but also if he's for real! :D )

Also since I moved all of my four sites to HotDrupal early this year, I NEVER -- EVEN ONCE -- experienced any downtime! How's that for reliability!

So if you're new to Drupal and are looking for a host, you can't go wrong with HotDrupal, and if you're an old Drupal user but are looking for a new host, HotDrupal is your long-lost soul-host.

You rock, Steve B, and HotDrupal! :D

scedwar’s picture

scedwar commented

I would echo all the positive reports above, and some more! We host www.charityrallies.org on hotdrupal and Steve and his team have been amazing in so many ways. Having a hosting company that really understand Drupal and sysadmin is such a change. You can throw pretty obscure technical questions at them and they'll come back with precise answers rather than the automated responses from most companies that start with "have you switched on your computer" type questions...! They're also proactive in contacting us when they make improvements to the server or config to make sure that there are no unintended consequences. Excellent service all round!

cheriejd’s picture

cheriejd commented

Have you ever gotten an email from your service provider asking you when it would be convenient for them to upgrade the server and do some maintenance so as to not disturb any large projects you are working on or any launches you have planned? If not, you aren't hosting with HotDrupal. They didn't tell me my site would be down at a specific time, they asked when it would be ok. I stared at the email for 5 minutes. I couldn't believe it.

Every question answered. Every problem looked into and a solution provided.

I even have my non Drupal projects on hotdrupal.com now.

The service is even better than Media Temple circa 2000. Of course, Media Temple customer service 2008 is one of the main reasons I went looking for a new host. Glad I found Steve and HotDrupal.

No down time, prompt friendly (and amazingly patient) service.

happy camper,

Cherie

rhouse’s picture

rhouse commented

What's their policy on non-drupal sites? I understand that they don't support it, but do they object?

scedwar’s picture

scedwar commented

I'd be shocked if Steve objected. He understands Drupal, but any CMS that sits on a LAMP stack has much the same needs. In short, they provide damn good hardware and support for any website that needs serious power to drive it - Drupal falls into that category but so does a good number of other systems.

HotDrupal.com’s picture

HotDrupal.com commented

Hi RTH,

In general we do want people to be, in general, to be Drupal oriented. That said we have people who mix in plain HTML sites and a few people who have a site that runs wordpress or some other generic PHP stuff.

Basically as long as you don't require Magic Quotes we can get most things working fine. As our default PHP is setup to work with Drupal out of the box, other apps may requires mucking around with PHP defaults to get running.

Sorry for the slow response, someone informed me you came here to ask a question. I'm not really monitoring this board.

HotDrupal.com

rhouse’s picture

rhouse commented

Thanks Steve, I basically want to set up Drupal sites, but I might want a small store using something like magento, later. AFAIK they all use the LAMP stack in much the same way.

cheriejd’s picture

cheriejd commented

He is helping me with some Wordpress site issues. He doesn't SEEM to have a problem with it. At least he is always polite about it. Nothing better for Drupal, but I just can't resist the fast servers and great Customer Service for the other sites I run that are in need of something less complex.

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

First, I should say that I've only been with HotDrupal for a few days, but I have a really awesome feeling about these guys, especially if customer service is any indication!

I am a uber-novice user. I started on the cheapest host plan I could find, then decided to move to a VPS in anticipation of having a ton of traffic. That was the WORST decision I could have made - I can barely put together a drupal site, much less act as a server admin. HotDrupal has so many options - and I think the prices are super reasonable. This weekend I decided to move over to one of their "Super" plans.

I was having so many problems trying to setup my former host. The technical support was so awful, after holding for like 20 minutes I would finally get a human being and would beg them to transfer me to the customer support people at headquarters.

Well, I read the forums and talked to some Drupal folks who recommended HotDrupal, and I signed up for an account online. Within the hour I got a PHONE CALL - yes, a phone call (!) - from them just to welcome me to their service and asking me if I had any questions.

I then proceeded to attempt to transfer my site from my previous host to HotDrupal, and was having all sorts of problems - not related to the host, but rather my own Drupal experience. Seriously, y'all, Steve at HotDrupal was AMAZING!!!! I called the toll free support number, and someone actually answered!!! No, hit 1 for spanish, hit 2 for billing, etc etc. a REAL PERSON answered the phone!

Many calls later (as well as online tickets - which were answered withing minutes, even though I put them as "low priority"), I have a fully operational site. I know for sure that they went above and beyond what any host should provide. My problems were totally related to Drupal, and had nothing to do with my server setup. But their customer support (read: Steve!) spent so many hours trying to help me, they even logged in to my Drupal admin site and tried to debug the issues I was having!!!

Not only that, but Steve gave me some ideas on speeding up my site and he totally knows all about Drupal, basing his suggestions on which version of Drupal I installed (6.4).

Seriously, I cannot say enough about HotDrupal. Thus far, it's been and awesome and amazing experience, and I'd recommend them to anyone looking for a host for their Drupal site. Their customer service cannot be beat - seriously y'all, how many times have you called the customer support number and spoken to a REAL PERSON after a few rings?!?!

I'll post an update after I've had more time to test their services, but if my initial experiences are any indication I am pretty confident that things will be fine going forward.

Please feel free to visit my site www.electionpreparedness.com to get a sense of the speed of their servers. I think it's actually much faster than the VPS I was on at 1and1!!

tagle.it’s picture

tagle.it commented

Wow, I came back here to follow up my first post but it looks like many have beat me to it. My update:

Average ticket response time: minutes
Resolution record: 100%
Unscheduled Downtime: 0 (zero) minutes
RE: the scheduled downtime "request" mentioned above - confirmed. Yes folks, customers were asked.
RE: follow ups for resolutions - confirmed. They actually do this.

I don't think I've ever found PAID support that is this good. Steve; bravo to you and your team at HotDrupal.

SSL Certificates
---------------------------------

I just got a quote from Steve for SSL certificates so I wanted to pass this along:

Price: two year cert for 69.95 + $2/month for a static IP
Installation: do it yourself? Nope. Surprise; they do it for you.

This is less than 1/10th the cost of Versign SSL's. See for yourself: http://www.verisign.com/ssl/buy-ssl-certificates/secure-site-ssl-certifi...

BTW, for those looking for SSL's here's an interesting article:

http://counsellingresource.com/practice/security/ssl.html

and here's a quote from Steve regarding single vs chained root: "Nope, no chained root. Signed by Equifax so they are quite well accepted. I would be ashamed to sell chained root certs to people."

I haven't tried his SSL's yet, but once I've worked with the product I'll again follow up with another post about my experience.

I want to restate for the record that I have no affiliation with, nor am getting any kick backs for using HotDrupal. This review is simply the result of using a solid product with amazing service which is being confirmed by the others on this thread. :-)

Mark

scedwar’s picture

scedwar commented

Fear not, I can confirm SSL is at the same standard as the rest - outstanding.

ISchier770’s picture

ISchier770 commented

BS"D

Steve and his staff are the most professional I have ever dealt with and I have been through more hosting companies than I can imagine. He's flexible and responds to any request for technical assistance as soon as humanly possible (I'm seven or eight time zones ahead of him and I would say I always have an answer within an hour of when he starts work if one of his offshore support people doesn't answer me first). I highly recommend HotDrupal!

And no, I have no relationship whatsoever with them or with Steve other than that of a very satisfied (and not easy to please) customer!