Aug 15, 2006 11:25 AM
8359 Views
(Updated Dec 11, 2006 09:50 PM)
Please read this review along with the negative review on webhosting about Indialinks that I wrote a while back. I have since moved to GoDaddy webhosting and I have purchased linux based hosting along with jsp/servlet support for a year.
Availability
I have not noticed any uptime problems - although around 2:00 PM India time there does seem to be a problem running jsp scripts, although static html pages and also php pages are not affected.
Capacity
Compared to India based providers - the capacity of the account is HUGE. The package includes diskspace of 100 GB and 1000GB of data transfer. My site https://planetarypositions.com/ with all its images and java servlets needs just about 3.5G of data transfer a month.
Economics
The charges are around $7 a month. This works out to 12 * $7 = $84 + $2 (domain name) = $86. This is peanuts compared to most India based sites with similar capacity.
Support
Email support is so-so. GoDaddy does not have a lot of technical people sitting behind the phones. For phone based support, you will have to make an ISD call. But problems in general are few.
*Value Add
*There are some free value-added application for free, which is the real plus for this account. Installation of Joomla, Wordpress and a guestbook may not be a big deal for geeks, but for someone without any experience of Linux webserver administration, it is nothing less than amazing.
Overall I am running static pages, php, jsp/servlet and a blog on this site without any issues. I would highly recomment GoDaddy to everyone who wishes to establish a site either for personal use or for corporate presense.
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*Old Review about Indialinks written on 15th August 2006
*I am a hobby astrologer. I have a small site on the net where you can find tools for generating kundalis and birth charts. I used to run this off of free Geocities. As the site grew, I needed something more than 4.2 MB per hour bandwidth and an ability to do some server side programming.
I did not do a lot of research and quickly chose a Mumbai based hosting provider Indialinks. I thought it would be good for the site to be based in India as getting in touch with support would be easier. I was also impressed that the engineers helped me bring up a sample application even before I paid any money.
As it happens with any Hindi movie, the actual movie was much worse than the trailer. Right from the beginning, the server was unstable. I regretted my decision in the first week itself when the site went down three times. On reminding them of the SLA and refund policy, the support engineers quickly blamed the servlet application and asked me to fix the problem in my code.
I started getting frequent emails from visitors to my site complaining about the performance and some even offered to help pay for the transfer to other hosting providers.
I am not much of a systems administrator and have never understood how Apache/Tomcat works, but during my interaction with the engineers, I realized that neither do these guys! They lack basic knowledge and troubleshooting skills to help the java developer pinpoint the problem. "Sir, abhi to chal raha tha, pata nahin abhi kya hua..." was the standard reply to a simple question - "Why is my site down and what is the problem?".
As I mentioned that I am a hobby astrologer and my working hours on this site are 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM. That is the time when I update the site, run into issues and try to solve them. Many a times, it is required to talk to the sysadmin. Indialinks has no concept of 24/7 support. After 7:00 in the evening and on weekends, it is rather difficult to catch hold of support engineers. If your site goes down on a Saturday, you can be rest assured that for the entire weekend, support would be sluggish.
I would not get into specifics of pricing, but there is only one word for it - atrocious. US based providers give 2, 000 times more space and 50, 000 times more monthly bandwidth for lesser amount of money. I found the servers to be ultra fast and very dependable. Not that you would really need it, but 24x7 support means 24x7 support. I see no reason why anyone should even think about renting servers from Indialinks.
As for me, I quickly realized my mistake and moved out only after six months even though I had paid for one full year in advance. I figured I would save on STD calls to Mumbai this way and would have peace of mind during weekends.
