This is an 11 day review of KnowHost.com’s Managed VPS (VS2 package). As is customary, my site is MachinaDei.com (http://www.machinadei.com) to verify I am on their servers.

Based off my questions here and at another forum, I choose KnownHost.com.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=900590

I am a VPS newbie and have little experience beyond shared hosting on Linux and Windows. So I wanted a managed VPS and KnownHost.com had very quick and well explained responses to my pre-sales inquiries.

It took 3 1/5 hours to get my VPS account from purchase. Which is within the 3-4 hour estimate they state on their site.

Setup was easy, especially since I have never setup a VPS before.

Since purchasing the VPS account, I have been tinkering around on the VPS and have installed WordPress MU to test. KnownHost.com support has responded to all my questions quickly. Only once did I put it at "High" and got a response in 10 minutes (better than I expected). One of my questions was about setting up my own backup and transferring it to another server. I set the priority at low, figuring I would have a response back later that day or the next as it was not that big of a deal. I sent the message at 1:39pm Sunday and had a response 20 minutes later.

Before I started writing this review, I sent a message asking how to change a regular account to reseller on low priority. I sent my support request at 4:32pm (eastern) and got the response at 4:43pm. I would have been happy with a response in a couple hours. That wasn’t to test response speed, I just didn’t know the answer…

None of my support request have been tough questions, just newbie questions. So I can not attest to what happens if there is a major issue.

A friend who works with a server farm at a data center tested a 10meg download file for me and got 1.32 – 1.35 mb/s for download speed. Not sure if that is maximum, but good enough for my use.

I was worried that 384meg ram would not run well with CPanel, but so far it has been pretty good. I tend to run at 35-40% ram use on a fairly quite site (high traffic sites are not transferred yet). So figure that is about idle for the VS2 package. I put a PHP script (PHPSysInfo) up to see what my use was at both my shared hosting account (1and1 – stop laughing) and the VPS. Pretty amazed at how heavily used the shared account was! I took a few screen shots of both servers and put in a post on my site.

http://machinadei.com/blog/2009/11/0…es-vs-oranges/

My only critique is the support section needs more information for a newbie. So far that is the only issue I have run into… They do have a good forum to use, but I like reading documentation when possible before asking questions.

So I will give two thumbs up :agree: :agree: to KnownHost.com. If you are considering a managed VPS, I do suggest you give them a consideration. Especially if you are going to need support.

Stu