Elief

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Elief Interview

We caught up with Richard from Elief to ask him some questions about their hosting solutions:

Where are your servers located (Geographically)?

Dallas, TX.

What is your average support ticket response time?

10 Minutes

Do your support staff work at the datacenter, or remotely?

Remotely

What is your average monthly uptime percentage (i.e. 99.9%)?

99.99% (100% uptime in the last 4 months)

How do you communicate downtime, outages & hardware issues with your customers?

All announcements are displayed on our forum, major announcements will also be emailed directly to customers.

How well do you handle Traffic Spikes (i.e. Digg.com)? Do you have measures to accommodate this or do you make the site unavailable?

Elief! can handle traffic spikes very well, infact our hosting is built around this. We utilize LiteSpeed Web Server technology, which is a lighter version of Apache which uses much less server resources while still having all the great features of Apache including .htaccess and mod_rewrite. It allows PHP and MySQL to perform much faster while using less resources. Databases and dynamic languages such as PHP are the root cause of slow downs during heavy traffic spikes, with LiteSpeed websites on our servers can use much heavier resources without causing slow downs or interrupts.

We can also enable bandwidth throttling which will control the traffic in/out per second. During heavy usage periods this can proove useful because another main reason servers slow down or become inaccessible is because the network pipe becomes saturated. By enabling bandwidth throttling we can effectively eliminate saturation, all the while keeping our customers websites blazing fast.

What measures do you have in place to help users scale their hosting needs with demand?

All Elief! servers are Quad Core and include 4GB-8GB RAM, as well as a RAID-10 hard drive configuration which allows for better read/write speeds, better disk i/o, and the best data protection in case of hard drive failure. We also use LiteSpeed Web Server (detailed above), for more information about this technology you can visit their website(www.litespeedtech.com).

We find that Elief! shared hosting plans offer a lot of flexibility and are very feature rich, developer friendly (SSH included) and scalable. We practically can eliminate the need for our users to upgrade to a VPS before going dedicated, our shared plans can usually scale enough where our customers are able to upgrade from our shared server straight to a dedicated server of their own.

On a Shared Node or VPS Node how many users do you tend to allow?

This depends on what type of sites are on the shared server and what type of resources they are using. We could have as little as 50 accounts or as many as 300 accounts and the servers would run virtually the same. I personally think what it comes down to is proper management. If you do not have staff who know how to monitor and manage a server correctly then you are going to run into problems, no matter how many users are on the server.

Some hosts offer Burst RAM & others prefer just to offer Guaranteed. Which solution do you offer & why?

We do not have any specific RAM or CPU limits, instead we like to have our staff monitor and focus on each individual account and communicate with our clients to find out the root cause of the problem and what we both can do to prevent it from happening.

That is the problem with most hosting companies today, they have no communication with their clients and would rather suspend a well paying client then work with them to figure out what the issue is. We find most of the time the problem is easily fixed by changing a badly written script or having the user optimize their code.

In 100 words or less, why should our readers host with you?

Taken straight from our front page: Elief! is one of today’s premier web hosts who delivers reliable and performanced based Shared Hosting, Reseller Hosting, and Dedicated Servers. Big or Small, hobby site or high profile website — we’ve got you covered. With the power of our LiteSpeed technology behind your websites you will be able to scale and stay available during heavy traffic spikes, including the Digg/Web2.0 effect.