It has been well over a year now, so I thought I'd take a bit of time to revisit my old review of ReliableSite.net that I put up last year. This was prompted by a request I received from the original review asking me for my updated opinion.

So...would I recommend ReliableSite.net for your shared hosting needs today?

Depends on what you are doing with it...

Now... keep in mind that I have zero experience with their dedicated servers, virtual hosting, or cluster hosting. I am a shared hosting customer, and that is the extent of my experience with ReliableSite.net. I also only host a few small, low-traffic, personal sites with them.

For personal sites or low priority systems like mine then sure. Reliable has a great price tag, their speed is quite good, and the system is reasonably reliable as advertised. Everything that I wrote in my original review is still true and accurate.

But for serious business apps, commercial services, high-traffic sites, or anything that requires high up-time I couldn't in good conscious recommend them as a hosting provider. Not directly because they have failed to meet my own expectations, but just because there have been some issues over the last year that have eroded my confidence in their capabilities and the prospects for their long-term survivability.

What puts me off of giving them my full endorsement?

• No Visible Growth.

  ReliableSite.net doesn't appear to be evolving.

  Their site hasn't changed much. Their forums are a ghost-town. Their documentation and support KB hasn't added many new articles. I've not heard of a large influx of customers adopting them as a provider. There are no new "non-biased" third party reviews online that I can find. And there is no "buzz" about this company around the net.

  This company is going into their 4th year or more, so I'd expect to see soem serious traction from them by now.... but today they are in almost exactly the same spot they were in back when I signed up.

  The lack of customers talking on their forums especially troubles me. I'd expect to see all kinds of stuff on the forums, but instead there is almost nothing going on there. Either they don't have many customers, or the customers have nothing to say.

  Either way, it is not a confidence builder that this company will be around a year from now.

• Support

  I had a bizarre reoccurring problem. The problem itself wasn't something to worry about regarding their hosting capability. It was just that their backup script would sometimes trip up on my database backups. This caused the backup files to start growing very fast, and within a day or two each nightly backup would end up being like 1GB or more (for a database of about 5MB).

  The problem itself isn't too worrisome... I suspect it has to do with an automated process my site performs that messes with the backup script --Not really their fault as far as I can tell.

  But each time this happened, my file usage would exceed the 3GB limit of my account at which point their system would automatically shut down my account. This takes down the web sites and email access.

  This system would send a notification telling me I was over the space limit, but I'd never get that notification because the email server gets killed too.

  So I'd find out the hard way that stuff was down at which point I log in and delete the messed up backup files and contact support to ask them to restart my services again.

  And here is the problem... if my sites went down outside their regular business hours, I wouldn't hear back from support until after 9am the next business day. So when my site would go down on Friday at 1am; it was be Monday around 9:15 am or so before it was back online again.

  This happened 10 or more times during the first year until I finally turned off the backup script.

  Basically, the lack of response from support made it feel like the entire operation is run by just one guy that works a regular 8 hour a day job... And for all I know this may be true.

  It is quite possible with this kind of setup that ReliableSite.net could just be a one man operation.

  A couple of web servers in a web farm, a few database servers, and DotNetPanel to tie it all together is not beyond one good admin's ability to manage.

  The support replies were generally good though, and they seemed to know what they were talking about (unlike many providers I've had in the past where the support staff obviously had no idea how to even spell computer, much less how one works).

• Downtime

  Overall, the sites have been pretty reliable as advertised. But there have been some cases where my site wasn't available. At least 4 or 5 times that I know of the email server or the web servers were non-responsive. Since I don't actually use the site that often though, there could be many more occasions where it was offline that I didn't know about.

  These problems would always get fixed without me having to contact support... but not until after 9:00 am the next morning.

• Email

  Their email system is pretty decent, but I've noticed a significant jump in spam that gets through their filters these days. This suggests that they aren't keeping on top of the latest anti-spam measures.

  Overall, though it is also clear that email is not one of the services this company really wants to be heavily involved in. They provide some basic service, enough for personal use or to support the email requirements of your web application, but the options are rather limited.

  And as I mentioned, they don't expect their own email servers to be the host of your primary email address... otherwise they'd not turn it off when your account exceeds the allotted space limits and such.

So anyway, almost everything from my first review is still correct, but I'm not feeling as optimistic about the company overall. I had planned to move my own hosting over to DiscountASP.net this past year, but I decided to renew with ReliableSite.net one more year and see how it goes… moving all my stuff is a royal pain, and I had other things to do at the time.

I can recommend this hosting provider for small and personal sites, but considering how competitive the shared hosting landscape is these days, I'd recommend you put serious sites on one of the larger, more popular, and well established providers instead.

[UPDATE - 1/17/2010] after a year with ReliableSite.net, I have posted a newer review of them. You should still read this review, as I've not re-covered the same ground again in the update and what I wrote here still stands true.  

As I posted last week, I am no longer hosting my sites with webhost4life. Once upon a time webhost4life offered a fantastic service at a reasonable price, but over the last few years I've grown increasingly annoyed with them. 

Instead, I've moved my hosting over to ReliableSite.net. So, I thought I'd spend a little time describing my experience with both providers for the benefit of anyone else that might be considering either hosting provider.

I first considered a switch to ReliableSite.net last year after hearing about them on a forum somewhere (dunno where). What got my attention was their pricing model; you buy the base service then customize the plan by purchasing additional services and features one-by-one as you need them.

Brilliant!

With other providers, I end up having to buy a lot more than I really need just to get enough of one minor feature that I overuse a tad. With ReliableSite.net though, I'd be able to pickup and pay just for features I actually need. 

But at the time, ReliableSite.net had only been around a year or so. It had good reviews, but I've been through at least a dozen providers that failed shortly after starting up or were unable to scale their services as they grew. So I'm cautious about jumping onboard with new providers. 

Webhost4life was hosting my personal sites, and I was increasingly unhappy with them, but I decided to wait another year at webhost4life to see if they improved and to see if ReliableSite.net would survive long enough to be a viable alternative. 

Five years ago, when I first started using webhost4life they were amazing!
  
They were one of the earliest providers to have a decent base hosting package under $20 and they were also the only provider at the time to have a fully comprehensive online management system. And my favorite part was that webhost4life offered early acces to new Microsoft platforms while they were still in beta.  

But about 2 years ago, webhost4life started sucking.

Stuff that cost webhost4life my business:

• Starting about 2 years ago there was a noticable decrease in performance of my sites, and this has continued to worsen ever since. I have also seen my sites become inaccessable for no reason much too frequently. The worse part of this problem was that I often had problems maintaining a sustained connection while downloading files from the web site, or when uploading files over FTP. It is really annoying to have to restart a deployment of your web site 15 times because the connection keeps dropping. 
    
• They abandoned support for SQL Express on the claim that it didn't scale well. Of course, the real problem was that they were putting far too many users on their servers without scaling out the hardware and decided to drop SQLExpress so they could squeeze in a few more users. 
    
• They released a new control panel that was more convoluted than their older one, but added no relevant features or convieniences for their customers.
    
• They had botched two email server upgrades during the time I was with them, and in one case I had to wait over a year to migrate to a newer system because the new system couldn't handle email lists. This would have been fine, except that the old system didn't have any anti-spam protection.
    
• There was a significant decrese in the qualituy and response times from their support staff. I used to get a decent reply back in just a few hours, but the last few times I had an issue it took over 24 hours to get a reply and when the reply came back it was just some form-letter that had almost nothing to do with my actual question. 
    
• Worst of all was that they stopped offering early access to new platforms. When  .NET 3.5, Windows Server 2008, and SQL Server 2008 were in beta, I was left in the cold. Even after those platforms went into the public market, it still took webhost4life several more months to bring an upgrade option to their customers... and they still aren't offering SQL 2008 support yet.
    
  I evaluate new platforms by upgrading my personal sites before the platforms are released. This way I can stay on top of new stuff before I'm asked to use it in my larger professional projects. Not having access to new platforms until months after they release to the public is not acceptable to me.
    

So this year, when I was up for renewal at webhost4life, I decided to switch. ReliableSite.net had survived their second year and were still getting good reviews... though the reviews are rather sparse. 

What I like about ReliableSite.net:

• Managment Tools:
    
  Reliable uses DotNetPanel for their online managment. DotNetPanel is a pure joy to use compared to the clunky online managment tools I've used at other providers. Not only is it pretty, but it is exceptionally intuative to use. Managing IIS, web sites, file systems, databases, DNS, and email systems is NOT a very easy task, and I'm a certified expert in all of those areas.  But most online tools for doing this kind of managment are even harder to deal with. 
  
  But I found that DotNetPanel makes things very simple, while not holding back on any critical options. 
    
  DotNetPanel is so good, Microsoft should consider buying out the company and getting their developers write their own native admin tools.
    
  DotNetPanel is a shining example of what administering servers should be like! 
  
  This is the first provider I've seen use this system, but as you can tell I am very impressed. Perhaps the best thing about it is that ReliableSite.net hasn't done much to customize the stock DotNetPanel. This isn't a problem since it is more than capable enough to get the job done. It also means that ReliableSite.net will be more able to upgrade as new versions arrive. Even better, I'm not a the mercy of ReliableSite.net's own developers to maintain and improve a custom tool over time. Instead, they can spend their time and resources making my service reliable and fast, and leave the development to a 3rd party with a direct financial incentive to improve the product. 
    
• Pricing Model:
    
  ReliableSite.net allows you to upgrade nearly everything about your account on a per-feature basis. This allows you to incrementally ramp up your services as you grow without paying for stuff you don't need.
    
  Another thing I like is the option to pay monthly, quarterly, or annually. I chose to take an annual payment option. Even better, when you add an upgrade to your service they pro-rate the charges to align them with your regular billing cycle.
    
• Performance:
  
  So far, the site is fast... at least 10x faster than I was seeing on the degrading webhost4life account I had been using. It isn't like crazy fast, but it is certainly as fast or faster than I expected. I haven't had the account long enough to say much about reliablity, but so far I haven't had any downtime that I'm aware of and speed seems consistant even at peak usage times.
    
• Affiliate and Reseller Programs:
  
  Though I no longer use these features, ReliableSite.net has a nice reseller system going. This is very useful if you are a free-lance developer or small site design company... you can offer your customers "hosting" as part of the deal, and still reap part of the reoccuring profits. And you don't have to deal with all the hard server and network stuff..  

What I don't like about ReliableSite.net:

• Email Options:
    
  The base plan is a little shy with emails, only giving 5 boxes and 5 aliases. They have well priced add-ons for increasing these but you can't buy just aliases or just inboxes... you have to buy both together.
    
  The price isn't bad, and even the unlimited option is quite affordable. But I can't help but feel like I'm getting robbed on aliases... aliases are just redirectors and don't really "cost" the provider anything much. I had to buy additional email boxes just to increase the number of aliases.
    
  They use SmarterMail, which is a fantastic and popular system. It is also the same system that  webhost4life used. I like the system, but ReliableSite.net didn't enable the built-in admin tools via the SmarterMail web client.
    
  Instead you are stuck using the simpler DotNetPanel tools to add accounts, aliases, and lists. The DotNetPanel allows you to create aliases, but it only allows one target email address per alias.
    
  Had they enabled the built-in SmarterMail tools for "aliases" I could have had multiple destination addresses for a single email alias.
    
  Due to this odd limitation of the DotNetPanel alias feature, I had to create a full mailbox for these kinds of addresses. fortunatly I was able to setup multi-target forwards on the inboxes via the SmarterMail personal account settings tools, but it sure seems like a waste to have to deticate an entire inbox just to forward mail on to multiple destinations.
    
  None of these problems are deal-breakers, just minor annoyances... but they still seems like an artificial and unnecessary limitation.
    
• There are a few differences in password requirments for some services. For example, the password policy for database user accounts is stricter than the requirments for the billing system, FTP accounts, and online control panel. This is REALLY annoying because I like to keep the same user and password for all services related to my hosting provider. While I was able to create the same user, my password didn't quite meet the policy requirments for their SQL server, so I had to go back and change all the other passwords to adhere to the stricter policy.  
    
  On a similar note, there are too many user accounts and passwords. I have a billing account, a site managment account, an FTP account, a SQL user account, and an account for the online statistics feature. Too many accounts. Sure, I understand that each of these is a different system internally, but it would be nice if the system attempted to create the illusion of a unified user and password... at least for the primary account owner.  
    

Stuff that is just strange about ReliableSite.net:

• Some of the base package seems extraordinarily generous, while other parts seem overly restricted. In the base package you get unlimited DNS domains and web sites, but you can only setup 1 sub-domain with the base account. This seems odd because sub-domains are just DNS tricks while web sites actually use resources.
    
  You also have unlimited FTP accounts, but you only get 5 email aliases (and 5 email inboxes boxes).
  
  Not a problem, just an odd choice. I would have thought that paying for additional domains, web sites, and FTP user accounts would make sense, but unlimited sub-domains and email aliases would be thrown in for free. 
    
• When you buy packages, you get to choose a billing cycle (monthly, annually, biannually, etc.). When you buy add-ons you only get to choose based on a monthly rate. When you buy the add-on, it charges the monthly rate to your card. Then a few hours later another charge appears that is a pro-rated amount for the remaining billing term of the base package.
  
  I don't mind this at all... I'd rather they pro-rate add-ons and sync the billing to the same cycle as the base package, but I did find it odd that the checkout process did not indicate that this would happen. From the point of view of the buyer, it appears as if you are going to be purchasing monthly. There is no mention that you will also be billed a pro-rated amount. Not a problem for me, but if you were on a tight budget and are just expecting to be billed for one month then this could be a major problem. 
    
• I had to setup static machine keys in my configuration files. When I didn't do that, my sessions would just abruptly end and it would not persist logins. I assume that this must be a web farm setup, but nothing in the documentation or marketing mentioned that. 
    
  Not a problem, but had I known this was a web farm environment it could have impacted my decision to host here. Fortunatly my apps are all adaptable to web farms, but I've had sites that were not in the past.
    

Overall I am happy with my initial experience with ReliableSite.net. The problems are very minor compared to any other provider I've used, and the advantages are significant. Hopefully, I'll remain as happy over time.

For 4 years, reddnet has been hosted by Webhost4life, but over the last two years I've been increasingly unhappy with them.

So I've moved on to a new provider, ReliableSite.net.

I'll write up a full review after I've had a while to really get to know the new provider...