midPhase Reviews
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Our Review
 | Founded in 2003, and based in the heart of Chicago Illinois, midPhase has grown rapidly during its short 4-year history to become a major player in the web hosting business. It currently boasts 68 employees and over 80,000 customers spread over hundreds of servers.
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midPhase can provide a full range of web hosting services; everything from Linux and Windows shared hosting to Virtual Private Servers (VPS) and dedicated servers.
- Reliability
On their website, midPhase boasts of a '99.9% Uptime Guarantee' and even says that they will provide one month hosting credit if they fail to meet the 99.9% uptime figure. This suggests that they are confident in their ability to keep your web sites online.
We are pleased to report that during our 3-month testing period midPhase easily exceeded the promised 99.9% uptime figure, with only two short (less than 30 minutes duration) outages detected during our testing period. Obviously, no downtime at all would have been preferable, but in our opinion, this is an un-realistic expectation with any shared hosting plan and we believe that two outages over a 3-month period is an excellent result.
- Control Panel
The control panel that midPhase provide with their shared hosting plans is something they call the 'midPhase Control Center', which is a highly customised panel built on top of the very popular cPanel/WHM package. Those with previous experience with cPanel will feel right at home here.
A web-based file manager, multiple web-based email clients and an easy to use site builder are all available from within the panel. The site builder in particular is very useful for those that need to create professional looking pages quickly without the hassle of using a full-blown web design package.
- Customer Support
midPhase supply technical support to their customers via a variety of means, including 24/7 phone support, email support and a community-based forum that seems to be populated by some very knowledgeable people, some associated with midPhase, but mostly just fellow customers willing to lend a hand.
There is also an online tutorial browser, where you can find information on a wide variety of subjects, in the form of Flash animations and PDF files. midPhase also maintain a network and service status page, which shows the state of their network at any given instant.
During our time with midPhase, we submitted three separate, unrelated email support requests; each was answered promptly (one within 10 minutes!) and each provided the information we were seeking in an easy to read style, without being condescending. Overall, we found midPhase support staff to be both friendly and very knowledgeable.
User Reviews (click on the name to see full review)
SELECT webhosting17.* FROM webhosting17 ORDER BY webhosting17.`review_date` DESC| Review by Larry | Date of review: 7/22/2007 |
I've been a Midphase customer since february 2005. During these more than two years my website has been down only one day for about 4 hours, due to an error on Midphase DNS servers. Other than that, my website has been up and running without interruptions.
Technical support has been good, although not as fast as I would like, when using the "ticket system". Response times average 20 minutes, but my problems have always been solved. Lately I tried the support system via Chat and found it faster than the normal ticket system. In less than 2 minutes I was chatting with a tech support guy and my problem was solved in less than 10 minutes.
However I'm thankful I haven't had to use more tech support. For me that's the way to manage a host service, so that the customer doesn't need to contact support.
| Review by Steve | Date of review: 6/6/2007 |
When they moved out of ServerCentral, they promised new capacity, even better uptime etc. Both of our dedicated servers were rebooted multiple times without warning over a two week period, then the whole MidPhase system went offline just before noon on a Monday for 8 hours. They did not offer any explanation other than "power problems." We notified them that we would be shutting down the servers well in advance of what was required by their TOS and they immediately charged our credit card on file, 20 days earlier than they ever had before i.e. they got their last charge in when we told them we were leaving. Requests for a refund were stonewalled with "we don't offer refunds, only credits." When I threatened to dispute the charge, with all the e-mail documentation showing their TOS, that they had always charged us on the same day of the month except for the SAME DAY we told them they were leaving, we received a credit -- a month later. Stay away!
Tech support was good from a couple of the guys who really knew what they were doing but they also had some real bozos. Not bad, really, just, when they moved, they were sold a bill of goods by the owners of the new place and they advertised, but were not taking orders for new dedicated servers because they were lied to. The only part that's MidPhase's fault is that a) they didn't do due diligence before moving their clients and b) were so unprepared that they let their entire hosting company go black for a full day and c) they were completely unethical to charge our card on the day we told them we were leaving and had to be threatened into giving a refund of money they never should have taken in the first place. I really didn't have any major complaints until they moved then they went completely to hell. The unethical part at the end I would have had no way of knowing until the shit hit the fan, then they were about as sleazy as they come.
| Review by Kevin | Date of review: 4/22/2007 |
We switched to midPhase almost two years ago. As we've grown their plans have grown with us. Any ticket we've submitted has been handled promptly by their technical staff. I recently had some struggles as I moved to VPS and their technical people went out of their way to help.
Recently I was setting up phpAdsNew for a group of our sites. Fantastico wouldn't install it, instead it was returning an error. I submitted a ticket with the error message. Within an hour I received an email that the problem was corrected AND they had installed the software. That extra effort, to make sure it actually worked, is typical of the follow through that midPhase shows.
Another example. I had a problem changing privileges on a folder. The other folders were ok, but there was one that just gave me an error message. I sent the error message in and received a reply that they had fixed the problem. It was an ownership setting on the parent directory. The message went on to explain that I had some folders set at 777 that probably should not be. The tech suggested I review a specific group of them and make sure that I wasn't creating a security hole in one of our sites.
No one compares on price and features, but even if they did I would have a difficult time giving up the service they provide.
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