Set up within the sunny state of Florida, Hivelocity has been gathering priceless business expertise since 2001. Headquartered in Tampa (the USA), along with its first knowledge heart, the corporate right now supplies cloud hosting options, dedicated servers and colocation services to hundreds of corporations in additional than 130 nations all around the world. They declare that the philosophy of their firm hasn’t modified for the reason that early days consistent with their “the extra profitable our clients are the extra profitable we can be” motto.
At this second, Hivelocity employs round 70 employees members and operates eight world-class knowledge facilities protecting Los Angeles, New York, Dallas, Atlanta, Tampa and Chicago (the USA), Amsterdam (the Netherlands) and Frankfurt (Germany). Each of those knowledge facilities is SSAE-16 SOC1 and SOC2 licensed, with HIPAA and PCI compliant providers out there as nicely. Hivelocity’s crew is led by Mike Architetto (CEO), Ben Linton (CTO) and Steve Eschweiler (DOP and one of many firm’s creators).
Although Hivelocity has been round for 20 years now, its official web site appears to be like and feels refreshingly fashionable, whereas offering all the data you must get all the way down to enterprise. The identical goes for his or her official weblog, which makes for each an informative and attention-grabbing learn.
In case you employ social media websites, you could find Hivelocity on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube, though the latter’s account hasn’t been up to date in years.
We also needs to notice a large quantity of optimistic evaluations from Hivelocity’s previous and current clients on shopper review websites corresponding to Trustpilot and HostAdvice, which is all the time welcome information.
Plans and pricing
At this time, Hivelocity maintains and manages greater than 15,000 bodily and digital servers and supplies managed options on devoted, cloud and digital non-public servers (VPS) in addition to colocation providers.
Even at first sight it’s obvious that Hivelocity’s internet hosting options are aimed toward well-to-do clients searching for highly effective high-tech options they’ll tailor to their very own wants. Pricing for “on the spot” naked steel servers ranges between $94.00 and $155.00 per thirty days, however together with add-ons within the combine can spike up the worth pretty rapidly. The identical goes for his or her devoted server resolution which might value you something between $135.00 and $451.00 per thirty days, each pre-build and customised ones. However, Hivelocity often presents packages at a reduction of round 20-25% off its authentic worth, so be sure you test it out.
Like many premium suppliers, Hivelocity presents no money-back assure nor do they supply refunds generally.
They settle for funds through bank cards (Visa, MasterCard and American Express), PayPal, checks, Wire Transfer, ACH, and Bitcoin.
Ease of use
To get the ball rolling, the very first thing you need to do is create an account with Hivelocity, and it is going to be up and working in a matter of minutes. You’ll solely have to supply your e-mail deal with, produce a password and run via the phrases of service, the place you’ll discover all the pieces (though a prolonged learn) defined in fairly simple method with out small print or comparable annoyances.
After this, you’ll proceed to myVelocity, which is Hivelocity’s personal management panel. It appears to be like somewhat simplistic, however in a great way. It makes deploying, monitoring and managing your gadgets, billing info, DNS, networking, storage, and all of the necessities fairly straightforward. While deploying your first server, needless to say Hivelocity’s technical crew is offered 24/7 to increase a serving to hand, so don’t hesitate to ask for assist on the first signal of hassle.
Here, you’ll have a possibility to resolve on a server location and if the one you need is out of inventory (and you aren’t in any hurry) get in contact with Hivelocity’s crew and see if they’ll get again to you when the server is offered once more. If it’s out there for the taking, be sure that to pick a location, a server (all specs are listed along with the worth), an working system (just a few variations of Ubuntu, CentOs and Windows can be found and extra), adopted by getting into a hostname and selecting a fee methodology.
As for non-obligatory settings, in a while you’ll be capable to add person knowledge, customise SSH key entry, and select a management panel and a kind of license you need. A full listing of management panels is at your disposal, together with cPanel, DirectAdmin, Parallels Virtuozzo, SolusVM, ProxMox, Webmin, Plesk and Webweb sitePanel. Therefore, with what ease you’ll handle all points of your web site(s) is straight proportional to your expertise with the chosen management panel. All servers embrace 10GB of cloud storage which is free-of-charge, however you’re free to improve it at any time (for an additional worth).
All in all, our expertise with Hivelocity as a complete was extra easy-going than we anticipated in our wildest goals, each when it comes to user-friendliness of their web site, the UI and the help we now have obtained alongside the best way.
Speed and expertise
Hivelocity presents an uptime assure for 99.99% of the time, which suggests all customers are eligible to obtain a 5% credit score (upon request) in the event that they expertise something lower than promised. However, scheduled upkeep is excluded from this. Keeping this in thoughts, we monitored uptime of Hivelocity’s major web site (through UptimeRobot) for a interval of 1 month and had been delighted to see a report displaying a spotless 100% of uptime.
When it comes to hurry, we referred to as upon the providers of excellent outdated GTmetrix to take a look at how briskly Hivelocity’s major web site is. After a number of assessments carried out from a number of server places we had been hit with just about the identical degree of poor efficiency when it comes to velocity, whereas the location’s construction obtained a spherical of applause. The time the location required to completely load was 4.6 seconds, which outshines the typical results of 8.1. However, whole blocking time and time it took for the most important content material aspect to develop into seen have exceeded the beneficial a lot that GTmetrix determined to punish the location with an E (41%), leaving us misplaced for phrases.
Support
Although some issues have modified with Hivelocity via the years, their buyer help appears to have stayed precisely the identical, displaying competence, courtesy and (above all the pieces else) dedication. This all-star technical crew is offered round the clock and could be reached through toll-free phone quantity, stay chat (that features extra as a help ticket) and e-mail. According to Hivelocity, their common response time for chat ought to by no means take longer than quarter-hour, which corresponds with our personal expertise. For all remaining inquiries, you may get in contact with the gross sales or billing departments Monday to Friday from 9AM to 5PM.
For these of us who need to stay as self-sufficient as we will, the perfect wager is Hivelocity’s knowledgebase. It makes use of the identical user-friendly web page format as their weblog, making the search easy and passable. Since the knowledgebase consists of a whopping 1388 articles protecting all necessary points, there wasn’t sufficient time to examine each considered one of them. Nevertheless, those we took a more in-depth have a look at had been straightforward to comply with and actually helpful.
The competitors
In phrases of providers, Hivelocity and Liquid Web appear considerably comparable, nevertheless, once we discuss pricing, they couldn’t be extra completely different. While Liquid Web is aimed toward giant and small companies alike, Hivelocity is extra targeted on offering plans for medium-sized to enterprise-level companies that want excessive efficiency servers with 100% uptime and first-class help. As a end result, Liquid Web’s internet hosting packages are rather more inexpensive and embrace all beginner-friendly options one would anticipate from such a supplier.
OVHcloud is one other supplier of cloud-focused internet hosting options that will get in contrast loads with Hivelocity, though they aren’t as comparable as they appear to be. For occasion, OVHcloud’s packages are notably inexpensive, however will power you to make a compromise when it comes to efficiency and buyer help (which has at occasions been described as “completely abysmal”).
Those who’re searching for a novice-friendly host to launch their weblog, little webstore or a small enterprise are more likely to discover Hivelocity’s packages a little bit of an overkill. In that case be sure you take a look at among the extra versatile hosts like HostGator and Bluehost, and since each present a money-back assure, you are able to do it with out worries.
Final verdict
Hivelocity is much too costly for somebody with easier wants and no shiny infrastructure, particular options and superior help goes to make up for that. However, in case you personal a enterprise which is demanding sufficient to require a devoted server and don’t thoughts paying good cash for it, you possibly can’t go flawed with Hivelocity.
However, when you have a funds to keep watch over, check out hosts corresponding to HostGator, GoDaddy and Bluehost. They will provide you with all the pieces essential to get off to begin and all with out burning too giant a gap in your pocket.
