Besides being recognized for its ardour for sports activities, Chicago is legendary because the hometown of Steadfast, a web hosting firm acknowledged for its progressive, managed IT infrastructure companies and all-inclusive internet hosting options appropriate for all kinds of companies. With the motto “Strengthen Your Focus”, Steadfast takes nice delight in taking good care of their purchasers’ infrastructure with reliability, responsiveness, experience, exhaustiveness, and adaptability, all at aggressive pricing. Thanks to this, you and your staff can concentrate on the initiatives and priorities that may assist your enterprise develop.
Steadfast was based in 1998 in Chicago and has grown from a small start-up to a multimillion greenback firm that manages hundreds of internet sites and tens of millions of domain names. They at the moment make use of round 200 in-house workers members and personal three absolutely redundant knowledge facilities within the USA: one among every in Chicago (Illinois) and Edison (New Jersey). The firm is specialised in managed companies, dedicated servers, colocation, cloud hosting, managed safety and data recovery.
Steadfast’s official website is intuitively designed, interesting to the attention and fairly distinctive. It is accessible in English completely, by which it additionally provides a weblog, and fairly an excellent one at that.
When it involves social networks, Steadfast has graced us with its presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube, and all accounts appear to be in fine condition.
Plans and pricing
Since Steadfast focuses on supplying managed IT options for everybody, from small to giant companies and with the USA in thoughts, that is mirrored within the pricing as properly. As for the companies, we’re speaking a couple of full scope of custom-designed cloud companies that may cowl all environments together with personal, public, and hybrid clouds. In addition, in case you search one thing extra tangible, there’s a advantageous assortment of bare-metal servers at your disposal.
Although all of their companies are described intimately, to get the precise pricing you’ll must request an entry to Steadfast’s cloud atmosphere or apply for a {custom} cloud session. Roughly talking, the costs for cloud internet hosting packages vary from $50 to $500 whereas within the case of devoted servers they’ll go from $180 to virtually $1000 monthly.
If you might be searching for a approach to avoid wasting cash, the most cost effective choice is the smallest cloud internet hosting bundle (known as X-Small) that comes with 2GB of RAM, 2 vCPUs, 50 GB of space for storing and 720 GB of bandwidth.
Like many suppliers of the identical caliber, Steadfast offers no free trials nor a money-back assure, though you may cancel their companies at any time. However, since they don’t present partial month refunds, remember that you’ll nonetheless must pay a full month-to-month charge.
Supported strategies of fee with Steadfast embrace all main credit score/debit playing cards, direct financial institution transfers and PayPal.
Ease of use
To get a glimpse of an ideal plan for your enterprise wants, you’ll must fill out a type together with your full title, e-mail tackle, telephone quantity (which is extra of a advice than a requirement) and the title of the corporate you characterize. Then you may checkmark all companies you’re all for, and these could embrace: cloud session, cloud internet hosting (public, personal or hybrid), cloud storage, devoted server, backup/catastrophe restoration, colocation, managed safety, time-synchronization-as-a-service (TSaaS) or you may merely select “Other”.
After this, there is just one query left to reply and that’s what you need from Steadfast’s staff: to request a service session, a worth quote, advertising supplies and literature or one thing else (by which case you’ll must elaborate beneath). Once the finished type has been submitted, you’ll have to attend slightly bit (half-hour or much less) earlier than a staff member will get in contact with you concerning your request. We bought our reply inside quarter-hour, wrapped in kindness and eagerness to assist, however not a lot precise details about the service we have been all for.
Noe that discovering a perfect-fit answer through e mail (or ticket) correspondence could be too time-consuming for everybody’s style, so we advise you to avoid wasting your self the difficulty (and time) by reaching them immediately over the telephone.
Steadfast’s VPS packages might not be as feature-rich because the extra frequent internet hosting options, however they need to do the job they’re meant to do, and with out a hitch. Some of the noteworthy options embrace help for each Linux and Windows, OS patches and updates, SSD storage, real-time monitoring, proactive response and a safety suite with backup and catastrophe restoration. A full listing of management panels is accessible (together with cPanel, WHM, Plesk and InterWorx) in addition to CMS options and different software program.
Speed and expertise
Taking delight in its “state-of-the-art” knowledge facilities and community, Steadfast invitations all customers to take a look at a variety of assets they supply for testing efficiency on their community and different trade factors on the WWW. If the efficiency leaves you unimpressed, they insist that you just should allow them to know, to allow them to do their best possible to “discover and repair the difficulty”.
However, after testing the velocity efficiency of Steadfast’s official website we have been stunned with one of many most interesting performances GTmetrix (our velocity testing software) has offered us with. The web page was fully loaded in mere 3.0 seconds and all the very important net metrics (largest contentful paint, complete blocking time and cumulative structure shift) have been past all expectations leading to an almost good A (99%).
As for uptime, Steadfast provides a 99.99% uptime assure backed by SLA in keeping with which one is entitled to an account credit score of 10 to 100% of the month-to-month recurring prices in case of struggling extra downtime than anticipated. It is vital to notice that each one SLA requests should be made inside 30 days of the incident.
With all this being stated, it’s extremely unlikely that it’ll come to this provided that after an entire month of monitoring Steadfast’s website our uptime testing software (UptimeRobot) wasn’t capable of file even a single second of downtime.
Support
As the corporate itself claims, Steadfast is obsessive about nice help. Understanding that the time is essentially the most worthwhile useful resource their purchasers have, Steadfast’s technical staff is at all times accessible (24/7/365). In addition, since they don’t make the most of name middle companies, all their customers are related on to actual, expert, on-site, engineers (which can be 100% US-based) who’re capable of act instantly in fixing any potential downside. The common response time with Steadfast is lower than 10 minute and the SLA guarantees it would by no means exceed half-hour.
This all-star staff will be reached through phone quantity and on-line ticketing system, each of which can be found round the clock. There can also be a bot-based stay chat (with a cheerfully cute little robotic), however in case you insist on speaking to a human, one ought to seem shortly sufficient.
For all those that would fairly discover a answer on their very own, there’s a well-stocked knowledgebase with round 100 well-written articles.
The competitors
If you need to construct your individual devoted server from scratch, but you aren’t positive that Steadfast is your best option for you, check out the options provided by InMotion Hosting for they arrive with the best of options and a 30-day money-back assure, which occurs as soon as in a blue moon with any such internet hosting. What’s extra, InMovement’s internet hosting packages will even allow you to avoid wasting cash for wet days.
While InMovement and Steadfast have knowledge facilities positioned completely within the USA, PraHost has servers in Europe (the UK, Germany and the Netherlands), the USA and Asia (Singapore), making them extra engaging to non-Americans. However, in case you are within the USA, each InMovement and Steadfast will give you enterprise-grade scalability and efficiency, whereas PraHost provides extra pocket-friendly choices total.
The most evident factor that Steadfast and HostGator have in frequent is that each hosts are born and raised within the USA. However, they’re vastly completely different by way of companies, pricing and buyer help. While HostGator is extra geared in direction of newcomers with its budget-friendly, feature-packed and easy-to-use options, Steadfast is healthier fitted to absolutely expert site owners who don’t have an excessive amount of time on their arms, however have greater than sufficient cash to spend.
Steadfast’s method to the issue of buyer help is noticeably higher than the one Bluehost has, though, to be truthful, Bluehost’s knowledgebase is kind of complete and likewise user-friendly. When it involves VPS and devoted servers, Bluehost throws in additional rookie-friendly options (corresponding to a free area, an SSL certificates and a money-back assure) and all at a beautiful worth. On the opposite hand, Steadfast doesn’t care a lot in regards to the bells and whistles, however will bend over backward to help you.
Final verdict
Steadfast’s {hardware} and community actually stand out, which was much more evident after we have been offered with proof of good efficiency throughout our testing. The firm’s two-decade-long expertise within the trade and a robust dedication to their clients manifests by 24/7 availability, quickness and the sheer competency of their help staff.
However, to get high companies you’ll must pay high greenback. Therefore, in case you are anxious that Steadfast’s options may burn a gap in your pocket, there are extra pocket-friendly packages on the market and you might be more likely to discover them with HostGator, GoDaddy or Bluehost.
