Tag Archives: linode

The Best of 2012 – Reflections and Awards

It's been an exciting year at Review Signal. We launched in September. It's been going well and we have really enjoyed the feedback from our users. Thank you to everyone who has visited, reached out and help us along the way.

We wanted to end the year with a look back through our data and recognize some exceptional companies that stood out this year.

Best Overall Web Host: A Small Orange

A Small Orange 2012 Best Overall Web Host

A Small Orange have consistently had the highest rating of any company all year. Their rating for the year ended at a 77% Overall Rating. Their customers have been simply raving about them.

However, one new specialty hosting company did eclipse them in November.

Best Specialty Web Host: WPEngine (WordPress Hosting)

WPEngine 2012 Best Specialty Web Host

WPEngine was a late addition to our system and it got a huge number of reviews very quickly. The consensus was that WPEngine is pretty good with an Overall Rating of 80%.

One of the biggest differentiators for hosting companies these days is the support. We wanted to recognize two companies that had the best service ratings. We separated them into managed and unmanaged because of the very different nature of each offer. We ran into some issues where some companies had high ratings but very few actual reviews related to it. To normalize for volume we applied a Wilson Score interval, so some companies may appear to have higher support scores but the confidence in those is lower because there were only a few reviews making up that rating.

Best Managed/Unmanaged Hosting Support: LiquidWeb / Linode

LiquidWeb Best Managed Support HostingLinode Best Unmanaged Support Hosting

Both LiquidWeb and Linode have very passionate customers and are near the top in Overall Rating as well as having the highest Support Ratings in their respective categories. Linode has a passionate fanbase in the developer community who seem more than happy to manage their own VPSs. LiquidWeb's customers are generally in the managed Dedicated and VPS categories.

We congratulate each of these companies on an excellent 2012 and hope their performance only continues to improve in 2013.

Hurricane in the Cloud: How Hurricane Sandy Impacted Web Hosting Companies

I thought it would be really fun to create an infographic about the effects of Hurricane Sandy on the web hosting companies we track. I learned my infographic skills are optimistically rated: very poor.

So here's the interesting stats and trends we saw occur during Hurricane Sandy:

418 People Tweeted about Sandy and a web hosting company.

119 of those Tweets were talking about Intel's Sandy Bridge technology

15 People were concerned about their web hosting

7 (/15) of those people were worried about Amazon

23 People Claimed to have issues related to Sandy

8 (/23) of those complaints were directed at BlueHost

The Most Popular Sandy Tweets:

"Unsure why Heroku is prepping for Sandy. I thought hurricanes were the strongest kind of cloud." - @tenderlove (42 RTs)

"Linode HQ weathered #sandy only to lose power hours later, late last night. It runs our VoIP phones so no calls until we can work around." -  @linode (15 RTs)

"Laughing Squid founder @ScottBeale is live tweeting post #Sandy recovery from Manhattan. Follow him updates: https://twitter.com/ScottBeale" - @LaughingSquid (9 RTs)

Some Angry/Happy Tweets:

"@GoDaddy UMADBRO?????? UMAD?!?!?!?!?!? I HOPE SANDY COMES AND DESTROYS ALL YOUR SERVERS." - @djdarrenmallett

"With Gawker, HuffPo and others experiencing outages, Sandy is IRL the equivalent of GoDaddy hosting." - @spydergrrl

"wow how in the hell did @linode have 100% uptime in Newark during #Sandy? that's some badass hosting right there." - @procdaddy

"Wow, so Jersey is getting HAMMERED by Hurricane Sandy right now, and yet my @linode in Newark is still up. THAT'S service right there!" - @bill_clark

Other stories we found in the data:

Heroku released regions to help deal with customers who might potentially be affected by Sandy.

We saw BlueHost decided to offer flexible payments to those affected by Sandy.

Finally.

For your entertainment.

You can see my first ever attempt at creating an infographic (in the future, I will hire someone else to design these!)

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