Comments on: Simple Helix Magento Hosting Review

By: Ashley

Ashley — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 08:31:31 +0000

Thanks for the feedback Fever, I think you make a good point and it’s advice I follow myself. Do your own DNS, and your own backups – that way there you can just up and move if your host lets you down.

By: Fever

Fever — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 08:21:35 +0000

I’ve been reading the simplehelix bad reviews, it seems like all the bad reviews are from the same 2 or 3 people. It is possible they had a bad hardware failure that would cause one server to go down.

I am hosting a heavy traffic site there I will let you know what I think.

I would not be so sillly as to mess around for 3 days. Pay 5$ and get a mirror of your site up on another server until the other host gets its stuff together. There is no sense in sitting there and waiting while your host is down when you can run a backup for small dollars. Do not let your host do you DNS for you. Do your DNS yourself with your registrar. Be a smart consumer and problems like this won’t sink you. Any computer can fail that happens.

By: Joakim

Joakim — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 09:33:54 +0000

After a server malfunction we were told we had to move to a different server. After the move the support staff has spent 3 whole days, and counting, trying and failing at setting up new symlinks and pointers because they had failed to include these in the backup process.

They claim their support center responds after 1 hour, they ignored me for 15 hours straight. They have still not corrected the issue, even after claiming it has been fixed.

When shit hits the fan this host shows its true face. If you rely on your webshop, don’t host with SimpleHelix. I’m moving ASAP.

By: Carey

Carey — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:01:22 +0000

Thanks for this, I have been looking at a good Magento host if I continue to use the system. I have done a review and analysis of my Magento experience here:

http://www.pickledshark.com/magento-ecommerce-complicated-bloated-brilliant/

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Thu, 21 May 2009 00:32:08 +0000

Yeah, Simple Helix really does suck. I’ve been with them for about a year and in the beginning they were impressive, but since then I have noticed how flakey and unprofessional they are. I have a few stories of how bad they suck on my blog. The most recent suckage: my sites (10 hosted at simple helix) were down for more than 2 days. 100% uptime SLA? Yeah, whatever.

If you do sign up with them and they suck it up, report them to ratepoint. Their reviews are all gamed, I’m sure. File a report with 1 star and stick to your guns.

By: Ashley

Ashley — Sun, 17 May 2009 00:49:52 +0000

Thanks for providing some feedback on Simple Helix’s reliability. I’d be interested to hear from others with experiences (favourable or negative) on Simple Helix’s reliability or hosting in general. Constant uptime is not really something my reviews can test for, so I appreciate having the input.

By: cheezus

cheezus — Sun, 17 May 2009 00:07:11 +0000

We have a store hosted at simple helix and it was recently down… FOR OVER 24 HOURS!!!

To make matters worse, their backup software failed and they lost the entire previous day of backups. So when the restore finally did complete we lost a whole day of orders!!!

Their rememedy? Our next month of hosting is free… Below is the timeline of events as reported to us:

—————————————
Here is a timeline of events. These events are directly from our
ticket history with GNAX (the data center) as well as our backup
software (r1soft).

5/12/09
1:00am – Server crash – we opened a ticket with GNAX (the data center
where our servers are located)
1:30am – Auto FS check failed
1:30am – Started manual FS check
6:57am – FS check was stopped by tech due to errors & data was being
dumped into lost & found
9:39am – We requested KVM to work on the server remotely
10:35am – We requested hard drive to be replaced
12:47pm – Hard drive was replaced – started to rebuild
2:01pm – Array failed at 63% – found that drive 0 was also bad –
requested hard drive to be replaced
2:54pm – Hard drive was replaced
3:10pm – Reboot requested
3:36pm – Server rebooted
3:53pm – Hard drive 01 was removed
3:57pm – Requested new drive install – replaced 01
4:08pm – Hard drive was installed
5:16pm – Download and burn CD was requested (Bare Metal Restore Disc)
5:19pm – Reboot requested
5:22pm – Server rebooted
6:09pm – CD in drive
6:29pm – Reboot requested
7:10pm – Server rebooted
7:35pm – Reboot requested
7:47pm – Server rebooted
7:56pm – Server rebooted
8:22pm – Bare Metal Restore started – ended at 6:44am (241 gigs total)

5/13/09
7:00am – Rebooted server to confirm BMR
7:05am – BMR Failed (bad grub.conf)
8:15am – Reboot requested
8:16am – Server rebooted
9:11am – Reboot requested
9:54am – Server rebooted
9:58am – Server rebooted
10:06am – Reboot requested
10:11am – Server rebooted
10:41am – Reboot requested
10:44am – Server rebooted
11:03am – Reboot requested
11:05am – Server rebooted

Started restore of the server at 7am on 5/12/09 and was cancelled at
9:31am (only 4.7/241 gigs had been restored within a 2 ½ hour period
at this rate the restore would take 128 hours. Opened ticket with
R1Soft and they informed us of a bug that affects restores or archive
of 100,000 or more files. )

THE BACKUP THAT WAS RESOTORED WAS FROM 5/12/2009 AT 2PM!!