Hey guys, here in this post you’ll read how I love A Small Orange. If you don’t want to read the entire post, you may skip to what happened to me today with them.

_______ lead me to them

It was the rage of Dreamhost users; the time when downtimes as long as four hours FREQUENTLY happened. That time I decided to move on a new host — good thing A Small Orange do have a good and cool web design (even if it’s simple). Their design made me remembered them when I needed a new host most.

And so…

As an impulsive buyer I am now, I swiftly checked out their plans. Then picked the right plan for me — added it to my shopping cart and checked out. Voila, I was officially the latest A Small Orange account holder that time.

Here’s a review.

Features

Uhm, I got a $5 a month plan which featured 400MB web space and 10GB bandwidth. The per-capita cost (cost per megabyte or gigabyte bandwidth/webspace) of my plan was far more than I had in Dreamhost. I do have about 240+ GB webspace and 5TB (that’s 5,000 GB) bandwidth. But it was no big deal since I was not able to utilize all my resources in Dreamhost. The ASO plan gave me something that best suited my current traffic.

As most of the current web hosts, they support PHP — both 4 and 5. Also with MySQL 4 or 5, Ruby-on-Rails and a lot more. You may request them to add special modules for you if you need them.

Reliability

Reliability-wise, they are FAAAAAR better than Dreamhost. Although I experience downtimes, they were mostly fast — some were even just seconds while the average is 10 minutes (but the longest was two hours) as compared to Dreamhost’s at least an hour downtimes.

I usually contact them when my site is down, and they respond right away and fix it in a snap.

Speed

Perfect — very perfect. My WordPress blogs on Dreamhost ran crap slow. Really slow.

A Small Orange, on the lighter side, ran my WordPress blogs like a cheetah. PHP is fast, file downloads and uploads, etc.

Support

Support is my favorite. They respond usually in less than an hour. Several times I’ve contacted them — all with immediate replies. I’ve already reached two pages of support tickets. When I confront into problems (even though they’re not downtimes), I ask them for possible answers and their answers work! I’m sure their support IS NOT outsourced, good thing. Their great, super great and knowledgeable.

The Real Story

Actually, I want to share to you my experience with them today. Three hours ago, my shared server went some sort of problematic. The memory usage, pagefile and CPU usage surged very high — making my websites inaccessible.

Then I contacted support ’bout the problem and monitored the server’s status. Gradually, the memory usage and pagefile size started to go down. My sites were already accessible, everything was back to normal except some very slight slowdown of PHP brought by the high load which was still a lil bit fast.

And so even if I was contented, I tried to ask them to move me to a faster and less crowded server. And they did it for me, for free. They did it very fast. From paulo server, I am now hosted at sarah in a snap.

Here are the differences of both servers:

• The new Sarah server is quad-core; while Paulo is only dual-core. A great deal!
• Disk usage is Sarah is significantly lower than that of Paulo. This means Sarah, indeed, is less crowded as of the moment.
• Swapfile in Paulo (the old one) averages at least at 20% while Sarah’s swapfile is usually on the 0 level. This means less stress is given to Sarah, as it’s memory can manage the whole geeky stuff without the help of a swapfile.
• Clamd module is present in Sarah. Clamd is an anti-virus, I think. Correct me if I am wrong .
• The only thing that is not on Sarah but is on Pauli is the Ruby-on-Rails support. I don’t use it anyway.
• Another last thing, SSL is supported at Sarah.

So if you’re looking for a host, I’d highly recommend them to you. A Small Orange rules! Use the coupon code 91ers upon signup and get $5 off on your order.

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