Stay away from Simple Helix

[irideflatland]

I couldn't find any threads on them here, but they've been such a hassle today.

I heard they were good to host Magento on, and I've been with them for 2-3 weeks now, setting up our store.

For some reason, my CuteFTP wouldn't work with them so they told me to download SmartFTP (trial is going to run out soon).

Then one day the servers went down for a short amount of time, probably less than an hour, I can't remember.

And now today, I was adding products and started to get database errors. Then the whole site went offline while I was chatting with tech support. Something they did with the databases earlier today was messing everything up, and they had to restart a bunch of stuff.

So a while later the site comes back online, and my boss tries to put in a phone order but gets a payment gateway error. I try to place an order as a customer and get the same error. So more chatting with tech support and finally they clear the cache session or something and it works now.




Way too much hassle for being with them only 2-3 weeks.
STAY AWAY

 

[kblessinggr]

Why would SmartFTP work but note CuteFTP? The only thing I can think of is maybe a different protocol (FTP vs SFTP). IF your hosting provider supports ssh/sftp/scp , download WinSCP if you're on windows, it's free and a good client to have with any host.

Btw based on the 'maintenance' they were doing, I'm going to assume you were on a shared hosting plan, not to sound mean, but that was your first mistake for anything of importance. I wouldn't go with anything less than a VPS, cuz then you won't have techs messing with your data.

I got two VPS on Known Host, and support has been prompt and very reliable for me. And if you make sure to get cpanel/whm with the VPS (would be silly otherwise if you're not a technical person), it is them a fully managed package, and you can just hit up support for issues on your server. But I would recommend least 512MB for cpanel/whm, its doable with 384MB rams, but seems to work best with 512. I have a VS2 (nginx, no control panel) and VS3 (cpanel/whm for my clients) package from them. They're also one of the few hosting providers on hyperspin to report over 99.8% uptime.

But Helix is sounding like my experience with dreamhost, and one of my hosting client's experience with media temple (database hell).

 

[kblessinggr]

PS: when you mentioned cache and so forth, almost sounds like they're using cluster hosting for the database and such, which if done incorrectly can make the database server act like it lacks short term memory.

 

[irideflatland]

I haven't actually noticed any downtime on the shared hostgator plan for all my other sites, so I figured shared would be fine for this.

I actually read a lot of good reviews for simple helix, and when the servers actually work, they are fast with magento just like they say. But it sucks when stuff doesn't work.

And I don't know about the FTP programs, they were both using FTP. CuteFTP would work for single files, but when trying to upload a lot of folders (like Magento), it woud stop halfway and give me an error.

 

[kblessinggr]

I haven't actually noticed any downtime on the shared hostgator plan for all my other sites, so I figured shared would be fine for this.

Fair enough, course to me, hostgator is a different beast than simple helix, of which I never heard of til now.

I actually read a lot of good reviews for simple helix, and when the servers actually work, they are fast with magento just like they say. But it sucks when stuff doesn't work.

depends on how deep you actually look into reviews, for example I signed up with dreamhost the first time because they were absolutely the rave of folks I knew at the time, course soon as they started offering unlimited plans and such (that seems to be the key, if it says unlimited, consider it an ASIS type of thing), they went downhill rather quickly.

And I don't know about the FTP programs, they were both using FTP. CuteFTP would work for single files, but when trying to upload a lot of folders (like Magento), it woud stop halfway and give me an error.

Sounds more like a combination of server latency on helix's side, and automatic flood protection. I had an similar issue with dreamhost's shared hosting, it would lock me out after trying to push up say 100 or so files. The temporary fix was to use passive mode.

Its probably because I'm a coder, but a VPS gives me much more freedom to work the way I want to work. For example with something like Wordpress or Magento, I wouldn't even mess around with uploading an unpacked group of files, too bloody slow. So instead I would upload the single .zip or .tar.gz file to the server, which is a hell of a lot faster to do than thousands of tiny files. And the once uploaded I could simply extra the files right there on the server (you can actually do this in Cpanel quite easily).

Also with anything that has ssh access, there's quite a bit of small but useful tasks that can be performed. So even a 20-30/month VPS plan is still going to give you a bit more performance as well as connivence than a shared hosting plan. But if you stick with shared hosting, I would recommend going with hostgator, or at least our own wickedfire member Subigo's hosting ZenSix.com

And far as staying away from Helix, sometimes you have to realize that your experience, while it truly sucks, combined with others who have had negative experiences with them, might only represent 1% of their total user base. Kinda like how I'll never go back to dreamhost, but I can bet you all the negative feedback probably didn't account for more than 5% of their user base (probably because most of their users will never hit anywhere near the limits that break crap). But in both cases, I'm guessing the positive experiences are mainly given to people who are lucky enough to not have to deal with support.

I understand that shit happens, stuff goes down, etc, it is of course how they choose to deal with the problem that separates professionals from amateurs.