Web Hosting : Tailor Made Servers – TMS – 1 Year and 8 Month Review – Highly Recommended!

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This web hosting thread started by Rev Pat H on 02 December 2008

Here’s my long overdue review for Tailor Made Servers ( http://www.tailormadeservers.com) and I’d like to urge everyone looking for a high quality unmanaged provider to take a few minutes to read this. I’m terrible at writing long posts, so I apologize if this review is a bit all over the place – it’s just so hard to contain my excitement!

Technical Support [10/10]:

First things first, TMS are an unmanaged provider so don’t expect any hand holding if you run into some obscure software or operating system problems. That’s not to say TMS wouldn’t help you, I’m sure they would to some extent, but it should never be expected from an unmanaged provider.

We have a total of 57 tickets recorded with TMS since April of 2007. Ten of those tickets were high priority requests to either manually reboot a server or check the console. Three of those high priority tickets were false alarms, but the other seven tickets were all answered within a few minutes at the very most.

When I say the tickets were answered, I don’t mean a canned reply of “We’re looking into it!” then an hour later someone decides to start working on it and then another hour later it’s finally resolved. If you submit a high priority ticket, it’s given immediate attention and resolved as fast as humanly possible.

Manual reboots take on average 10 minutes, some have been performed in a couple of minutes while the longest we ever had to wait was about 15 minutes which is what they advertise. There have only been a couple of hardware issues, a failing NIC was recently replaced in under 15 minutes, a server died last month and a chassis swap was done in under 3 hours. Hard to find any faults here – the technical support & response times are very reassuring and above average when compared to a lot of other unmanaged providers.

Network & Uptime [10/10]:

TMS are located in the prestigious Colo4Dallas facility and using an impressive blend of InterNAP, Level3, Time Warner and XO Communications for bandwidth providers. There are also InterNAP FCP devices in use to attempt to provide the most efficient routing possible and also work around any problems thanks to it’s intelligent routing capabilities. This differs from BGP in the sense that BGP will always provide the shortest path possible – not necessarily the best path.

The latency and throughput are what you would expect from a reasonably multi-homed provider in Texas. Typical response times to my location in Ontario, Canada are about 60ms while response times to the United Kingdom are around 110ms. Average response times to other parts of the US are nothing short of impressive, 25ms to Chicago, 35ms to Los Angeles, 20ms to Atlanta and 50ms to Seattle.

There have been no network outages in well over a year and that’s based on 1 minute monitoring from Pingdom. The last significant outage was in May of 2007 when a faulty router module had to be replaced and the downtime was a little under 1 hour. Other than that one instance, there’s nothing really to report. TMS clearly has a solid network and should satisfy everyone from web hosting providers looking for maximum uptime to die hard gamers looking for the lowest latency possible.

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