When looking for a reliable hosting solution, never pay exclusive attention to the bandwidth allocation and space that you can make use of because if the host doesn’t have the hardware that necessary to handle your site, your website performance will dramatically fall once you come across heavy traffic loads. Dedicated hosting solutions often deal with the problem since all the resources in the server are directed towards a single website allowing webmasters to fully manage their website with root access and all. Still, they are getting costly and therefore Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting is becoming more used by people who need control of their site in a shared hosting environment to save money. SWVPS is one of the solutions that offer such services.

About SWVPS Hosting

SWVPS is an US web hosting company that offers cheap vps solutions with servers located in both US and UK. It supports Linux OS as well as Windows and offers four general plans to choose from. The first plan is a special hosting offer which costs $7.95 a month and comes with basic specifications plus the root access. The LVPS-1 plan boasts additional disk space, RAM, and bandwidth without adding too much to the cost. The most expensive plan costing $135 a month includes a server with a quad core processor and fairly high specs to power any large website with flexible operating system choices.

Pros

Only the specifications make SWVPS seem attractive enough at first. Each plan is highly detailed and the flexibility shows up with a variety of 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems supported ranging from CentOS to Fedora Core, Debian, Ubuntu, and Gentoo. Windows operating systems are also supported in 2003 and 2008 flavors. The software included with both Fantistico Deluxe and Plesk an option also add to SWVPS’s attractiveness.

Cons

The potential of SWVPS is immediately reduced by poor uptime and even poorer technical support. Recent customer reviews indicate that SWVPS often goes into monthly maintenance periods in bad time periods such as one instance where the site went offline for maintenance on a Friday morning. Even though the support does address these issues, downtimes can be pretty long – up to 45 min – when rebooting or installation of new software is in progress.

Customer support differs depending on the situation where the live support is taken offline during crucial moments of the downtime. What they manage to do is explain the nature of their downtimes, but suddenly afterwards, disappear for a few weeks leaving the customers clueless on when the problem will be solved.

In general, the price and features of SWVPS are good, but good hardware features turn useless unless they are being used to their maximum. No need to have a fast running site that often goes offline during unexpected periods. This may improve in the future if the team is really actively installing new software and hardware so consider this solution when more positive reviews are piling up.