midPhase Review

midPhase is one of the fastest growing web hosting outfits, and with good reason. Not only do they offer appealing plans, but they are financially solid, they own most of their own equipment which they house is a top tier facility, and they have a well-earned reputation for network reliability. With their recent relaunch and expansion into Windows, VPS, and dedicated server hosting, midPhase has cemented their position as a top-tier hosting provider.

In late 2007, midPhase and its sister-host AN Hosting were acquired by UK2, but there has been no drop in quality of service or offerings. In fact, I’d say most of their customers are probably unaware of the acquisition.

Shared Hosting

What people notice first about midPhase’s shared hosting offerings is the unmetered bandwidth for the higher level plans and generous bandwidth for the lower level ones. To be sure, this is a great feature if you have a popular website in need of some room to grow. But bandwidth alone is not enough to make a great host and midPhase offers much more.

If you are just beginning, you can put your site together quickly and professionally with site design tool. Under Unix, you also get the Fantastico script library (blogs, portals, forums, galleries, wikis, calendars, and more) for the more advanced site developer. And you can roll your own applications with the usual development tools, whether under Unix (PHP, Perl, MySQL) or Windows (PHP, Perl, ASP.Net, MySQL, Access).

VPS Hosting

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are relatively new on the hosting scene, having just appeared in the last year or so. They offer a pretty sweet balance between the price of shared hosting and the power of a dedicated server. You get root access and all the features of having your own server, but at a much lower price. This is because you are actually still sharing but with far fewer other accounts. If you are outgrowing your shared hosting package, but are leary of the expense of dedicated servers, we highly recommend VPS accounts.

midPhase has only recently added VPS hosting to their stable of plans, but the plans are attractive, especially when combined with midPhase’s great support and uptime record. Unlike shared hosting, you have a choice of control panel, with Webmin being the default; CPanel or PLESK will cost you $7 more per month. As with all of midPhase’s plans, you get a free domain name for life.

midPhase runs their VPS plans on serious iron. Quad-core Xeon servers with 12GB of RAM, and 4 500GB drives in a RAID-5 array. Very slick. On the software side, they are using Virtuozzo, which means very little of the machine’s resources are lost to overhead. All told, a very robust foundation for their VPS customers.

Dedicated Servers

Some may think that midPhase is new to running dedicated servers, but this is not really true. They may not have marketed them under the midPhase brand before now, but their Autica label has been providing dedicated servers since 2003. Now they are bringing that experience to servers under the midPhase name.

midPhase’s range of servers is not exceptionally broad, nor does it need to be. Both are solid machine that are worth the cost of a dedicated server. I mean, honest, why would anyone pay to use a Celeron box nowadays? On top of these platforms, you can run your choice of Windows, Linux, or FreeBSD, to customize the server to your liking. Of course, their signature “free domain for life” also applies to these plans. Add in network connections from eight different providers and real human monitoring 24/7 and it is hard to go wrong.

Support

midPhase has a solid support record, with average ticket and telephone supports times below 15 minutes. I think this is their best selling point, regardless of how attractive their features are. If you’ve tried some other “bargain” hosts, you know that these times can be orders of magnitude larger, which is just painful when your site has a problem. They also have an online support forum where you can converse with other customers.

What the Reviewers Say

• “They just plain get it right.” — Top Web Hosting Reviews
• “midPhase was Fantastic.” — Upperhost
• “Check these guys out!” — 100 Best
• “All the hype about midPhase is true.” — Web Hosting Jungle
• “A very tasty package.” — Groundzero

Customer Testimonials

• “The best step I’ve taken after 8 years of having my website online, has been selecting midPhase. Amazing support and great value.” — Sergio Bustamante
• I’ve been with several webhosting companies over the past several years, and to this day I have not regret making midPhase my final switch! Thank you midPhase!” — Marc Bollinger (marcbollinger.com)
• “I’ve had many experiences with different hosting companies and midPhase has the best customer service ever! They always will strive for 100% customer satisfaction and they have mine.” — Eric Kyle Gilbert (erickylegilbert.com)

What midPhase Says

In just a few years Hosting Services, Inc. has grown from no customers to having over 120,000 customers. We began working from a couple home offices and have grown and expanded to our current facility in the heart of Chicago. We have grown from one server to hundreds of servers in our state of the art Cogent Facility. Our staff has grown from the original two founders to 75 employees.

Mission Statement: Hosting Services, Inc. aims to provide the absolute best web hosting by focusing on speed, price and reliability.

Hosting Services, Inc. is a privately held web hosting and Internet services company based out of Chicago. midPhase provides budget, shared, advanced and other types of web hosting services to a wide range of clients ranging from small business to individuals. By providing a robust technological base and reasonable pricing, midPhase is able to offer customers an unbeatable value.

midPhase is able to distinguish itself from countless other providers by offering an incredible value to our customers. This combination of advanced products and affordability has helped midPhase retain a record breaking growth pattern, faster than the industry average every month since inception. Unlike most web hosting providers, midPhase owns all of the hardware it uses. midPhase does not rent or lease servers.

When we designed our products, we did so with the average small business in mind. What do small businesses want in a web hosting account? For starters, to be able to build a website and setup E-mail without paying a designer to do it for them. Small businesses need hand holding, and we’re ready and happy to help.

Go to midPhase

www.midphase.com