I just bought another irresistible dedicated server offer from a reputable provider (although I have no use of it at the moment). The details of the mouth watering deal is

Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2100 CPU @ 3.10GHz
4GB DDR3 Memory
500 Gig Sata hard drive
100mbit network
5 IPs

all that for just $49/mo

I got the hard upgraded to a 1TB Sata3 and memory (RAM) upgraded to a whopping 12GB (some one you may be surprised to see ONLY 12GB but for me, this is the heaviest system I have rented to date). I am planning to keep it running even though I have no use for it at the moment.

Update:

Classic IO test

[root@kvm ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=iotest bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync && rm -fr iotest
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 9.17903 seconds, 117 MB/s

Classic Network test

[root@kvm ~]# wget cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test -O 100mb.test
--2012-01-17 00:53:25--  http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test
Resolving cachefly.cachefly.net... 205.234.175.175
Connecting to cachefly.cachefly.net|205.234.175.175|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `100mb.test'
100%[======================================>] 104,857,600 11.2M/s   in 9.0s
2012-01-17 00:53:34 (11.1 MB/s) - `100mb.test' saved [104857600/104857600]

I started out with iweb.com yearly ago (approx 5-6 years ago). I upgraded servers, changed servers completely but managed 2 servers during my time. If someone asks me to rank them, here is my ranking/review of iweb.com

Account Opening

Account opening process is the same as most companies, you have to provide your credit card copy (with the numbers covered) and fill in a form + send in your identification (National ID card’s scanned copy OR Drivers License)

Verification takes about 5-6 hours and server deployment takes about the same time.

Support (Live and Email support)

Email support? well you create a ticket and you don’t hear from them in a long while. Everytime I created a ticket using their very-complex and highly complicated system, I had to go online on LIVE CHAT to get them to pursue someone to reply to those tickets or take actions. Be it sales, support, billing or any other issues.

Good thing is, we had LIVE CHAT which was available most of Canadian time (since iweb is in Canada). LIVE CHAT is primarily for Sales but I always had to hop on the LIVE chat to get answers to my tickets.

Server Support for unmanaged servers

First of all, if you have an unmanaged server, server administration is YOUR duty, but still iweb.com offers 15min of server administration per server per month FREE. Anything above that is charged at a rate of $50/hour. Although I never exhausted the free 15min (since I do administration myself) but still it was a nice gesture for their unmanaged server line.

If you take for example OS reloads, every other company I know (even if its unmanaged) they are at least letting their customer have a free OS reload per month (at least) but NO, iWeb.com wants to charge a whopping $50 for just OS-reload (reload = reinstall). If you talk to support they DO it for free but then they count it as a favor we have been given which is very annoying.

Affordable?

Well, iweb.com used to be affordable but not anymore. They have raised their prices a lot including but not limited to Hard Drives, Memory etc. I can understand a bit difference in a few things but if everyone else is selling a 1TB SATA2 drive for $20/mo (rented) and iweb.com’s asking me for $30/mo (rented) for the same drive then there is a huge fluctuation in the overall billing.

Take an example of Core i3 SandyBridge (2nd Generation processor) and it costs $129 to get a Core i3 with 4GB memory, 500GB SATA2 disk and 10TB transfer. I get the same specs at other unmanaged companies at far less (close to $59/mo with 1TB SATA3 drive instead of 500GBSata2). So, I believe iweb.com’s loosing its charm because the 3 other dedicated servers I ordered in the last 14 days were either from HostDime US or DataShack (WholeSaleInternet) but NOT iWeb.com

Addons?

cPanel is at $20/mo even though all other competitors are offering it for almost half the price iweb.com’s offering. WHMCS? Fantastico De Luxe? Softaculous? NO. iWeb does not offer any freebies and the addons are very costly as well.

Network Uptime?

Network uptime was 100% througout. There were a few times (a few min in my whole 5-6 years of tenure) when latency would increase but it would was temporary.

Hardware SLA?

I had a drive crash twice in 6 years, iweb.com’s staff contacted me to find a suitable time to take down the server to replace the drive. They guarantee the hardware SLA to be within 4 hours but generally, it was much less.