Alentus Web and Database Hosting Review

Here's a quick review of the Alentus Corporation website and database hosting company I used to host many of my websites.

I am a very long term user of Alentus Corporation's web and database hosting plans. I first opened a web hosting account with Alentus back in 2000. Alentus wasn't even called Alentus back then, they were still called Pacific Netware.

Alentus have a range of hosting plans. I started off my IT career as an ASP developer, so I chose Alentus due to their support for Active Server Pages. Those were the days before ASP.NET existed. I now also have an ASP.NET hosting plan with Alentus, and I am pleased with that hosting plan. The good thing about Alentus is that their ASP.NET hosting plans are based on Microsoft Windows based server hosting. I have ASP.NET hosting plans with AwardSpace, but their ASP.NET running on Linux is not the same as developing ASP.NET on a native Windows environment.

What I also liked about Alentus when I was looking for a website hosting company was the fact that they had a good range of hosting plans, from basic startup hosting plans to hosting plans with more disk space, bandwidth and the option to host a database such as Microsoft SQL Server. Should my website business grow significantly then it's also possible to get a dedicated server.

One nice feature of my Alentus hosting plans is that they allow multiple domain names to be hosted using the same hosting account - this has saved me a fair bit of money over the years.

As well as using my own personal hosting plans, I've also used sites I've developed and managed as part of my job. Alentus have some reasonably priced Microsoft SQL Server database hosting plans.

As well as Windows hosting plans, Alentus also offer RedHat Linux hosting plans - these usually come supplied with a MySQL database option. Another popular offering from Alentus is a hosted Sharepoint service. It's also possible to get Exchange Mail Server hosting from Alentus which saves the hassle of running a Microsoft Exchange Server for your own business.

I've used the Alentus support system on occasion. Technical support is usually good, although it can be slow sometimes, especially out of hours. I'm also in a completely different timezone to most of their support staff.

Website performance on Alentus infrastructure seems good. My sites get a lot of traffic and I have achieved very good Google rankings for my sites.

A few years ago I found my website was getting increasingly unreliable. To their credit, Alentus acknowledged that the server my site was hosted on was very old and so they moved my websites onto a much faster server.

The problem with shared hosting accounts is that your website's performance is somewhat reliant on who else's websites are hosted on the same machine as yours. This problem isn't as prevalent as it once was, for two reasons. Firstly Windows web hosting is a lot more reliable these days as the IIS web server on Windows Servers is now a lot more effective at isolating different websites from each other. If one website crashes on a server its now a lot less likely to stop the other websites or worse still the entire server. Secondly a lot of website hosting companies now use virtualisation of their servers, so increasing a server's RAM or disk resources is now much easier.

I still get occasional problems with my hosting account. Normally they are due to problems with database connected websites. I've never got around to converting my websites to a SQL Server hosting plan. Instead they rely on Microsoft Access databases, and these aren't ideal for storing data to be displayed on the web. My personal website is also still programmed in ASP - if I moved to ASP.NET then the site would likely be a lot more reliable.

Even with these problems I am very pleased with the uptime my website achieves. Since I run an ecommerce operation selling code documentation generators, any downtime would lead to my potentially losing valuable sales. I have no problems with trusting Alentus with my important ecommerce websites.

I had big problems with Alentus in 2009. I found out that my hosting account had been tampered with, and some bad stuff was lurking on a few of my web pages.

I was really pleased that because I had signed up to Google Webmaster Tools, Google actually emailed me when they noticed I had some infected pages on my website.

So eventually I found out the problem. Alentus weren't really to blame. What had happened is that my PC had become infected with a virus that listened to all the Internet traffic coming from my PC and grabbed any FTP site username and passwords that I had been using. Yikes! This is an unfortunate problem with hosting accounts that rely on simple FTP to upload files to the hosting account. FTP is not secure so it's quite easy to steal FTP passwords with simple hacking tools.

So all in all I'm pretty pleased with my Alentus hosting accounts. They're not the cheapest hosting company around, but customer support is good and website reliability is excellent. I would recommend Alentus, particularly for their ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server hosting plans.