eBoundHost

In March 2012 TutorZ.com selected eBoundHost as a new VPS (Virtual Private Service) hosting provider. Reviews about eBoundHost were mostly favorable and because of their higher cost points TutorZ.com thought they would deliver their promise of reliability and performance. However, TutorZ.com got disappointed in both respects. For the record, they selected the eBoundHost VPS 3, for $50 per month plus $5 licensing for cpanel. They had CentOS. The best thing of eBoundHost was their fast response time for support tickets. EBoundHost hosts about 30 containers in a quad core Xenon machine. They also like to sell the $5 licences for cpanel. In cpanel one can configure backups to run, typically at 1 or 2 AM each night. These cpanel backups are very file I/O and memory intensive. So when a bunch of contains runs backup the performance of the entire machine drops significantly. TutorZ average page response time dropped from 1.5 seconds to 4.5 seconds during these backups. And because all contains compete for hardware resources they got dragged out to run for hours, roughly 2 AM to 6 AM. Because of the bad neighbor effect, the high number of containers and the relatively low performing hardware (quad not 8 core, slower RAID). For the record, eBoundHost moved TutorZ container to a new machine but it is only a matter of time until all 30 contains fill up and performance is poor again. The worst problem of eBoundHost were its down times. From March to July 2012 there were about each month a downer. But it got unbearable in August 2012 when TutorZ.com was down 3 times. The outages lasted for 2-3 hours. Tech support said they had network problems.