Okay I am trying to find the best hosting provider.  I have tried several and have not found the best.  What do you guys and gals think of 3Essentials? 

They look good from the outside, but of course they are going to put good things on their site.

Thanks in advance,

MykkMoose

I use 3Essentials for a few of my sites.  They have good up time and their mail system is nice.  Installing DNN yourself can be problematic with them because you actually have to submit a ticket to get them to change permissions.  However, they will install DNN for you if you ask at no charge.

The speed of their network is around average.  I have had a few issues with their data services.  Some modules time out because of slow data access.  However, these problems are usually short lived.

Their support is superior to most hosts.  They are on live chat very frequently and the wait is usually less than 5 minutes.  I have been up at 3 AM and they have been available to assist me live.  They are also friendly which is something you don't see with most hosts.  Their ticket system is pretty standard.  I normally get a response to any question within 2 hours which is actually quite good.

Their system uses Plesk which is a great management system.  I personally prefer H-Sphere but Plesk is still quite nice.  The system is fast and easy to use.

My one complaint is the structure of their plans.  They sell a 10 pak and a 50 pack of domains.  However, they only allow 1 alias per domain.  So if you have a .com, .net, and . org pointing to the same site, you will have to pay for it.  That really becomes problematic for a reseller.  I asked if I could get a custom plan allowing me to have unlimited domains and aliases.  They respectfully declined my request.

So, that is the long answer.  The short answer is that you will not go wrong with 3Essentials especially if you have only a few domains to work with.

Hope this helps.

I wanted to post an update about 3Essentials. I had a few struggles with speed and some modules timing out. The support was really above par. They kept me up to date on the repair estimate and offered to migrate me to new servers. Once the repair proved ineffective, the migrated the site for me.

I am now on a different server and the site performs very well. I have been tracking teh site with an "up-time" service and it has been great.

So, while I still wish they would offer more flexible plans, I can not say enough about their service. They are always available and ticket turn around is usually less than an hour. It is rare to find this kind of support and I thought I would update my last post.

Good Luck.

I just signed up with 3Essentials and although I'm very happy with their quick support response, I'm struggling with back up and restore database issues with this hosting provider. I'm on the small fries shared hosting plan which they do not allow us direct access to make a back up of our database. So they provided the httpdocs along with a backup file which I believe is in Sql Server 2008 but I only have Sql Server 2005 installed. So, upon their tech support advice, I installed the free Sql server express 2008 so that I could restore their given backup file on my localhost only to find that the express and full 2008 R2 versions are not compatible. Theyir advice was to install the full version of 2008 but the cost of purchasing the license is prohibitive and I wonder what other DNN developers who like to download the live to their local for upgrade testing do??? Being denied access to the sql database is reason enough to search for another hosting provider? In 3Essentails defense, they did reply promptly to my rant to state that they were looking into alternative options so stay tuned...

Hello,

It is possible to purchase a developers version of SQL Server, which is the full working version, but it is just licensed for developer use (ie. localhost) rather than full server use.

Have a look on Amazon for it, I seem to remember paying around £40 for it (this was a few years ago for an earlier version)

No, you can't restore a backup from a higher version of SQL Server on a lower version of SQL Server. Yes, you can restore a database from Web, Standard or Enterprise Edition to Express Edition, the only condition is that, you must have the Higher or Equal Version of SQL Server, you can check the SQL Server version by using SQL Server management studio > SQL Server Instance > Right Click > Properties. Good Luck

I never used 3essentials, but my good friend is using 3essentials and is very satisfied with them. I also found them as one of the recommendations here: http://webmasterformat.com/blog/bes...eb-hosting