I would like to offer a follow-up on my original review of Softsys Hosting.  In my initial review, Softsys got good marks for their current technology platforms, customer support, other customer reviews, and price.  They met or exceeded each of those criteria and I based my decision to switch on that.  It's been a little more than a month since I signed up and transferred all my domains to Softsys.  Time for a review update!

Their customer support remains good.  I have opened a couple of support requests inquiring about how certain things work and to gain additional access to email features.  All the support requests have been answered promptly and professionally.  On one or two occasions, the first level technical support was not able to answer my question and it had to be bumped to second level support.  On one occasion, first level support did not understand the issue and responded incorrectly.  After a little back and forth, I finally got the issue resolved.  Most issues are handled within 2-4 hours.  A few took a day or two.

Their servers have been reliable and responsive.  I have not noticed any issues with my sites.  No downtime or network issues to speak of.

Getting email setup and configured took a while because it was an entirely different system than the one I was used to.  To get access to the more advanced email configuration options, you need to have an email account setup as a primary admin.  That requires a support request, but it was very painless and quickly done.  You have to use the SmarterMail webmail interface to do all the configuration, but that's a good thing.  SmarterMail is by far the best webmail interface I have used.  Hands down it beats DWMail, SquirrelMail, IMP, and Zimba.  It has a very clean and uncluttered interface.  It is also visually appealing which is more than I can say about some interfaces (ahem Gmail).  I digress.  Anyways, the advanced email configuration options allow you to setup greylisting and spam filtering.  It took a little bit to tweak them, but I'm down to less than 1 spam message being delivered to my inbox a day.  For comparisions sake, if I turn off those features I would be getting more than 60-80 a day.

Softsys has also redesigned their website since I first signed up.  I like the new look, although it does look like the designed used a pre-built template.  As a web developer myself, I'm not a big fan of templated sites.

All in all, I'm happy with my decision to switch.  So far it has been a good ride and I hope it will continue to be.  If they stumble along the way, I'll be sure to post another update and discuss it.

This past weekend I moved my sites from my old web host to a new one.  The new web host is called Softsys Web Hosting.  They are an India-owned company, but the data center is in Denver, Colorado.  I chose them based on a couple criteria: technology, customer support, reviews, and price.

Technology - My old web host was very slow to adopt and offer new technologies to its customers.  For example, it was nearly 2 years after SQL Server 2005 was available before they finally made a server available to their new customers.  Notice I said new customers.  That is because existing customers couldn't get access to the new SQL Server unless they created a new hosting account and then manually moved all their domain and email settings over.  They could not figure out how to migrate your settings nor could they make the new SQL Server available to existing customers.  However, for an additional monthly fee they could manually setup a new SQL Server database on the new server for me.  Quite contradictory eh?  In picking my new host, I needed ASP.NET 3.5, IIS7 (not absolutely necessary, but nice to have), multiple SQL 2005 db's, and webmail access.  Softsys fulfilled all those requirements.

Customer Support - One of the first things I like to do before purchasing any kind of technology is to check out their customer service.  It's like an audition to ensure you aren't buying something that is going go unsupported after you buy it.  The audition works like this, 1) send a bunch of questions, 2) see how long it takes them to respond, 3) see how well they did in answering the questions.  If they answer the questions in a reasonable amount of time they pass.  If they answer all the questions I asked, they pass.  If they answer the questions to my expectations, they pass.  I like to ask at least one question that is fairly difficult or impossible.  For example, if I know the software or service can't do something, I'll ask if it can.  If they're honest, they'll tell you "Sorry, our software can't do that."  If not, you'll get a used-car salesman response, "Sure it can.  Buy our software."  I would much rather deal with an honest company than someone who is just out to make a buck.

Reviews - Customer reviews are a way to see into how a company treats its current or former customers.  You have to be careful because customer reviews can actually be company reviews.  What I mean is the company goes out and "seeds" good reviews for itself.  One good place to find reviews for web hosting companies is at Web Hosting Talk.  I also use Google to find reviews by typing in "companyname review".  Watch out for the disgruntled customer though.  They may post the same review to a dozen different places.  If the reviews all sound exactly the same, it's probably because they are from the same person.

Price - This was a fairly important factor in my decision.  I didn't want to spend a fortune to host my low-traffic websites.  My budget and what I feel is acceptable to host my websites is around $10/month.  Many web hosters will offer a really low price of $4/month, but they don't have any features.  Need SQL databases, $5/month more.  Want to host more than 1 domain, $5/month more.  Need IIS7, SPAM filtering, or ASP.NET Full Trust, another $5/month more for each add-on.  By the time you add all those add-ons up, it's like $25/month or more.  I got the Silver Plan which was $70/year ($5.83/month) and if necessary I can upgrade to the Gold Plan at any time.

After I narrowed down my list of possible web hosts, I selected Softsys based on the above criteria.  So far I haven't had any major problems.  My sites are up and running without any issues.  Email is working nicely and I especially like the SmarterMail webmail they have.  Coming from SquirrelMail and DWMail, this is a huge step forward in usability and GUI attractiveness.