i did lots of research, and mainly focused on support and no contract. i read forums, and aso gave me good impression that their support was friendly and responsive. and i get to have unlimited bandwidth and space for just $5 per month, no contract! that was awesome. anyway, i got a coupon for free hosting for the first month.
initially the support was really good, really fast. but after about 3-4 months of using, they started to go slow, sometimes took them half a day to reply my ticket. i am living in a different zone, so i couldn't sleep until i received their reply. what's more disappointing was when i received their reply, it took several more tickets to have my problem solved.
i know you guys were good, but sorry, i gotta move on. if only you were to improve your support, back to where it was, i might consider coming back.
I have account with ASmallOrange.com (ASO) and would like to share it.
General Features [7]
ASO uses Cpanel, so the features is all the same. Except they allow unlimited domain in single hosting account. But the rest is totally the same as other Cpanel hosting.
Reliability [8]
I'm hosting my online store with ASO and everything is perfect, except for some major downtime lately. One is because their DNS servers hacked and one is because some of their server compromised.
Customer Support [9]
Customer support is fantastic. They reply fast and prompt.
Actually, I seldom contact their Support since everything is working normal.
Pricing [7]
I started with their Tiny Plan: 75MB Space & 3GB Bandwith, cost me US$20 per year.
Then I upgraded to their Small Plan: 400MB & 10GB Bandwith until today, cost me US$5 per month.
Space [6]
Web hosting space at ASO is a fortune, you can not get GBs space for $5 like others do, but since I never use that much space, the space is enough.
Speed [8]
Their speed is good and reliable.
Bandwidth (Data Transfer) [6]
Bandwith allocation is not "unlimited", but it is reliable.
SUMMARY [7]
The Good
At simple word, I'm happy with ASO. This month, I already a year with them and have no intention to move. My online store with ASO: www.midave.com
The Bad
This is not actually bad thing about ASO, but it is true that space and bandwith in ASO is a fortune.
I just wanted to give some input on my experiences with ASO:
I've been with them for about six months (I purchase their smallest package for a year) after reading a bunch of raving reviews about them. I run a small personal website/blog and most of the visitors are just my friends and every now and then some random people online.
So far, I've had a lot of problems with downtime. There was a week in April where I was afraid to pull up my site because I was afraid the server would be down. There is an alarming amount of downtime, but for my site it really doesn't matter since I'm not losing money or anything.
So I would recommend these guys if you're going to host a personal site or blog or something that isn't too sensitive to downtime. But if you are going to gigantic site with lots of visitors, I might look somewhere else.
I have a small blog with ASO and I've hosted other sites there too. I've always found them to be responsive and I've never had any complaints from them.
I have an account with amsallorange.com. I put a few low traffic sites on there while I keep higher traffic sites on hostgator and lunarpages.
Despite the fact that these sites are extremely low traffic and that I never come anywhere close to using my monthly bandwidth allowance, the clowns that run asmallorange shut me down at least every other month.
When I ask why, it's always something about CPU usage. Which site was the problem? They don't know.
Like I said, my other shared hosting plans handle much busier and resource intensive sites. Asmallorange has been total crap compared to hostgator or lunarpages.
I really need to find a new host and everyone else really needs to learn from my mistake. Never sign up with asmallorange.com
