Looking for great hosts? Nimbus Xenforo Specialists - Look No Further

[DaiAku]

For those looking for a great host I wanted to recommend Nimbus who have been the best hosts we have had over the course of our numerous host changes. To top it off, they are Xenforo Specialists.

Precursor Games is a games development house where we are having the community contribute video game creation. We have had a significant changes in hosts over the last year. We have gone from goDaddy, to Amazon Cloud Servers, Cirrus to Nimbus (with a few more in between). Without question Nimbus has not only have the best customer service and stable servers, but have been the most friendly as well.

goDaddy is where we started and had low cost shared server where we made our changes. These were very slow and cheap and we moved away from them quickly. Amazon servers were very high end but difficult to manage. Beanstalks are complex and I really cannot recommend them as they do not seem developed enough for mainstream use. They require very detailed knowledge of servers and a lot of customization. As an example, it took several weeks to get xenforo to run on this distributed architecture with some pretty high paid consultants and even then it was not running perfectly.

From ACS we migrated to a cheaper and simpler solution as we took a break from our crowdsourcing efforts and moved a local Canadian host call Cirrus. Simply put, Cirrus was awful - during our short time with them we experienced many problems, from slowdowns, server crashes and to even being hacked. Their outsourced support could not even tell us how we were hacked or even how to armor ourselves from this happening again in the future. They had almost no logging so we couldn’t even investigate what happened ourselves.

At this point we reached out to Nimbus (recommended by @Chris D - thank you!) who not only gave great advice but stepped in extremely quickly and did the transfer to their servers in record time as our site was a mess with Cirrus. They optimized the site for Xenforo and responded to minor problems often within minutes of the request. They went through server options options with us to help pick the right one and continue to touch base to make sure everything is working well. A special thank you to Matt Cooper from Nimbus who was amazing during this stressful time for us.

If you are looking for a stable, reliable and cost effective host look no further than Nimbus. We cannot recommend them strongly enough, they’ve been fantastic and reliable.

 

[Slavik]

I've also moved one of my servers recently to Nimbus.

Unfortunately, despite being a 1+1 customer, and happy with them for many years, the last couple of weeks i've run into a whole bunch of problems with them, and their attitude was terrible. (Even trying to blame me for a £400 charge on my account they screwed up).

I had a quick scout around on costings, and yea I could get better for the price, but at the end of the day, they have been so highly reccomended on here, its hard to ignore that, and frankly I wasn't in the mood to scout WHT for reviews of every provider...

Anyway, so far im impressed, though the server isn't live yet, all my interactions with them thus far have been excellent.

 

[Ingenious]

Don't get me started on 1&1 Slavik!! So glad to have left them behind - great while it's all working, not so great when you need help. I moved from them to TSO Host who were good for a while then just got SO slow, so from them to Nimbus, and very pleased so far.

 

[craigiri]

Good to hear.

It's always somewhat confusing. They claim their servers are "cloud" but also say they are UK based. Does that mean that Americans and Canadians, etc. should not consider them if they want the quickest server responses?

What does cloud mean in this case?

 

[DaiAku]

Good to hear.

It's always somewhat confusing. They claim their servers are "cloud" but also say they are UK based. Does that mean that Americans and Canadians, etc. should not consider them if they want the quickest server responses?

What does cloud mean in this case?

I would definitely consider them as we are in Canada (close to Toronto) and the performance/server response has been better then local servers from another host in Toronto.

 

[WSWD]

They claim their servers are "cloud" but also say they are UK based. Does that mean that Americans and Canadians, etc. should not consider them if they want the quickest server responses?

Cloud has nothing to do with how fast it is to various parts of the world. Perhaps you're thinking of cloudflare? US and Canada would very likely not want to use UK servers due to the latency involved. Slows everything down.

 

[Ingenious]

I think in the UK at the moment there is a lot of confusion over the word cloud. It has become a "buzz word" and basically every host is using it, even shared hosting providers talk about "clouds". But for hosting a site it still boils down, IMO, to whether your service is shared, virtual server or dedicated server, that's what you need to find out.

@craigiri the hardware for Nimbus is UK based, so ideally to reduce latency you'd look for something as good but local to your site users. However try out a few Nimbus based sites and forums and see how they feel. The good performance might mitigate any loss to latency, considering the cost.

 

[Moshe1010]

Cloud has nothing to do with how fast it is to various parts of the world. Perhaps you're thinking of cloudflare? US and Canada would very likely not want to use UK servers due to the latency involved. Slows everything down.

It doesn't really hold up anymore. First, a CDN can minimize this effect almost to zero.
Second, I have a VPS in Amsterdam, I'm from Los Angeles. The difference between my page load (home) and people that live nearby is about 200-300ms (Load not DOMContent, which is a much smaller difference).
Anything lower than 400-500ms wouldn't really be noticeable by users. The only time it makes a difference is in a thread that has lots of pictures, but that's rare.

 

[DaiAku]

It doesn't really hold up anymore. First, a CDN can minimize this effect almost to zero.
Second, I have a VPS in Amsterdam, I'm from Los Angeles. The difference between my page load (home) and people that live nearby is about 200-300ms (Load not DOMContent, which is a much smaller difference).
Anything lower than 400-500ms wouldn't really be noticeable by users. The only time it makes a difference is in a thread that has lots of pictures, but that's rare.

I agree with the above post, it really doesnt matter where you provider is anymore for website hosting. Unless you are doing something like an actually game through the web, just about anywhere will work. Nimbus is great, our site response times have been awesome and our community has positively responed to them as our provider.

 

[craigiri]

IMHO the word "cloud", IMHO, is misleading. I was always taught that the cloud was effectively the giant storage unit created by a network of server farms or computers with spread out locations. We all know that Amazon and Google as well as Akami networks, etc. use the cloud.

I think they should either carefully explain....or stop using the word. If cloud computing means your VPS is on a single server somewhere (just like they have always been), it's a bit of a stretch....in other words, was my 1995 server as part of many on a Pentium 90 "on the cloud"? If not, why is a current platform that way.

Ah, marketing.

 

[TPerry]

Ah, marketing.

While doing some googling (yes, I'm bored) came across this.

 

[WSWD]

Nonsense! Location absolutely does matter, and CDNs are rarely useful for dynamic content. 200-300ms is a huge difference, especially if you are downloading larger files or such...or lots of small files, CSS files, etc., as is the case with most forums. Of course, file downloads are potentially a situation where a CDN would come in handy, but most CDNs in existence today really don't perform terribly well.

Give me some IPs and test files, and I'll show you with real numbers why location matters.

 

[Mr Lucky]

I agree with the above post, it really doesnt matter where you provider is anymore for website hosting. Unless you are doing something like an actually game through the web, just about anywhere will work. Nimbus is great, our site response times have been awesome and our community has positively responed to them as our provider.

I believe it can make a difference for SEO in regard to local searches on Google.

e.g. if your site is .co.uk it will of course show in a google uk search. However if you have a UK oriented site that is .com, it will not show in a UK search unless it is hosted in the UK.

That may or may not be relevant to you depending on whether you want to be in local searches, but if you are selling a service that is aimed at a UK market, you would want to be found in a local UK search.

I found this out the hard way when I had a .com site hosted with 1 & 1. I thought they were a UK company, but the servers are (or were) in Germany, so this site was not appearing in the UK Google results. So I switched to Zen Internet after establishing that there servers were in the UK. I Am now probably going to migrate over to Nimbus - getting back on topic.