Crucial Review

Crucial Review

Bandwidth:
50GB
Disk Space:
5GB
Free Domain:
No
Price:
$18.95
Ratings
Overall
Features
Price
Reliability
Support

Crucial webhosting does not appear to have been around very long when compared to some of the other hosting companies but it is definitely backed up by its cutting edge technology. Their enterprise grade servers use a dual processor with a Hex core, Intel Xeon Gulftown processors and solid state drives, Seagate Cheetah hard drives, RAID 1+0 disk arrays, with 1000 Mbps uplink port speeds. Each server has dual power supplies with independent power supplies to ensure maximum uptime.

Crucial’s technological advantages are not just dependent on their hardware. They also use new forms of hosting to improve performance. Split-shared and Split-Dedicated hosting are trademarked products Crucial uses instead of traditional hosting. In short, they limit the number of users on each server as well as limiting the resources each site is using to ensure better performance for every site. Split-Dedicated hosting is similar to Split-Shared but is still dedicated hosting, so this review focuses on the Split-Shared plans.

There are four tiers available from Crucial, each providing graduating degrees of resources. The first tier provides 5 GB disk space with unlimited bandwidth, unlimited POP3 and IMAP e-mail accounts with webmail access, Secure Shell (SSH), FTP, and unlimited MySQL databases. From there, each tier offers slightly more disk space – 10 GB, 15 GB, and 20 GB – and a few more features. Tier 1 customers cannot have addon domains, subdomains, or parked domains; all other Tiers allow for unlimited instances of these.

At first blush, Crucial’s monthly prices are just this side of outrageous – more than double what you would pay elsewhere – however their yearly rates are somewhat more competitive. For example, a Tier 1 plan costs $10.00US per month but only $100.00US annually, which amounts to just over $8.00US per month. That is still about twice what you would pay elsewhere and you would get more features, space, and options from most competitors. Further, while Crucial notes that their systems are compatible with many of the most popular applications, they do not appear to offer one click installation, meaning you will be left to install them on your own – no mean feat for inexperienced webmasters. If Crucial is anything like most hosting providers, this also means their customer service representatives are unlikely to be able to provide help with these processes.

Crucial uses the relatively new LiteSpeed Enterprise instead of Apache. According to Crucial’s site, LiteSpeed is 9x faster than Apache, processes PHP 50% faster, and is 3x faster at processing SSL. It seems apparent that Crucial considers this technology such a massive improvement over hosting providers without it that it justifies their price hike. The truth is that most websites are not going to need the improved speed and performance. Sites with a lot of multimedia or applications will definitely benefit from the increased performance, though.

It is worth noting that Crucial hosts some big name companies, including Jim Beam, Sears, The New York Times, Macy’s department stores, and others. These major companies obviously chose Crucial for a reason, so one should not discount that. Overall though, few websites are going to be able to justify the high price of Crucial web hosting.


Crucial Review

3
hostingman
2013-10-05 08:12:01
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