Summary: MDD is awesome but price increase is a bit much for me. HostMantis has been great so far.
MDD Hosting is awesome – with one terrible, horrible, no good, very bad exception – a multi-day outage back in Sept 2018 (bad things can happen even to great hosts). I’ve had a reseller account with them for three years and expected to stay for many more years. Uptime – great (with that one exception). Speed – great. Price – until recently, very reasonable. They check all my must-have and nice-to-have features: LiteSpeed server; cPanel; free Let’s Encrypt SSL; CloudLinux account isolation technology; SSD storage; Softaculous Autoinstaller; PHP version selector; Not associated with Endurance International Group (EIG); No obnoxious up-selling or other BS marketing games. Most impressive is help service – always prompt, courteous, and knowledgeable. But, cost of my reseller account is doubling. Not MDD’s fault, the evil greedy folks at Oakley Capital are to blame. And yes, I am such a notorious cheapskate that I will abandon an awesome host to save a measly $33/month.
HostManitis first impressions are very positive. Only one month in, but uptime so far is great, speed is great, price for a 50 gb, 100 site reseller account is $7/month vs. the $40 that I would otherwise have paid – and billing is month-to-month with no long-term commitment. LiteSpeed, SSD, PHP version selector, Softaculous Autoinstaller, not EIG, no BS upselling. I entered one support ticket and received a prompt, polite, helpful response:
Q: How do I migrate a large email account from cPanel to DA?
A: We’ll be happy to do that for you.
For some reason my preferred contact form plugin does not live happily on HostMantis, but my second-favorite works fine. DA takes a bit of getting used to for someone who has used cPanel for the past two decades, but it does everything I need. I honestly don’t expect long-term MDD-level awesomeness, but it isn’t a must-have for me. I use my reseller account for my own personal sites. If I had a business site that makes me money, I would not hesitate to put it on MDD, nor would I hesitate to recommend MDD to others. HostMantis, though – so far, so good.
