Ultimahost was one of the first hosting companies that offer VPS in Toronto, Canada location in early 2010 in my search vision. At that time, I needed a Windows VPS hosting for my Canadian client’s .Net application, In my research, Ultimahost was one of few that offer unbeatable price, 99.9% up time guarantee and multiple location to choose from including Toronto. On the other hand, multiple mixed review were given as well.

Plan Detail

The sign up process was fluid, Their sales was easy to talk to through the online chatting tool. It’s hard to negotiate with their sales since the price was already one of the lowest online. I was satisfied with the price and plan and took the deal.

Windows Server 2008 Enterprise
8GB dedicated Ram
80GB hard drive
2000 GB Bandwidth
1 IP Included

I really like the huge bandwidth was given to the plan. Because high network bandwidth was a requirement for the video streaming application hosted on the VPS. There are not many VPS hosting plans that come with more than 1000 GB bandwidth per month within my budget that’s where Ultima host really stands out.

Another key buy in point for me is the Windows hyper-V technology that promises reliable and faster performance with dedicated hardware resource. I found it is indeed more stable compares to Virtuozzo that I had experienced before.

Network and Speed

The sign up process was quick and easy. It took less than 24 business hours to setup my VPS account on their server. I did a quick speed test about their network and it was pretty low latency to my client’s location in Toronto. It was averaged 25 Mbps download and 7 Mbps upload speed which was more than good enough for my client.

In fact, the network speed in their multiple US location are even more amazed. Their sales was kind enough to setup a test IP in their LA location so that I can do a comparison of United States vs Canada before I make my final decision. I constantly getting 50/25 Mbps from that location. That’s a much faster and reliable data center compares to the Toronto one. At the end, I picked the Toronto location.

The server itself is a powerful dual CPU – Quad core  with 64 GB Ram hosted multiple VPS clients. I turned on the performance monitor within my node and CPU usage never go over 10% in most of time.

Conclusion

Over a year with Ultima, I was a happy client besides there was a few down time. Their response from support were blazing fast, averagely under 30 minutes from most of tickets I submitted. When issue occurred, their support guys was able to response to issues within a hour. At the end, there were some issues that requires restarting my VPS node once a few weeks and eventually I decide to move out of their Toronto location. However, I never had issues in their LA location. (That is probably why their sales was trying to convince to me purchase their LA instead of Toronto location)

Like

1. Fabulous network/speed in US location
2. Good price of VPS plan with high bandwidth (2000GB or more)
3. Blazing fast ticket response
4. Excellent hardware (dual quad core Xeon)
5. Affiliate Program

Dislike

1. Some network issue experienced in Toronto location
2. Setup Fee (talk to sales to get it waved)