Rochen Review

I have had multiple sites with them for over 2 years and not once have I had a site down.

I have been using Rochen for about a year, but was going to move to a less expensive host. I receive an email stating that my credit card on file would be charged on 4/1/2010 for another year of service.

Well, on 1/4/2010 my card was charged. There was a mixup with how dates are written (month first vs day first). I promptly opened a support ticket notating the mistake and that I would like to go ahead and close my account and receive a refund.

Their response??? There is no way to issue you a refund. I can cancel in 2011 if I would like.

??? WHAT?!!?!? I am charged an entire year over a misunderstanding?

Whats more, the rochen forums claim to contain unedited testimonials. NOT TRUE. Mine have been deleted. And another thread locked.

Please beware of this company! Not sure where you should turn, but watch out! Here is a link to my post that is still on the site http://forums.rochen.com/showthread.php?t=14047

If that one is removed, it just goes to show ya!

We used to use Siteground (in fact we still have a number of sites there). However, we often had server performance problems, and on some of our heavier scripts even had timeout errors. Siteground support was good, except when it came to performance errors (they "don't exist").

So I switched to Rochen because I had heard of their reputation. Turns out that Rochen is actually cheaper for me by quite a bit. I had a reseller account at Siteground but had to pay $4/month for each account. When I had around 20 sites that was $80 a month. When I moved to Rochen I was able to easily fit the 20 sites on my basic $35/month reseller account. The more sites I add the more I save over Siteground.

Their support has been stellar. Yes, its all ticket-based, which normally I don't like, but they are so consistently quick in their response (usually less than 10 minutes) that I have stopped worrying about that. More than that their responses are always very knowledgeable and helpful (maybe just a little british attitude sometimes). Compare their support to 1&1 and its night and day (1and1.com was awful).

Servers are fast, fast, fast. That is definitely their strong point.

The ONLY downside is that their disk space is very conservative. I find that I have to keep an eye on disk usage of my clients and increase as necessary. Most sites are fine, but more active sites need to be monitored. They notify you by email if it gets close to filling up.

I would highly recommend Rochen.

I have had many hosts for several sites. I am in web development and always urge my customers to go with Rochen.

One feature not mentioned is the Rochen Vault which can be an absolute life saver of you do something "stupid" to the site and need to restore it!

Would never use another host again!

First, I must say I'm very impressed with their server management. My Joomla sites have never run better or smoother. I would recommend them for performance without hesitation.

However, despite what others here say, I have not had a very good experience with their customer support. First of all, both accounts I set up with them failed and needed a support ticket to fix. However, you can't file a ticket without an account! Fortunately, I had the owner's email, and he was able to get things sorted. Also, they have NO phone support. It took several days and two email follow-ups to receive an answer to my pre-purchase questions.

The Rochen support folks will ONLY answer questions related to their hosting. If you run into issues with your Joomla install, domain names, etc., you're on your own. Sometimes it takes several hours to receive a response due to the wide time zone difference between the U.S. mid-west and the U.K. And their answers often seem inhospitably short and non-intuitive (geek-speak). More than one time, I had to file multiple tickets until I understood what I needed to do.

Finally, they are VERY British, which comes with an attitude. A little less condescending tone when talking to customers would suit them better.

What makes or breaks a host for me is customer support. Its the only thing that REALLY varies from host to host. I was with Powweb, GoDaddy, LunarPages, and some others. Rochen's managed server staff are Joomla experts and extend themself beyond their prescribed duties on nearly every occasion. The price is the only consideration, but as I tell all my clients, it pays dividends in the end.