Review of Indialinks

This post is also appearing as a review of Indialinks in Mouthshut.com.

I am a hobby astrologer. I have a small site on the net where you can find tools for generating kundalis and birth charts. I used to run this off of free Geocities. As the site grew, I needed something more than 4.2 MB per hour bandwidth and an ability to do some server side programming.

I did not do a lot of research and quickly chose a Mumbai based hosting provider Indialinks. I thought it would be good for the site to be based in India as getting in touch with support would be easier. I was also impressed that the engineers helped me bring up a sample application even before I paid any money.

As it happens with any Hindi movie, the actual movie was much worse than the trailer. Right from the beginning, the server was unstable. I regretted my decision in the first week itself when the site went down three times. On reminding them of the SLA and refund policy, the support engineers quickly blamed the servlet application and asked me to fix the problem in my code.

I started getting frequent emails from visitors to my site complaining about the performance and some even offered to help pay for the transfer to other hosting providers.

I am not much of a systems administrator and have never understood how Apache/Tomcat works, but during my interaction with the engineers, I realized that neither do these guys! They lack basic knowledge and troubleshooting skills to help the java developer pinpoint the problem. "Sir, abhi to chal raha tha, pata nahin abhi kya hua..." was the standard reply to a simple question - "Why is my site down and what is the problem?".

As I mentioned that I am a hobby astrologer and my working hours on this site are 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM. That is the time when I update the site, run into issues and try to solve them. Many a times, it is required to talk to the sysadmin. Indialinks has no concept of 24/7 support. After 7:00 in the evening and on weekends, it is rather difficult to catch hold of support engineers. If your site goes down on a Saturday, you can be rest assured that for the entire weekend, support would be sluggish.

I would not get into specifics of pricing, but there is only one word for it - atrocious. US based providers give 2,000 times more space and 50,000 times more monthly bandwidth for lesser amount of money. I found the servers to be ultra fast and very dependable. Not that you would really need it, but 24x7 support means 24x7 support. I see no reason why anyone should even think about renting servers from Indialinks.

As for me, I quickly realized my mistake and moved out only after six months even though I had paid for one full year in advance. I figured I would save on STD calls to Mumbai this way and would have peace of mind during weekends.