Virpus Review

Detailed Virpus Review

Better Business Bureau Rating: F
Date Established: January 2006

Reliability: F
Server Speed: D-
Customer Service: F
Cost: D-

This hosting service has recieved

Virpus

Virpus Review Virpus Networks Company is a web hosting provider that was founded in the early part of 2006. It was established and is still based in Kansas City, Missouri with datacenters in Dallas, Texas. The company currently specializes in VPS hosting (as does InMotion) and providing colocation services to more than 4,000 customers across the globe. This privately-owned, debt-free (according to their company profile) web hosting provider is committed to its mission of providing world-class solutions and premium services at competitive prices. With its fully-owned server equipment and network infrastructure along with a management team that mostly consist of knowledgeable people who have been in the hosting business for over 20 years, Virpus Networks guarantees and is supposed to deliver high quality overall performance with absolute reliability and security to preserve the integrity of customers’ data.

Does that sound too perfect? Unfortunately, it does; and this review will show you how apt the saying is about “being too good to be true…” You’ll find several specific reasons why you should be wary of this company and why I don’t recommend Virpus Networks as a hosting provider that you should entrust your hosting needs to.

Virpus Features

Virpus Networks offers three types of hosting: Unmanaged VPS with four plans starting at $5 to $29 per month; 4 plans of Managed VPS also with a monthly fee range from $14 to $40; and Virpus Cloud with the lowest monthly fee of just $7 to a high of $150 a month. Their rates seem to be as cheap as PacificHost. Along with these unbelievably low prices, you get full root access and equal share of the CPU with SolusVM VPS Management and offsite backup manager; plus all nodes feature RAID redundant hard drives, a minimum of 12GB RAM and a quad core processor at the very least. Sounds good! So where’s the catch?

There are actually several snags. If you read Free DirectAdmin (or cPanel) don’t get excited too soon, read on and you’ll see that the control panel only comes free when you prepay at least 6 months (and this is only true to the Advanced and Elite plans); otherwise, you have to shell out $4 more for DirectAdmin control panel and even higher (at $10) for cPanel. The super packages advertise “Instant Activation” but even this already has a qualifying statement that they don’t guarantee it in all cases (as though they knew all along they couldn’t live up to it). Too many people have been taken in by this promise only to get disappointed and dismayed to find out that it takes at least a week before the site becomes operational (in some cases it even takes longer) – no immediate acknowledgment or welcome note with log in details for you here.

Virpus Uptime and Reliability

Downtime is a major issue with this company, it’s almost a constant; and the 99.9% uptime guarantee the company flaunts is a complete farce. Intermittent hourly slowdowns of 10-15 minutes are a common problem among many customers. Worse, they neither notify nor give explanations for outages, even when they have to shut you down for legitimate reasons, like when they have a problem in the system or when there are upgrades being done or your site needs to be transferred to another node; unless you barrage them with a million emails and tickets - maybe. In severe instances, downtime happens 4 to 5 times a day and some of them last for 3 hours or more. Now if you sum it up and get the average, you can also calculate the losses you incur when you stay with this company.

Virpus has one of the worst customer support systems ever recorded in the industry. Rarely do they respond with just a single ticket or email. When they do reply, expect to be told that they would check on it and get back to you; of course, they never do – well, maybe after 4 attempts, if you’re lucky. Even with live chat support which is restricted to business hours, response time is known to be around 30 minutes. If you were guessing that you wouldn’t get clear-cut answers and your problems remain unresolved even with chat support – you got that right!

Can you believe this? Virpus currently has NO built-in backup system and the “quick backups” feature has been disabled and thus, not available. Even the advertised Off-site backup is not consistent and has been frequently down. Packets of data have been known to vanish into thin air. Now, how could you entrust your precious data with a company like this?

Bottom Line

As a customer, you are entitled to expect reasonable performance and reliability, decent customer support and a fully functional backup system, even with a low-budget VPS; not all low-priced hosting plans are as bad as Virpus, believe me. In fact you can check my Fatcow Reviews and you’ll see that there are indeed hosting companies that can truly deliver excellent services despite less-expensive prices. Don’t get lured by Virpus offers that sound too good to be true. Go for authentic low-cost hosting companies that honestly give value for your money. Also check my Omnis Network Reviews, where you can see that they have a suitable plan for start-ups and low budget business websites.