Rax has been in business since February of 2001, which makes them one of the oldest web hosting providers in all of Europe. They offer high quality hosting solutions for indivdiuals and businesses throughout Europe, or those from anywhere in the world who want to have a site or service hosted in Europe. This includes places that want colocation or redundant hosting services in this region to help build their global audience. This is certainly a top tier hosting provider, which comes with slightly higher prices than you would find at most other hosting companies. You do, however, get what you pay for.
You will be able to choose from a large number of hosting options provided by this company, and a number of great supporting features such as DDoS protection. Anyone who is looking for great hosting and other web focused services in Europe will absolutely want to consider Rax. They are well-established and have a lot to offer their customers.
Uptime & Reliability
100% Uptime Guarantee
Rax is committed to extremely reliable hosting solutions. This is important for their customer base, which is primarily going to be businesses that need to make sure their sites are up and available for their customers at all time. To help give customers confidence in the level of service, Rax offers a 100% uptime service level agreement, which is significantly better than the standard 99.9% uptime guarantee that most other hosting companies offer. The stability isn’t just a sales pitch either. They use state-of-the-art hardware throughout their datacenter along with redundant networking and power equipment to help ensure your sites will be up and running all the time.
Features
Huge List of Great Features
The features available through this company are quite extensive and will be more than enough to meet the needs of just about everyone. They offer traditional hosting solutions, high availability services, DDoS features, and more. When looking through all the different options available, the only potential issue is that it will be hard to choose the exact service that is right for you. The features provided here clearly have an expectation that customers will have at least a basic understanding of web hosting and related services, but even if you don’t, their sales team will be there to assist you in choosing what you need.
The entry level hosting options start at just €1.49 per month. This is a bare bones option that is meant for just one blog that isn’t going to get a ton of traffic. From there you can move up to other shared hosting options, which can give 5-10 gigs of disk space, 50-100 gigs of bandwidth, and much more. Their content delivery network is also included with all these options.
If you need more power and control over your hosting experience, the cloud hosting options are the way to go. They have public, private, and hybrid cloud services that are powered by VMware. They provide several pre-configured options, but you can also upgrade or downgrade the CPUs, memory, disk space, and other features as needed without any downtime. These are great for high availability systems that need to be up at all times.
The dedicated servers are the best option for companies that want specific hardware reserved only for their sites or services. They have a number of servers available, and they are built using Intel XEON processors for maximum speed and reliability. These servers are housed in a tier 4 datacenter with fully-redundant network connectivity for maximum uptime. You can also choose their colocation services, which allow you to use their datacenter, bandwidth, and infrastructure to power your servers. This is a great option for many businesses that don’t want to have to manage their own datacenter but still want all the benefits without the costs & responsibility.
Support
World-Class Support 24/7
The technical support teams are available to assist you any time you have a problem. They are available via phone or by sending them a message through the website. The technical team really seems to know the ins and outs of not just their own systems, but hosting in general so that they can fix problems and give you guidance to help ensure the best overall hosting experience. In addition to their live help options, they also offer a knowledge base with quite a few articles about how to properly run websites. This knowledge base is available in both English and Danish.
Price
Surprisingly Affordable Prices
When reviewing companies like this that primarily target higher end hosting needs, it is expected that the prices are going to be high. With Rax, however, that is not the case. While not the cheapest around, the prices are very reasonable for what you are getting. The top of the line hosting solutions start at just €1.49 per month for shared hosting options. For colocation services, you’ll pay just €69-€89 per month depending on what you need. Dedicated servers start at €140 per month, and go up from there based on the type of hardware you need. The highest level server is €1999 per month plus the server price, but this gets you a 1 GigE Unmetered port, 1 Gbps EU peering, 30 IPv4 subnet IPs, 48 IPv6 block IPs, and much more. Obviously, the higher end options are just for larger businesses that get a lot of traffic.
Speed
Very Responsive Hosting
No matter which hosting package you choose, you will enjoy a very fast overall experience. Of course, the higher the level of hosting you choose, the faster it will be, but as long as you pick the right level based on your needs, it will be more than sufficient. All the internal hardware as well as the external ports are wired and configured for speed and reliability, and that is just what you will get.
Summary
Excellent Hosting at Every Level
Whether you are just looking to get hosting for your personal blog, or you need professional grade hosting for a large business, Rax is there for you. They have lots of different options available and have been around for many years providing customers with a great overall experience.
Pros:
- 100% Uptime Guarantee
- Tier 4 Datacenter
- Great Technical Support
Cons:
- Some Packages Overpriced
- So Many Options It Can Be Confusing